Earlier we looked at how the lefty New York Times, a green press role model, misdescribed what the Bonn climate summit was going to be about. Their post-summit wrap-up — titled “What Happened (and didn’t) at the Bonn Climate Talks” — is just as bad. No wonder their readers don’t know what is really going on.
As usual with the green press, it is more a matter of weaving together a series of half truths, omissions and advocacy, than of outright lies. After all, lies are easy to expose, artful bias is far more deceptive.
The NYT begins with an advocacy quote from China’s chief negotiator, saying that the momentum for global action on climate change was “irreversible.” This is hardly true. In fact these talks may well collapse in 2020, if not sooner, when the huge sums of money supposedly promised to the developing countries by Obama et al fail to appear.
It is the case, however, that China led the global green team at Bonn. Quoting them up front is thus a form of praise. It is also a form of hypocrisy, given that China’s coal fired power emissions are vast and growing.
This time the NYT at least mentions the proposed monumental wealth transfer that is basic to these negotiations, but not correctly. Their one-liner includes this howler — “wealthy countries promised to deliver aid amounting to at least $100 billion per year by 2020 to help poor countries develop clean energy and build resilience to disasters.”
Countries do not make promises. People can make promises and so can governments; however neither can make promises for future governments. For example, multi-year government contracts are always explicitly contingent on future Congressional appropriations.
In this case the so-called promise was made solely by then President Obama. He should have qualified it with being dependent on future Congressional action, which at this point is simply not going to happen. Moreover, all developed democracies operate under this principle. In short there are no such promises. This NYT statement is a case of repeating a lie, hoping it will come true.
The article then goes on to say that the US delegation “played nice (mostly).” They did indeed because they were Obama-era people, following outdated Obama policies. The Trump Administration was not represented. In that sense America was not at the table.
Then the article moves to a huge financial issue, but makes it seem very small. This is the so-called loss and damage claim, according to which America and the rest of the developed countries are potentially liable for the cost of pretty much all bad weather in the developing world, forever.
This liability could amount to untold trillions of dollars; however the NYT presents it as though it were just a matter of aiding some small island countries. They did manage to refer to it in passing as “sweeping steps to compensate countries” but never explained what that means and the absurdity of it.
They then slip into an anti-coal sidebar having little to do with the summit. Of course they refer to coal as “the dirtiest of all fossil fuels” even though atmospheric CO2 is perfectly clean. It is also the world’s food supply, as over 90% of the dry mass of most plants comes from the carbon and oxygen in CO2. Plants feed the world and CO2 feeds the plants.
At the end they shift into pure green alarmism. We get the usual pseudoscience about the present pledges leading to a mythical 3 degrees C of warming, leading to “a drastic change that would reshape coastlines, put many populated islands underwater and usher in a new era of deadly heat waves, floods and droughts.”
We are told that more needs to be done — more action, more money, more and more. Global domination to follow.
This article is a good model for all of the green press, dedicated to keeping people scared and in the dark. The one thing that it is not is journalism.
[Originally Published at CFACT]
David Wojick is a former consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science.
