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  • 2016-09-24 (xsd:date)
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  • Gary Johnson: 'Forget Global Warming Because the Sun Will Envelop Us All One Day' (en)
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  • As part of the usual media probing of virtually everything a presidential candidate has ever publicly said or done, in September 2016 multiple news sources reported that Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson had once proclaimed that efforts to combat global warming were futile because the sun would eventually engulf and destroy the Earth: These reports originated with comments Johnson made back on 11 August 2011 during an appearance at a National Press Club luncheon. When Johnson, a former two-term governor of New Mexico, was asked by moderator Mark Hamrick about how he viewed the issue of climate change and what the government's role in mitigating it should be, he responded as follows: There's no question that Johnson said this, but what he meant when he said it is debatable. Although he did suggest that money currently being dedicated to address global warming was being spent ineffectively, he didn't literally say that we should do nothing about global warming because the sun will someday expand and destroy the Earth regardless. So what did Johnson mean? His remarks clearly indicate that he believes global warming is anthropogenic (i.e., caused by man) and that he is aware the destruction of the Earth by its sun is billions of years off, so clearly he wasn't speaking from total scientific ignorance. Remarks Johnson made earlier in the luncheon reinforced that he didn't actually say we should ignore global warming because it's not not a serious issue and/or because non-anthropogenic warming will kill us all eventually regardless, but rather that some current proposals would involve the expenditure of huge amounts of money to achieve disproportionately small results, and those monies would therefore be better directed elsewhere (i.e., towards different solutions to global warming or in other ways): But still, why did he mention the ultimate destruction of the Earth by the sun billions of years from now? What was his point? Perhaps his statement was, as some critics content, a flippant, ridiculous, or ignorant justification for not spending much money on global warming and assigning the issue a low priority because it's an unsolvable problem in the long term. Or perhaps Johnson was trying to make a point by satirizing those who would defend spending trillions of dollars now on approaches that may do little to ameliorate the problem (rather than waiting for better or most cost-effective solutions), under the guise that they're taking a long-term view — that is, demonstrating the folly of stretching a long-term view to an absurd extreme. Which was it? We can't say for sure, but given that Johnson asserted the very same thing during the course of an interview about environmental issues several months later, we'd have to come down on the side of the former: For what it's worth, the official Johnson-Weld campaign site reiterates the candidates' position that global warming is (probably) a real and man-made issue, but that government-imposed regulations on the private sector are not an effective means of addressing it: (en)
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