Opinion: Hannity's climate change lies will cost Fox News viewers, Republicans most financially
Fox News host Sean Hannity's high-profile stance against climate change will end up drastically hurting his own viewers and Republicans financially.
Hannity, in a 2019 segment, lambasted Democratic Presidential candidates for wanting to spend trillions of dollars to stop climate change. Hannity equated supporting climate reform to giving "up your liberty and your freedom and a lot of your tax money."
According to a study from Science Magazine via the Atlantic, climate change could create an effective 20 percent tax on county-level income for states that border the Gulf of Mexico by the end of the century. The South, a host to many Republican states, will see the largest effective tax.
"Harvests will dwindle, summer energy costs will soar, rising seas will erase real-estate holdings, and heatwaves will set off epidemics of cardiac and pulmonary disease," said the Science Magazine study.
Below is a map, via the Science Magazine study, showing how areas in the United States will be impacted economically and how mortality rates will change due to climate change by the end of the century.
What do you notice about the states that will be most impacted by climate change? They are red states that voted for Donald Trump in the South. We all know that Donald Trump supporters like to watch Sean Hannity.
Sean Hannity will counter with the idea that renewable energies are way too expensive and that climate change predictions are often false.
SPOILER: Both of the claims are false.
NASA has confirmed that climate models are getting future warming projections correct.
"Electricity from renewables will soon be consistently cheaper than from most fossil fuels," said the International Renewable Energy Agency in 2017. "By 2020, all the renewable power generation technologies that are now in commercial use are expected to fall within the fossil fuel-fired cost range, with most at the lower end or undercutting fossil fuels."
"Going solar is a money-saver in the long term, even though startup costs are higher for the consumer," said ConsumerAffairs. "Electricity from fossil fuels costs between 5 cents and 17 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar energy costs average between 3 cents and 6 cents per kilowatt-hour and are trending down."
If the United States wanted to replace all carbon dioxide-generating fossil-fuel electricity themselves, CNBC says it would cost $1.59 trillion. The United States passed the CARES Act for coronavirus relief that was worth $2.2 trillion. The money is there to combat climate change now and actually make a more affordable future in terms of electricity costs for the people of America, not a more expensive future.
The climate-change denial from Hannity is ironic. Hannity's lies will greatly impact his own Republican viewers, many of which live in the South, the most financially if there is no climate change reform.
Well done Mr. Hannity!
About Ryan Lipton:
Ryan is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill majoring in Business Journalism. He has written in the past for SB Nation's Silver and Black Pride, USA Today Sports Media Group, North Carolina Business News Wire, the Daily Tar Heel, and has worked with Ice Cube's BIG3 basketball league.
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