Tucker Carlson says climate change is a liberal invention ‘like racism' in shocking on-air rant

Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that climate change was a liberal fabrication on his show Friday as he reported on the ongoing destruction of the west coast forest fires.  

Mr Carlson claimed that Democrats were trying to blame the wildfires that have destroyed huge portions of California, Oregon and Washington on climate change, and accused them of using environmental fearmongering to scare people into voting for them in the 2020 US election.  

"Climate change, they said, caused these fires. They didn't explain how exactly that happened. How did climate change do that," Mr Carlson asked. "in the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky. You can't see it, but rest assured, it's everywhere and it's deadly."

While hand-waving away climate change as a liberal lie, he also seemed to downplay the existence of systemic racism.  

"And like systemic racism, it is your fault. The American middle class did it," he said. "They caused climate change. They ate too many hamburgers. They drove too many SUVs. They had too many children."  

It is unclear who or what Mr Carlson was quoting when he made his statement.  

Critics of Mr Carlson accused him of having a gross disdain for the planet and for humanity.  

"You should watch this to really understand the damage that Tucker Carlson is doing to our democracy and the planet," Tommy Vietor, a host on Pod Save America, wrote. "This little white nationalist rage monkey just wants to own the libs until the planet is underwater or burning."

Dr Michael E Mann, a distinguished professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University, did not appreciate Mr Carlson's analysis.  

"Yes, Tucker Carlson is both a climate change denier and a racist f***," he wrote.  

Mr Carlson's remarks on Friday were not the first time he suggested that climate activists were stooges for the Democrats.  

Last year, Mr Carlson derided children who participated in the Climate Strike - an event during which students skipped school and held demonstrations supporting efforts to combat climate change - as participants in a "coordinated left-wing protest."

"And there you have the modern left's climate agenda: no drinking straws, no automobiles, no airplanes, no meat, no democracy," he said.  

Despite Mr Carlson's insistence that the changing climate has a liberal agenda, scientists have ringing alarm bells for years that fires would worsen as a result of increasingly warmer global temperatures.  

Speaking with CNN, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the fires are no fluke.  

"[The fires are] in line with essentially every prediction for what could happen this year and the trends we're seeing over years and decades," he said.  

Mr Swain explained how rising global temperatures cause the continual loss of moisture from the ground and from vegetation, which results in landscapes prone to wildfires.  

"That couple of degrees of [average] warming over decades ... you don't notice it as much, but it's still there lurking in the background, sucking extra moisture out of the vegetation and the soil," Mr Swain said.