op-ed ltr editor

belated? 5/17

this includes newspaper edit bd, wonder how much matter

punked mainstream but also bogus like wa examiner

merri ok

point of vulnerability? some hacks/ flacks specialize in?

do i need to disambig/dis-aggregate vuln insertion pt fpr BS from what a newspaper editor/ial bd comes up with?

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SCAIFE

AI Overview GGL 6 26

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (TribLIVE) frequently publishes climate-skeptic content, primarily through its opinion pages. The publication has faced criticism for providing space for columns and letters to the editor that dispute the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

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1 24 heated gmail

no lnx pix grf?

Here’s how much Democrats get paid to shill for fossil fuels

Two former Democratic lawmakers made six-figure salaries for falsely promoting methane gas as a climate solution, tax documents seen by HEATED show.

ARIELLE SAMUELSON

JAN 18

In January 2022, only a few years after leaving the elected seat she held for six years, former Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota got a new job: convincing climate-concerned liberals to love the fossil fuel industry.

“It’s clear we have an existential threat to the planet,” said Heitkamp, in a December 2022 commercial for the methane gas lobbying group Natural Allies For a Clean Energy Future. “We should be doing everything that we can to help other countries do what we did, which is dramatically reduce our CO2 emissions by using natural gas.”

The ad—titled “Real Talk with Heidi Heitkamp”—was one of a handful of public relations jobs Heitkamp did that year for Natural Allies, some of which she did alongside former Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Together, the notoriously moderate Democrats wrote a sponsored article in Politico claiming that “natural gas is accelerating our clean-energy future,” and an op-ed in Newsweek declaring that methane gas can “actually achieve our shared global climate goals faster.” Landrieu also did her own “Real Talk” commercial in March 2022.

For these ads and op-eds, Heitkamp was paid $185,266 and Landrieu was paid $210,690 in 2022, according to IRS 990 tax documents obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute and seen by HEATED. The documents show payments made to Heidi Heitkamp Inc. and to Landrieu’s consulting firm VNF Solutions.

A screenshot of Natural Allies’ 990 tax form from FY2022, showing payments to Landrieu’s consulting firm and Heitkamp. They also show $1 million in payments to Mad Global, a public relations firm that specializes in politics and government, and more than $3.5 million to Omnicom Public Relations Group, a global public relations company.

It’s unclear if these positions represented full-time jobs; both Heitkamp and Landrieu were hired as members of Natural Allies’ “Leadership Council” in early 2022. According to a press release about the hires, the Leadership Council seeks “to bring greater awareness to the foundational role natural gas must play in transitioning to a clean energy future.” Neither Heitkamp nor Landrieu responded to HEATED’s request for comment.

Whatever the case, the numbers are a rare glimpse into the lucrative business of greenwashing the fossil fuel industry. Natural Allies is run and funded entirely by fossil fuel companies, including Williams, TC Energy, Kinder Morgan, National Fuel Gas, Southern Company Gas, and Cheniere Energy.

“It's not every day we get to see the price tag of a former U.S. senator’s advocacy,” said Charlie Spatz, a senior researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute.

Spatz said the numbers also highlight one of the reasons it may be so hard to pass truly effective climate policy in Congress.

“It's sending a message to current Senators that maybe you shouldn't be so harsh on the fossil fuel industry, if they're going to take care of you after you finish,” he said.

A six-figure salary to spread climate misinformation

With each passing year, the science on methane gas pollution and climate change becomes more damning. A recently revised analysis from Robert Warren Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell, found that greenhouse gas emissions from liquified methane gas “are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 18% to 185% greater for the average cruise distance of an [liquified methane gas] tanker.”

At the same time, with each passing year, more and more former Democratic lawmakers are lining up to tout methane gas as “climate-friendly” in exchange for a paycheck from Natural Allies, which is currently running a seven-figure campaign to target young, liberal, and Black and Latino voters “as effectively as we have messaged to the right.”

In addition to Heitkamp and Landrieu, former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, former Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, and former Florida Congressman Kendrick Meek all accepted positions with Natural Allies in 2023.

Those former lawmakers’ salaries were not disclosed on Natural Allies’s 2022 tax forms, as they were not yet hired by the organization. And it’s unclear if they will be disclosed on future forms, as the IRS only requires that non-profits disclose the five contractors with the highest salaries over $100,000.

However much they are making, they are spreading messages about methane gas that climate scientists have roundly decried as misleading.

“Their claims are all either extremely vague or disproved with middle-school-level science,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Project Drawdown, who previously worked at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“Using natural gas warms the climate. Period, full stop,” said Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “There is no world in which natural gas is a long-term ‘solution’ to the climate problem.”

Natural Allies cites multiple “independent studies” to support its claim that methane gas is the best way to solve the climate crisis. But, as we reported last year, all of those studies were funded at least in part by fossil fuel interests, and none were published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Actual peer-reviewed science with no industry backing has shown the opposite of what Natural Allies claims. According to a 2021 systematic review of the scientific literature on methane gas, increasing investments in the fossil fuel carries a long-term risk of delaying the clean energy transition and worsening the climate crisis. That’s because investing in further natural gas development “could lock-out emerging renewable technologies for extended periods.”

Building new gas pipelines, LNG terminals, and gas-fired power plants “pose a particularly great risk for carbon lock-ins,” scientists wrote this year in the journal Nature Energy.

What Natural Allies is doing is called “solutions denial,” a common form of climate misinformation, as we previously reported:

“It's an absolute tried-and-tested argument within the disinformation playbook to constantly create more interim milestones before we achieve what a real necessary transition looks like,” said [Jennie] King, who works at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “So taxpayer money [goes] into creating new dependencies on [fossil fuels], which ultimately in the long term, make it much harder for us to achieve an actual clean energy transition.”

But former Democratic lawmakers and mainstream media are still more than willing to spread the misinformation coming from Natural Allies, so long as Natural Allies is willing to pay for it. Since 2020, Natural Allies has spent $10 million on a national PR campaign targeting Democratic voters, including more than $4 million to place ads in E&E News and Politico newsletters, Axios, Newsweek, Vox, the Wall Street Journal, and across cable news stations, according to reporting from the Guardian and Floodlight.

