Guardian UK 2

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ggl 3 26

Climate Deniers Expected More Resistance to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Blitz - DeSmog

*published in partnership with The Guardian.

As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel agenda.

“In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the “World Prosperity Forum,” a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a right-wing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The event’s sponsor was The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation for decades, and was also a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for President Trump’s second administration.

“Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no push-back on this,” Morano said — and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.

“The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” said Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.

“And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whimper. I never thought I’d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.”

Last month, the Trump administration repealed the 2009 “endangerment finding” establishing that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. It was a determination that undergirded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants.

Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement.

Its repeal is just the latest in a long line of President Trump’s climate-related destruction. Since taking office in January 2025, his administration has significantly curtailed the country’s weather forecasting organizations and climate science research facilities, published reports denying established climate science, and made deep cuts to funding for climate-related energy and community projects.

Under the leadership of Trump appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year all but banned its key renewable energy department from using terminology like “climate change,” “green,” and “sustainability.”

”Trump overturned Biden’s climate agenda at breakneck speed,” Morano said at the Heartland Institute’s Zurich forum.

Instead of pushing back on this blitz, many Democratic Party representatives have retreated from talking directly about climate change across social media, podcasts, speeches, and in Congress. The party is now embroiled in a debate about whether affordability is a better message than climate action, despite polling suggesting that 63 percent of the American public believes the president and Congress should prioritize clean energy.

This trend hasn’t gone without resistance in the party, however. “Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ — people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) posted on social media in January.

Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. “The Democrats’ climate hushing is politically foolish,” she said in an email. “It only benefits the Trump regime’s agenda.”

At the Heartland Institute event, Morano expressed delighted “shock” over the “flips on climate” of tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the founders of Amazon and Microsoft respectively, whose companies have abandoned once-ambitious climate promises as they confront the skyrocketing energy demands of their AI businesses.

Gates, whose foundation has donated millions of dollars to a think tank run by climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg, published a controversial memo in October arguing that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and advocating for ending climate funding in favor of direct humanitarian aid.

Microsoft and Amazon, which have donated large sums to Trump, have both recently embraced fossil-fuel powered AI data centers alongside Trump energy officials and fossil fuel industry players.

In early February, Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, slashed at least 14 reporters from the venerated paper’s climate desk. Just weeks later, the Post published an editorial board opinion, “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach,” praising Trump’s repeal of the endangerment finding.

Morano noted that overall, journalists have been reporting less aggressively about Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. “When you have Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief, calling climate a cult, a scam, religion, he doesn’t even get push-back from reporters,” Morano said.

During Trump’s first term, by contrast, environmental officials like Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 to July 2018, “would have to be very careful on climate,” Morano said. Otherwise “they would be beaten and browed by the media.”

The growing “climate hush” is not limited to the U.S. — a hushed silence about climate change has expanded across the globe.

At Davos in January, world leaders across business and government talked noticeably less about addressing climate change than in previous years.

Why? “In today’s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” Anjali Chaudhry, a business sustainability researcher at Dominican University, wrote about the silence in Forbes.

Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who once served as a United Nations Secretary-General Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, limited his mentions of climate change at Davos to a quiet reference to the COP climate summit and a simple “Canadians remain committed to sustainability.”

Despite all this quiet, the vast majority of people worldwide, 89 percent, support climate action, even if they underestimate how much others care — a misperception that has added fuel to a “spiral of science.”

What can be done to counteract the trend towards silence? “In this time of ‘climate hushing,’ having conversations about climate change is more important than ever,” Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and climate communications expert, advised in her influential blog.

For environmental sociologist Brulle, addressing the growing hush around climate must go beyond talking.

“I think the climate movement in the United States has failed. It has flat failed, and that means we need to rebuild this movement in a completely different manner,” he said.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben is more optimistic. “I think [the Trump administration] is whistling past the graveyard of their fossil-fueled dreams,” he said in an email. “The real story of the last year is how politicians, movements, entire nations are moving fast towards clean energy. They’re not all doing it in the name of ‘climate,’ but we’re making faster climate progress than we have at any point in the last 40 years.”

McKibben added a caveat: “Fast enough? Of course not. The deniers have delayed change and that continues. But it’s going far faster than they want it to — hence their resort to political gamesmanship.”

