The
first law of climate policy is that global warming won’t stop until we stop burning fossil fuels. As long as our policy elites attempt to address global warming while appeasing the fossil-fuel industry, all they can achieve is the appearance of insanity.
We are now entering the era of climate schizophrenia. As the costs of fossil-fueled global warming grow, our leaders are accelerating the extraction of carbon reserves.
President Obama is the most prominent climate schizophrenic today. His self-defeating climate policy describes global warming as an existential threat to be solved by increasing fossil fuel production. In a July speech at a Seattle fundraiser, Obama discussed how costly western wildfires and drought are linked to climate change:
“And so I raise that because in all the day-to-day challenges that we face that are extraordinarily important, a long-term challenge that has to be dealt with right now is making sure that the planet works for the next generation and the generation after that. And so we’re very proud of the work we’re doing right now with our Climate Action Plan to make sure that we’re building resilience, and that’s what we’re talking with a lot of Western governors about — how can we start adapting our infrastructure to what are already increases in temperature, but then also what can we do to mitigate the damage that’s happening in climate change.”
Fifteen sentences later, Obama celebrated the massive increase in fossil fuel production during his presidency:
“Our energy production has been extraordinary. We’re now producing more oil in the United States than we are importing, and that’s the first time that’s happening in a couple of decades. Our natural gas production makes us the leading producer in the world and has skyrocketed.”
According to the official transcript, his audience of liberal supporters applauded.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shares Obama’s climate schizophrenia. At a recent clean-energy summit convened by Senator Harry Reid, Clinton called climate change “the
most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world.” She then promoted increased fossil-fuel production: “Assuming that our production stays at the levels, or even as some predict, goes higher, I do think there’s a play there,” she said. “This is a great economic advantage, a competitive advantage, for us. … We don’t want to give that up.”
“The boom in domestic natural gas production is an example of American innovation changing the game,” she continued.
The journalist quoting her, Politico senior energy & environment reporter Darren Goode, did not note the logical inconsistency in her remarks.
On September 7, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called for lifting the export ban on domestically produced crude oil in order to significantly increase the global supply and “bring down the price of oil” while implementing a carbon tax to “take us beyond fossil fuels.” “That is a strategy hawks and doves, greens and big oil could all support,” Friedman claimed about his incoherent policy recommendation.
Post Carbon Institute’s Asher Miller responded:
“The oxymoronic logic displayed here is so dizzyingly self-contradictory that I had to re-read it three times in the vain attempt to find the hidden rationale that would turn the apparently nonsensical into the brilliant. I know that this ‘all of the above’ strategy has been President Obama’s energy policy but that doesn’t make it right.”
The transparent absurdity of attempting to solve global warming by increasing climate pollution is a consequence of the power of the fossil fuel industry, which showers money on the nation’s
news media,
politicians, and
policy experts.
For that money, journalistic organizations run feel-good ads by climate polluters amid coverage of extreme weather disasters. Policy advisors contort themselves into logical knots to justify new extreme-energy infrastructure. For every dollar the fossil-fuel industry spends on campaign contributions and lobbying in Washington, the watchdog group Oil Change International estimates, it receives $59 in federal subsidies.
In other words, we are paying climate polluters to profit from our own destruction. And that’s simply madness.
I joined the People's Climate March to call for an end to climate schizophrenia and a return to sanity. If our leaders won't lead, then the people will have to.