Lesley Stahl Demonstrates Liberal Virtue Signaling On “Climate Change” In Trump 60 Minutes Interview

President Trump’s recent interview with Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes was testy and contentious, to describe it modestly.  Stahl’s tone was blatantly adversarial regarding everything the Trump administration has accomplished, while Trump took Stahl to task for CBS’s hypocritical treatment of his presidency, gloating to her face at one point with “I’m President – and you’re not.”  

One of the more interesting parts of the interview was at the beginning, with the discussion on “climate change”.  60 Minutes led the entire discussion by trying to bait Trump into stating that climate change is a hoax, as he has done in the past:

Lesley Stahl: Do you still think that climate change is a hoax?

President Donald Trump: I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again. I don’t think it’s a hoax, I think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this. I don’t wanna give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t wanna lose millions and millions of jobs. I don’t wanna be put at a disadvantage.

Lesley Stahl: I wish you could go to Greenland, watch these huge chunks of ice just falling into the ocean, raising the sea levels.

President Donald Trump: And you don’t know whether or not that would have happened with or without man. You don’t know.

Lesley Stahl: Well, your scientists, your scientists–

President Donald Trump: No, we have–

Lesley Stahl: At NOAA and NASA–

President Donald Trump: We have scientists that disagree with that.

Like many of the climate scientists Trump disagrees with, 60 Minutes conveniently takes a snapshot of one part of the planet where ice is melting, ignoring the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica, where ice is gaining, as climate change proponent National Geographic was forced to admit:

The surprises began almost as soon as a camera was lowered into the first borehole, around December 1. The undersides of ice shelves are usually smooth due to gradual melting. But as the camera passed through the bottom of the hole, it showed the underside of the ice adorned with a glittering layer of flat ice crystals—like a jumble of snowflakes—evidence that in this particular place, sea water is actually freezing onto the base of the ice instead of melting it.

Of course, Trump’s position didn’t stop Stahl from delivering her scripted blame of recent hurricanes on climate change:

Lesley Stahl: You know, I– I was thinking what if he said, “No, I’ve seen the hurricane situations, I’ve changed my mind. There really is climate change.” And I thought, “Wow, what an impact.”

President Donald Trump: Well– I’m not denying.

Lesley Stahl: What an impact that would make.

President Donald Trump: I’m not denying climate change. But it could very well go back. You know, we’re talkin’ about over a millions–

Lesley Stahl: But that’s denying it.

President Donald Trump: –of years. They say that we had hurricanes that were far worse than what we just had with Michael.

As FMShooter has previously detailed, major hurricanes are hardly new occurrences…

And view some context on the most powerful storms, again per Wikipedia:

As of 2007, the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 was the most intense hurricane to make landfall on the country, having struck the Florida Keys with a pressure of 892 mbar. It was one of only three hurricanes to move ashore as a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale; the others were Hurricane Camille in 1969 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which had a landfalling pressure of 900 mbar and 922 mbar, respectively. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the third most intense hurricane to strike the country with a pressure of 920 mbar, though its winds were not as strong as Andrew.

The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was the deadliest hurricane in the history of the United States, killing at least 8,000 people. The 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane caused at least 2,500 casualties, and in 2005, Hurricane Katrina killed about 1,500 people. In the 1893 season, two hurricanes each caused over 1,000 deaths.^[2]

The costliest was Hurricane Katrina, with damage amounting to $84.6 billion, though in normalized dollars it may only be second to the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926.

…but its also not new for alarmists like Stahl to blame any natural disaster on “climate change” – even if the disasters in question are consistent with the past few hundred years worth of climate history.  

Omitted in the 60 Minutes exchange with Trump on climate was any possible solution Stahl could put forward, besides heavily taxing those who can afford it least.  The liberal pipe dream is to replace all coal plants with wind and/or solar, so it is important to look at how electricity is generated in the US:

Even though there hasn’t been a nuclear power plant completed since 1990, nuclear energy is close to 20% of the total megawatts supplied to the US market… and 60% of the nation’s carbon-free electricity.  Nuclear plants have large fixed costs (largely due to burdensome NRC regulations), but the power is delivered very cheaply once the plant is complete.  In comparison, wind power at 4.7% is “expensive and deeply inefficient”, as is solar, which remains a pipe dream unable to supply even 1% of the nation’s energy needs.

Nowhere in the mainstream media platform on reducing carbon emissions is expansion of nuclear power and/or research and development of Thorium reactors suggested – or curtailing heavily wasteful personal activities.  The only solutions proposed by 60 Minutes involve feel-good yet impractical solutions that are not only unable to put the megawatts on the market, they ignore the net carbon impact of the processes used to extract the requisite raw materials.

The truth is articulated by Twitter user Patrick Ryan in a recent tweet – the industrialized world will likely always be reliant on fossil fuels to power it:

Of course, none of this stopped 60 Minutes from attempting to ambush President Trump in their interview with nonexistent “facts” on climate science.  However, while they came up short in tripping up Trump and/or blaming him for “climate change”, they came up even shorter when it came to providing a solution to reducing both US and world CO2 emissions.