Climate Alarmism Targets a New Audience: Hip Hop Fans
It’s getting hot in here.
Hip Hop artists and rappers including Common, Ne-Yo, Karmin and Elle Varner collaborated on a new album that mixes hip hop with climate change alarmism and left-wing talking points. On Nov. 18, National Journal said four original tracks with environmental themes were released that day on the “HOME” EP. The full album from People’s Climate Music project will be released in December.
Common, Malik Yusef and Kumasi recorded one of those songs, “Trouble in the Water,” after a discussion of water pollution and drought, National Journal said. In the song he used several liberal talking points related to climate change. One of them was that hurricanes were related to global warming, “Through hurricanes, the pain is made audible.”
NBC News and others in the liberal media have claimed this before. In 2013, NBC predicted “more and stronger hurricanes” this season,” but were proved wrong. Historically, the U.S. is under a major (Category 3 or higher) hurricane drought according to meteorologists. That fact presents a problem for climate alarmists.
The hip hop project comes at a time when the news is not on the alarmists’ side. As Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works satellite data shows there had not been any global warming in the last 18 years. Climate models used by the United Nations,which predicted more warming, failed to predict that possibility.
“Trouble in the Water” also took a swing at hydraulic fracturing (fracking) suggesting it was responsible for flammable tap water with the phrase“firewater flow straight out of the faucet.” It was also suggested that, “with all this (EXPLETIVE) fracking they going to (EXPLETIVE) around and release the (EXPLETIVE) Kraken.” In the currently available version the expletives were muted, but iTunes lists the currently unavailable album as explicit.
The idea of flammable tap water was made popular by the 2010 anti-fracking film “Gasland.” The Colorado well he featured was drilled into a pocket of methane, and had no link to fracking. Josh Fox, the film’s director, later admitted he also ignored the fact that flammable tap water existed long before fracking was done. In fact it has been observed at least as far back as the 18th century.
In addition to its new songs the album will feature some covers. The duo Karmin covered “Big Yellow Taxi,”an environmentalist standard by Joni Mitchell, the National Journal said on Nov. 18. That song criticized DDT saying, “Hey farmer, farmer put away that DDT now give me spots on my apples but leave me the birds and the bees please.” Environmentalists, thanks to Rachel Carson, successfully got DDT banned.
Angela Logomasini, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said in a Nov. 30, 2012, report that Carson got her facts wrong and that DDT was used to preserve human lives.
“DDT, which many governments banned after the publication of ‘Silent Spring,’ had been used to control the spread of malaria, which now kills more than 1 million people annually,” Logomasini said. Forbes reported that since DDT was no longer available, “many mosquito-control authorities are depleting their budgets by repeated spraying with expensive, short-acting and marginally effective insecticides.”
