The Biden Administration Is More Worried about Global Warming Than Nuclear War

By Andrew Follett

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

 

Amid global crises with rising body counts in Israel and Ukraine, the Biden administration doesn’t want us to forget about global warming. President Biden has even said that he is more worried about the global average temperature rising 1.5 degrees than about the possibility of a nuclear war.

 

“The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a — than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20 — 10 years,” Biden said during a trip to Vietnam last month. “We’re — that’d be real trouble. There’s no way back from that.”

 

In a recent Fox News interview, John Kirby, Biden’s coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, was asked if Biden still stands by these comments. Kirby responded, “Absolutely he does. Climate change is an existential threat.” He clarified that it was indeed “more frightening than nuclear war” to the Biden administration.

 

A 2019 simulation by Princeton researchers showed that a “limited” nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would have 92 million casualties . . . in just the first few hours. A full-scale nuclear war between the two powers would kill 360 million people directly and more than 5 billion more as a consequence of starvation because of supply-chain disruption and reduced agricultural yields from soot created by firestorms, according to an August 2022 Nature Food study.

 

By contrast, even the dire Nature Communications forecast, one of the most pessimistic estimates ever published, found global warming would “cause 83 million excess deaths” globally by the end of this century.

 

Less extreme estimates of global warming’s worst-case death toll by the World Health Organization estimate roughly 250,000 additional deaths annually, with alleged increases of extreme weather and heat deaths being the largest plausible vector.

 

Of course, scientists and researchers in this field have a long track record of predicting endless Armageddons, which never arrive. “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000,” the Associated Press wrote in 1989. “Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.” Yet that never stops them from making more dire predictions.

 

Activists are even worse on this score. It has been over five years since infamous environmental activist Greta Thunberg claimed on Twitter that scientists warned “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” Instead of correcting herself, Thunberg simply deleted the tweet and continued making similar claims.

 

Meanwhile, deaths from natural disasters and weather have dropped significantly, despite environmentalists’ predictions and fear-mongering claims. Natural disasters claimed just 373 American lives in 2023, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those numbers are actually dramatically below the 30-year annual average of 580 natural-disaster and weather-related deaths, so if anything such deaths are declining. And they are far below the number of deaths even a modest nuclear exchange would likely cause.

 

Environmentalists frequently use heat deaths to talk about the dangers of global warming, but a warmer world might actually lower the number of deaths related to overheating. In the U.S., hot cities such as Phoenix, Ariz., have the lowest rates of heat-related mortality, while cooler cities in the Northeast have the highest rates. This is because humans are adaptable and can change their behavior to handle changes in the environment, something environmentalists sometimes pretend is impossible. Even the scientific journal Nature, despite its obvious left-wing bias, admits that if global warming does increase the frequency of heat waves, it would actually result in a reduced rate of heat-related mortality because of human adaptability.

 

Environmentalists have demanded for years that global warming be treated by the U.S. government like a war, even claiming the Department of Defense’s budget should be redirected toward fighting it. Biden even attempted to have global warming treated as a military threat.

 

“World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing,” Bill McKibben, described by the Boston Globe as “probably America’s most important environmentalist,” wrote in 2016. He elaborated later that year: “We have things like the defense budget that need to be put to work defending us against the most dangerous adversaries we face,” he said. He continued: “By all the measures that we normally count as warfare, that’s what’s going on. We’re losing territory day by day. People are being killed day by day in great numbers. We’re at war, we’re just not fighting back, and the time has come to do that, and it will take as the history of WWII shows, government leadership to make that happen.”

 

Even though McKibben thinks global warming is dangerous enough to require a full-scale mobilization paid for by the U.S. defense budget, he apparently doesn’t think it’s serious enough to use nuclear power or hydraulic fracturing, the only technologies proven to actually cause substantial reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions.

 

McKibben is a useful stand-in for the extreme flank of environmentalist opinion. In the 2016 primary, he attacked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s stance on energy issues as not doing enough to prevent global warming, repeatedly criticizing her for not banning fracking and supporting nuclear power. Under pressure from such environmentalists, Clinton repeatedly flip-flopped on energy issues to win the Democratic nomination. Biden didn’t repeat Clinton’s mistakes, so McKibben, and others, supported him. Biden returned the political favor to environmentalists with $369 billion in global-warming spending in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

 

It’s one thing to be concerned about climate change. But to advocate war footing to fight it, while downplaying the much greater consequences of a much deadlier possible catastrophe to humanity, is a poor way to address either.