During a recent hearing of the Senate Budget Committee, members heard from witnesses who notably included a former prime minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) is a member of that panel, and, well, his interactions with Turnbull — who was there to discuss climate change and its global impacts — went about as well as you’d expect, meaning poorly.
Turnbull nonetheless managed to school Johnson on how so much of the world is actually against him on this issue. “Climate has always changed, always will,” Johnson asserted. “My viewpoint is, I don’t think there’s anything we can really do about it.”
“There is no doubt that global temperatures have fluctuated and sea levels have fluctuated,” the witness said. “But there are now, what, eight billion people living on the planet, and the impact on humanity of runaway global warming will be devastating… With great respect Senator, it isn’t conjecture… You may be right and just about everyone else may be wrong, but the odds are that the trend, the momentum in the world is to renewable energy. Now the good news is, we can have clean electricity and cheaper electricity and greater national security.”
Johnson, of course, wasn’t convinced, and he described efforts to impact the climate as having been largely a waste based in an ambition to accomplish something that’s supposedly not able to be done. Sure, the environment in the U.S. has become substantially cleaner in just recent decades as the federal government has poured its resources into fixing those problems, which can have an impact on the climate if what’s being fed into it is no longer so toxic and damaging, but Johnson didn’t acknowledge that.
Instead, he focused on supposedly major problems with the approach of trying to stop whatever exactly it is that humanity has done over the past decades and few centuries with our economic expansion and industrialization — which it seems ludicrous to suggest hasn’t impacted the climate. Check out the hearing below:
