Despite propaganda from nuclear/coal front group, NOW IS the time to talk about climate change

This is exactly the time to be talking about climate change, Joel Makower, Chairman & Executive Editor, Green Biz Group, Green Biz, March 31, 2020 – I rarely get exasperated from reading environmental business media, but a quote last week in a Bloomberg article about sustainability and the U.S. economic crisis got me headed in that direction.

The quote came from Ted Nordhaus, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a research group whose founders, self-described environmentalists, have made a career out of being gadflies — for example, arguing in favor of nuclear power and natural gas, arguing against putting a price on carbon emissions and claiming that there’s no real limit to the earth’s carrying capacity, or that energy efficiency doesn’t work because of something called the “rebound effect.”

I’ll leave it to you to proceed down the wormhole of websites critiquing the group’s analyses. Suffice to say that the Breakthrough Institute has become a darling of the anti-science, pro-pollution conservative right, which frequently cites its work in order to attack environmentalists and climate scientists and their fact-based policy recommendations.

Here’s last week’s quote, in reference to the notion of integrating climate measures into congressional appropriations as we rebuild the economy reeling from the coronavirus pandemic:

…… he says. “It would be tone-deaf to talk about climate change now.”

It’s a specious ploy often used by conservatives. Following a mass shooting, it’s not the right time to talk about gun control. Following a hurricane, it’s not the right time to talk about climate-exacerbated weather events. Following the police shooting of an unarmed black man, it’s not the right time to talk about race relations and inequality.

Of course, later on, when it’s presumably “the right time,” the public’s fickle attention likely has moved on to other front-burner topics.

Just because a problem isn’t in the news doesn’t mean it somehow has been solved. All of the above challenges remain, pandemic or not. And, to varying degrees, they all need to be kept alive, even amid other pressing priorities.

So, Nordhaus is dead wrong: This is exactly the right time to be talking about climate change.

In fact, we need to be talking unapologetically about climate, the clean economy, renewable energy, resilient food systems, sustainable mobility, the circular economy and the Sustainable Development Goals with more vigor than ever…….https://www.greenbiz.com/article/exactly-time-be-talking-about-climate-change