This is exactly the time to be talking about climate change

I rarely get exasperated from reading environmental business media, but a quote last week in a Bloomberg article about sustainability and the U.S. economic crisis got me headed in that direction.

The quote came from Ted Nordhaus, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a research group whose founders, self-described environmentalists, have made a career out of being gadflies — for example, arguing in favor of nuclear power and natural gas, arguing against putting a price on carbon emissions and claiming that there’s no real limit to the earth’s carrying capacity, or that energy efficiency doesn’t work because of something called the "rebound effect."

I’ll leave it to you to proceed down the wormhole of websites critiquing the group’s analyses. Suffice to say that the Breakthrough Institute has become a darling of the anti-science, pro-pollution conservative right, which frequently cites its work in order to attack environmentalists and climate scientists and their fact-based policy recommendations.

Here’s last week’s quote, in reference to the notion of integrating climate measures into congressional appropriations as we rebuild the economy reeling from the coronavirus pandemic:

“Right now I would have no explicit climate or clean-energy angle,” says Ted Nordhaus, founder of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank. “It’s not the time to be talking about climate change or demanding climate policy.”

Nordhaus worries that the economic recession will be deep, and without a “miracle cure,” could go on for more than a year. “That’s going to cause extraordinary economic pain for a lot of people, most of whom don’t have the privilege of worrying about climate change,” he says. “It would be tone-deaf to talk about climate change now.”

Read the story from GreenBiz by Joel Makower - “This is exactly the time to be talking about climate change.”