Privileged Block Climate Progress

By FRANK LINGO

A columnist for the Wall Street Journal wrote a tortured treatise in its Sept. 4-5 Weekend Edition entitled “Media Can’t Handle the Climate Truth.”

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a dogmatic defender of all that is white privilege. I’ll just call him Hole, short for Holman and something else. Hole’s sort of a print version of Tucker Carlson. (BTW, Carlson recently advised people to call Child Protective Services on parents who put masks on their kids.)

But back to our other jerk. According to Hole, the media have been alarmist for decades. Hole wrote about the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “But if you’ve been buying the media’s exaggerations, you can relax quite a bit.”

Regarding Hurricane Ida flooding cities in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Hole writes, “heavy rains always happened ...” Well, it has happened at least once before — that was Hurricane Sandy.

A little perspective on Hole is in order.

In 2018, New York Magazine ran a piece by Jonathan Chait that highlighted the devotion Hole and his WSJ colleagues have for Trump. Hole stuck to his position that Trump did nothing wrong regarding Russia, and the Republican Party has a duty to defend Trump from his accusers.

So Hole must have grown up in a rich family that taught him to protect the status quo, right?

No. His Dad was a soldier in WWII and then became a professor of political science who admired liberal icon Hubert Humphrey. Hole’s Mom was a volunteer at the library. Incidentally, my Dad worked for Vice President Humphrey in the 1960s. I stayed with those values.

So Hole came on his own to the Wall Street Journal’s mission to glorify greed and deny the climate crisis. When all that matters is money, a columnist can contort conclusions.

Witness Hole and his paper’s craven support for Trump as the corruption continued and even escalated to insurrection. There is no conservative policy in Trump’s agenda. His followers, including columnists, are cultists now, refusing reason or rationality.

Besides fealty to the former Oaf of Office, Hole seems eager to soothe our fears about the consequences of climate chaos. He takes comfort that the former estimate of the planet’s temp going up 4.5 degree Celsius was being downgraded to only a 4.0 rise.

HUH!!?? That’s still terrible, Hole. How much evidence do you need to see the obvious? Isn’t it enough that Siberia recorded 118 degrees Fahrenheit this year? Isn’t it enough that California forest fires are so huge that the smoke from them is being breathed on the East Coast?

When do all the conditions of the Earth become evidence that Exxon was right in its secret research from half a century ago that burning fossil fuels was going to cause a calamitous effect on our ecosystem?

Oh, and the same question to George Will, who, despite his apparent intellect, is a continuing climate change denier.

Hole and George’s arguments are just as freakin’ dumb as the folks who take horse de-wormer instead of a vaccine for COVID. This is where these columnists’ contortions come in. They use their noggins for nefarious purposes instead of trusting the scientists who have devoted their lives to studying the issue and now warn us humans that we are setting our home on fire.

But here’s the good news. A United Nations worldwide survey of over a million participants found that the majority of Earth’s people think climate change is a global emergency. They’ve got a lot more common sense than the allegedly learned Hole and George.

Now that a majority of us see the situation, let’s make the politicians and corporations work toward the solutions.

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” Email: lingofrank@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2021

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