OPINION:
In a recent Axios interview, White House climate czar Gina McCarthy called on social media companies to clamp down on discussions that clash with her version of climate change. During that very interview, Ms. McCarthy made climate statements that are fringe positions, if not outright lies.
This pressure on tech companies is particularly concerning as we learn more about how responsive they were to the left with respect to the origins of COVID-19.
As with so many aspects of COVID-19, the virus’s origin was quickly politicized. A widely cited Lancet letter, published just a few months after the onset of the epidemic, provided the cover the media needed to squelch discussion of non-wildlife origins. The letter’s writers, and many of its signers, were associated with the EcoHealth Alliance, a group that helped fund controversial gain-of-function research at labs in Wuhan, China, the location of the virus’s first appearance. This conflict of interest was ignored.
Despite growing evidence for the theory that the release of the virus had begun in a lab, proponents of the lab leak were blocked from social media. Sen. Tom Cotton was infamously labeled a conspiracy theorist in The Washington Post for simply suggesting that the virus might have leaked from a lab.
Fortunately, a devastating article in The New Yorker brought the theory and associated facts to mainstream readers in the spring of 2021.
The delay in pursuing the likelihood of a lab-leak origin meant that critical data were destroyed. This delay was abetted by media and tech companies suppressing the debate.
What does this have to do with climate change?
The Biden White House wants to use the same tactics to censor uncomfortable debate and facts that don’t support its climate crisis narrative.
The real climate debate is about the costs of global warming and the impact and costs of policies to mitigate the warming. The left wants to kill this debate by labeling any opposition to their extreme agenda as false information. The same media that blocked the COVID-19 origin story have signed up to do the same for the climate debate. The narrative-over-facts agenda was on full display in Ms. McCarthy’s Axios interview.
The great irony of this interview is that, while arguing for censoring misinformation, Ms. McCarthy makes multiple assertions that do not comport with widely accepted data and projections.
Her most egregious error was claiming that there are “billions of human beings across the world dying because [of] … fossil fuels or climate.” Worldwide, around 60 million people die each year from all causes, so she starts off by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Perhaps she meant to say “millions” instead of “billions.” It happens. But even at that level, it is misleading. The chance of dying from extreme weather (floods, droughts, storms, wildfire and extreme temperatures) has dropped 99% in the last century. Cold weather kills more people than does hot weather.
Or maybe she means the deaths from fossil fuels that have nothing to do with CO2 (which is colorless, odorless and nontoxic) but from particulates. Even here, the studies linking deaths to current levels of particulates were dismissed by the EPA’s Clean Air Science Advisory Committee in 2019. Given their central role in sustaining billions of people around the world, the deaths from forgoing fossil fuels could dwarf Ms. McCarthy’s hyperbolic claims of climate impacts.
When she said billions, it was absolutely wrong and misinforming. When she said climate change is killing people, it was misinformation. If she led people to believe that CO2 was a pollutant that was killing people, it was misinformation. Ironic, given that the interview was about stopping misinformation.
Ms. McCarthy asserted that climate change is an existential threat. This, too, is misinformation.
According to research by Nobel laureate, William Nordhaus, the average person in 2100 will be four to five times richer in 2100 than the average person today, even after accounting for climate impacts, and even these impacts are based on implausibly hot climate models. If this projected damage could magically be eliminated, it would add a few percent more to that 400% increase. Either way, the projection is far from catastrophic and should instead be taught to children as proof of the better tomorrow that awaits them.
Finally, Ms. McCarthy also said that fighting climate change would increase the economy today. Her assertion runs counter to virtually every analysis done when economy-wide impacts of transition costs are included. Nordhaus’ analysis shows that under the scenario with aggressive climate policies, people spend less than if nothing is done, at least through 2050.
The more extreme policies promoted by Ms. McCarthy and the Biden administration are even worse. The Department of Energy’s own model shows that the administration’s climate plan would cost the economy more than $7 trillion dollars in the first 18 years — without achieving the climate targets.
The First Amendment was first for good reason. Government control of speech becomes government control of everything else. Only those most uncertain of the sturdiness of their own arguments seek to suppress the arguments of others.
• David W. Kreutzer is the senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research.
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