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daniel turner pwr the future

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NO MERRI QUITE LONG

SEE POWER THE FUTURE

TRUMP ENERGY DOMINANCE

chLs koch inst

crc

TESTIMONY

rion oann FOX

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LI 6 26

Daniel Turner - Power The Future | LinkedIn

Executive Director

Power The Future

Dec 2017 - Present · 8 yrs 7 mos

Power the Future advocates for the millions of men and women, almost predominantly in rural communities, who work in the energy industry. The constant political attacks against them, the hired protesters and paid agitators, sent out by billionaire activists with an agenda, have shut down industry across the nation leaving these once prosperous and happy small towns with all the accompanying, tragic consequences of poverty: welfare, drug use and overdoses, declining tax revenue, closing schools, falling house prices.

This is the terrible human toll to radical environmental activism, and as billionaires who long for national fame and Hollywood elite who love to opine contribute millions to shut down this mine or that field, no one talks about the families left behind once their phony protesters take the bus back home.

Millions of Americans do a precise, difficult, sometimes even dangerous job, all so that we can turn on our lights and fill up our tanks. Power The Future celebrates them, thanks them, recognizes their critical contribution to our world, and pledges to stand with them against the political attacks of a misguided, indifferent and obtuse activist. We need energy and energy workers; they do power our nation, and they Power The Future. www.powerthefuture.us

[

Lost amid all the 'noise' over Scott Pruitt is the very real damage Obama's EPA did to rural communities

My work takes me to small, energy-rich towns around the country - the places where America gets its power, where multiple generations of energy workers live and worship and raise their families.](https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-turner-32b8114a/overlay/Position/1259969887/treasury/?profileId=ACoAAApxWZMBa3Meg04Jo30xJ76QdwIplJwWMR8)[

Community Voices: The politicians playing with California’s energy workers

California has become the epicenter of the left-wing resistance to Donald Trump. When the president made his first trip to the Golden State last week, he was greeted with the](https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-turner-32b8114a/overlay/Position/1259969887/treasury/?profileId=ACoAAApxWZMBa3Meg04Jo30xJ76QdwIplJwWMR8)[

Why This New Organization Believes Energy Jobs Power the Future for American Communities – InsideSources

The United States of America was built quite literally out of the wilderness. The narrative of American history and progress is generally a technological o](https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-turner-32b8114a/overlay/Position/1259969887/treasury/?profileId=ACoAAApxWZMBa3Meg04Jo30xJ76QdwIplJwWMR8)Show all 4 media

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Taking the summer off...

Rockaway Beach

Jun 2017 - Present · 9 yrs 1 mo

Great opportunity to change career paths and try a new industry... but I'm taking the summer off, spend time with family at the beach house, and figure out where I want to go next. Convenient part of being single without kids and 15 years of savings is that I'm in no rush. The right opportunity will come along. It always does if you have your eyes open and a good network and reputation!

My first summer vacation since 1989...

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Director of Events and Venue Marketing

DC Event Hub

Feb 2017 - Mar 2017 · 2 mos

Washington DC-Baltimore Area

With amazing venues at the already famous Loft at 600F and the newly acquired, historic National Union Building at 918F, we've got some of the most exclusive and chic space in Penn Quarter.

Wedding, corporate events, parties and celebrations, trade & craft shows, team retreats, company off-sites, film shoots, black tie soirees... we've got the space to create the event of your dreams.

And we're just starting... more to come. So excited to join this new company, work with a great team, and see happy clients who love being in DC's best location.

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[Director of Strategic Communications Charles Koch Institute

Jan 2015 - Jan 2017 · 2 yrs 1 mo](https://www.linkedin.com/company/2446474/)

What does it mean to embrace freedom? Not the political notion of freedom... not elections and talking points and looped videos of Old Glory in the amber waves of grain... but the notions of freedom which reach back thousands of years. Those deeply held principles and beliefs which bind Harvey Milk and Lucretia Mott to Cato and Rousseau: human dignity, individual rights, civil liberties, healthy societies.

My job at CKI is to tell stories of freedom applied: Criminal Justice Reform, Foreign Policy, Tolerance. It's highlighting the destructive power of cronyism and corporate welfare, and advocating a space where technology and innovation can thrive.

It's not an easy job, because authentic freedom is not an easy concept to communicate. It is so much easier to advocate the Utopian world of "free" goodies. It's more convenient to scare people into believing incessant overseas wars will keep us safe. It's more common to pit people against each other based on identity.

Freedom is so much more than that. Freedom can be scary, but it is beautiful. It is the only state that truly respects the nobility and dignity of mankind. "Freedom is the revelation of dreams you didn't know you had." I love that quote.

Come know CKI- the greatest advocate for freedom in America. Freedom in academia, freedom in thought, freedom from government coercion, freedom to live, love, and die realizing the fullest of human dignity. And help me tell better stories.