These campaigns are effective, in part, because it is very difficult to tell who is behind them. Readers of these news outlets may not recognize, as we uncovered last year, that Natural Allies’ ads are a form of fossil fuel industry climate disinformation. And that is the real price of Heitkamp and Landrieu’s sell out: a deception not measured in dollars, but in the degrees threatening our livable climate.

Climate deniers are going all in with disinfo for COP26 (Sorry, Teslas really do produce fewer emissions)

TAGGED:COP26, DENIAL, TESLA October 27th, 2021

As the world gears up for the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow next week, deniers are already laying the groundwork for the disinformation they’ll peddle in a hopefully-vain attempt to recreate their success in using Climategate disinformation to disrupt the Copenhagen COP.

While every year brings a new and exciting display of denial, a few recent stories stand out as top candidates for the fossil fueled opposition to latch onto when confronted with the possibility that letting polluters profit our planet to death is a bad idea.By Climate Denier Roundup

Though we can expect some totally-unhinged and unsubstantiated claims about banning beef, one of the biggest recurring arguments is also one of the most misleading, that the Texas blackouts offer a warning of what climate policies will make common.

For example, Sean Spicer, who hasn’t quite danced his Trump-stained reputation clean yet, has a new book out, and the Koch-funded RealClear ran an excerpt. It opens with a heart-tugging story about a 12 year old who died of hypothermia, and then quickly exploits the child’s death to score cheap, and completely false, political points. The 80+ deaths “were caused by political decisions,” Spicer writes, and “the tragedy of the Texas blackout was partially the result of the growth of the green energy industry.”

But the majority of the responsibility for the blackouts can be laid at the fossil fuel industry’s failure to do the one thing it claims it does best: Be reliable.

That reliability claim is also at the core of another strain of disinformation we’re seeing around COP26, which is the suggestion that the Teslas parked at the Gleneagles Hotel that the VIPs will use in Glasgow are going to be charged by diesel generators. “Couldn’t make it up,” one viral tweet claimed.

It was used as the basis for a ZeroHedge story, and the same narrative has been picked up by the UK’s Spectator magazine, and the climate denial blog Watts Up With That.

The problem? Well, it turns out you could make it up, and they did, as it turns out it’s Jaguar-brand electric vehicles they’re using, not Teslas, and while the COP26 crew may use supplemental generators to charge the vehicles somewhere, Gleneagles Hotel has denied setting up any chargers, while conference organizers told Alastair Dalton for the Scotsman that any spare generators are going to be filled with cooking waste oil, AKA biodiesel, not petroleum-based diesel.

Although unreasonable for faux-populist conservatives to attack the rich elite pushing for climate action, it does seem odd that they’re apparently incapable of doing so in an honest way, despite that being so very, very easy to do.

For example, a recent New York Post op-ed does a fine job of criticizing the billionaire boy’s club of Bezos, Musk, Gates, and Jobs(‘s widow), but also throws in some fakery for good measure.

While Paula Froelich is correct that “the electric cars made by Musk’s Tesla are not emissions free,”she then goes on to claim that the Wall Street Journal showed that “building one of his cars actually generates more emissions because of the metals needed for its lithium-ion batteries.”

But when you click through to the WSJ story, the subheadline notes that while “there are caveats”, “EVs produce fewer emissions overall than their gas-powered counterparts.” That’s because while the manufacturing of an electric vehicle requires more materials than a gas-powered car, the pollution from refueling far outweighs that initial difference.

Drive a Tesla for more than (at most) 20,000 miles, and you’ve broken even on emissions.

Drive it for a car’s average lifespan of 150,000 miles, and not only has the EV cost you less in ownership (because electricity is cheaper than gas) but you’ve also generated less than half as much pollution.

So if they had ordered and produced new electric cars for the COP26, and then immediately scrapped them afterwards, then yes, that would be hypocritical and wasteful. But the UK government has already said that the cars “have all been sourced from existing fleets in the UK,” so there’s not even that initial manufacturing pollution to count, dramatically improving the emissions footprint.

But, as one local environmental campaigner, Colin Howden, told the Scotsman, what they could’ve done to reduce emissions even further (and avoid this issue all together) is have the dignitaries take advantage of the “fleet of new electric buses” in Glasgow.

(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)

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https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled

see Brulle

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t98nfoexa2fglji/SchmertzAMBspeech.jpeg?dl=0

speech meh

mobil op ed orig 1970, mgmt thot oil wd be in short supply, so boost mass transit?! nyt widely read (and repected?] has op eds from editors an guests; run of paper" ad cheaper than specifc spot and corner of op ed page is among highest; p 24 1st try controv w/ other oil co b/c mass transit, but proved worked; by q972 every wk; ow in wapo, LAT wsj boston globe...obsrvations kinda watered down op ed in 400 sunday supplements; other msg taylor to aud eg biz

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https://www.drillednews.com/post/the-mobil-oil-flack-who-brought-us-false-equivalence-advertorials-and-corporate-free-speech

ep 4 and 5

In episodes four and five of Drilled, we tell the story of Herb Schmertz, former VP of Public Affairs for Mobil Oil. Schmertz brought many new PR tactics to the oil industry; he invented the advertorial, bullied journalists into false equivalence (what he called "creative confrontation"), and pushed for the first big corporate personhood case—long before Citizens United—back in the 1970s. He also coined the term "affinity of purpose" marketing to describe Mobil's longtime funding of Masterpiece Theatre and various other PBS programming, which helped to establish Mobil as "the thinking man's oil company."

Collected below are examples of the advertorials Schmertz distributed (in numerous interviews he refers to them as "pamphlets" and to The New York Timesas an excellent distribution system for the company's pamphlets), as well as some of the documents we referred to in the episode (speeches Schmertz gave, transcripts of interviews with him, and a Mobil doc explaining its advertorial strategy and the success of it). You can also listen to the episodes wherever you get your podcasts, or via the embedded players below.

