The Atlantic: Nuclear War Bad for Climate

BUCK: It’s expensive out there, folks.

BUCK: Bill Maher. Guy’s got plenty of cash, but he knows it’s rough. Over $8? I didn’t even know that had happened in California, over $8 a gallon, and let’s understand that in states like California because of all the taxes and restrictions and decisions that have been made gas is more expensive in that state than it is anywhere else in the country. It’s also one of the reasons — or, rather, the environmental lobby is the primary reason — that housing prices remain so high there, because they prevent developers from doing what they would do based on market forces.

It is very hard to build particularly — particularly — middle-income housing anywhere in California anywhere near the coast. You can do it deep in the interior where the rich people don’t live, but if you want to do it anywhere near the coast they make it really hard because the delta smelt will be upset or something. There’s always some problem from an environmental perspective, which just brings me to the near religious zeal of the climate movement and how they can make anything about climate change.

Clay, we talked about this before. I tweeted about it over the weekend. I meant to send it to you guys. This is in The Atlantic. “On Top of Everything Else, Nuclear War Would Be a Climate Problem.” It goes into this. “When we talk about what causes climate change, we usually talk about oil and gas, coal and cars, and — just generally — energy policy,” he says. “But energy is not the only domain that has a direct bearing on whether we have a livable climate or not. So does foreign policy –specifically, nuclear war,” and he’s talking about what would happen if nuclear war broke out. It would kill tens of millions of people very, very rapidly.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Probably destroy the entire planet as we know it.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But over time, Clay, the climate change would, like, also get really bad.

CLAY: I understand that there are many people out there that are focused on political issues that truly make them insane, and I think the covid insanity certainly has worked, but I tend to think that it goes away at some point. I don’t know how the climate change people ever go back to normal. And I foresee it becoming wilder and wilder going forward than it even is right now.

But just imagine if you had a semblance of sanity in your media organization, if somebody pitched to you the idea, “Hey, nuclear war could kill millions of people, but you know what we’re not paying enough attention to? What it could do to the climate!” That you would okay that idea, that you would say, “You know what? That seems like a very logical and reasoned part of this discussion that is not receiving enough attention.”

It’s like when CBS did the story during the Ukraine invasion, Buck, remember, about the difficulty for transgender people to get transgender respect in Ukraine? And they said they were fighting a two-fronted war, and you’re like, “I don’t really know that I consider those to be equivalent wars.”

BUCK: The left takes seriously… There’s the old joke in journalism that lib journos, if the headline was, “World to end tomorrow,” the subheadline is, “Women and minorities hardest hit.” And they actually, at some level, take that almost seriously. They’re like, “Oh, yeah, no, that’s real! They would be the hardest hit if the world ended tomorrow.”

CLAY: Yes, if we all died the people who would take it the most, definitely women and minorities.