As the meat myths we saw recently can attest, deniers are all too happy to spin a study saying “here’s red meat’s climate impact” into a completely unfounded “liberals are coming for your burger!” And since they’re desperate to make climate change about anything other than the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for the problem, no lie is too shameless, and they’re back at it this week. This time they’ve chosen a target even more near and dear to the average American heart: our pets.
Like the meat myth, this story starts with a piece published during Earth Week, this one at Vox. They ran a very cute longform-comic illustrating the 13-million-cars-worth of climate impact of dogs and cats. It’s very light-hearted and fun, from the perspective of someone who got a pandemic pooch, and not at all preachy, judgemental, or in any way objectionable. Unless your job is to stoke anger at and fear of liberals in order to sell a book of climate denial and distract from the fossil fuel industry, in which case it’s a very serious assault on pet owners everywhere.
“They’re so emboldened by how compliant the public was with lockdowns,” Marc Morano told KTRH AM radio, “Stay in place. Curfews. You can’t leave, it has to be essential services. They’re just ramping it up now. Not only can you not leave your house. Not only can you not travel anymore. Now you can’t even own a dog and cat anymore. That’s where this is headed.”
Is it though? Again, this wasn’t part of a Biden proposal, or an activist group’s demands, or even a regular ol’ article. It was a comic explainer on Vox dot com.
Apparently Morano’s paranoia intrigued Fox News, because on Thursday morning he was on Fox & Friends, this time with an added element of interest: his marketing strategy of targeting a woman of color. In this case it was, like the face he slapped on the cover of his book, NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had tweeted about a Civilian Climate Corps to employ American youth to improve American public lands.
To Morano’s gas-addled brain, this employment plan is little more than a ploy to get loyal voters, and “the real question is given they’ve gone after hamburger eating and even owning dogs and cats in the climate agenda, are they going to lose the ‘R’ in ‘Climate Corps’ and become ‘Climate Cops’ and start admonishing people, knocking hamburgers out of their mouth at a park or telling them they shouldn’t own a pet dog?”
Got that? Climate denial means you can’t take action on climate because it will destroy jobs, but also that giving people jobs to help public lands adapt to climate change is bad, because they will then become burger-bashing dog catchers.
Completing the “I have a denial book to sell” circuit is Joe Bastardi, writing at Morano’s fossil-funded employer CFACT to connect Morano’s AM radio hit with Morano’s Fox hit, and adding a little spice of his own.
As a pet owner himself, Bastardi (who has “a guinea pig, two rabbits, and a cat” but quickly notes he has “always been a dog person,” because he can never escape his own toxic masculinity) went to his local pet store recently and “decided to bring this headline up with” the owners. He says that “they started laughing and saying that would never happen. It was like a big joke to them.” Which, to their credit, is correct.
He goes on to compare the Climate Corps to the Brown Shirts, and warns that “the climate agenda is coming for your freedom of speech. They are linked with people that want to take away your right to defend yourself (and your pets I guess if they come for them). But when they come for your pets, that should be a bridge too far even for the most ardent leftist.”
Again, Joe, it was a comic you’re clutching pearls over. So yes, it is a big joke to us.
And so are you.