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[VP of Communications Generation Opportunity

Apr 2013 - Jan 2015 · 1 yr 10 mos

Arlington, VA](https://www.linkedin.com/company/3133458/)

What's the one issue everyone in Generation Y can agree on? Not political, social or cultural... not at all. They can- and they do- agree that their generation, the most networked, tech-savvy, community focused and socially engaged generation ever, is facing more setbacks, more debt, more inherited chaos and government insolvency than any other generation. They pay into programs that are scheduled to expire before they come of age. They each owe over $800k to a government that has no plans to fix their own problems. It's a tragedy- it's foreseeable- it's reversible. I'm part of a national organization that is paving the way for a generation of opportunity. Find out more online, on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest and get onboard. The future depends on it. Have ideas? Outreach? Messaging? Shoot me an email and I'd love to hear them.

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[Associate Booz Allen Hamilton

2009 - Apr 2013 · 4 yrs 4 mos](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1403/)

Strategic Communications Planning, Executive Communications, Workforce Communications, Crisis Communications

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Director of Public Affairs

Romney Transition Team: R2P

Sep 2012 - Nov 2012 · 3 mos

Washington DC-Baltimore Area

HAD Romney won... we had the most comprehensive, exhaustive and far reaching public affairs strategy that included everyone: friends, supporters, detractors, skeptics... the spirit was one of inclusion, governing, leadership and nothing of victory laps (least of all punish our enemies).

Thanks Gov. Leavitt for your leadership and example. You assembled a great Transition Team. I was honored to be part of it.

(Don't ask me what President-Elect Romney would have done on December 23, 2012. I'll never tell.)

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Network and Cable Liaison Director

2012 Republican National Convention

May 2012 - Sep 2012 · 5 mos

Greater Tampa Bay Area

We have a great message and many exceptional Republican, Conservative, and Libertarian men and women who can help tell it to the American people during an exciting 4 day Convention in Tampa, Florida. How to get the right person on the right network at the right time...

I'm here to help.

Want to get involved? Check us out at http://www.gopconvention2012.com and on Facebook, Twitter and Google+

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Advisor

Bob Turner for Congress

2010 - 2011 · 1 yr

When your Uncle comes to you with the idea of running for Congress, you pitch in, add your talent and experience and work with the whole family and friends and neighbors to make it happen.

It didn't 1st time, despite our great efforts. But then something happened on Twitter...

RIP Andrew Breitbart.

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[Bush Administration U.S. Department of State

2007 - Jan 2009 · 2 yrs 1 mo](https://www.linkedin.com/company/3100/)

Probably the most challenging job I could have and I was early in my career- I will always be grateful to the people who took a chance on me giving me positions of enormous responsibility. Running media affairs during 2 wars, taking elected officials on tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, planning media strategies around the return home of American diplomats and foreign service officers, appointment to the Puerto Rico Task Force (best challenge coin ever is POTUS'...). In a nutshell build media and public affairs strategies to promote the US foreign policy. But it was so much more- and I met great friends in the process.

Pontifical University

Philosophy

1997 – 1999

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University of Dayton

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MMA

Fox personalities used to claim that energy independence would shield the US from potential retaliatory action by Iran — such as closing the Strait of Hormuz

As gas prices rise, the network has scarcely invoked the concept of “energy independence,” mentioning it a fraction as often as it did during the start of the Russia-Ukraine war

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 03/18/26

In reality, America has never truly been energy independent, and such a policy is not even truly possible. Energy prices are determined by a global market, meaning the United States will never be free from oil and gas price fluctuations no matter how much oil it produces domestically. Indeed, this moment represents the most definitive rebuke yet of the idea of American “energy independence.”

Even as the U.S. is producing record amounts of oil and the Trump administration pursues a voracious pro-fossil fuel agenda, the national average price of gas reached $3.45 a gallon on March 8, with The New York Times reporting that oil prices rose “above $100 a barrel for the first time in roughly four years, more than 40 percent more expensive than it was before the United States and Israel began attacking Iran on Feb. 28.” As of March 18, gas has climbed to a national average of $3.84 a gallon.

But rather than conceding the point that oil markets have always been and will likely always be volatile, Fox personalities are moving the goal posts on what “energy independence” means compared to the network’s narratives in 2022 and 2020. They’re now suggesting that energy independence can be achieved by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, that it means disruptions to gas prices caused by conflicts overseas are only temporary, or that energy independence enables the U.S. to start new wars that “wouldn't even have been possible if Joe Biden was president.”

In fact, Fox News mentioned “energy independence” at least 329 times in the first two weeks of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and it continued to be a central narrative of Fox’s coverage after that, with mentions increasing to 632 one month into the conflict. Now, as prices skyrocket in response to Trump’s war on Iran, that talking point has been far less prevalent. In the first two weeks of the conflict, from February 28 through March 13, the terms “energy independence” or “energy security ” were mentioned just 12 times on Fox News programs.

Part of the 2022 narrative on Fox was also attacks on the Biden administration for releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to lower gas prices after Russia invaded Ukraine. Fox’s Maria Bartiromo claimed the move “tells you that they were blindsided” because the SPR “is supposed to be a reserve for crises and emergencies.”

