BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, ENERGY POLICY, ENVIRONMENT, FREE SPEECH
DEMS WANT TO BAN TELLING THE TRUTH
In a virtual Axios event on Thursday, Gina McCarthy, Joe Biden’s top climate official, urged tech companies to suppress truthful information about climate issues:
“The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” she told Axios’ Alexi McCammond at a virtual event that aired Thursday. “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” McCarthy said.
“Really jump in” means to ban, suspend, delete and censor views on climate issues different from those of the Biden administration’s extremists, like McCarthy.
McCarthy said that overall, the problem of disinformation has shifted from disputing the reality of climate change…
No one has disputed the “reality of climate change.” The climate has been changing for millions of years, and will continue changing as long as the Earth exists and has an atmosphere. The issue is not climate change per se, but rather the theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming that is in dispute. On that issue, the realists are winning out over the alarmists.
…to inaccurate claims about the feasibility and benefits of moving away from fossil fuels.
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“Now, the challenge really is, how do we accelerate the solutions we have available to us, the technology improvements that we’ve seen that are most cost-effective, in fact cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
…to inaccurate claims about the feasibility and benefits of moving away from fossil fuels.
***
“Now, the challenge really is, how do we accelerate the solutions we have available to us, the technology improvements that we’ve seen that are most cost-effective, in fact cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
“And what the [oil] industry is now doing is seeding, basically, doubt about the costs associated with that and whether they work or not.”
First of all, the claim that “green” energy technologies are “cost-competitive with fossil fuels” is ridiculous. If that were true, then there would be no need for subsidies and mandates–measures that the likes of Gina McCarthy will defend to the death. And energy bills across the country would not be rising rapidly as more wind and solar energy are added to the grid.
And McCarthy doesn’t like talk about “the costs associated with that” because the costs of the administration’s green dreams are in fact ruinous. The impact of high energy prices that we are now seeing is only a drop in the bucket compared with the economic and human disaster that will unfold if the “green transition” actually proceeds. But the Biden administration wants all such discussion censored from social media and from the internet (at least to the extent that Google controls the internet).
Finally, “whether they work or not”–whether the “green” measures proposed by environmentalists would actually have a significant impact on global temperatures–is another sensitive point for the administration. It is sensitive because, on any competent scientific evaluation, the administration’s proposals (and those of any environmental group you care to name) will not “work.” Their impact on climate will not be discernible. Far from being “misinformation,” that is scientific fact that the administration does not even attempt to rebut.
We have here a form of McCarthyism–we could call it Gina McCarthyism–far more dangerous and irrational than the McCarthyism of the 1950s. The Biden administration wants to suppress the dissemination of scientific facts and arguments not because they are wrong, which would be bad enough, but because they are right. And because they are right, they promise to destroy public support for the Green New Deal. The combination of economic and human ruin with suppression of free speech is as contemptible a combination of government policies as one can imagine. |
