Does Glenn Beck's Hot Air Make Global Warming Worse?
Reminding myself that my usual Birkenstock sandals might be an unfortunate choice of footwear that morning, I took a casual stroll down to The National Mall on Saturday to toe the outskirts of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally. I was mostly curious. At home, in my isolated bubble just 3 blocks from Washington, D.C.'s feared "green and yellow" line (a place no Tea Partier dare tread), I hadn't run into many of our fair city's most-distinguished guests except on the boob tube.
The man of the hour preached about God and Country, faith and fairness. As many have reported, it was a "non-political" affair (if you don't count all those Obama-hating signs hanging around). Apparently Glenn Beck is quite comfortable preaching hatred and fear in politics all week on Fox News and making nice on the weekend.
Except there's one angle that news media outlets have ignored, and it is highlighted in The Hill by Peter Navarro, an economics and public policy professor at U.C. Irvine. Asked about the political fallout of the rally, he responded, "Political fallout unlikely — although global warming might get worse from all the hot air."
Navarro may be joking but Glenn Beck's hot air is indeed directly tied to rising global temperatures. Let me explain.
It begins with Beck's lies and fear-mongering. The man who on Sunday said “We must look to God and look to love. We must defend those we disagree with," is also the man who has compared Al Gore's climate campaign to "what Hitler did" in justifying the Holocaust with pseudo-science claims about genetics and racial superiority. Or more to the point, he said “I think we should hate the environment,” in a 2008 interview, according to Mother Nature News network.
He doesn't just spread vitriol, he also spreads lies. Just this April, according to the League of Conservation Voters, he said on-air: "Cap-and-trade is the biggest social scam, totally discredited climate change industry and zero warming for over a decade." This is patently false: This year is on track to be the hottest year on record ever. And this decade? Certainly warming. In fact, since February 1985, every single month (303 of them in total) has been hotter than the global average of the 20th century.
And Beck, please enlighten me as to who comprises this "climate change industry." Do you mean thousands of academic scientists, working individually, each of whom generally have nothing personal to gain by inflating their findings? Or do you just mean environmentalists or anyone else who takes them seriously? Or are you worried about the emerging renewable energy industry, the one that doesn't hold a candle to the political power of is coal, oil and gas counterparts?
I'd like to ignore Glenn Beck, and mostly I do. But though I hate to admit it, Glenn Beck has a bit of power from his perch at Fox News. Even at his lowest low, he still has an audience of more than 1.75 million a show. True, this is a self-selecting audience, and he is preaching to the choir anyway. But the reality is the more he is allowed to get away with fanning the outrage of his base to fight global warming regulations, the more politicians will hear from this misinformed constituency and the more prominence these lies will play in Tea Party rhetoric. And that is in fact bad news for the planet.
Please tell Glenn Beck to stop spewing hot air and stop making global warming worse! The League of Conservation Voters happens to have a petition to help you do that here.
Photo credit: Emil Kepko via Flickr
Jess Leber
is a Change.org editor. She most recently covered climate and energy issues as a reporter in Washington, D.C
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