NYT, WaPo, TIME: America Must Pay for Causing the Typhoon
Developing nations demanded payment from climate “polluting” countries following the typhoon that killed thousands in the Philippines. The liberal news media, which blame climate change for weather events all the time, have promoted such calls for compensation even before this tragedy occurred.
Frequent proponent of global warming alarmism TIME Magazine argued in 2009 that President Barack Obama’s promise to cut emissions by 17 percent by 2020 was “far below what science shows is needed to avert dangerous warming.” The same TIME article called on rich nations to pay for, at the very least, the past two decades of “climate change” damage.
Time Senior Writer Bryan Walsh wrote that “Even if developed nations got a pass for the decades of emissions that occurred before the world became aware of climate change, they had to have been aware of man-made warming since at least 1990, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put out its first assessment.”
In the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, The New York Times ran a front page story that bolstered calls for climate compensation Nov. 17, 2013, saying that “[p]oor nations here are pressing for a new effort that goes beyond reducing emissions and adapting to a changing climate.”
The Times article continued, “[w]hile they have no legal means to seek compensation, they have demanded concrete efforts to address the ‘loss and damage’ that the most vulnerable nations will almost certainly face.”
The online version of the Times article included an educational video, which argued that the destructive power of storms was increasing over time, and that “you can blame climate change for that.”
A Washington Post editorial on Nov. 18, 2013, called for a “middle path” of “a modest carbon tax” because there are “certainly some ill effects of global warming,” although the Post admitted that the science behind climate change predictions made “assumptions.” Of course, a “modest carbon tax” is hardly middle ground when numbers like $76 trillion are being seriously considered.
The Heritage Foundation estimated that capping carbon would act as an energy tax of nearly $2,000 on every American household. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has said “it would destroy tens of millions of good-paying jobs.”
The UN stated in 2009 that such a shift to renewable energy alone would cost the US $6 trillion over the course of ten years. To the left and some in the media, that’s climate justice. In 2011, the UN upped that number to $76 trillion. For context, the national debt is currently at $17 trillion, less than a quarter of the estimated cost.
The left is set on having the U.S. and other developed nations pay for the supposed climate sins. The UN suggested in 2009 that rich nations need to pay $142 billion each year to fight climate change. Clearly, some media outlets are on board.
These demands for climate change reparations are not new. For years, the left and foreign leaders have called for the U.S. and other developed nations to pay billions, or even trillions, to the rest of the world for “climate justice.”
Left-wing billionaire George Soros’ crony Jeffrey Sachs is one such proponent of making the West pay for the effects of “climate change.” He once wrote, “How to make rich countries pay for climate change” and stressed that rich nations should pay poor countries because “they owe it to them.”
On Dec. 9, 2010, Bolivian President Evo Morales called for both climate change reparations and the death of capitalism, claiming that “[t]here are two ways: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies.” Morales cited a debunked stat which claimed that 300,000 people die annually from the effects of climate change.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben, a cofounder of the Soros-funded 350.org, wrote a piece for the liberal magazine Mother Jones calling Congress a “climate cheapskate.” He claimed in the Nov. 9, 2009 article that even a bad climate solution would “still leave about a good $10 or $20 billion-with-a-B for the U.S. to put up each year.” 350.org got $8,900 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations in 2008.
But some experts disagree. Meteorologist Joe Bastardi told Forbes on May 26 that “blaming turbulent weather on global warming is extreme nonsense” and that the current climate changes are part of a normal weather cycle.
Despite what the media have claimed about climate change, not all scientists share the same viewpoint. More than 1,000 scientists are on record dissenting in some way from the so-called "consensus." U.S. government atmospheric scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has said, "It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic [manmade] global warming." Other scientists disagree about the extent of man’s influence on climate or over how threatening that is to the planet.
— Mike Ciandella is Research Analyst at the Media Research Center. Follow Mike Ciandella on Twitter.