Documents:

1978 briefing for the American Management Association, "Corporations and the First Amendment"

1982 internal Mobil progress report on its advertorial program, uncovered by the Climate Investigations Center

1984 article by Schmertz in the journal Communications and Law, entitled "The Press and The Public"

1987 Herb Schmertz speech "Patronage, Creativity, and American Culture: Patronage that Pays"given at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT

1991 transcript of interview with Laurence Jarvik for the book Masterpiece Theatre and the Politics of Quality

Advertorials

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sum

Fossil fuel companies have been lying to the public for decades; it's well-documented that almost as soon as climate change became a scientific reality, they actively downplayed the crisis. But to keep Americans unaware of the growing urgency of our environmental problem, those same companies needed a way to paint themselves as heroes. Advertising allowed fossil fuel companies to sell themselves, not their products, as the good guys. The depictions of billion-dollar companies were often folksy, innovative, innocent, and brazenly, stereotypically American. The strategy was genius. It’s also now the subject of congressional scrutiny. This week, the House Oversight Committee officially launched an investigation into the fossil fuel industry's disinformation efforts and their impact on the climate crisis. Journalist and podcast host Amy Westervelt wanted to go back to the beginning — to find out how advertising, the media, and the fossil fuel industry became so intertwined. Her podcast Drilled profiled several of the men who invented the public relations business we know today — starting with a man named Herb Schmertz.

This is a segment from our September 17th, 2021 program, Fire and Brimstone.

no lnx

The Birth of Climate Disinformation

Photograph of Herb Schmertz in his office, circa mid 1980s.

TRANSCRIPT

SACHA PFEIFFER We heard Hertsgaard say that fossil fuel companies have been lying to the public for decades. In fact, it's well documented that almost as soon as climate change became a scientific reality, they actively downplayed the crisis. But to keep Americans unaware of the growing urgency of our environmental problem, those same companies needed a way to paint themselves as heroes. Advertising allowed fossil fuel companies to sell themselves, not their products, as the good guys. The depictions of billion dollar companies were often folksy, innovative, innocent and brazenly, stereotypically American. The strategy was genius. It's also now the subject of congressional scrutiny. This week, the House Oversight Committee officially launched an investigation into the fossil fuel industry's disinformation efforts and their impact on the climate crisis. Journalist and podcast host Amy Westervelt wanted to go back to the beginning to find out how advertising the media and the fossil fuel industry became so intertwined. Her podcast Drilled, profiled several of the men who invented the public relations business we know today. The following is an excerpt from one of those episodes.

[CLIP]

HERB SCHMERTZIf you're going to do the job properly, you have to find unconventional ways to communicate to the public. And it's not a question of convincing the press of anything. It's a question of convincing the public [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT That’s Mobil Oil's legendary PR guy, Herb Schmertz. Schmertz was VP of public affairs for Mobil for decades. Slick and handsome, always with an expensive suit, he was the smartest guy in the room and mostly thought that both journalists and other PR guys were idiots. He ran PR for Mobil Oil from 1969 to 1988 and became a master of media manipulation. Schmertz didn't just focus on placing particular stories he set about fundamentally changing the relationship between corporations and the media. To Schmertz, the press was more of an obstacle between him and the public or Mobil and policy makers.

[CLIP]

HERB SCHMERTZ And to do the job properly, you have to really go around the press or beyond the press or against the press to get a story out so that the public focuses on it, not the press. If you're just going to limit yourself to getting the press to focus on it, you're not doing the entire job. [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT Schmertz is the guy who really turned media into another propaganda tool for the fossil fuel industry. He invented the advertorial for a start. He also invented issue advertising, which is now the only type of advertising the oil industry does. You'd think all they do is farm algae and research carbon capture and worry about climate change if you only paid attention to their ads.

[CLIP]

EXXON MOBIL ADVERT Energy is a complex challenge. People want power and power plants have more than a third of energy related carbon emissions. The challenge is to capture the emissions before they're released into the atmosphere. Exxon Mobil.... [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT Schmertz, also bullied journalists into covering big oil’s side of the story, and he encouraged his peers to do the same. Which, sadly, worked really well, and he lobbied for corporate First Amendment rights and against any media regulations that would make it harder for him to use the press as a tool. Known during his heyday for dapper suits, cigars and generally being something of a dandy. For the first half of his life, Herb Schmertz seemed more destined to be secretary of labor than a famous PR guy. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1955, Schmertz was drafted into the Army. The Vietnam War was just beginning, given his law background, Schmertz was sent straight to work in counterintelligence in Washington, D.C. After 2 years there, it was back to law for Schmerts. Labor law, following in the footsteps of his older brother. In 1960, Schmertz signed on to work for JFK's campaign.

[CLIP OF JFK AD PLAYS, CHORUS SINGS "KENNEDY" REPEATEDLY]

AMY WESTERVELT He was a Democrat, an idealist, and he helped the campaign with voter registration and reaching out to special groups. Including labor and various ethnic communities in New York. When he went to work for Mobil, commerce is actually still working in labor. He handled the company's labor relations for 5 years, but his background in law and political campaigning, combined with his relationships with various labor unions, made Schmertz an even greater, if unexpected, fit for the company's public affairs office. By this point, 1969, Mobil's CEO was a man named Rawleigh Warner. Warner wanted Mobil, which always seemed to be playing catch up to Exxon, to be more of a visible player in the industry. Schmertz had a lot of ideas on that front, starting with humanizing Mobil. Giving the company a personality, complete with ideas that needed to be shared. Here's Schmertz much later in life, describing that strategy.

[CLIP]

HERB SCHMERTZ As a personality where we believe very strongly about the importance of public policy. We believe fervently that as custodians of vast resources and one that we were not doing our job if we did not participate in the marketplace of ideas [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT To get all the facets of the corporation's personality across to the public, Schmertz used the tools he's come to be known for. The issue ad and the advertorial. The latter was born in 1970, when the New York Times opened up its op-ed pages to advertising for the first time. Schmertz wanted Mobil's ad to be just as smart and provocative as any editorial that might appear in the section otherwise. He hired legit writers to write them and eventually ran them every week for decades. They ran the gamut from squawking about taxes, to complaining about the media,to unexpected takes in favor of public transit. Schmertz talked about one of his advertorials on the PBS show The Open Mind in 1980.

