New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has a hot take about the Ukraine War, and of course, it involved trying to freak people out about climate change.
Friedman blurted in a new op-ed that the Ukraine War “needs to end with America finally, formally, categorically and irreversibly ending its addiction to oil.” Friedman's op-ed, headlined "How to Defeat Putin and Save the Planet," pontificated that “[n]othing has distorted our foreign policy, our commitments to human rights, our national security and, most of all, our environment than our oil addiction.”
Then came the apocalyptic doom-mongering: “Our civilization simply cannot afford this anymore. Climate change has not taken a timeout for the war in Ukraine.” It’s ridiculous to read a lecture about “our commitments to human rights” from the same person who absurdly praised communist China in 2009 for showing how a one party system could impose “‘critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.’”
JunkScience.com founder Steve Milloy and Climate Depot founder Marc Morano sounded off to the MRC about Friedman’s nonsense. Morano said Friedman’s article should be headlined, “‘How to Defeat U.S. Energy and Do Nothing to Save the Planet.'”
Friedman used the fact that U.S. and NATO allies were buying Russian energy and enriching Russian President Vladimir Putin to push Green New Deal pipe dreams like solar and wind power.
Milloy ripped Friedman for making oil the scapegoat for the Ukraine War. “It was mindless green policies – advocated by Putin-funded activist groups in Europe -- that drove Europe to abandon its own fossil fuel resources for wind, then to buy more and more coal, oil and gas from Russia, thereby enriching Putin,” Milloy said. Morano blasted Friedman’s fantasy that “we can somehow use wind and solar, which are less than 4% of U.S. energy production combined.”
Morano tore into Friedman’s “national security” argument and said he “misses the entire point.”
“[T]he U.S. is perfectly capable of plentiful domestic energy production if our industries are not hamstrung over 'climate change' concerns,” Morano said in a Twitter message. “The greatest national security threat we face is the energy policies advocated by Friedman.” Milloy said the “solar and wind” tools are exactly “the same failed technologies that caused the Green New Deal War [in Ukraine] in the first place. No thanks, Tom.”
Friedman even tried to claim that releasing restrictions on oil companies to drill “would not be all that significant” in the short term to lower gas prices. Friedman, like a hypocritical elitist, instead claimed the “surefire, climate-safe method” to reduce gas prices would be to “reduce the speed limit on highways to 60 miles per hour and ask every company in America that can do so to let its employees work at home and not commute every day.” It appears that Friedman is clamoring for the 1970s, when a 55-mile-per-hour national speed limit was signed into law by President Richard Nixon, which even the leftist Slate admitted had no “significant effect on gas consumption.” [Emphasis added.]
Both Morano and Milloy slammed Friedman for pushing counterfactual scare porn on how “[s]imultaneous extreme heat waves gripped” part of Antarctica in March, and allegedly raised its temperatures. Milloy pointed out that “the Antarctic has been generally cooling for 70 years and Antarctic sea ice is expanding.” Morano directed the MRC to a recent October 2021 CNN article headlined, “Antarctica's last 6 months were the coldest on record.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 1 (800) 698-4637 and demand it distance itself from Friedman’s climate nonsense.