Now, on the March 13 edition of *Fox & Friends First*, co-host Carley Shimkus claimed that “President Trump is restoring America’s energy independence [by] ordering 172 million barrels of oil to be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,” calling it an example of how he is “battling back” against “the economic impacts of war.”

Notably, Fox correspondent David Spunt pointed out on March 9, before Trump decided to tap the reserves, that Biden was criticized by the right for releasing oil from the SPR in 2022 to offset sanctions against Russia by putting more oil in the global market.

In 2022, energy independence meant maintaining low gas prices during a foreign conflict. Now, Fox and others in right-wing media suggest price hikes driven by the fighting are only a temporary “sacrifice” for attacking Iran.

One Fox host, Tomi Lahren, did seem to acknowledge that energy independence has not shielded the U.S. from price shocks, though she still worried that people would grow impatient with gas costs.

It’s “really such a shame too because this president has worked so hard up until now on getting those gas prices down,” Lahren said. “American energy independence, still obviously a priority, but this kind of shakes the boat a little bit.”

In 2022, Fox personalities suggested energy independence was about insulating us from foreign conflicts. Frequent Fox guest and former Trump adviser Steve Moore now suggests it's about enabling us to start new wars abroad, claiming during a March 5 appearance on *Fox & Friends* that “this incursion wouldn't even have been possible if Joe Biden was president, because we didn't have the energy capacity to do it.”

“Thanks to drill, baby, drill, and Trump's America energy independence plan, … we produce more oil and gas than any other country in the world today,” he continued. “Thank you, Donald Trump, for making that possible. It’s really made it much — we're much less reliant on the Middle East than we used to be.”

And Fox anchor Shannon Bream tried to quickly move past the connection between rising global oil prices and Trump’s domestic energy policies during a March 1 interview with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), calling it “a whole ‘nother conversation.”

Kaine rebutted that it “does connect — the president wants energy independence, so he says, while he is terminating offshore wind projects and alternative energy all over the United States. If you want U.S. energy, why are you doing that?”

Video

Citation

From the March 1, 2026, edition of Fox News Sunday

In a January 4, 2020, op-ed for Fox News, Daniel Turner with the pro-industry think tank Power the Future argued that the “US can withstand Iranian attack on global oil supplies, thanks to Trump energy policies.” He wrote: “Fortunately, President Trump has aggressively pursued deregulation and other needed policies that have led to big increases in U.S. production of oil and natural gas. This makes us far less vulnerable to Iranian threats to block the Straits of Hormuz."

Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis said on the January 3, 2020, edition ofFox News’ *Outnumbered* that Trump’s oil deregulation efforts were a “national security strategy.”

“Yes, the Strait of Hormuz, about 25% of the world's oil comes through there, so we'll be watching that closely,” she said. “But the U.S. just hit 12.6 million barrels a day in production. ... So when I look at the Trump administration rolling back regulation, what they’ve done with the oil strategy, I really look at it as a national security strategy.”

Fox Business host Stuart Varney even claimed on the January 3, 2020, episode of Fox & Friends that because of Trump’s energy independence policies, “if you took out Iranian oil installations, I don't think it would have that big an impact on us in America.”

Now, Trump is threatening to target the centerpiece of Iran’s oil production facilities on Kharg island — a major escalation that analysts warn risks “accelerating a structural shift in how energy supply chains are priced.”

“War-risk insurance premiums will likely remain elevated long after the last missile is fired,” wrote Jeff Currie of Carlyle Analysis. “And the behavioral response — hoarding, contract renegotiations, the scramble for alternative suppliers — permanently reprices the supply chain.”

The reality is that the U.S. cannot drill its way to “energy independence.” Becoming truly energy independent means weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels and adopting clean, renewable energy sources. That was true in 2020 and 2022, and it's even more important now.

Methodology...

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aha hmmn do they look for cUdgel before cop eg UK server -gate?

mma

Ahead of COP30, right-wing media misrepresented Bill Gates' memo to declare climate change is over

Climate scientists question why Gates is pitting poverty reduction against climate action

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Research contributions from Ilana Berger

Published 11/14/25

Bill Weir, CNN’s chief climate correspondent, correctly predicted how right-wing media would respond: “This will be used by detractors and denialists to say that the story is shifting.”

On *CNN News Central’*s day one coverage of COP30, Erica Hill laid out some of the impact of Gates’ memo at a time when the United States is already turning its back on the “world’s largest climate summit”:

But there it seems Gates was wrong. Right-wing media figures, who regularly downplay the climate crisis are likely among those who “think climate is not important,” and they are not disagreeing with the memo. They have celebrated it and used it to further downplay the climate crisis, attack climate science as “fraudulent,” and advance right-wing narratives and misinformation related to global warming, including denying sea level rise, suggesting that current climate change is unremarkable because the climate has been changing for billions of years, and pushing the “global cooling” myth.

