On Friday, CBS ran a story by Cara Korte that explored “how climate change helped strengthen the Taliban.” It’s a nuanced story on an obviously charged topic, and Korte talked to multiple experts to explain how droughts and floods have caused economic and food stress, which the Taliban have exploited to bolster their recruitment.
Deniers, predictably, went wild with the idea that now the media is blaming climate change for terrorism. From Twitchy’s aggregation of lazy dunk-attempts from conservatives on Twitter, to lazy dunk-attempts on blogs and all the way to lazy dunk-attempters Tucker Carlson and Fox and Friends and a combo of all that from Fox’s “media reporter” Joseph Wulfsohn.
But at the same time deniers were trying to make the idea that terrorists exploit hardship and stress sound stupid, one of their own was delivering what may be the stupidest example of climate denial. Ever.
It comes courtesy of one Wayne Christian, who you may know as one of the Texas Railroad Commissioners who got talking points from an industry propagandist and then rushed to blame renewables for the blackout in February to deflect blame from the gassy culprits.
Christian, who’s got a history of claims that are half-true, at best, told an energy conference on Friday that there’s a better solution to climate change than “$78 trillion in spending, shutting down the industries around the world, keeping third-world countries from having coal-generated electric power and all kinds of things.”
What could this miracle solution be? “Turn the damn air conditioner up. It’s that simple.”
Of course! Putting aside the obvious fact that not everyone on the planet can afford to crank the air conditioning, does Christian not realize the outside… exists? Apparently farmworker Florencio Gueta-Vargas should have just turned up the A/C when his tractor got stuck in the mud during the recent Pacific Northwest heatwave, leading to his untimely death from the heat, like hundreds of thousands of others every year.
Nevermind that the tractor didn’t even have a roof to shade him, much less A/C. And of course, forget about the fact that air conditioning is energy intensive and worsens climate change.
Building a house in the summer? Apparently before you can even start on a foundation, Wayne Christian thinks you should get the A/C up and running. Plan on playing a sport, or even practicing? Better hope that your (high school) football field is inside where there’s air!
Apparently Wayne Christian thinks that the outdoors can be air conditioned. That, or he just doesn’t care about the thousands of workers, disproportionately people of color, whose jobs require them to be outside in un-air-conditioned heat.
It’s that simple.