Tuesday, December 22, 2020

No, Joe, We’re Not in a ‘Climate Crisis’

 Rich Lowry

He doesn’t want to get us thinking about climate change, but rather to suspend all rational thought about the issue.


 "Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s famous axiom is that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. It’s an even worse thing to manufacture.

"Although President-elect Joe Biden obviously disagrees. Creating an unwarranted sense of drama and urgency around climate change is central to his approach, in order to catalyze action unsupported by the facts or common sense.

"In announcing his climate and energy team the other day, Biden declared climate change a crisis requiring a “unified national response.” Going even further, he called it “an existential threat of our time,” a frankly preposterous claim if taken literally, or even seriously.

"To maintain that increasing global temperatures are a threat to human existence itself entails believing that human beings — an endlessly adaptive species that has dramatically increased its own lifespan over the past century — will be snuffed out if the planet gets a few degrees hotter."  . . . 

Biden spoke of “a feeling of dread and anxiety” over climate change, but this isn’t a sentiment that, to the extent it exists at all, he wants to address or assuage. Instead, he seeks to stoke it, and if that requires frankly distorting the scientific consensus to paint catastrophic scenarios, so be it.

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