Once Again, NJ Spotlight Prints Corporate Lies About Costs With No Mention of Costs Of Climate Chaos
NOAA Report Documents Increasing Billion Dollar Extreme Climate Disasters
Backed by corporate fossil money, the NJ business community has mounted another campaign of climate denial, lies, and political attacks on renewable energy. This time, after targeting off shore wind and gas stoves, the corporate climate killers are focusing on electric vehicles (read their campaign letter).
The climate emergency and climate science are increasingly being used as political footballs in traditional partisan attacks and in the culture wars as well. And the lies – particularly the huge lies of omission – and the rhetoric are heating up faster than the climate!
For example, Ray Cantor of the NJ BIA – a former Christie DEP Deputy Commissioner and Republican partisan legislative aide – has even gone so far as to accuse the Murphy DEP of engaging in “climate-fear ideology over science-based reality” and demanded that DEP “must stop imposing ideological policies”.
NJ Spotlight once again printed these corporate lies about costs as facts, and did so with no rebuttal and no mention of the well documented costs of the climate emergency, known in the jargon as “the social costs of carbon”. EPA issued that Draft Report last year, and it got no coverage by NJ Spotlight or other NJ media that I am aware of.
Amazingly, just days ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report on the HUGE costs of climate driven storms and catastrophes: (Read the NOAA Report)
The U.S. has sustained 371 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2023). The total cost of these 371 events exceeds $2.615 trillion.”
2023 in Progress…
In 2023 (as of September 11), there have been 23 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect United States. These events included 2 flooding events, 18 severe storm events, 1 tropical cyclone event, 1 wildfire event, and 1 winter storm event. Overall, these events resulted in the deaths of 253 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted. The 1980–2022 annual average is 8.1 events (CPI-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2018–2022) is 18.0 events (CPI-adjusted).
But there was no coverage of this NOAA report and NOAA science by NJ Spotlight and NJ media.
There has been no reporting on the trillion dollar subsidies to fossil, documented by the International Monetary Fund (surely no green outfit!) see this IMF Report:
This paper provides a comprehensive global, regional, and country-level update of: (i) efficient fossil fuel prices to reflect supply and environmental costs; and (ii) subsidies implied by charging below efficient fuel prices. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion in 2022 or 7.1 percent of GDP.
Ray Cantor, NJ BIA revolving door hack
Yet Ray Cantor and his corporate lying friends want to continue to build along the NJ shore, along flood prone NJ rivers, and in highly combustable NJ Pinelands forests.
These reckless corporate fossil criminals want to expand the production of fossil fracked gas, build more fossil pipelines and block the transition to renewable energy by stopping the development of off shore wind, electric vehicles, and electrification of buildings.
These people are climate criminals who should be in jail, not given a platform and bullhorn in NJ media.
And NJ media must stop the lies by omission and start printing the facts, like the EPA Social Costs of Carbon Report, the IMF fossil subsidy Report, and the NOAA Billion Dollar Disaster Report.
(Disclaimer: Contrary to NJ Spotlight, this site accepts no corporate money and does not publish “sponsored content”. The content is exclusively our own.)
[End Note: My disclaimer was targeted at this absurd “Editors note”, appended to the bottom of the NJ Spotlight story. They just so happened to run “Sponsored content” on the same day and the same subject matter:
Editor’s note: Sponsored content from New Jersey Business and Industry Association’s campaign appears on NJ Spotlight News today.
Right.