[CLIP]

DAVE Herb, thanks for joining me today.

HERB SCHMERTZ A great pleasure to be here Dave.

DAVE I want to turn as quickly as possible to a new fairy tale, the Mobil ad or op ed piece or editorial, call it what you will ...

HERB SCHMERTZ We call them, pamphlets,.

DAVE Pamphlets, but they appear in newspapers.

HERB SCHMERTZ Yes. [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT A new kind of fairy tale was the title of Schmertz's latest advertorial, and it criticized PBS for running a film that stereotyped Saudi Arabians. It was, of course, in Mobil's interest to be seen as a friend and staunch defender of Saudi Arabia.At this point in time in particular, the company was increasing its profits mainly by expanding its development and production in Saudi Arabia.

[CLIP]

DAVE At the end, your conclusion in the ad, we hope that the management of the Public Broadcasting Service will review its decision to run this film. Meaning you hoped they wouldn't run it.

HERB SCHMERTZ Well not necessarily [OVERTALK]

DAVE ...and exercise responsible judgment in the light of what is in the best interest of the United States.

HERB SCHMERTZ Right

DAVE Do you think they did exercise responsible judgment?

HERB SCHMERTZ I think they did a better job after this ad period than they otherwise would have, but they could have done substantially more [END CLIP]

SACHA PFEIFFER Driven, at least in part by this advertorial, PBS aired a panel discussion following that film where Mobil's position was represented alongside other voices.

AMY WESTERVELT In various documents and speeches, Schmertz referred to how they helped shape the discourse on key issues to the company and established mobile as the thinking man's oil company. In a long buried briefing that we found called the Corporations and the First Amendment that Schmertz wrote for the American Management Association in 1978, he explains why he chose The New York Times for these ads. He writes, quote, The Times was chosen because it is published in the nation's leading population communications and business center. Because it has a highly intelligent, vocal, sophisticated readership and because it reaches legislators and other government officials. In short, it was the paper most likely to reach the largest number of opinion leaders and decision makers. Schmertz also talks about the program as a great success, in this briefing. "Mobil found that the medium worked," he writes. "The messages stimulated discussion among influentials on both sides of the issue. Exactly what the company had set out to do." But it turns out that the result of placing all those ads was quite different from simply stimulating discussion, not just in terms of reaching a large audience of readers, but also in shaping the Times his own coverage of these issues.

KERT DAVIES They talk about having influence The New York Times editorial viewpoints.

SACHA PFEIFFER Kert Davies is the founder and director of the Climate Investigation Center, a nonprofit watchdog group that focuses on influence around energy and environmental policy. They uncovered an internal marketing report from 1982 in which Mobil's marketing and PR team was reporting to the company's leadership about how these advertorials had done.

KERT DAVIES The document says, quote, our analysis shows that the Times has altered or significantly softened its viewpoints on conservation, moving from a total reliance on conservation to advocating increased production incentives to solve the supply shortage on monopoly and divestiture. Moving from approving the breakup of the oil companies to opposing divestiture.Moving from advocating strict environmental safeguards to suggesting more relaxed controls on offshore drilling. Moving from valuing environmental concerns at the expense of exploration and development, to urging accelerated offshore drilling. So they are tallying how they have affected the viewpoints of The New York Times on conservation, monopoly and divestiture. Decontrol, natural gas, coal, offshore drilling, all things that they had written op eds on.

GEOFFREY SUPRAN And they've been open and forthright about this, even in some of the editorials themselves.

SACHA PFEIFFER Harvard science historian Geoffrey Supran has studied these advertorials at length.

GEOFFREY SUPRAN No doubt the fossil fuel industry has been very effective at embedding themselves into our culture and our society and our media in an increasingly insidious way that makes it hard to discern when you are being advertised to, versus simply being reprogrammed to see the world and society in a slightly different way.

AMY WESTERVELT Mobil was convinced enough that its advertorial strategy worked, to keep running them weekly in the Times for decades. It was even a program that Exxon kept going after it acquired Mobil.

GEOFFREY SUPRANThey've taken out about one in four of all the advertorials that have ever appeared on the op ed page of The New York Times.

AMY WESTERVELT He said one in four. So 25 percent of all advertorials that have ever run in the New York Times op ed pages were commissioned by Mobil or ExxonMobil.

GEOFFREY SUPRAN Political scientists studying these efforts have described this campaign as towering over all other competitors in its volume and expense.

AMY WESTERVELT ExxonMobil doesn't run its advertorials anymore, but it's moved on to the latest iteration. Campaigns made by The New York Times itself. It's not the newsroom, it's the brand studio that The New York Times created, but still, it's the same company that puts out The New York Times newspaper – making oil companies ads for them. See if you can spot a bit of the Schmertz magic here. In 1978, he said the goal of Mobil's advertorial campaigns was to, quote, stimulate discussion among influentials. In 2020, The New York Times brand studio website's tagline is, quote, stories that influenced the influential. Here's a campaign they did for ExxonMobil last year. Highlighting the company's algae biofuel program.

[CLIP]

ALGAE BIOFUEL ADVERT These vibrant green dots, microscopic living organisms are algae. Look closely, algae grows almost everywhere from murky ponds. [END CLIP]

AMY WESTERVELT Again, the brand studio is separate from the newsroom. There's a definite firewall between advertising and editorial. And every time I talk about these campaigns, New York Times reporters bristle at the idea that they are being accused of being manipulated or influenced by industry. Whether they are or aren't influenced is not really the point. It's not even the goal of these campaigns. The goal is to reach and influence certain types of readers and to wrap the industry's messages in the cloak of credibility provided by The New York Times or The Washington Post, which also does this.

