Michael Bloomberg’s recent opinion piece blaming “climate denialism” for the tragic Texas floods isn’t just opportunistic, it’s dishonest. While communities are still searching for loved ones, grieving, and rebuilding, Bloomberg couldn’t resist swooping in to exploit their suffering as a marketing opportunity for his brand of alarmist hype and centralized energy control.

Natural disasters are heartbreaking. They also deserve clear-eyed analysis, not cheap rhetorical stunts designed to terrify voters into surrendering their energy freedom. Bloomberg’s argument boils down to this: if politicians had just embraced more subsidies for wind turbines and solar panels, lives would have been saved. That’s a fantasy, and he knows it.

He claims “the scientific evidence is clear” that climate change is driving more frequent flooding. Yet even the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which he selectively cites when it suits him, admits there is very low confidence about any detectable changes in extreme precipitation events on the short time scales that cause flash floods.

As Roger Pielke Jr. has documented in The Honest Broker, “

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