MAY 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Eminent climatologist MJ Greene enlightened her base this month by tweeting her astute observations about climate change. Here goes:

“If you believe that today’s “climate change” is caused by too much carbon, you have been fooled.”

“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. “Considering all of that, yes our climate will change, and it’s totally normal!”

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 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”.

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 Greene had any intellectual curiosity—or integrity—she would have consulted greenhouse gas charts published by NASA or the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but that’s not what hard-righters do.