In the coming days and weeks, people will hear an awful lot from America’s political, media, Hollywood, and academic elites about the urgent need for Congress to pass President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” plan.
A centerpiece to Biden’s plan is the Green New Deal, the far-left’s effort to end the production and use of fossil fuels, which are critical to our nation’s economy. We’ll be lectured that “there’s no time to waste” and “the climate crisis is making hurricanes stronger and more deadly.” That assertion, like much of what we hear from radical environmentalists filtered through the liberal media, is flat-out wrong.
In recent days, we have seen far-left politicians directly blame Republicans for bad weather. Every time a tornado or hurricane hits, they claim that if Republicans would just go along with leftist climate policies, the flooding wouldn’t be as bad, and natural disasters (tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.) could somehow be prevented in the future. They expect us to shut up, comply, and let them jam their radical policies through Congress.
First, the country’s energy demands cannot be met without the use of coal, oil and natural gas, and nuclear. These energy resources are critical to powering our homes, schools, businesses, and even electric vehicles. Green technologies, though promising, are still in their infancy and are inherently inefficient and expensive. Just look at environmentally woke Europe, which has bought into the “rush to green energy sources” hook, line, and sinker. And, as we saw last year, they need natural gas so badly to heat their homes, cook their food, and keep their lights on that they’re willing to make a deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to get it.
Second, before making sweeping policy changes, people deserve to know the truth that natural disasters are not becoming any stronger, more deadly, or more frequent. With the clamor of the climate crisis movement at a fever pitch and with far-left politicians shamelessly predicting that the End of Days is around the corner, it can be difficult to separate fact from the fiction in all the heavily financed propaganda.
According to a heavily researched 2018 study by the American Meteorological Society titled “Continental U.S. Hurricane Landfall Frequency and Associated Damage: Observations and Future Risks,” hurricanes aren’t getting any stronger, and there aren’t more of them. They’re just causing more property damage because we’ve built more structures (homes, businesses, critical infrastructure, etc.) in vulnerable locations close to the ocean. It’s no surprise that this study didn’t get much attention because it didn’t fit the far-left’s narrative.
Further, according to the University of Oxford and the Global Change Data Lab, “Over the course of the 20th century there was a significant decline in global deaths from natural disasters. In the early 1900s, the annual average was often in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. In the second half of the century and into the early 2000s, we have seen a significant decline to less than 100,000 — at least five times lower than these peaks. This decline is even more impressive when we consider the rate of population growth over this period.”
The bottom line is that political, media, academic, and coastal elites are lying to us. They want us to believe that America’s production and use of fossil fuels are making hurricanes more deadly and more frequent. This is simply not true. This far-left talking point is nothing but a scare tactic used to enact radical climate change policies that will devastate our great nation while doing nothing to improve global air quality. It’s enough to make reasonable people ask, “If the elites are lying to us about this, what else are they lying about? And why?”
Bill Johnson represents Ohio’s 6th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