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REF 2 GUK

Trump has signed an executive order protecting production of glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Roundup, which some bodies and studies have linked to cancer and which are the subject of widespread US litigation.

The president’s move, which also seeks to provide “immunity” for makers of the herbicides, was strongly criticized by health and environmental advocates including some figures in the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) coalition.

The order also protects domestic production of phosphorus, which is used in making glyphosate and other agricultural chemicals, as well as a range of other products, including some in military defense.

Ensuring “robust domestic elemental phosphorus mining and United States-based production of glyphosate-based herbicides is central to American economic and national security”, the order states.

[

Bayer agrees to pay $7.25bn to settle Roundup weedkiller cancer lawsuits

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/17/bayer-proposed-settlement-roundup-cancer-lawsuits)

The 18 February order cites authority under the Defense Production Act and instructs US Department of Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins to issue orders and regulations as “may be necessary to implement this order”.

The White House said “the threat of reduced or ceased production” of phosphorous and glyphosate herbicides “gravely endangers national security and defense, which includes food-supply security”.

Neither the executive order nor the fact sheet the White House put out accompanying the order discloses that glyphosate-based herbicides have been linked to an array of cancers and other health problems in multiple independent research studies and by cancer experts of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The move by the White House comes as Roundup maker Bayer is facing tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging the company’s glyphosate herbicides cause cancer and the company failed to warn farmers and other users of the risks.

The company, which inherited the litigation when it bought Monsanto in 2018, has already paid out billions of dollars in settlements and jury verdicts and said this week it was proposing to pay $7.25bn in a class action settlement to try to head off future lawsuits.

Bayer has said that if it cannot find relief from the litigation, it may stop making glyphosate herbicides for the US agricultural market.

“This executive order reads like it was drafted in a chemical company boardroom,” said Vani Hari, a food activist, author and one of the grass roots leaders of the Maha coalition. “Calling it ‘national defense’ while expanding protections for toxic products is a dangerous misdirection. Real national security is protecting American families, farmers, and children.”

Kelly Ryerson, another key actor in the Maha movement who has been lobbying US regulators and lawmakers for restrictions on glyphosate and other pesticides, said the move by Trump is an insult to those who have largely supported the administration because of promises that Maha issues would be taken seriously.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, who was appointed by Trump as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and who heads a Maha commission set up by the White House, has a long history of criticizing glyphosate and its maker over the health harms tied to the herbicide. Both Trump and Kennedy had pledged to address health concerns about glyphosate and other pesticides.

“The President is making a mockery of the very voters who put his administration into office,” Ryerson said. “Expanding the production of glyphosate, a pesticide derided by the Maha movement, is a commitment to perpetuating the toxic, chemical food system that has created a sick and infertile American population.”

In response to questions about the executive order, Kennedy issued a statement saying that the order “puts America first where it matters most – our defense readiness and our food supply”.

Lori Ann Burd, environmental health program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the executive order “a sickening love letter from Trump to the largest pesticide companies in the world.

“It’s more proof that Trump doesn’t care at all about Americans’ health,” she said. “While he’s pandering to chemical companies the rest of the country, especially those who’ve been poisoned by pesticides, is rightfully asking ‘what about us?’”

[

Trump’s EPA reapproves contentious weedkiller dicamba for some GM crops

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/08/epa-reapproves-contentious-weedkiller-dicamba)

Trump’s order contains a clause that “confers all immunity provided for in section 707 of the Act (50 U.S.C. 4557)” and states that “domestic producers of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides are required to comply with this order.” The act cited states that “no person shall be held liable” for “any act” resulting from compliance with an order issued pursuant to that law.

Bayer did not respond when asked how involved the company was in Trump’s executive order. But the company issued a statement saying: “President Trump’s Executive Order reinforces the critical need for US farmers to have access to essential, domestically produced crop protection tools such as glyphosate. We will comply with this order to produce glyphosate and elemental phosphorus.”

Bayer maintains that its glyphosate herbicides do not cause cancer and has been engaged in an array of tacticsto try to lift the litigation pressure, including pressing Congress for language in the farm billand other legislation that would restrict the ability of people to sue the company for failing to warn of cancer risks if the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t require such warnings.