6/22/22]

10/29/25]

10/30/25; Washington Post, 9/16/16; Media Matters, 12/17/12; 5/22/19]

Newsmax host Rob Finnerty falsely claimed that Gates is “saying that it’s [climate change] not real.Finnerty said, “Now think about what Democrats have done to all of us in reaction to the climate hysteria created by people like Bill Gates over the last five decades: wind farms, electric cars, carbon footprint, bike lanes, electric buses, eating less meat, renewable energy. We could go on all night and all of it was total garbage. … Bill Gates, who's been right there with always-wrong Al Gore warning us of impending doom for years now, saying that it's not real.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [10/31/25]

Right-wing streamer Zack Hoyt, known online as Asmongold, told his audience that Bill Gates no longer believes in climate change and quotes Trump’s Truth Social Post.“You know who else doesn't believe in climate change recently? Bill Gates. Bill Gates has dramatically changed his position on climate change, acknowledging for the first time that there is no doomsday risk for, of global warming. … We just won the war on the climate change hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely wrong on the issue.” [YouTube, AsmongoldTV,

11/1/25]}:

3/25/24]

Additionally, The Guardian pointed out that a number of climate scientists have criticized Gates for using “‘straw man’ arguments about the threat to humanity and ‘false dichotomies’ between spending on climate or aid for the poor.”

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an 6 25

Government watchdog Congressional Integrity Project (CIP) is slamming the new Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee under U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). The group calls the subcommittee a “rogues" gallery of extremists, conspiracy theorists and C-team political operatives” promoting President Donald Trump’s clampdown on certain non-government organizations (NGOs).

The Guardian reports far-right firebrand Greene will launch hearings this week on “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild”, purporting to expose the use of federal funds by NGOs to advance “radical” agendas such as “open borders and the Green New Deal scam.”

But a (CIP) memo condemns the hearing as “political theater” and “weaponized government oversight.” The memo also describes the hearing as extreme hypocrisy considering the substantial federal funding Republican allies and rightwing groups receive.

READ MORE: The MAGA death cult’s entire game was just exposed by one clerical error

“Their own networks have systematically benefited from government contracts, subsidies, and loans worth billions of dollars,” the memo states, according to the Guardian.

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

Personalities contributing to the committee display this week on Capitol Hill include personalities such as Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates a hate group. Krikorian has made statements that Haiti’s problems today stem from the nation being one of the first in recent history to throw off the yoke of slavery and not be.” VID]

The memo adds that CIS received more than $700,000 in PPP loans and is now under investigation by the justice department for potentially lying to obtain at least one of them.

“That’s right, Republicans chose as their star witness on government waste someone who may have committed fraud to secure government money for his organization,” the memo claims.

READ MORE: The rift we didn’t see coming: MAGA elites could be turning on Trump 'lickspittles'

Another participant is Power the Future founder and Executive Director Daniel Turner, who the CIP describes as a career political operative who worked for the Charles Koch Institute before founding Power the Future. Power the Future is a climate-denial organization that attacks environmental groups for receiving federal grants, says CIP. It added that Turner’s former employer, billionaire Charles Koch, has received more than $750 million in government subsidies, even as Greene claims to be rooting out government waste.

“Turner … represents everything wrong with this sham hearing,” CIP told the Guardian. “He’s a junior varsity Republican operative masquerading as an objective analyst while advancing the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry – the same interests that have systematically profited from the very government largesse he now pretends to oppose.”

Read the full Guardian report at this link.

REF

The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has assembled a “rogues’ gallery of extremists, conspiracy theorists and C-team political operatives” to promote Donald Trump’s crackdown on non-government organisations (NGOs), a congressional watchdog has claimed.

The House of Representatives’ Delivering on Government Efficiency (Doge) subcommittee, chaired by Greene, is due to hold a hearing on Wednesday entitled “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild”.

The subcommittee said in a press release that the hearing will “expose” the use of federal funds by NGOs to advance “radical” agendas such as “open borders and the Green New Deal scam”. It frames its work as an investigation of the alleged funneling of taxpayer dollars to politically motivated groups while “lining the pockets of their friends and allies”.

But a memo from the Congressional Integrity Project (CIP), obtained by the Guardian, condemns the hearing as “political theater”, “weaponized government oversight” and an exercise in hypocrisy, given the substantial federal funding received by Republican allies and rightwing groups.

While attacking civil society organisations for receiving federal grants, the memo says, “their own networks have systematically benefited from government contracts, subsidies, and loans worth billions of dollars”.

Wednesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill will feature witnesses Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies; Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of Power the Future; and Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center.

The CIP describes Greene’s lineup as “rogues’ gallery of extremists, conspiracy theorists and C-team political operatives masquerading as government watchdogs”.

It notes that the Center for Immigration Studies has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and regularly circulates content from “white nationalist and antisemitic writers”.

Krikorian has made statements including that Haiti’s problems stem from not being “colonised long enough”.

