Must-Read: David Roberts: Carly Fiorina Did a 4-Minute Riff on Climate Change. Everything She Said Was Wrong

David Roberts: Carly Fiorina Did a 4-Minute Riff on Climate Change. Everything She Said Was Wrong: “Fiorina’s comments are a farrago of falsehoods and red herrings…

The key to a ‘moderate’ Republican position on climate change is that it has to neutralize the science…. Denialism, concentrated in conservative white men, has become a liability among… demographics Republicans badly need to court. So the trick for the aspiring Republican moderate is to acknowledge the scientific consensus on climate change while maintaining opposition to any policy that might penalize fossil fuels or advantage renewable energy…. Fiorina seems to have pulled it off, at least in the eyes of conservatives. There’s just one problem. After acknowledging the science at the outset, literally everything Fiorina says subsequently is false or misleading. And yes, I know what ‘literally’ means….

I have chosen a representative (but not exhaustive) sample of 10 misleading or false statements to address below. 1) ‘One nation, acting alone, can make no difference at all’…. First, it’s not true…. [Second] so what?… America is doing its small part and working to coordinate with other countries doing the same, building a framework of trust…. What’s the alternative?…. 2) California ‘destroys lives and livelihoods with environmental regulations’ California’s climate regulations are indeed the most ambitious in the nation…. Looks like the state is surviving its environmental regulations so far. 3) ‘The answer to this problem is innovation, not regulation’… mean[ing] tax breaks for favored industries like natural gas and ‘clean coal.’ (If any Republican has a broader plan to spur clean-energy innovation, I haven’t seen it.)… In reality, of course, it’s not an either-or…. 4) ‘China could care less’ if we try to reduce carbon…. It is not so…. 5) ‘China is delighted we’re not spending any time or energy figuring out clean coal’ This makes no sense…. 6) ‘Coal provides half the energy in this nation still’ No, it doesn’t. Coal provides 20 percent…. It could be that Fiorina meant half the electricity… but she would still be wrong. In 2014, coal produced 39 percent…. 7) ‘To say we’re basically going to outlaw coal, which is what this administration has done…’ No, it hasn’t. US coal has taken a beating from natural gas, renewables, and efficiency–the market, in other words–but it still provides more than a third of US electricity. And EPA expects that under the Clean Power Plan, that share will be at 27 percent in 2030…. 8) ‘Do we tell people the truth, that [wind technology] slaughters millions of birds?’ A recent peer-reviewed survey of bird mortality studies found that wind turbines kill between 214,000 and 368,000 birds a year, compared with 6.8 million that die from colliding with cell and radio towers and between 1.4 and 3.7 billion killed by cats…. 9) ‘Does anybody see how unsightly those huge wind turbines are?’ The poor communities where coal power plants, oil refineries, and other fossil fuel infrastructure tends to be located probably find those polluting facilities unsightly…. People seem okay with the huge wind turbines. 10) ‘Solar is great, but solar takes huge amounts of water’ No, it doesn’t…