Detroit – The first 2024 presidential debate put to rest the false media narrative that Joe Biden is sharp as a tack. But it continued to feed another whopper.
“Another persistent challenge is the climate crisis,” claimed CNN moderator Dana Bash. “2023 was the hottest year in recorded history, and communities across the country are confronting the devastating effects of extreme heat, intensifying wildfires, stronger hurricanes, and rising sea levels. Former President Trump will you take any action as President to slow the climate crisis?”
The climate crisis rhetoric is having profound consequences on America’s industrial heartland as regulatory agencies from Washington to California dictate the future of the auto and energy sectors in a rush to head off “an existential crisis… capable of wiping out all human life on earth," according to John Kirby, the Biden Administration’s National Security Council communications advisor.
CNN’s string of falsehoods – all allegedly caused by fossil fuel consumption - are repeated ad nauseum daily in major US news outlets and turbocharged by “climate crisis” guidelines issued by the partisan Associated Press which has retooled its industry-standard Stylebook to enforce Democratic Party dogma.
Climate industrial policy initiatives are wasting billions to address false alarms.
Just this summer, for example, the federal government admitted that $5 billion distributed to states under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program had yielded just 11 chargers in three years. Meanwhile, the EPA fined General Motors $146 million for what it deemed excessive carbon dioxide emissions for vehicles produced from 2012-2018 (on top of $128 million for 2016-17 models) and Stellantis paid 236 million for 2018-19 models and $711 million for 2022 emissions. In the next few years, these fines will accelerate.
The panic is driven in part by the AP Stylebook, which instructs member outlets from TV to newspapers. AP is obsessed with CO2 emissions and helping government remake the transportation industry.
Bash’s debate fib came right out of the AP’s latest, massive 2,734-word guideline on how to cover the “climate crisis.”
AP instructs journalists that mankind is “responsible for more intense and more frequent extreme storms, droughts, floods and wildfires.” The evidence of this? AP tells journalists they must consult only government sources: the United Nations “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; NASA; the World Meteorological Organization; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.”
Opposing viewpoints? “Avoid false balance,” orders AP, “giving a platform to unfounded claims or unqualified sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views. For example, coverage of a study describing effects of climate change need not seek ‘other side’ comment that humans have no influence on the climate.”
Imagine AP instructing media outlets to ignore independent experts and only quote government agencies on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction leading up to the 2003 Iraq War.
In this media bubble, authorities like 2022 Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser are ignored. “The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people,” says Clauser whose work has concluded that CO2 has a “negligible” effect on climate.
Or Florida State, which – contrary to the narrative of more intense hurricanes – recorded the longest hurricane drought in Florida from 2005-2016.
Or Canada’s Fraser Institute, which – citing satellite data from the European Space Agency – recently reported “that wildfire activity has been trending downward in recent decades and is currently approaching its lowest level since the record began in the early 1980s.”
Or studies from Arizona State climatologist Laura Larocca and Northwestern climatologist Yarrow Axford who found that a “comprehensive sampling of sediment cores extracted from 66 lakes and seas (found) the Arctic was far warmer 6000 years ago than it is today.”
The relentless climate narrative fib has shaped an industrial policy with government billions feeding battery plants to make EVs for which there is no proven market. Michigan is systematically shuttering fossil fuel plants that will have to charge this EV future, driving up energy costs.
Bash’s climate falsehoods should have been knocked down by GOP candidate Trump. But viewers got pablum instead.
“So, I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever,” he said.
Biden echoed Bash: “The only existential threat to humanity is climate change. And (Trump) didn’t do a damn thing about it.”
The false narrative marches on.
Payne is the auto columnist for the Detroit News and a Townhall contributor
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