By Joseph Vazquez
A leftist assistant professor argued that the U.S. needs to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars to fight climate change. And spending “trillions” is just the “down payment,” according to her perspective.
University of California, Santa Barbara Assistant Professor Leah Stokes joined liberal news organization Democracy Now! to push her extremist vision for U.S. spending on what she called the “climate crisis.”
Co-host Juan González asked Stokes to address the “state roles, uh, in addressing, uh, the uh, the climate crisis.” Stokes said the “states have an important role to play,” but she pivoted to emphasize her fixation on federal spending. “[T]he federal government really has the power of the purse. And we’re not talking about, sort of, a one-time surplus. We’re talking about spending trillions of dollars on the climate crisis,” Stokes bleated.
Her nutty proposal didn’t stop there. She proceeded to stipulate that her prescription of “trillions of dollars” in spending was “really just a downpayment on the scale of the crisis.”
So, a trillion here, a trillion there, and “soon we’re talking real money”? The updated logic of the late GOP Senator Everett Dirksen’s facetious warning seems to be the thinking behind the professor’s understanding of economics.
Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow Bjorn Lomborg already slapped down the leftist notion that the world is facing a “crisis” as a pretext for enormous amounts of spending. During the April 23 edition of Kudlow on Fox Business, Lomborg accused Biden of trying to scare Americans over an “existential crisis” myth: “You’re scaring kids, and you’re scaring everyone by telling them this is an existential crisis. No, it’s not. The UN Climate Panel does not tell us this is an existential crisis.”
Lomborg pointed out that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that if “we do nothing” by the 2070s, “the net impact” will only be the equivalent of the world population losing “0.2 and 2 percent of their income.” Lomborg added: “[B]y then, of course, we’ll be 363 percent as rich as what we are today. That’s the UN’s own estimate. So, instead of being 363 percent as rich, we’ll only be 356 percent as rich. That’s not an existential crisis.”
If all presidents for the next 70 years followed Biden in cutting emissions, Lomborg noted, “it will reduce temperatures trivially.” Lomborg said the reduction would only be a meaningless “0.07° Fahrenheit. And this is through the UN climate model. So, it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be very costly. It’ll have virtually no impact.”