The company has already succeeded in getting laws protecting it from lawsuits passed in two states and is pressing for more state laws. It has also asked the US supreme court to rule in its favor on the issue of federal preemption of failure-to-warn lawsuits, and the high court has set a hearing for 27 April.

This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group}:

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After defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race, President-elect Donald Trump didn't back down from his promise to impose stiff new tariffs. Trump, in fact, doubled down, vowing to charge 25 percent across-the-board tariffs on all goods coming into the United States from Canada and Mexico.

Many Trump critics have been warning that those tariffs, if implemented, will make inflation much worse. Some companies are already raising their prices.

According to The Guardian's Callum Jones, however, some companies that donated to Trump's 2016 campaign dodged tariffs during his first term as president.

"With Donald Trump threatening to impose steep tariffs upon his return to office this month," Jones explains in an article published on January 6. "U.S. firms are bracing for impact. But an analysis of Trump's last presidency identified one way to boost their chances of avoiding the levies: donating to the Republican Party."

Jones continues, "While the initial stage of the president-elect's tariff agenda is designed to hit America's largest trading partners — Canada, Mexico and China — it is U.S. firms that pick up the bill, paying duties imposed on the goods they buy from these markets. Such additional costs can prove devastating."

The Guardian reporter cites a study published on July 29, 2024. The study names some of the companies that dodged tariffs during Trump's first term.

"The federal government typically allows a carefully selected group of businesses from paying such levies," Jones notes. "Thousands of companies applied for exemptions, and permission to import items without paying a new tariff, during Trump's first presidency."

Jesus Salas, an associate finance professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, anticipates that the same thing will happen during Trump's second term and finds it "shocking" that companies that supported Democrats in 2016 were, according to the study, less likely to avoid tariffs.

Jones quotes Salas as saying, "(There are) many reasons to think some of this behavior is going to continue…. It's going to be the same staff, probably the same ideas, so we'd assume it's going to be the same behavior."

READ MORE:['Sickening!' Trump slammed over comments at mysterious Mar-a-Lago party

Read The Guardian's full article at this link.

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GUK 12 24

SEE MUSK 6 ANNO

n the days since the sweeping Republican victory in the US election, which gave the party control of the presidency, the Senate and the House, commentators have analysed and dissected the relative merits of the main protagonists – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – in minute detail. Much has been said about their personalities and the words they have spoken; little about the impersonal social forces that push complex human societies to the brink of collapse – and sometimes beyond. That’s a mistake: in order to understand the roots of our current crisis, and possible ways out of it, it’s precisely these tectonic forces we need to focus on.

The research team I lead studies cycles of political integration and disintegration over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies, organised as states, can experience significant periods of peace and stability lasting, roughly, a century or so. Inevitably, though, they then enter periods of social unrest and political breakdown. Think of the end of the Roman empire, the English civil war or the Russian Revolution. To date, we have amassed data on hundreds of historical states as they slid into crisis, and then emerged from it.

So we’re in a good position to identify just those impersonal social forces that foment unrest and fragmentation, and we’ve found three common factors: popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.

To get a better understanding of these concepts and how they are influencing American politics in 2024, we need to travel back in time to the 1930s, when an unwritten social contract came into being in the form of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. This contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses and the state in a way similar to the more formal agreements we see in Nordic countries. For two generations, this implicit pact delivered an unprecedented growth in wellbeing across a broad swath of the country. At the same time, a “Great Compression” of incomes and wealth dramatically reduced economic inequality. For roughly 50 years the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance, and overall income inequality remained remarkably low.

That social contract began to break down in the late 1970s. The power of unions was undermined, and taxes on the wealthy cut back. Typical workers’ wages, which had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, started to lag behind. Inflation-adjusted wages stagnated and at times decreased. The result was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for the majority of Americans. One shocking way this became evident was in changes to the average life expectancy, which stalled and even went into reverse (and this started well before the Covid pandemic). That’s what we term “popular immiseration”.

With the incomes of workers effectively stuck, the fruits of economic growth were reaped by the elites instead. A perverse “wealth pump” came into being, siphoning money from the poor and channelling it to the rich. The Great Compression reversed itself. In many ways, the last four decades call to mind what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900 – the time of railroad fortunes and robber barons. If the postwar period was a golden age of broad-based prosperity, after 1980 we could be said to have entered a Second Gilded Age.