Last year, The Post ran a series of stories that its brand studio created for the American Petroleum Institute, all about how, quote, natural gas and oil are helping to deliver a sustainable fuel mix. These campaigns are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for newspapers at a time when the business model for journalism has never been more strained. And when you ask for proposals on them, as I did, ad sales, people start offering all kinds of things. You could place content they write for you in the climate section. You can peg it two key words like climate change and make sure it's a suggested next read on any related news story. Influence doesn't look like an oil tycoon in a top hat showing up at your desk to twirl his mustache and tell you to spike a story. It looks like readers being fed a bunch of oil propaganda before, after and right next to your legit climate reporting. We have Herb Schmertz to thank for that.

SACHA PFEIFFER That was an excerpt from the Mad Men season of Drilled, an Investigated podcast about climate change hosted by Amy Westervelt.

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Manchin fumes after Bernie Sanders op-wd in West Virginia paper calls out obstruction of Biden agenda

Andrea Germanos Common Dreams

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia lashed out Friday after a major newspaper in his home state published an op-ed by Sen. Bernie Sanders that called out Manchin's obstruction...

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alternet likes to run eg of home town paper op ed, do these affect voters?

eg https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/hawley/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/ted-cruz-2655236983/

Dallas Morning News torches Ted Cruz for blaming Trump's debt crisis on Democrats

Meaghan Ellis

October 06, 2021

The Dallas Morning News is pushing back against Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-Texas) attempt to blame Democrats for the massive debt the United States is faced with as the party tries to pass the much-needed, trillion-dollar infrastructure package.

Its no secret that the Republican lawmaker is worki....

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Dallas Morning News torches Ted Cruz for blaming Trump's debt crisis on Democrats

Meaghan Ellis

October 06, 2021

Its no secret that the Republican lawmaker is worki....

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/scathing-editorial-by-wisconsin-newspaper-slams-ron-johnson-as-a-con-artist-whose-grifting-made-his-cronies-even-richer/

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desantis thot police

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/miami-newspaper/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/pennsylvania/

editorial on voter suppress?

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820

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/newsweek-should-disavow-racist-insinuation-that-kamala-harris-is-not-a-citizen/

no lnx pix twt

newsweek should disavow racist insinuation that Kamala Harris is not a citizen

Written by Jim Naureckas / FAIR August 14, 2020

Less than 24 hours after Kamala Harris became the first person of color to be chosen as a vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket, Newsweek ran an op-ed (8/13/20) insinuating that she was not a citizen and therefore ineligible to run.

The piece, by former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman, disregarded almost two centuries of Supreme Court jurisprudence to pretend that there is an actual debate over the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which appears in the 14th Amendment passage that grants automatic citizenship to people born here:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Newsweek: Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility

Newsweek (8/12/20) gives a platform to a fringe legal theory that holds Kamala Harris is not actually a US citizen because her parents were immigrants.

Long before the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, however, the Supreme Court made it clear that children born to residents of the United States were citizens. In Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor’s Snug Harbor, an 1830 case, the Court declared:

Nothing is better settled at the common law than the doctrine that the children even of aliens born in a country while the parents are resident there under the protection of the government and owing a temporary allegiance thereto are subjects by birth.

Generations later, in the 1898 ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court spelled out its understanding of what the 14th Amendment means for citizenship, listing all the categories of people who were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US:

The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes.

(Indigenous Americans were recognized as citizens by Congress in 1924, removing one of the very few exceptions to the birthright citizenship rule.)

Most of a century later, in Plyler v. Doe (1983) the Court reaffirmed that “jurisdiction” is to be understood in “predominantly geographic sense.” The ruling held that “no plausible distinction with respect to 14th Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

In 2018, when President Donald Trump threatened to issue an executive order that he claimed would strip US citizenship from the children of unauthorized immigrants, the Congressional Research Service (11/1/18) summed up the legal situation:

At least since the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the prevailing view has been that all persons born in the United States are constitutionally guaranteed citizenship at birth unless their parents are foreign diplomats, members of occupying foreign forces, or members of Indian tribes…. Because none of these exceptions permits the denial of birthright citizenship based on the alienage of parents who are not diplomats, the case is most often interpreted as barring the federal government from accomplishing such denial through any means other than a constitutional amendment.

Newsweek: Eastman's Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism

Contrary to Newsweek‘s editors’ note (8/13/20). the column it ran is entirely in the spirit of racist birtherism.

Are there lawyers who believe that the Supreme Court could and should overturn the 122-year-old precedent of Wong Kim Ark and find some new ground for declaring certain US residents not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States? Yes, and they are generally regarded as fringe theorists, motivated by a desire to denaturalize millions of US citizens, overwhelmingly people of color, who are every day recognized as full-fledged Americans for purposes of paying taxes, serving on juries, registering to vote—and running for office. That Newsweek chooses to give a platform to this xenophobic legal quackery is dismaying.

Newsweek‘s global editor in chief Nancy Cooper and opinion editor Josh Hammer published an editors’ note (8/13/20) hours after Eastman’s op-ed appeared, saying that “some of our readers have reacted strongly to the op-ed we published by Dr. John Eastman, assuming it to be an attempt to ignite a racist conspiracy theory around Kamala Harris’ candidacy.” The editors assert:

His essay has no connection whatsoever to so-called “birther-ism,” the racist 2008 conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing then-candidate Barack Obama by claiming, baselessly, that he was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya. We share our readers’ revulsion at those vile lies.

Eastman’s column, they claim, “is not an attempt to deny facts or to make false claims. No one is questioning Harris’ place of birth or the legitimacy of an obviously valid birth certificate.” But it is an effort, based on the most far-fetched legal speculation, to assert that Harris is literally not an American because her parents were immigrants. It is the exact same impulse that prompted hatemongers like Donald Trump to question Barack Obama’s right to run for office, motivated by the identical racist ugliness.

ACTION ALERT: Please contact Newsweek‘s editors and demand that they retract the op-ed insinuating that Kamala Harris (like millions of other Americans) is not a US citizen.

