Hosting a climate change denier, Tucker Carlson complains about “relentless propaganda” about climate change
Carlson says that taking action on climate is “clearly political, not science speaking”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
From the March 20 edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight:
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Is it surprising to you that after 25 years of really relentless propaganda beginning in children's cartoons going all the way up, probably, [un]til the moment of death that Americans rate climate change at 2 percent concern -- 2 percent are most concerned about climate change. Are you shocked?
JOE BASTARDI (GUEST): Well, not really that shocked because I think my experience is, is a much greater percentage of people in their 20s that believe what's going on. I think it's because they don't look at everything. I have said hundreds of times that if all I looked at and all that I was told was the global warming issue, I'd say “Well, I believe it too. CO2 is causing this.” But when you start looking at the entire picture, the totality of the picture and you put some perspective into it, that the last forty years are the equivalent of six seconds out of an eighty-year-old man's life, you realize that there is a very, very different story here. It is like, it is like one scene in a movie for five seconds determining the whole movie. That's not the case here at all. The foundation you stand on today was built yesterday to reach for tomorrow. It's the same thing with weather and climate, folks. What happens is you have to go back and look at the big picture. In our business, and what I do at weather bell is, we need to supply accurate forecasts for energy companies -- that includes wind and solar, retail companies -- and knowing what happened yesterday, and putting in perspective and say, “guys, this can happen again,” is something that we do.
CARLSON: So I just want to be clear. I'm not denying -- and I'm not a meteorologist, unlike you, or a climate expert -- that climate changes. It does change of course and ... has from the beginning, since the planet cooled. Can I ask a question?
BASTARDI: Absolutely.
CARLSON: Why, since more people were killed last year in the United States by illegal aliens than were killed by climate change -- why do you think they are so focused on scaring us, and telling us that we are all going to die? Why did they need to tell us that, when they don't know that?
BASTARDI: Well, I think H. L. Mencken -- and I quoted this in my book, said it best, that practical politics always tries to whip up this kind of thing. Most of them are imaginary, and the urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.
Now, that is a Democrat that said that, he passed away, 1956, but since I come from that kind of background, from an old Democrat background, I knew who H. L. Mencken was. So, I think that's what's involved here. I wrote that book because the purity of what I've loved since I was three -- my dad is a meteorologist, right? This is all I ever wanted to do. I can't believe that this is what it's come to.
CARLSON: That's right.
BASTARDI: It's turned into this political football or whatever. It's really bad.
CARLSON: It is, and it's clearly political, not science speaking.
Previously: