“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” — Kurt Vonnegut
Whenever Ron Johnson appears on TV, it is usually a safe bet he is the dumbest person on the screen. For once, Fox News host Dagen McDowell makes that bet not a given. In what was nominally an interview — in reality, it was competing diatribes — McDowell claimed that solar panels are racist. I will let her explain. First, she laid the table.
"He [Biden] has gone to war on our fossil fuel industry. He has empowered and enriched nations that hate us, including Iran and Russia. Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if not for that. And at the same time, has empowered and enriched China because he and his cronies have a bet on electric vehicles."
First, Biden has proposed reducing the burden taxpayers bear because of the subsidies Congress has showered on US fossil fuel companies — a cost ranging anywhere from $10-50 billion annually. How is a demand for a return to free markets a “war?” I thought unfettered commerce was something conservatives wanted — not to mention the budgetary black ink.
Second, how does support for alternate energy empower Iran? McDowell does not say.
Third, Russia’s recent adventurism in Ukraine is merely an extension of the invasion that started in 2014. Russia’s oft-stated reasons for the war are twofold. One, Ukraine is not a real country. It is merely a province of Russia. Two, it was necessary to slow down NATO expansion. (Oops!)
Four, how does support for electric vehicles empower and enrich China? McDowell does not say — do you detect a pattern? Maybe she can discuss that with Elon Musk, an uber-conservative who makes electric cars.
She goes on:
“However, he goes into this weird rambling discussion about we’re going to give money to nations like Angola and Africa to develop solar energy is it we're not already deeply in debt. But what is so vile about this … John Kerry, a year ago, told African nations, you're not developing natural gas for electricity.
These people are telling sub-Saharan Africa, “You have to stay in the dark” and not develop your fossil fuel because we say so. This is keeping 1 billion people in the darks [sic] Senator. Because they say so. It’s called … it’s essentially climate colonialism. It's racist.
Why was McDowell so triggered? It seems the culprit was an AP report on the African Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. One of the topics was the role of solar-powered mini-grids as an alternative to the unreliable national grids that leave 500 million sub-Saharan Africans with no assured source of electricity. Note: The featured speakers were all African officials and one Irish UN representative — not an American in sight.
The bottom line is that all the fossil fuel in the world, making an ocean of electricity, is useless if consumers cannot receive that energy.
McDowell does not care. She has a point to make — and has no use for people like Monsurat Qadri, a Nigerian mother who was frustrated that her daughter lacked the light to study after dark. Qadri installed a small solar system that powers five bulbs and a fan. And now she says, “I’m done with worrying about lighting.” Decent people would celebrate Qadri’s relief. McDowell does not.
Ron Johnson, who had been waiting expressionless, leaped in as soon as McDowell came up for air, saying:
“Dagen, there are 1600 scientists from around the world that have just joined in a declaration led by two Nobel laureates, that said we are not in a climate emergency. That all this climate change alarmism is based on bad science completely ignoring the impact of clouds to basically be a heat sink.”
Clouds basically being a heat sink? Problem solved. Move on. It is so unfathomably stupid. It is hard to understand how dumb you must be to think that sounds intelligent. But that is our Ron for you.
Johnson appears to be referring to a petition issued by a group calling itself Clintel (Climate Intelligence). The two Nobel Laureates are Iver Giaever, who won the Physics Prize in 1973 for “tunneling phenomena in superconductors," and John Francis Clauser, who won the 2022 Physics Prize for experiments with “entangled photons.”
No doubt the two men are brilliant. But they are physicists, not climatologists. Scientific knowledge has become extraordinarily specialized. Physicists opining on climate is like an orthopedist advising on heart transplants — unreliable.
Like many people suffering from Dunning Kruger, Johnson is unaware that his slam dunk evidence proves the antithesis of what he thinks it does. There are an estimated 8,000,000 scientists worldwide - meaning 7,998,400 did not sign the petition. The math renders the 1,600 who did a rounding error. They represent 0.02 of 1% — statistically zero.
Worse, not all the signatories are even scientists. Clintel calls them “scientists and professionals” — which includes retired teachers, a ship designer, an investment banker, financial planners, lawyers, and a veterinary epidemiologist.
It would be the stuff of good-natured ridicule, except that Fox brainwashes millions of gullible Americans with this insanity — and Johnson is one of the 535 elected officials that legislatively design American energy policy — and our economic, fiscal, health, etc. strategies.
Kurt Vonnegut should have been more specific. It is not your entire high school class — it is only the bullies, the know-it-alls, and the nose-picking, cud-chewers, who slept at the back, who are running the country.