CONTACT: You can contact Newsweek here or via Twitter: @Newsweek.

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/dallas-morning-news-editorial-board-conducted-rare-climate-change-focused-qa

ted mcd

The Dallas Morning News’ editorial board conducted an interview with discredited climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg and published an edited version without explaining his background or contextualizing his claims. He used the opportunity to push for minor solutions that do not adequately address the scale of the climate crisis.

On December 1, The Dallas Morning News -- a top 15 U.S. newspaper by circulation -- published a condensed interview about climate change solutions with Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish political scientist and director of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center. Lomborg criticized current spending on climate change as inadequate and instead proposed that leaders “look at where can you spend a dollar and do the most good” -- which he suggested should include implementing a carbon tax, increased spending on clean energy research and development, investment in climate adaptation, and consideration of “geoengineering,” or using technology to purposefully change the climate.

Those proposals sound relatively benign, and Lomborg has been making these arguments for quite some time. But they are not nearly enough to tackle climate change, and they allow for the continued burning of fossil fuels when what is really needed is a drastic cut in carbon emissions. Lomborg, who has a long history of downplaying the climate crisis, offers relatively minor approaches to solving this massive problem. Unfortunately for readers of the piece, the editorial board does not provide any of this context.

What’s worse, it’s extremely rare for climate change to come up in a Q&A with The Dallas Morning News’ editorial board. Media Matters reviewed Dallas Morning News Q&As going back to January 2017, and just one -- a July 2017 interview with Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) -- included a substantive mention of climate change. When the topic of climate change was finally addressed again in a Q&A format, instead of reaching out to a climate scientist, activist, or policymaker, the paper chose to talk to serial climate misinformer Lomborg.

Lomborg is a climate contrarian who has connections to the Koch network

The only information provided about Lomborg in this interview reads: “Bjorn Lomborg is an academic and author of the book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist.’” The interview gives the impression that Lomborg is a credible climate expert, but there are many issues with his climate-related work.

Lomborg is a contrarian who “represents an insidious form of climate change denial,” according to The Washington Post. Lomborg has been long discredited within the climate science community. He’s been caught downplaying the risks of sea level rise and even misrepresenting Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. His work showing that it’s a poor investment to limit global temperatures to 2 degrees C under the Paris climate agreement has been scrutinized and rejected by scientific experts.

He’s also been credibly accused of misinforming about climate change’s effects on both poverty and extreme weather. NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt has said that Lomborg is “totally undermined by his whole career of cherry picking whatever the most favorable reading is and refusing to countenance any possibility of something worse.”

His book is rife with scientific inaccuracies. The one major disclosure about Lomborg in this piece is that he is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. This best-selling book published in 2001 helped launch Lomborg to fame, but its main claims have been debunked by the climate science community. In 2003, a Danish government committee found him guilty of “scientific dishonesty,” concluding, “Based on customary scientific standards and in light of his systematic one-sidedness in the choice of data and line of argument, [he] has clearly acted at variance with good scientific practice.” Climate news site Grist spoke with scientific experts in eight environment-related fields, and all of them found his analyses in The Skeptical Environmentalist to be fundamentally flawed -- with one expert noting that Lomborg lacks even “a preliminary understanding of the science in question." Scientific American also shared critical responses to his work. There is even a website that takes down the errors in Lomborg’s book one by one.

Groups connected to the shadowy Koch network have generously donated to Lomborg’s think tank.Since its registration in the U.S. in 2008, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has received $170,000 from the conservative Randolph Foundation, whose director, Heather Higgins, has ties to multiple groups within the Koch network. Copenhagen Consensus Center also received $300,000 from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which is part of the Koch network’s attempt to influence state and federal judges. The group also received $200,000 from conservative Republican billionaire Paul Singer, who had previously given more than $1 million to the oil billionaire Koch brothers. The Koch network has donated lavishly to climate denial efforts.

Lomborg generally appears in right wing media to make his case

Climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf said in 2015 that Lomborg’s “propaganda message is not only popular with fossil fuel interests, but continues to get ample space in the media.” Since then, and after Lomborg was thoroughly shut down by the climate science community, he has been generally relegated to right-wing media outlets to make his points (save for a few USA Today op-eds).

Lomborg regularly publishes op-eds in the conservative Wall Street Journal and New York Post. As noted above, he generally downplays the seriousness of climate change, avoids calling for a reduction in carbon emissions, and argues in favor of focusing on milquetoast approaches like increasing clean energy research and development spending.

He’s also appeared on Fox News three times in 2019 -- twice on Tucker Carlson Tonight and once on The Ingraham Angle. In all of these appearances, he’s downplayed the risks of climate change. For example, in an April appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, he stated, “They’re telling us global warming is a problem. But it’s also a moderate one.”

His various debunked climate views have largely kept him out of the mainstream media -- until now.

The Dallas Morning News’ news team has done a decent job with climate coverage over the past year: The September youth climate strike and the IPCC land report were important enough for the paper to feature them on its front page. They also took a look at climate change’s role in amplifying extreme weather in Texas and elsewhere. The paper’s opinion section has stepped up, too, with an op-ed from climate scientist Andrew Dessler and an op-ed linking global warming to racial equity. That’s why it’s so disheartening to see that when the editorial board conducts a rare climate-focused interview, it gives that space to such a dishonest actor.

punked GUK then

https://yyy.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/24/bjrn-lomborg-centre-got-640000-for-report-saying-limiting-warming-rise-to-2c-not-worth-it

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/reporter-disgraced-by-ukraine-scandal-gets-scathing-review-from-his-former-outlet-but-key-details-are-missing-from-the-story/

no lnx

Reporter disgraced by Ukraine scandal gets scathing review from his former outlet — but key details are missing from the story

Written by Cody Fenwick February 19, 2020

President Donald Trump’s sprawling Ukraine scandal consumed Washington politics for months and led to the third Senate impeachment trial of a president in U.S. history. Among the casualties in the uproar was the reputation of John Solomon, a writer for The Hill and personality on its online streaming channel, who was directly implicated in spreading misinformation at the heart of the scandal.