The memo adds that CIS received more than $700,000 in PPP loans and is now under investigation by the justice department for potentially lying to obtain at least one of them. “That’s right, Republicans chose as their star witness on government waste someone who may have committed fraud to secure government money for his organization.”

The CIP describes Turner as a career political operative who worked for the Charles Koch Institute before founding Power the Future, a climate-denial organisation that attacks environmental groups for receiving federal grants. Yet Turner’s former employer, Charles Koch, has received more than $750m in government subsidies.

The memo states: “Turner, who calls ‘climate change the slippery slope to socialism’ and promotes conspiracy theories about climate science, represents everything wrong with this sham hearing.

“He’s a junior varsity Republican operative masquerading as an objective analyst while advancing the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry – the same interests that have systematically profited from the very government largesse he now pretends to oppose.”

Walter leads the Capital Research Center, “a secretive organization that won’t disclose its donors while attacking others for lacking transparency”, the CIP alleges.

“His organization’s fiscal arrangements appear designed to shield activities from public scrutiny, yet he positions himself as a watchdog exposing liberal ‘dark money’.”

In 2023, according to the memo, Walter helped funnel nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations to supreme court justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas’s group while his organisation had business before the supreme court, creating conflicts of interest.

Walter also has a history of making or defending offensive statements about race, gender and sexual orientation. He publicly defended a university professor accused of making racist statements, said average Americans have “disgust at homosexual practice” and in the 1990s mused that one good thing from the Monica Lewinsky scandal might be “that feminism will die, that sexual harassment laws will fizzle”.

The memo adds: “This hearing represents weaponized government oversight at its worst, with Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene assembling hate group leaders, conspiracy theorists, and dark money operatives to attack civil society organizations while the very people crying about government waste have pocketed billions in federal contracts and subsidies.”

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mma

Kari Lake says Voice of America will push OAN content abroad. This is how network personalities discussed foreign policy since Trump took office.

Written by Jane Lee, Helena Hind & Isabella Corrao

Published 05/16/25

Trump adviser Kari Lake has announced that international broadcasting network Voice of America will include content from One America News Network, a pro-Trump propaganda network.

Since Donald Trump's inauguration, OAN personalities have pushed bizarre and inflammatory foreign policy commentary, including referring to Canada as “our vassal state,” calling Greenland ”the new Africa,” and pushing for a revival of “manifest destiny.” They’ve also run cover for Trump over his planned acceptance of a luxury jet from Qatar.

The Trump administration wants to feed content from OAN to Voice of America — after canceling contracts with existing wire services

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mma 5 24

right-wing media are attacking a series of new regulations the EPA issued in an effort to cut planet-warming carbon emissions and other types of toxic pollution from coal plants and some natural gas plants.

In response to the new rules, which the agency issued on April 25, right-wing media have misleadingly argued that one key action — forcing coal plants and new natural gas plants to cut carbon pollution by 90% in the next eight years — would inevitably cause blackouts and steep energy price increases, fueled by growing demand.

They also insist that the move is unconstitutional, pointing to the 2022 West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency Supreme Court decision, even though the regulations were designed with the decision in mind.

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foxic pub cit see below

Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power the Future, an energy advocacy organization that supports the fossil fuel industry. Despite its focus on energy, the nonprofit has no official stance on climate change. However, Turner previously told climate change campaigners in a blog post that if they “are so anti-energy, don’t use it.” Turner is an alumnus of the Charles Koch Institute and previously worked for the Koch-tied non-profit, Generation Opportunity. After earning a degree in Philosophy, he went on to specialize in communications and public affairs. He is also an affiliate of the Heartland Institute. 

During a June appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Turner criticized Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden’s announced climate plan which aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, calling it “nonsensical.” He went on to claim that “every proposal that involves climate change, usually enriches their donors and their donor base, or it takes away individual rights and individual liberty.”

Conclusion

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OMG

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/15-nonsensical-comments-made-right-wing-media-during-2023s-summer-climate-fueled

15 nonsensical comments made by right-wing media during 2023’s summer of climate-fueled extreme weather events

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER

PUBLISHED 08/07/23

July 2023 was the earth’s hottest month on record, punctuated by record-shattering extreme heat events, catastrophic floods, and historic wildfires. While major media outlets sounded the alarm on the climate crisis, climate denial and downplay reached a fever pitch among right-wing media outlets and influencers.

Many in the right-wing media have downplayed the record heat — suggesting that it’s normal summer weather, despite clear evidence that the intensity of this summer’s heat waves would not have been possible without climate change — or dismissed its lethal impact by arguing that more people die of cold than heat. Others have said those linking July’s extreme weather to climate change are weaponizing these events to push a radical climate agenda or call for climate lockdowns.

