Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks “climate change” science is bogus, and its proponents are grifters. She presented her case in a tweet. She starts,
“If you believe that today’s “climate change” is caused by too much carbon, you have been fooled.”
Her “scare quotes” say she does not believe in climate change. However, she leaves it unclear whether she denies the planet is getting hotter — or if she accepts the increase in global temperature but denies it is due to carbon.
More telling is her use of it the passive voice — “you have been fooled.” In doing so, she avoids saying who was doing the fooling. Her opening sentence is both unclear and wishy-washy. It is the hallmark of someone lacking confidence in their argument.
In the second paragraph, she lays out the groundwork for her argument.
“We live on a spinning planet that rotates around a much bigger sun along with other planets and heavenly bodies rotating around the sun that all create gravitational pull on one another while our galaxy rotates and travels through the universe.
Technically the Earth, other planets, and heavenly bodies “revolve” or “orbit” around the sun — a mass rotates around its axis. As for these “heavenly bodies”, my best guess is she means asteroids and comets.
She is correct that our galaxy — the Milky Way — does rotate and travel through the universe. And she is also right that all masses in the universe exert ”gravitational pull” on each other. (Note, astrophysicists no longer believe gravity is a pulling force, but I am probably splitting more hairs.) Overall, Greene offers a reasonably accurate, if simplistic, explanation of things.
Her vocabulary reveals the genesis of her ideas. Her use of “heavenly bodies” illuminates her religious approach to astronomy. ‘Heaven’ is, of course, not a scientific concept.
Then she arrives at her QED moment.
“Considering all of that, yes our climate will change, and it’s totally normal!”
She has left us hanging. She does not explain how all this movement leads to climate change — although it is good of her to acknowledge that our climate is changing.
My best estimate is that she has heard the sun drives climate and weather on Earth and has tossed in the rest because Republicans believe in baffling with bullshit. Call it ‘the more words, the merrier.’
As for “it’s totally normal,” I hazard that she is referring to the conservative climate-apologist tactic of pointing out that the Earth has had climate change in the past — without bringing up time scales. What used to take centuries or millennia is now happening in decades. Who knows what Greene means — I doubt she could explain it.
Next, she gets to her comfort zone — conspiracy theories.
“But there are some very powerful people that are getting rich beyond their wildest dreams convincing many that carbon is the enemy and that if humans sacrifice enough energy producing things we can actually control the climate.”
She dodged bringing up these anti-carbon activists before by using the passive voice. Now she obfuscates who they are by not naming these “very powerful people”. The genius of her argument is that if you stay fact-free, it is harder to be fact-checked. And it takes far less time and effort to blame shadowy cabals rather than take on the scientific community.
Greene again befuddles her audience by warning that humans may potentially “sacrifice enough energy producing things.” Does she mean fossil fuels? If so, why not just say so? The answer is that her scattershot writing is just more of the watery gruel Greene serves up as a solid argument. Who can blame her? Her readers will not question it.
She closes with a warning.
Don’t fall for the scam, fossil fuels are natural and amazing. They produce an abundance of energy that we all need to survive along with more products than you can possibly imagine.
Who are the scammers? We still do not know. Fossil fuels are natural and amazing. However, so are funnel web spiders, belladonna, and mosquitos. The first can be fatally venomous; the second, fatally poisonous; and the last spread malaria, which has killed innumerable people over time. “Natural and amazing” is not necessarily the asset Green thinks it is
Greene is correct that fossil fuels produce an abundance of energy — and we need that energy to survive. But humans have invented better alternatives to the old ways throughout our existence. The internal combustion engine replaced the horse. EVs will replace gas-powered cars. It is what we do. There is no need to stop with fossil fuels when so many renewable, clean, efficient, and non-carbon energy sources are available or within our grasp.
Greene is also correct that we make a lot of stuff from fossil fuels. Petroleum products are the basis of many artificial fibers. Manufacturers use them in cosmetics, medicine, packaging, and food dyes. Ironically, one use is to make the plastics that go into solar panels.
However, while the citizen should be concerned that many petroleum-based products are not biodegradable, making consumer products from oil does not add CO2 to the atmosphere — if manufacturers power their plants with alternate energy. CO2 is generally only released when we burn fossil fuels.
Greene finishes with her clincher — a picture that shows a decline in chemicals released into the atmosphere as fossil fuels increase. She is either a moron or a cynic. The decrease in airborne pollution results from ecological policies enacted under the 1970 Clean Air Act and enforced by the newly created EPA. An act and an agency today’s GOP wants to disembowel and diminish.
But far more egregiously, it does not measure the greenhouse gas that Greene is the crux of Greene’s tweet — carbon dioxide, CO2. This omission is not a surprise as the source of this misleading graph is FossilFuture.com — a website that promotes Alex Epstein, a fossil fuel advocate with a computer science/philosophy degree.
If she were an honest dealer, Greene would have used this chart (source: NASA). But that would have shredded her already piss-poor argument.
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