Climate Crisis Fantasy Hurts Everyone
I believe there is broad bi-partisan agreement on this basic statement: We all love the environment.
We all want to live in harmony with nature and leave a clean, healthy, beautiful environment as a legacy. We all want to have access to clean air, clean water, and abundant, reliable energy. We understand that abundant and reliable energy creates prosperity. Prosperity creates a society that can afford to do things to help improve the environment.
Alternatively, poor, third-world countries have little ability to protect the environment—they’re busy trying to survive. Bjorn Lomborg has done some really thoughtful work on the importance of prosperity on improving the health of the environment and climate (bit.ly/3IRi4GL).
The question becomes how should our society achieve these sensible and mutually held goals? What policy and legal solutions should be implemented that will maximize environmental and societal goals while harming citizens the least? Is there actually a “climate crisis”? Is the world really about to overheat or are we actually on the cusp of a new ice age? Is the science “settled”?
Well, no! Science is never “settled.” As we learned in fifth or sixth grade, science progresses by proposing a hypothesis, and then running experiments and collecting data to prove or disprove the theory. No matter how certain we are of a theory, it remains a theory, and new information could completely upend what we think we know about a particular field of study.
Does climate change? Yes, it does. All we have to do is look back to the age of the dinosaurs to see that the climate now is really different than it was then … Earth was warmer and very lush (bit.ly/3vGeQlF). Is it the fault of the dinosaurs that it’s colder now? What caused the multiple different ice ages? What caused the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age? Is it possible that the overall cycle of changing climate is very much like the changing of seasons?
Would you presume to think that if you just drove an electric car or put solar panels on your house that you could stop spring from turning into summer? If everyone in our state drove an electric car, would that stop summer from coming? Of course not. Yet, that’s exactly what the advocates of the “climate crisis” appear to claim. In addition, the mainstream news media doesn’t report on the scientists who are disproving the global warming “climate crisis” on excellent sites like Wattsupwiththat (bit.ly/3pKuxVn).
Radical progressive politicians from President Biden to Governor Inslee and the state Democratic caucus have seized on a particular scientific theory, and are using it to push a political agenda with a scary narrative—a climate fantasy—that uses fear to manipulate people to agree to radical political policy choices that harm many everyday people. We face higher energy prices, a lack of affordable housing, and an increasingly unreliable power grid, all because of these fantasy-driven policies.
Last year’s dreadful cap-and-tax legislation (The Climate Commitment Act, bit.ly/3HHmYEY) expanded the bloated bureaucracy at the Department of Ecology, and increased the cost of fuel and food prices. This carbon tax was imposed despite the voters rejecting it twice. In 2021, the Legislature also passed a low-carbon fuel standard which imposes new costs on carbon that will raise money primarily by raising the cost of gas for consumers.
Inslee and his cadre of climate alarmists have successfully pushed even more harmful legislation this 2022 session. This year, the democratic majority decided to deepen the affordable housing crisis by increasing the cost of building homes with SB 5722 - Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in buildings (bit.ly/3IQmFJt). New rent control measures in combination with these mandatory greenhouse gas compliance requirements will further reduce the inventory of available housing. Washington state's electric grid may experience reduced reliability due to the increased reliance on electricity mandated in this bill.
HB 1099 - climate response update to comprehensive planning, will deepen the Washington State housing affordability crisis even more (bit.ly/3vJWJeT)! This bill makes our problems worse by slowing permitting and restricting use. Sadly, this bill is also based on the theory of global warming. The whole premise of the bill is a theory that has never been proved.
Then, there is the Biden administration’s fierce opposition to allowing our country to resume oil and gas production. We could be an energy producer for the world, and yet many productive drilling production sites have been shut down or placed off limits by the radical climate crisis fanatics at the federal level. The nation’s average gas prices jumped nearly 20 cents in less than a week, but Labor Secretary Matt Walsh says more U.S drilling is NOT on the table (bit.ly/3KlJVzb).
I don’t know about you, but $1.79 gasoline, a reliable power grid, and affordable housing are starting to look pretty good. I believe that a Republican majority in Washington state and at the national level can find environmental policy solutions that will “save the planet” without putting you out on the street, driving you into poverty, or turning off the lights.
Nancy Churchill is the state committeewoman for the Ferry County Republican Party. She may be reached at DangerousRhetoric@pm.me. The opinions expressed in Dangerous Rhetoric are her own.