Here are 15 other examples that illustrate the lengths to which right-wing media are going — often deploying nonsensical arguments or outright lies that attempt to ignore the fact that there is scientific consensus that carbon emissions are heating our planet— to maintain climate denial in the face of climate-fueled catastrophes: 

1 in

  1. response to extreme weather that grounded planes in the Northeast, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy said the left is “trying to control the weather” and “trying to be God.” Fox News, Fox & Friends, [7/3/23]
  2. Responding to calls for climate action, Newsmax host Eric Bolling denied that human activity is responsible for warming: “Real scientists, meaning those not purchased by the kings of propaganda, well, they’ll tell you there is actually no such thing as climate change.” Newsmax, Eric Bolling The Balance, [7/11/23]
  3. Fossil fuel shill Steve Milloy on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight: “The Earth is greener than ever before. Have we affected the planet and wildlife? Yeah, sure. But you know, in the end, it's been, I think, positive. The Earth is carrying more life now than ever before thanks to warming, thanks to CO2, thanks to fossil fuel use.” Newsmax, Rob Schmitt Tonight, [7/11/23]
  4. Newsmax host Greg Kelly said that “LGBTQ+IA whatever has been kind of pushed so relentlessly. … I think climate change and the whole phony debate about it has something to do with it,” suggesting the goal is to decrease population in order to reduce climate impacts. Newsmax, Greg Kelly Reports, [7/11/23]
  5. Fox host Jesse Watters suggested that U.S. special presidential envoy for climateJohn Kerry made it “impossible” to believe in climate change because according to Watters he lied about using a private plane. Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [7/13/23]
  6. Conservative radio and Fox News host Mark Levin on his radioshow said climate change is a religion not based on science: “This is a religion. This is an ideology. This isn’t science. ...Don't you see how hot it is in Nevada? In the middle of the damn summer?It's what we have air conditioning for.”Westwood One, The Mark Levin Show, [7/13/23]
  7. Far-right media host Steven Crowder claims that carbon dioxide is not pollution because plants use it: “Is carbon dioxide the — basically, you know, the neurotoxin atmospheric poison that people make it out to be? Because you just pointed out plants thrive on it.” Rumble, Louder with Crowder, [7/15/23]
  8. Fox host Greg Gutfeld attempted to downplay the record-breaking heat with bizarre logic: “The problem with using weather — like saying, ‘This place broke records’ — how many states,how many countries didn't break records? Nobody ever provides you the context. They’re going, ‘Three countries had record-breaking heat waves.’ It’s like, well, how many countries are there?” Fox News, The Five, [7/17/23]
  9. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh claimed that the record heat is not a result of human activity but the sun: “The sun … that’s what calls the shots on Earth. It determines the temperature. It determines everything in terms of weather. … And until you can figure out a way to literally control the sun, there is basically nothing we can do to intentionally and significantly raise, lower, or otherwise affect the temperature on Earth.” The Daily Wire, The Matt Walsh Show, [7/18/23]
  10. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro: “Thank God we have this thing called air conditioning. … You know what’s a great cure for being super-duper hot outside? Being a first world country.” The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, [7/20/23]
  11. Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on America Reports: “This is not an overly hot July. ... Hot weather happens in some places; cooler weather happens in other places. We do not have a climate catastrophe.” Fox News, America Reports, [7/21/23]
  12. :{Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on climate science and why carbon dioxide is not pollution: “The science is not solid. The science is debated. They look at science as if it is religious, irrefutable dogma.” Kirk added, “The built-in premise of the climate hoax is carbon is bad. OK, well, carbon is life, actually. …:{ Don’t plants thrive on carbon dioxide?}:” :{Real America’s Voice:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:, The Charlie Kirk Show, [7/24/23]}:
  13. On The Ingraham Angle, American Majority founder Ned Ryun called climate change a “hoax”: “It is nothing more than an attempt to manipulate people into a state of fear to have them give more control over to a ruling elitewho would take this hoax and enforce it through a whole host of means.” Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, [7/27/23]
  14. On America’s Newsroom, fossil fuel shill Daniel Turner deliberately conflated weather with climate: “And if you look at the weather forecast for this great city, where I’m born and raised, next Friday is mid-70s. So we are in what's called a heat wave.” :{Fox News, America’s Newsroom:(style="background-color:#6633ffff"):}::{, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[7/28/23:{]}:
  15. Climate denier Marc Morano on Jesse Watters Primetime blamed global wildfires on arsonists, dismissing the role of climate change: “This is a global problem of people starting this. Now, is it climate change? Well, this would be the equivalent of blowing up a dam or sabotaging a dam and allowing a valley to flood and then saying, oh, look, climate change is causing more floods.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [7/28/23]

…

Next page

Related

Right-wing media deny climate change in face of deadly and record-breaking extreme weather event

07/20/23

Right-wing media downplay the hottest day in modern history with the help of Twitter’s community notes feature

07/11/23

Only 5% of national TV news segments on the record-shattering heat wave that scorched Texas mentioned climate change

07/03/23

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/donors-to-tucker-carlsons-daily-caller-news-foundation-revealed?ref=home

ref roger s 12 22

this reporting is one of several scoops featured in this week’s edition of [Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

The non-profit that feeds the conservative Daily Caller website co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from entities and individuals who have received favorable coverage, including some who authored opinion pieces, a new filing shows.

