Climate 411

The distortions and lies from opponents of global warming action are flying fast and furious. Please help us keep up by adding claims you’ve seen as comments to this post.

We’ll review your submissions and try to respond to as many as we can in the main Truth Squad categories.

Submission suggestions:

1. Please send us the exact quote from our opponents with source or link. We’re looking for material that we can directly refute and it helps for us to understand the context in which comments were made.
2. Please keep this focused on claims from opponents of global warming action. There are plenty of other places on the web where we can debate the finer points of climate legislation. We’d like to use this space to focus on the most outrageous claims from those opposed to any real action at all.
3. Please feel free to provide links to video, radio, podcasts, blogs and other forms of online content.

Thanks for your help as we try to document the bogus claims of our climate action opponents.

Claim:

“We utilize energy from carbon not because we are bad people, but because it is the affordable foundation on which profound improvements in our standard of living have been achieved – our health and our welfare.

“I was a physics and chemistry teacher at Nyeri Baptist High School in Kenya, East Africa and witnessed first hand this simple rule – without energy life is brutal and short. World-wide, carbon-based energy demand will grow as Africans and others continue to discover the benefits of technology, medicine, mobility and agriculture and start reaping the benefits of higher standards of living just as we have. Having lived in Africa, I don’t see how one could halt the progress they need and will achieve. In my view, international rules to limit energy production will not halt the expansion of their energy use because of the tremendous benefits provided by energy that the energy-poor crave.”

— John R. Christy, Alabama’s State Climatologist and Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, written testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, February 25, 2009.

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This week, Joe Stiglitz and Nick Stern published an opinion piece in the Financial Times titled “Obama’s Chance to Lead the Green Recovery“. They call for a “stable, strong” price for carbon, but do not say how that price should be set. I just posted a response in the FT‘s Economists’ Forum. Here’s how it begins:

Joe Stiglitz and Nick Stern are exactly right to emphasize the role President Barack Obama can play in leading the green recovery. They are also right to calling for a “stable, strong carbon price.” But it matters how that price is set. In the United States in particular, the right environmental, political and economic answer is a cap-and-trade system.

Take a look at the whole conversation. I also provided some more detail on the greenness of economic stimuli over at the Environmental Economics blog. Spoiler alert: China’s trumps the United States’ package 2:1.