The devastating toll of delusion

“In every corner of the country and the world, people are suffering the devastating toll of climate change. Historic hurricanes and floods wiping out homes, businesses, and houses of worship. Wildfires destroying whole neighborhoods and forcing families to leave their communities behind.”

This is the opening paragraph of President Biden’s statement on the pausing of approvals for new LNG export capacity. It is a very good intro as intros go, setting the tone of the whole statement, stating the most important part of the message, and, of course, invoking negative emotions.

These days, it’s a top priority to scare and depress people if you’re in politics, regardless of whether you’re a regional party functionary in Europe or, indeed, the president of the United States.

I do have a slight doubt most people would ask “What historic hurricanes?” given that the past three years have been relatively unremarkable and last year was a huge disappointment as far as apocalyptic visions go but it doesn’t matter. If a scare must be had, a scare shall be had. In this case, however, there was more than one scare. And the second one is the more important — and painfully pathetic — one.

The Biden administration paused approvals for new LNG plants under pressure from environmentalists. The pressure began building last year, when green activist Bill McKibben, of “We must develop an aesthetic appreciation of wind and solar installations” notoriety, presented in the New Yorker a study on LNG.

The study was authored by a person who calls himself “a biogeochemist and ecosystem scientist” and teaches at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell.

In this study, Robert Warren Howarth claimed that LNG is devastatingly worse for the climate than coal. And this is why, per Howarth, “ending the use of LNG must be a global priority.” Something tells me the world would beg to differ but this has turned out to be unimportant, trumped by climate fears — or should I say voter loss fears.