The uber-wealthy increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020

Welcome as the extra wealth might seem for its recipients, it ends up causing problems for them as a class. The uber-wealthy (those with fortunes greater than $10m) increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020, adjusted for inflation. A certain proportion of these people have political ambitions: some run for political office themselves (like Trump), others fund political candidates (like Peter Thiel). The more members of this elite class there are, the more aspirants for political power a society contains.

By the 2010s the social pyramid in the US had grown exceptionally top-heavy: there were too many wannabe leaders and moguls competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, this state of affairs has a name: elite overproduction.

Elite overproduction can be likened to a game of musical chairs – except the number of chairs stays constant, while the number of players is allowed to increase. As the game progresses, it creates more and more angry losers. Some of those turn into “counter-elites”: those willing to challenge the established order; rebels and revolutionaries such as Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads in the English civil war, or Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia. In the contemporary US we might think of media disruptors such as Tucker Carlson, or maverick entrepreneurs seeking political influence such as Elon Musk alongside countless less-prominent examples at lower levels in the system. As battles between the ruling elites and counter-elites heat up, the norms governing public discourse unravel and trust in institutions declines. The result is a loss of civic cohesiveness and sense of national cooperation – without which states quickly rot from within.

One result of all this political dysfunction is an inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. Together with the loss of trust and legitimacy, that accelerates the breakdown of state capacity. It’s notable that a collapse in state finances is often the triggering event for a revolution: this is what happened in France before 1789 and in the runup to the English civil war.

How does this landscape translate to party politics? The American ruling class, as it has evolved since the end of the civil war in 1865, is basically a coalition of the top wealth holders (the proverbial 1%) and a highly educated or “credentialed” class of professionals and graduates (whom we might call the 10%). A decade ago, the Republicans were the party of the 1%, while the Democrats were the party of the 10%. Since then, they have both changed out of all recognition.

The recasting of the Republican party began with the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in 2016. He was typical of political entrepreneurs in history who have channelled popular discontent to propel themselves to power (one example is Tiberius Gracchus, who founded the populist party in late Republican Rome). Not all of his initiatives went against the interests of the ruling class – for example, he succeeded in making the tax code more regressive. But many did, including his policies on immigration (economic elites tend to favour open immigration as it suppresses wages); a rejection of traditional Republican free-market orthodoxy in favour of industrial policy; a scepticism of Nato and a professed unwillingness to start new conflicts abroad.

It seemed to some as though the revolution had been squashed when a quintessentially establishment figure, Joe Biden, defeated Trump in 2020. By 2024 the Democrats had essentially become the party of the ruling class – of the 10% and of the 1%, having tamed its own populist wing (led by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders). This realignment was signalled by Kamala Harris massively outspending Trump this election cycle, as well as mainstream Republicans, such as Liz and Dick Cheney, or neocons such as Bill Kristol, supporting the Harris ticket.

The GOP, in the meantime, has transformed itself into a truly revolutionary party: one that represents working people (according to its leaders) or a radical rightwing agenda (according to its detractors). In the process, it has largely purged itself of traditional Republicans.

The defeat on 5 November represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war

Trump was clearly the chief agent of this change. But while the mainstream media and politicians obsess over him, it is important to recognise that he is now merely the tip of the iceberg: a diverse group of counter-elites has coalesced around the Trump ticket. Some of them, such as JD Vance, had meteoric rises through the Republican ranks. Some, such as Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, defected from the Democrats. Others include tycoons such as Musk, or media figures, such as Joe Rogan, perhaps the most influential American podcaster. The latter was once a supporter of the populist wing of the Democratic party (and Bernie Sanders in particular).

The main point here is that in 2024, the Democrats, having morphed into the party of the ruling class, had to contend not only with the tide of popular discontent but also a revolt of the counter-elites. As such, it finds itself in a predicament that has recurred thousands of times in human history, and there are two ways things play out from here.

One is with the overthrow of established elites, as happened in the French and Russian Revolutions. The other is with the ruling elites backing a rebalancing of the social system – most importantly, shutting down the wealth pump and reversing popular immiseration and elite overproduction. It happened about a century ago with the New Deal. There’s also a parallel in the Chartist period (1838–1857), when Great Britain was the only European great power to avoid the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, via major reform. But the US has so far failed to learn the historical lessons.

