Over the years, the arguments against taking meaningful action against climate change have evolved from raising doubts about the science to claiming that rising temperatures might not be caused by human activity. Now President-elect Donald Trump is pushing it in an entirely new direction: Climate change is good, actually.
Trump, who has mused that rising sea levels might lead to more beachfront property, announced recently that his pick for energy secretary is Chris Wright, a Big Oil CEO who has downplayed the risks of rising global temperatures and argued that climate change might actually be good for the world.
These sentiments were revealed over the weekend in an article in The Wall Street Journal that featured various comments Wright made to the far-right platform PragerU, whose founder has bragged that he wants to “indoctrinate” American children with his politics.
Per the WSJ:
A fracking executive, Wright acknowledges that burning fossil fuels is contributing to rising temperatures. But he also says climate change makes the planet greener by increasing plant growth, boosts agricultural productivity and likely reduces the number of temperature-related deaths annually. “It’s probably almost as many positive changes as there are negative changes,” he told conservative media nonprofit PragerU last year, referring to climate change. “Is it a crisis, is it the world’s greatest challenge, or a big threat to the next generation? No.”
For the record, the things Wright lists as positives of rising atmospheric carbon — like more plant growth and a boost in “agricultural productivity” — don’t always occur in climate change scenarios, and when they do, they aren’t always positive developments. (Read more on that here and here).
And contrary to Wright’s claim about temperature-related deaths, the Environmental Protection Agency reported this year that “dramatic increases in heat-related deaths are closely associated with the occurrence of hot temperatures and heat waves.”
There are plenty more catastrophic scenarios that we know stem from climate change — circumstances that literally kill people and destroy properties and environments. Indeed, these are big threats to all generations that currently live on earth and any that wish to do so in the future.
Reputable scientists around the world have concluded that over several decades, an average global temperature increase above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees F) could produce “irreversible” changes with “dangerous impacts for humanity.” But Wright wants us all to see climate change through rose-colored glasses.
“A little bit warmer isn’t a threat,” he said in the resurfaced PragerU interview. “If we were 5, 7, 8, 10 degrees [Celsius] warmer, that would be meaningful changes to the planet.”
That sequence of numbers is particularly bizarre. Scientists believe the world is on track to get at least 3 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times, causing everything from destructive heat waves, wildfires and droughts to an ice-free Arctic Ocean to shifts in insect-born diseases. Six degrees is considered a doomsday scenario, with whole swaths of the Earth now uninhabitable. But Wright starts there, skipping up to an unimaginable 10 degrees of warming as maybe a problem in his offhand calculation.
No one should be surprised that Trump is living up to his promise to let Big Oil executives live their wildest dreams if they gave money to his campaign. But arguing that climate change is good and the Earth could stand to warm a few more degrees is a new low, even by our already lowered standards.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.