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IRA Won't Solve Global Warming, Obviously. But Why's The Washington Post Running WSJ-Style Disinfo? [1]

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Date: 2022-08-25

Yesterday we discussed how Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal opinion page is basically bursting at the seams with climate disinformation . Apparently it's also an inspiration to the Washington Post, hardly considered a bastion of conservative propaganda, like the WSJ, but nonetheless seems happy to publish content that leaves their readers ill-informed.

Back when the Inflation Reduction Act passed the Senate, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board was scrambling for a response, and apparently found one in Bjorn Lomborg's back-of-the-envelope calculation that it would "reduce the estimated global temperature rise at the end of this century by all of 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit in the optimistic case. In the pessimistic case, the temperature difference will be 0.0009 degrees Fahrenheit."

It's an interesting attack, because, even assuming it's accurate, which would be quite a bold assumption, what it shows is that despite being the biggest federal investment in climate action ever, it's still not enough to justify flying a "Mission Accomplished" banner and moving on to other issues. The climate crisis is so large that yes, the IRA can be a huge investment and still not be enough to secure climate safety.

And, of course, no one's saying that it is! Even the bill's boosters have been forthright that it only puts us on a path to meeting the country's goal of cutting emissions in half by 2035 and to zero by 2050. So while activists might worry that the bill's passage would mean that people think we've solved the climate crisis and can therefore forget about it, Lomborg and the WSJ are accidentally helpful in showing that no, it's still a big problem that's going to require a lot more work.

One would think that in the ensuing two weeks since that WSJ editorial, they could have found a different line of attack, one that doesn't inadvertently justify further climate activism and action.

Nope! On Tuesday, the WSJ ran an op-ed by none other than Bjorn Lomborg , who still hasn't been able to think of something original or clever or even do a more robust calculation about the emission reductions, instead repeating the 0.0009 and 0.028 figures once again for the WSJ's apparently slow-on-the-uptake readers. Most people would say that if it's not new it's not news, but for Rupert Murdoch's media outlets like the WSJ, it's the opposite. Murdoch knows the importance of message discipline. You have to repeat the propaganda over and over again for it to sink in.

Fortunately for Murdoch and the fossil fuel industry propagandists from whom they apparently take direction, the WSJ is being echoed by a decidedly not-conservative outlet.

Because also on Tuesday, the Washington Post ran a nearly identical column by Marc Thiessen — a Fox panelist, employee of the Koch-funded AEI , and for some inexplicable reason, Washington Post columnist. "The Inflation Reduction Act won't reduce inflation. Or climate change," reads Theissen's headline, published and tweeted just hours before the WSJ ran Lomborg's similarly headlined "The Inflation Reduction Act Does Little To Reduce Climate Change."

And like he has in the past , Theissen brings WSJ-style disinfo to the Post's pages, repeating, and thus validating, Lomborg's 0.0009 and 0.028 figures, though of course with the spin that this means that the bill is useless, and not that it's just the first step of a long journey to climate safety.

(And no, neither Theissen nor the Washington Post editorial staff thought it necessary to include the unit of measurement, which we would assume is in Fahrenheit, but either way it's a problem when something makes it in the Washington Post that would immediately lose points on a 10th grade chemistry quiz.)

The US just took its first big step in the multi-decade marathon to reduce emissions. But for Lomborg, Theissen, the WSJ and apparently WaPo, the fact that this small step didn't get us to the finish line is portrayed as a reason to believe it's not worth running the race.

One wonders how these people get anywhere in life, when the first step of the driving directions doesn't end at their destination!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/25/2118679/-IRA-Won-t-Solve-Global-Warming-Obviously-But-Why-s-The-Washington-Post-Running-WSJ-Style-Disinfo

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