Trump victory not a mandate for radical change, top election forecaster says

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/28/trump-victory-election-forecast)

What comes next? The electoral defeat on 5 November represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war. The triumphant counter-elites want to replace their counterparts – what they sometimes call the “deep state” – entirely. But history shows that success in achieving such goals is far from assured. Their opponents are pretty well entrenched in the bureaucracy and can effectively resist change. Ideological and personal tensions in the winning coalition may result in it breaking apart (as they say, revolutions devour their children). Most importantly, the challenges facing the new Trump administration are of the particularly intractable kind. What is their plan for tackling the exploding federal budget deficit? How are they going to shut down the wealth pump? And what will the Democrats’ response be? Will their platform for 2028 include a new New Deal, a commitment to major social reform?

One thing is clear: whatever the choices and actions of the contending parties, they will not lead to an immediate resolution. Popular discontent in the US has been building up for more than four decades. Many years of real prosperity would be needed to persuade the public that the country is back on the right track. So, for now, we can expect a lasting age of discord. Let’s hope that it won’t spill over into a hot civil war.

Peter Turchin is project leader at the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, and the author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (Allen Lane).

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an 1 24

as the third anniversary of the deadly January 6 insurrection approaches this weekend, one columnist is calling on journalists and editors to stop treating the future of democracy like a standard partisan issue.

In her latest column for The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan expressed her frustration about the beltway media's tendency to find a both-sides angle when covering former President Donald Trump's repeated threats to democracy.

"In a constant show of performative neutrality, journalists tend to equalize the unequal, taking coverage down the middle even though that’s not where true fairness lies," Sullivan wrote, urging reporters to "get beyond delivery and appearances, to get beyond poll numbers and approval numbers – all the things that they are most comfortable with."

"The mainstream media is not nearly as comfortable with communicating the larger concepts, even when the stakes are this high," Sullivan continued. "Constantly under attack from the right, they fear looking like they are 'in the tank' for a particular candidate or party, so they fall back on those traditional building blocks of coverage – numbers, polls, approval ratings."

"That may have worked in the past, or at least been relatively unobjectionable," she added. "Not any more."

Sullivan cited several examples of false "both sides" narratives in prominent publications, including a New York Times article that she said was "typical of the mainstream media’s tone and focus." That article noted that President Joe Biden was giving a speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania on the anniversary of January 6 to remind Americans that his predecessor's lies about the 2020 election helped fuel an attack on the US Capitol, but framed it as "an effort to redirect attention from Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers." ABC News had a similar approach in a recent article with the headline "One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry."

Vanity Fair special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast criticized that headline in a post to X (formerly Twitter).

"There aren’t two sides to a violent insurrection in the United States capitol," she tweeted.

In her column, Sullivan lauded former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron's blunt evaluation of the threat to democracy Trump posed when he said the ex-president is "the only politician I’ve heard actually talk about suspending the constitution."

"He’s talked about using the military to suppress entirely legitimate protests using the Insurrection Act. He’s talked about bringing treason charges against the then-outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. He’s talked about bringing treason charges against Comcast, the owner of NBC and MSNBC. He’s talked explicitly about weaponizing the government against his political enemies," Baron said. "And, of course, he continues to talk about crushing an independent press... all of those [threats], by nature, by definition, are authoritarian."

Sullivan ended her column by asking journalists and editors to "remember that being in favor of democracy isn’t a journalistic crime. In fact, it’s a journalistic obligation."

Read Sullivan's full columnby clicking here.

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British journalist and academic is warning that because the Republican Party and its members are cementing belief in Trump's big lie about the 2020 election in its national identity, democracy is at risk.

In an essay for the Guardian, Peter Pomerantsev — a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University — opined that the recent election of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) as the next Speaker of the House is a sign that the GOP is embracing election denialism as part of its core identity. Pomerantsev added that adherence to lies is a typical tactic of some of the world's most authoritarian governments.

"Agreeing to Trump’s claims about the rigged election is the absurdity you have to pledge allegiance to in order to show you belong to the tribe. It ensures your fealty by making you complicit," Pomeratnsev wrote. "For anyone who has lived in authoritarian regimes, it’s a familiar sight."