A new piece published by The Hill on Wednesday heavily scrutinized Solomon’s work for the outlet, pointing out conflicts of interest, errors in judgment, and failures on his part and that of the editorial process. But there are key questions that remain unanswered about Solomon’s role at The Hill, questions that demand more scrutiny for the outlet itself as it enabled the disgraced reporter.

Solomon and the Biden story

Solomon, who no longer works for The Hill but contributes to Fox News, received a scathing review in the new piece. In particular, his writing about former Vice President Joe Biden’s connections to Ukraine demonstrate significant failures on journalistic ethics.

His writing played a major role in supporting the false narrative that Biden had corruptly involved himself as vice president in Ukrainian politics to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who was working for the energy company Burisma in the country. As is now well known, Biden, with the backing of President Barack Obama’s administration, intervened in Ukraine in 2016 to oust Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Solomon’s columns, The Hill noted, supported the widely debunked notion that Biden was attempting to protect his son by undermining Shokin’s efforts to investigate Burisma. This allegation formed the basis of Trump’s demand over the course of many months in 2019 that Ukraine investigate Biden, his potential 2020 rival. The House of Representatives later determined this action to be a corrupt abuse of power, an illegitimate interference in the upcoming election, and an attempt to solicit a bribe.

But the claim remains unsupported and is contradicted by known facts, and Solomon’s basis for pushing the allegations appears highly dubious. Shokin, who was widely viewed as corrupt, was one of the people Solomon interviewed for his research, The Hill reported, even though his “reliability as a source is in question.”

“In certain columns, Solomon failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation,” the piece noted.

And Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who acted as his point person in the Ukraine matter, said he was a key source for Solomon’s reporting as well, though Solomon denies it. Solomon did, however, work with Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who has since been indicted on charges of conspiracy and campaign finance law violations. The Hill said the extent and nature of Solomon’s work with Parnas “remain unclear but potentially troubling.” Parnas has turned over evidence that indicates extensive involvement with Solomon, Giuliani, and others.

Solomon also quoted or referred to lawyers Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, who represent clients with interests in Ukraine and some of the figures in the broader scandal. But Solomon did not disclose when referencing the pair that they also represented him legally. And The Hill noted that Solomon shared a draft of one of his columns with Parnas, diGenova and Toensing, in violation of the outlet’s editorial policy.

Was The Hill concerned about Solomon before his role in the Ukraine scandal was revealed?

In response to these and other serious problems in Solomon’s work, The Hill announced it will devote itself to implementing eight lessons learned from the episode. It also has added editor’s notes to Solomon’s columns to add more context or disclosures “that should have been highlighted at the time of his writings.” While this kind of public admission of failure and commitment to accountability is welcome and appropriate, there are some gaps in the outlet’s account.

Most notably, one event recounted in the piece remains underexplained: “Solomon also wrote numerous news articles for The Hill in 2017 and 2018. An editorial decision was made to label Solomon’s work as opinion as of May 14, 2018.”

For close followers of political journalism, this fact was always notable about Solomon’s work. Though The Hill typically has a sharp delineation between opinion pieces and news pieces, Solomon’s writing clearly blurred the line. For example, one headline read: “Ukrainian Embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016.” This sounds like it would be a normal news story at The Hill, but it was nevertheless labeled as an opinion piece.

The Hill acknowledged this problem:

While Solomon’s columns on Ukraine were labeled as opinion, they largely read like news stories.Adding to the potential confusion between opinion and news, Solomon was identified as “an award-winning journalist” in his column tagline. When appearing on television to discuss his Ukraine columns, Solomon was not typically labeled an opinion writer by the broadcast programs. The Hill did not contact television producers to label Solomon as an opinion columnist. It should have.

Lending further support to an impression that the columns were more like news stories, rather than opinion columns, Solomon’s Ukraine columns were longer than typical opinion pieces, in many cases contained what could be viewed or was identified by him as original reporting, and stuck to one general topic. This may have suggested to many readers it was an investigative series, which normally resides in the news department, rather than opinion. Solomon’s subsequent appearances on Fox News where he was often identified as an investigative journalist further potentially blurred the distinction between news and opinion in the minds of some readers.

Every news outlet is free to set its own standards, and the delicate balance between news, analysis, and opinion can be handled in a variety of ways. But The Hill acknowledged that Solomon’s work violated the standards it tried to set for itself, with the effect of potentially confusing readers.

But most critical is that The Hill changed the way it described Solomon’s columns’ in 2018. While once they were considered news, they were afterward considered opinion. What changed? No explanation is given.

The change is critical because it points to The Hill’s responsibility for Solomon’s work. Were his editors suddenly concerned about the nature of his work? Did they feel he was less credible than he had been before? Did they believe his previous credibility had been overrated? Importantly, pieces by opinion contributors such as Solomon in The Hill bear the tagline: “The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.”

If there were concerns about Solomon’s reliability and the accuracy of the reporting, they were certainly warranted. As the review and subsequent events have shown, Solomon’s claims and reporting in his columns were highly dubious and in violation of journalistic standards.

But if this was the reason for designating his columns as opinion rather than news, the switch was wholly insufficient. As the review published Wednesday noted, “opinion” pieces aren’t free from the standards of journalism; they are “vetted for accuracy, conflicts of interest, and other relevant factors; when statements of fact are found to be incorrect, or conflicts of interest are found to have been undisclosed or overlooked, The Hill routinely corrects those or adds clarifications to columns.”

The worry, then, is that The Hill had reason to suspect Solomon’s reporting was dodgy, but it kept printing his columns anyway. Why would it have done this? One possible reason: Solomon’s pieces were quite popular and gained traction in right-wing circles. As the review noted:

Starting in March 2019, Solomon wrote a series of columns on Ukraine, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, as well as U.S. diplomats in Ukraine. Solomon discussed his columns on television, most notably on Sean Hannity‘s opinion show on Fox News. These appearances amplified the reach of Solomon’s work at The Hill.

