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It was in early 2021 when The New York Times described Sen. Ron Johnson as “the Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation.” It’s unfortunate how much effort the Wisconsin senator has put into proving the assessment correct.
Johnson has cultivated a truly cringeworthy record, peddling bizarre claims about Covid-19. And the Jan. 6 attack. And Russian disinformation. And the 2020 presidential election.
But let’s not forget that the GOP senator has a bizarre perspective on the climate crisis, too.
Johnson appeared on Fox News on Sunday, where viewers initially heard guest host Dagen McDowell launch into an odd rant about the Biden administration pushing a “racist” agenda in sub-Saharan Africa because the White House supports a solar project in Angola. But that merely paved the way for the Wisconsin Republican to endorse climate denialism:
Dagen, there are 1,600 scientists from around the world that just joined in declaration with -- 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. Again, the climate has always changed, always will. I’m not alarmist. I’m not in denial. But we have spent over $5 trillion globally on climate change. We haven’t moved the needle, according to climate alarmists. How much more are we going to waste? These windmills, according to an earlier report on your network, are killing the whales.
The senator added that those who believe climate science are “driven” by the desire to take “control over our lives.” He went on to suggest that the focus on the climate is “why we are experiencing inflation.”
To be sure, it’s not easy to pack in this much nonsense in such a short amount of time, but “the Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation” is a special kind of politician.
There’s probably little value in fact-checking every error of fact and judgment Johnson presented to Fox News’ audience — though I’m certainly curious about the lawmaker’s cloud-related ideas — but I found myself stuck on the idea that windmills “are killing the whales.”
Why, exactly, would Johnson think that? Or more specifically, why would he take seriously Fox’s coverage suggesting that whales are dying as a result of windmills?
Evidently, this idea has been percolating in conservative circles and Republican-aligned media for much of the year, though the evidence to support the claims doesn’t appear to exist. CNN reported in January on a spate of whale deaths off the coast near New York and New Jersey, noting “scientists say there’s no evidence to support a connection” between the deaths and a local offshore wind farm.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center came to the same conclusion two months later, quoting an expert in marine conservation technology saying there’s “basically zero chance” there’s a connection between the two.
In April, the Department of Energy issued the findings of research from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Marine Mammal Commission, and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which collectively found “no evidence to support speculation that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys.”
To be sure, this isn’t the weirdest rhetoric Republicans have ever peddled in opposition to wind power. That award goes to Donald Trump, who told members of the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2019 that the noise caused by wind turbines might cause cancer.
But four years later, the right’s windmill-related rhetoric clearly isn’t getting any better.