POLL:Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

To illustrate this point, Pomerantsev noted that even though Johnson had unanimous support from his caucus in the speaker's race, many Republicans "have admitted both publicly and privately that the elections were, in fact, not falsified."

IFrame Content

"Yet when journalists faced a gaggle of Republican congressmen and questioned Johnson’s record on this blatant lie, his colleagues jeered and he mockingly said: “Next question” – as if the facts were irrelevant here," Pomerantsev wrote. "And in a sense, they are."

Pomerantsev's essay elaborated that because Republicans have to believe in a claim they privately know is false in order to maintain power, right-wing media must follow suit in order to sate the tribalist nature of their audience. Because of this, he argues, "it will be hard to fact check our way out of this situation."

"The issue can’t simply be resolved by “trusted” sources, even those on the far right, who can communicate the truth about the election to Trump supporters. Instead, sources only become trusted if they agree to the lie," he wrote. "Pledging loyalty to the 'big lie' is more about identity than knowledge – and to fight it entails understanding the need for belonging and meaning it fulfills."

"Authoritarian propaganda can give the illusion of status and at its extremes a sense of supremacy to compensate for the lack of real agency," he added.

Click here to read Pomerantsev's essay in full.

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ecowatch 12 22

More than 30 media organizations in more than 20 countries have come together with a simple but daring proposal: world leaders should tax big fossil fuel companies to help the most vulnerable nations respond to the climate crisis.

The editorial, spearheaded by The Guardian, was published in conjunction with the COP27 UN climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and has appeared in an international array of outlets including Hindu in India, Tempo in Indonesia, the Mail & Guardian in South Africa, Haaretz in Israel, Rolling Stone in the U.S., El Espectador in Colombia, La Repubblica in Italy and Libération in France.

“My hope is that in speaking with one voice, we remind people that this is a global crisis, threatening all of us,” head of environment at Guardian News and Media Natalie Hanman said in a Guardian article about the initiative. “It’s now imperative that world leaders listen, and act.”

[twt]

the editorial outlined the stakes of the moment. The most recent UN Environmental Programme Emissions Gap Report found that amped up national pledges following last year’s COP26 climate crisis still put the world on track for 2.4 to 2.6 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. The editorial noted that this meant national pledges were delivering only one fiftieth of what is needed to reduce emissions in time to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. At the same time, many nations are hurrying to start new fossil fuel projects in a short-sighted bid to wean themselves off Russian gas in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine.

“All this underlines that humanity has to end its addiction to fossil fuels,” the editorial said. “If renewable energy was the norm there would be no climate emergency.”

The editorial also highlighted the injustice of the climate crisis.

“Rich countries account for just one in eight people in the world today but are responsible for half of greenhouse gases,” the editorial said. “These nations have a clear moral responsibility to help. Developing nations should be given enough cash to address the dangerous conditions they did little to create — especially as a global recession looms.”

Yet so far this money has not materialized. In 2009, developed nations pledged $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing nations both adapt to and mitigate the climate crisis, money that was never paid in full. Now, a new report published in conjunction with COP27 found that developing nations excluding China needed more than $2 trillion a year by 2030 to both reduce emissions, adapt to climate change and repair the inevitable loss and damage from the crisis.

One way to help with this gap between unmet needs and insufficient spending would be to tax the profits of major fossil fuel companies.

“As a bare minimum, a windfall tax on the combined profits of the largest oil and gas companies — estimated at almost $100bn in the first three months of the year — needs to be enacted,” the editorial authors wrote.

In this, they are echoing the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres during his opening remarks to the UN General Assembly in September, who called for a windfall tax on fossil fuel prices to help both poorer nations reeling from the climate crisis and individuals everywhere struggling with the energy and cost of living crises.

“[T]he fossil fuel industry is feasting on hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and windfall profits while household budgets shrink and our planet burns,” Guterres said at the time.

Such a tax has also been endorsed by California Governor Gavin Newsom and U.S. President Joe Biden threatened such an act if oil and gas companies did not work to reduce prices.

