Make Nexus Hot News part of your morning: click here to subscribe.September 18, 2018
Two Wrongs End Up Right: WSJ Opinion Page 🦖 Accidentally Prints Facts That the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page published dumb pieces over the weekend is hardly worth talking about. However, two of them, each in their own extra-special way, managed to accidentally tell some truth.
On Sunday,
Paul Tice 🦕, investment manager, adjunct professor at NYU, anti-divestment advocate and Endangerment finding denier, wrote about how
Trump's 🦀 rollback of the Clean Power Plan “will not change the trajectory of the coal industry.”
This, apparently, is a bad thing. Tice laments how various pro-renewable policies at the state level have been successful in lowering prices to the point where “excess renewable capacity has served to depress wholesale power prices and crowd out sources such as coal.” As a result, Tice explains, there hasn’t been a new coal plant built in the US in five years, and it would be risky for an executive to even propose one now.
Yes, renewables are replacing coal because they're cheaper. In
Tice’s world, cleaner, cheaper energy that doesn't kill people at every stage of production is bad.
Blinded by ideology,
Tice and the
WSJ effectively admit that denier claims that renewables are too expensive are false. But it's likely ignorance, not ideology, that led to the WSJ's other accidental own-goal.
On Friday,
WSJ columnist Holman Jenkins Jr. 🦖 penned a column that started out with some healthy both-siderism: Trump’s Maria denial is wrong, but apparently he’s not wrong about “many in the media” being biased for reporting those numbers. He then makes the
Pielke-esque 🐉 argument that increased development on coasts is responsible for increased damages, not storms.
Jenkins defending
Trump and parroting
Pielke Jr. is hardly a surprise What is a surprise is where Jenkins went next.
When considering the cost of rebuilding after Florence,
Jenkins asks how money should be spent so the government funding doesn’t “become an artificial incentive to live and build in high-risk places,” like hurricane-prone coasts. Similarly,
he dings the
National Flood Insurance Program for being “a perverse subsidy for coastal development.”
Yes,
conservative Jenkins , in the pages of the
Wall Street Journal 💵 🎩 🍌 🏴 ☠️, is promoting an adaptation policy the climate community calls “managed retreat.” It's one of the most extreme possible policy options, ideally left for once all other mitigation options run out.
Planned retreat describes how as sea levels rise (and hurricanes intensify) there will come a point at which we should move communities away from the coasts instead of repeatedly evacuating and rebuilding after every disaster. Instead of sea walls and other adaptation measures, we instead abandon the billions of dollars of coastal real estate as it is gradually submerged by the rising seas.
Does
Jenkins 🦖 know that this is an established, already happening, yet extreme and fatalistic, climate adaptation policy? Unlikely.
After describing this last-ditch climate adaptation policy, he rhetorically asks where Al Gore is, and baselessly accuses “the climate crowd” of being “enamored of coastal development.” Why would the climate crowd embrace putting more people in harm’s way? Because, claims Jenkins, that means more “victims of climate change” that are used “for the benefit of generating media coverage of climate politics.”
Is the
climate crowd ignoring this issue?
Hardly! On the same exact day Jenkins posted about the climate crowd ignoring managed retreat,
WUWT criticized a climate scientist for talking about managed retreat.
Sounds like
Jenkins is either terribly ignorant of climate policy options, or is
just a liar feigning ignorance to make a partisan point. Either way, the fact is that he presented a surprisingly solid argument for a relatively extreme climate adaptation measure, from a conservative perspective, in a conservative outlet.
If we ever get any support for climate action from deniers, it might only be by virtue of their ignorance.
Fortunately, that appears to be a renewable resource.