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WSJ Flies Further Toward 'Crazytown' 'Climate Lockdown' Conspiracy Theory Territory [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-09-06
The Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) opinion page, the standard-bearer of elite conservative ideology, has never been particularly honest in its coverage of climate change, but now it is seemingly tilting ever further toward the kind of " climate lockdown " nonsense more frequently found in the fevered rantings of social media stooges than the esteemed pages of prestige press.
It started off normally enough with a pair of pieces in Friday’s paper: an editorial pulling both anti-EV and anti-union double-duty and columnist Holman Jenkins, Jr.'s preening denial of the role of climate in the Maui fires. The latter concludes that the science supposedly "suggests a relatively manageable human adaptation to a slowly warming planet," as though humans can simply adapt to being on fire!
Those two pieces set the stage for Sunday's "Inside View" column by Andy Kessler, with the headline warning that " the climate-change 'emergency' is coming for you " but the subheadline offering some reassurance: "We've not fully arrived at crazytown. But the urge to curtail individual freedom is visible in countless blueprints for a controlled future."
What are Kessler's signs that we're headed to "crazytown" and "living as if we're already under [climate] emergency conditions"? Apparently just the fact that consumers can no longer buy wasteful incandescent bulbs . "Will electricity be rationed next?" Kessler asks rhetorically, before pointing to "September 2022," when California had to ask residents to reduce power.
What Kessler didn't mention, though, was that there was a much more recent example: just a few days ago, Texas had to ask residents to reduce their energy use . Now why oh why did Kessler stretch a year back for his example? Probably because the cause of Texas's troubles is that it’s the hottest summer on record. There’s a huge demand for energy in the unrelenting heat, and coal and natural gas plants are failing, with twice as many outages as expected — about 10 to 15 power plants-worth of failures.
So the fossil fuels causing the climate emergency are also failing to do the one thing they're good for, and instead of blaming them, the WSJ is running cover for their fossil-fueled friends.
And like so many other desperate dorks on digital platforms, Kessler is scraping the bottom of the intellectual barrel for ideas, moving quickly from one conspiracy theory hotbed to another, be it eating bugs or a 2016 quote about an artificially-induced meat allergy that Kessler likely read about on Infowars , or gas stoves or pizza ovens , and of course the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group goal of cutting the number of short flights. "That sounds like climate lockdowns to me," Kessler wrote, of the list of fact-checked-as-false conspiracy theories .
Apparently not having read that sentence in his own column, Kessler finally concludes with the line chosen for the subheadline: "climate lockdowns still sound like crazytown, but the urge to curtail individual freedom is visible in countless government, media and think-tank blueprints for a controlled future."
Clearly it's Kessler who's headed to crazytown, and since he doesn't have far to go, he's probably just mad about the thought of having to take a train instead of a short flight!
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/6/2191776/-WSJ-Flies-Further-Toward-Crazytown-Climate-Lockdown-Conspiracy-Theory-Territory
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