The editorial said that a windfall tax should not replace climate finance from richer to poorer nations, but it was something that countries could pass on the national level without the need for an international deal. The authors also argued that the debts of developing countries recovering from extreme weather events should be forgiven.

Finally, the editorial called the climate crisis the “moonshot of our times” and argued for daring financial solutions such as the purchasing of government bonds undertaken by central banks in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is no time for apathy or complacency; the urgency of the moment is upon us,” the editorial authors wrote.

The call to action comes as another report underscored the media’s failings on climate messaging, BusinessGreen noted. A six-nation Yougov poll commissioned by the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) and the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN) found that people who listened to, read or watched the news five times or more per week were more likely to believe common climate falsehoods — such as the idea that natural gas is a “greener” choice — than those who did not.

“This suggests that news outlets’ reporting regularly includes misinformation narratives, which are adversely influencing their readers’ opinions,” CAAD wrote in a press release.

The Guardian, however, has long been a leader in climate coverage. In 2019, for example, it updated its style guide to use the terms climate crisis, breakdown or emergency instead of climate change to accurately convey the urgency of the situation.

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Climate COVID? The Guardian Insists 'Next Pandemic' May Come From … 'Melting Glaciers'

Newsbusters

Climate Depot founder Marc Morano ripped The Guardian's nonsense as a media precursor to legitimizing government-mandated climate lockdowns ...

no lnx

mrc medit cruise w/ celebs bozell...

Climate COVID? The Guardian Insists ‘Next Pandemic’ May Come From … ‘Melting Glaciers’

Joseph Vazquez

October 19th, 2022

It’s happened. The eco-crazies in the liberal media are trying to mesh climate change and the pandemic into one big fear porn monstrosity.

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The Guardian released a nutty story Oct. 18 propagandizing how “[t]he next pandemic may come not from bats or birds but from matter in melting ice, according to new data.”

The liberal outlet tried to frighten readers into believing in the imaginary specter of climate COVID: “The findings imply that as global temperatures rise owing to climate change, it becomes more likely that viruses and bacteria locked up in glaciers and permafrost could reawaken and infect local wildlife, particularly as their range also shifts closer to the poles.”

The headline for the article didn’t beat around the bush: “Next pandemic may come from melting glaciers, new data shows.”

The Guardian, however, conceded a glaring contradiction that upended its fear-mongering, which it conveniently chose to bury in the eighth paragraph. The scientists the outlet cited apparently didn’t bother determining whether the so-called “viruses” trapped in the ice were even capable of triggering infections:

The team did not quantify how many of the viruses they identified were previously unknown – something they plan to do in the coming months – nor did they assess whether these viruses were capable of triggering an infection, [emphasis added].

Climate Depot founder Marc Morano ripped The Guardian’s nonsense as a media precursor to legitimizing government-mandated climate lockdowns similar to the 2020 COVID-19 restrictions.

“Unchecked climate change leads to more deadly viruses,” Morano told MRC Business. “Presto! Climate change becomes a public health issue subject to undemocratic dictates by unelected bureaucrats.”

He’s right on target.

The Guardian’s climatepropagandizingfalls right in line with a 2020 Project Syndicate piece that pushed an eco-dystopian idea from economist Marianna Muzzacato. That 2020 story exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to make the case that the world may need a “climate lockdown” to preempt climate change unless the world undergoes a “green economic transformation.”

The Guardian is seeking to legitimize those same dystopian ideals by “morphing climate and viruses into one issue,” Morano noted. “Climate activists were at first jealous of the COVID lockdowns then they decided to copy the same methods."

Morano pointed to a Yahoo! News article that noted “[s]ome environmental advocacy organizations have been urging Biden to declare climate change a national emergency ever since he won the presidency.” Center for Biological Diversity Energy Justice Program Director and Senior Attorney Jean Su reportedly told Yahoo! thatif Biden were to declare “‘a national [climate] emergency, it triggers the ability for him to deploy around 130 different powers.’”

Morano added that climate activists are operating with intent to “[b]ypass democracy and rule by abuse of emergency powers." He continued: “That is the lesson that COVID taught the climate activists.”

Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Guardian at guardian.readers@theguardian.com and demand it stop exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic to push climate propaganda.

tags Marc Morano

The Guardian

Business

Coronavirus

Global Warming

Pollution

Environment

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