The document—the Daily Caller News Foundation’s fiscal year 2021 tax statement—includes for thefirst time a list of donors to the 501(c)(3) organization, a group that is not required by law to disclose donor information. The filing also reveals that Carlson, who in 2020 announced he was leaving the Daily Caller and selling his stake in the website, is still the foundation chairman, and has not cut back on his hours.

When Carlson announced his split with the Daily Caller in 2020, he cited work constraints. “I’m just too absorbed in what I’m doing,” the host told The Wall Street Journal at the time, explaining, “I wasn’t helping in any way, because I’ve got an hour to do every night” on his Fox News program. The tax filing, which covers the following year, shows he continued to hold the chairman position and put in the same hours as in all previous foundation filings—five hours a week.

Many of the foundation’s donors are tied to industries and issues that the Caller covers frequently. Most notable is the Ariel Corporation,which manufactures natural gas compressors and gave $135,000 to support the news organization—which has for years been criticized for its pro-carbon energy reporting and financial ties to the Koch brothers, the right-wing industrialists.

Other donors have an even closer relationship with the site, including some who have published pieces in their own names, without a disclosure of their financial ties. That, according to top journalism ethics expert Kelly McBride raises ethics questions.

“With any news organization that solicits donations, you really have to have an editorial policy that articulates how you separate out your loyalty to your audience and to your journalistic mission from your ties to your donors,” McBride, who is senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, told The Daily Beast.

such a policy, she said, would ideally include an advisement to donors that they can’t influence editorial work, and a promise of transparency whenever there’s a conflict of interest.

“You’re looking for, first of all, separation between fundraising and the editorial product, and you’re also looking for clarity around what donors can expect in exchange for their donation, as well as transparency so the audience understands,” McBride said, adding that “a tagline on an op-ed would be an obvious transparency mechanism.”

The Daily Beast reached out to the Daily Caller and Carlson for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply.

The journalistic and ethical standards published on the Daily Caller website don’t mention the foundation or any policy regarding donor influence over editorial content. But some donors have contributed content themselves.

For instance, RightForge, an internet infrastructure provider that caters to conservatives, in 2021 gave the foundation $7,500. In May of that year, the Daily Caller ran an op-ed from RightForge CEO Martin Avila, criticizing what Avila called the social media “witch trial” of former President Donald Trump. Months later, RightForge announced it would host Trump’s new social media network, Truth Social.

Real estate investor Adam Milstein gave the foundation $25,000 in 2021 and published an opinion piece that same year. The piece—titled, “Strategic Active Philanthropy Can Strengthen Our American Values”—includes a brief bio for Milstein, which describes him only as “an active philanthropist, an investor, and community leader.”

While the Daily Caller has been blasted for its affinity for the fossil fuel industry, the tax filing shows the Daily Caller News Foundation received financial backing from conservative green-energy group ClearPath Action, which gave $10,000 in 2021.

ClearPath has received favorable coverage from the Daily Caller, which earlier this year cited CEO Rich Powell in an article about his group, without a disclaimer. When Powell landed a Daily Caller op-ed earlier this month, the outlet added a note to the piece and his contributor page that read, “The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.” But those notes did not mention the financial relationship.

Then there’s Daniel Oliver, a Daily Caller regular​​ contributor who also serves as trustee of the George E. Coleman Jr. Foundation, which gave the foundation $7,500 in 2021. The Daily Caller highlights some of Oliver’s rich experience in his bio—chair of the Education and Research Institute, director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, and former chairmanships of the Federal Trade Commission under President ​​Ronald Reagan and the National Review”—but doesn’t mention his role with the Coleman Foundation, or the donor relationship. (Buzzfeed News reported in 2019 that the foundation was a FDRLST Media investor, citing Oliver’s role.)

An even more influential GOP figure also appears in the filing, in the form of a $10,000 gift from CRC Advisors, a group headed up by arch-conservative megadonor and judicial activist Leonard Leo. The Daily Caller published a piece on Friday based on the results of a CRC poll, without disclosing the relationship. The two groups also show overlap in their employees, including current CRC vice president Kevin Daley, whose LinkedIn page says he left the Daily Caller in 2020 after four years as a reporter.

​​Power the Future, a nonprofit that advocates for the fossil fuel industry, donated $10,000 in 2021 and appears frequently enough in the Daily Caller that articles about the group have their own tag on the site. Since the donation, Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner has been cited in multiple Daily Caller pieces as an expert voice, without no mention of his status as a foundation donor.

Justin Olson , an elected Arizona utility regulatorand former Arizona GOP Senate candidate, gave the foundation $10,000 in 2021, listing his role at the time as an officer with right-wing youth activist group Turning Point USA.

The Daily Caller has given TPUSA favorable coverage, including after the donation. It also published an exclusive report in November 2021, the month after Olson announced his bid, revealing that a Scottsdale school board official had access to a so-called Google Drive “dossier” of personal information of vocal conservatives. (Police cleared the official of wrongdoing.) Olson tweeted the article when it came out, and expressed repeated outrage at the story on the platform, while a Twitter search shows he had not tweeted about schools previously.