The publication of Solomon’s columns was enormously consequential. It helped further a negative narrative about Biden that is, by all appearances, entirely baseless, which could have impacted his standing in the 2020 primary election. It may have even helped lead to the impeachment of Trump.

It’s worth asking, then, what The Hill’s editors knew about Solomon’s work and when they knew it.

AlterNet reached out to The Hill with questions about Solomon’s role and why his pieces were designated as opinion. This story will be updated with any response.

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Conservative Op-Eds Argued Wrongly That China and India Are Not Taking Action

Right-wing op-eds falsely claimed that China, India and other developing nations were not committed to Paris goals.

In a syndicated column that appeared in USA Today and USA Today Network newspapers, Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment and a former vice president of Americans for Prosperity, wrote, "The Paris treaty effectively bans coal-fired power plants in the United States—while China has 368 coal plants under construction and more than 800 in the planning stage. India's coal production under the deal is allowed to double by 2020—and they are likely to have emissions much higher than what they promised." And in his anti-Paris op-ed in theBoston Herald, Loris wrote, "Developing nations want affordable, dependable energy to raise their standards of living, and countries such as India, China and Indonesia need to use a lot of coal to get there."

China and India are on pace to meet their emissions targets ahead of schedule.

The Washington Post recently reported that an analysis conducted by the Climate Action Tracker found that "China and India are on track to overachieve on their climate pledges" and quoted Bill Hare, CEO of the nonprofit science and policy institute Climate Analytics, saying that China and India "are going to slow the global growth in CO2 emissions significantly." A New York Times editorial discussing the same analysis noted, "The shift from fossil fuels has ... been much faster and more pronounced than most experts expected. China has reduced coal use for three years in a row and recently scrapped plans to build more than 100 coal power plants. Indian officials have estimated that country might no longer need to build new coal plants beyond those that are already under construction."

China and India are taking big steps to develop clean energy and scale back coal plants.

In January of this year, China announced that it plans to spend more than $360 billion through 2020 on renewable energy sources and is canceling plans to build more than 100 coal-fired power plants. Last year, India announced that it plans to get 57 percent of its total electricity capacity from renewable sources by 2027 and launch a $2 billion equity fund to boost renewable energy development. According to The Associated Press, a March report by the groups CoalSwarm, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace found that "construction starts for coal-fired plants in China and India were down by 62 percent in January from a year earlier while new facilities starting operation declined 29 percent." Additionally, a May 22 New York Times editorial noted, "Electric vehicle sales in China jumped 70 percent last year, thanks in large part to generous government incentives. India is much further behind in this area, but the country's minister of power said last month that all cars sold in the country should be electric by 2030.

Developing nations pushed for a strong Paris agreement and were "crucial" to its adoption.

Developing countries, including the least developed countries, were a key part of the "high ambition coalition" that called for tougher climate change policies and "was widely credited with ensuring the Paris meeting ended in agreement," according to Climate Change News. Far from pushing for a weak agreement and wanting leeway to burn coal, the developing nations have been insistent on the need for fast action to deal with climate change, and have sounded alarms about the role of corporations and lobbyists in UN climate negotiations, fearing that they might weaken emissions goals.

Developing nations committed to cutting emissions even though it's more difficult for them and they have less responsibility to do so.

The world's developing countries have emitted only a small proportion of the climate-warming gases that humans have sent into the atmosphere over the past 160 years, and so they're responsible for only a small proportion of the global warming the world is experiencing. And yet all but two of the world's developing nations signed onto the Paris agreement and submitted action plans, many of which experts said were ambitious. Yet developing countries face a tougher challenge reducing emissions than their wealthier counterparts do. As Robert Lempert of the RAND Corporation explained to the Chicago Tribune, "The richest countries have much of their economy in lower-emitting sectors. ... The U.S. can grow their economy and improve their quality of life without increasing energy use. But in developing countries, you can't do that."

Op-Eds Against the Agreement Pushed Climate Science Denial

Anti-Paris agreement op-eds spread climate science misinformation.

In an op-ed for The Washington Times, Princeton emeritus physics professor and climate denier William Happer wrote that the U.S. "should withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement," claiming, "For too long, well-meaning policymakers have been misled by propaganda, masquerading as science, that more atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will harm the planet ... More CO2 is not a pollutant but is a benefit to humanity." In an op-ed in The Hill, Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute attempted to undermine the scientific rationale behind the Paris agreement by disputing that human activity is the dominant cause of recent global warming.

Slate's Phil Plait: Claiming CO2 is not a pollutant is "ridiculous" and "in-your-face wrong."

In a Feb. 18 column, science journalist Phil Plait wrote in Slate that the frequently used climate-denier claim that CO2 is not a pollutant is "ridiculous," "in-your-face wrong" and a "typical denier distraction technique, trying to downplay or distract you from what's really going on." He summarized the overwhelming scientific consensus: While some carbon dioxide is necessary for plant life, burning fossil fuels and thus releasing excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is warming up the globe "too quickly for many living things to adapt." Carbon pollution is causing rapid changes to the Earth's climate, and, as Plait explained, that speed is the "danger; the rate at which we are heating the planet is unprecedented."

Humans are "by far" the dominant cause of global warming.

InsideClimate News reported in 2016 that "ninety to 100 percent of climate scientists agree that the planet is warming due to human activity, according to a peer-reviewed paper published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The study, called a 'consensus on consensus' synthesizes findings from prior published research." In 2013, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported, "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines "extremely likely" as having 95 to 100 percent probability. A 2009 letter signed by 18 U.S. scientific organizations stated that "greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver" of climate change. In a 2012 literature review for the blog Skeptical Science, Dana Nuccitelli laid out the overwhelming evidence that humans are the primary driver of climate change, writing, "A wide variety of statistical and physical approaches all arrived at the same conclusion: that humans are the dominant cause of the global warming over the past century, and particularly over the past 50 years. This robust scientific evidence is why there is a consensus among scientific experts that humans are the dominant cause of global warming."

Reposted with permission from our media associate Media Matters for America.