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.” [bold, links added]
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 heatwaves 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.”
Read more at NewsBusters
Let’s face it. Over the years Freidman has devolved into just another garden variety Green “ideologue.” Like his elitist contemporaries, he has little to NO KNOWLEDGE about our domestic energy system or world markets, let alone the PHYSICS that determine energy imperatives and the fundamental realities of any energy transition. Your first clue is this: We are not “addicted” to oil…we are addicted to PROSPERITY! In the balance, our modern daily lives have been far more ENRICHED by hydrocarbons than any of the unfortunate geo-political developments or perceived climate emergencies created. The inability to see any BALANCE is notable. To be creditable, Mr. Freidman and his “crew” only have to answer one fundamental question: “What CLEAN, SUSTAINABLE, ENERGY DENSE & COST EFFECTIVE alternative do you suggest to REPLACE 80% of your nations primary energy that fossil fuels currently provide?” That does not even factor in the myriad of useful products that derive from oil & gas. Mr. Freidman has always fancied himself to be a strategist & forward thinker. OK, so INSTEAD of VILIFYING energy producers & promoting old technologies that are dilute & intermittent (wind & solar) and battery storage which may NEVER reach requisite levels to stabilize an electric grid, why not look at better “bridge” opportunities? Renewables are not the answer. Combined cycle natural gas, to modular nuclear to fusion (ultimately) is the way forward in any rational energy transition. As far as climate, if you can demonstrate it’s an actual crisis, fine. Then ADAPT, don’t WASTE TRILLIONS of dollars on mitigation. Sorry Tom. If you were any kind of objective journalist, with any complex arena you’d understand one basic thing, To get the right answers, you FIRST have to start asking the RIGHT questions…
The New York Pravda(Times)its been a leftists propaganda rag since 1932 thats 90 years its been a liberal lie a day leftists rag a total waste of Paper,Ink abd Freedom of the Press