The filing reveals the names of 2021 donors, but does not indicate whether they had donated before. Some of the contributors who present apparent conflicts of interest have had contributor roles in the publication previously, such as Leo and Adam Milstein, who published op-eds in 2018 and 2019. In 2018, when Power the Future announced its debut, the Daily Caller had the exclusive story.

There are, of course, numerous examples of media companies drawing funding from non-profit backers. But the Daily Caller and the DCNF have a unique relationship.

The foundation was created in 2011, a few years after Carlson founded the Daily Caller with then-partner Neil Patel, who still helms the operation. Thanks to the organization’s non-profit status, the foundation can subsidize not only publication costs, but the production of the actual content—with a built-in tax break.

Part of the foundation’s stated mission is to train young reporters, but its staff also generates content, which the Daily Caller then gets to post to its site for free. And while this content is nominally available to any publication,The Washington Postreported that it’s rarely used by anyone beyond the Daily Caller. A 2017 Center for Media and Democracy report found that the Daily Caller published “virtually everything” the nonprofit churned out.

However, other groups have taken advantage of the arrangement. The fact-checking site Snopes reported in 2019 that conservative political activists appropriated foundation content to populate a number of small-time websites styling themselves as local news outlets to smuggle political content to unsuspecting audiences.

The Daily Caller has also been called out for its financial and political ties to Trump’s campaign, which shelled out about $150,000 for access to the Daily Caller email list in the 2016 election, the Center for Media and Democracy reported.

One of the most familiar examples of a donor-funded news organization would be National Public Radio. While NPR gets some government grants, most of its money comes from private contributors—including from industries it reports on. But McBride noted that NPR puts disclaimers on stories that may present an apparent conflict.

“When you listen to public media, you hear that certain people give money for certain lines of reporting, like for climate change, et cetera. So you can fund a line of reporting, but you get no influence over how that news is presented, and public media also lets the audience know when that funding may intersects with the reporting,” McBride said.

It’s unclear whether any Daily Caller News Foundation donors tabbed their contributions for specific issues or series. But some well-known issues-driven names populate the list, including top GOP megadonor and election-denial enthusiast Dick Uihlein ($25,000), anti-climate change groups the Bradley Foundation ($50,000) and Sarah Scaife Foundation ($350,000), and conservative free-market underwriters Searle Freedom Trust ($230,000).

The source of the biggest donation, however, is still unknown. That would be the $400,000 the group received through DonorsTrust, a nonprofit known as a conservative dark money “ATM,” which allows funders to channel money anonymously to various recipients. The foundation also got a $300,000 injection from someone identified as “anonymous.”

The Daily Caller operation—which has been exposed forties to white nationalists—has been widely criticized on the left for its financial ties to energy interests, most specificallyCharles Koch, who has provided millions in funding over the years, and at one point reportedly accounted for more than 83 percent of the foundation’s annual revenue.

That bankroll swelled between 2020 and 2021. The foundation’s fiscal year 2020 filing shows $1.57 million in contributions, a number thatnearly doubled to $2.8 million the next year, according to the 2021 document. The foundation spent $1.4 million—$254,000 of it on fundraising—which, combined with previous assets, left it with a year-end balance of about $2.1 million.

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https://www.citizen.org/article/foxic-fox-news-networks-dangerous-climate-denial-2019/

really good sum analysis:

belated  post 2x?

Foxic:

in 2018,myriad extreme weather events wreaked havoc across the globe. Dire, authoritative reports were released, confirming unequivocally that the climate crisis is happening, that it’s driven by the burning of fossil fuels and that it requires immediate and bold action.

The first half of 2019 has already delivered more of the same undeniable climate chaos.

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But dangerous climate denial still persists in our political institutions, funded by Big Polluters and fed to large parts of the populace by right-wing media, further contributing to ongoing and deadly inaction.

In the face of a crisis that threatens our very existence, the most watched cable news network in the country — the Fox News Network — is still promoting climate misinformation and deploying tactics to distract from the urgency of the climate crisis, ensuring that its viewers’ understanding of the issue is based on deliberately distorted facts and distractions.

The millions of Americans who tune into Fox News are regularly bombarded with messages intended to undermine climate science, cast climate advocates as hysterical and frame climate policy as dangerous and un-American.

A review of Fox News programs for the first half of 2019 reveals that the network continues to give ample airtime to long debunked climate myths and fringe deniers.  Among Fox’s roster of contributors on climate issues, not one is a climate scientist, and none has appeared on any other major network to talk about climate during the period reviewed.

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Methodology

For this analysis, we searched Fox News Network television transcripts from the first six months of 2019 that mentions of “climate change” or “global warming.”

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Key Findings

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Denial Is Alive and Deadly on Fox News

With 391 mentions of climate change or global warming on programs airing from January to June, Fox News Network is far from silent on climate. 

In fact, Fox News three most-viewed programs are discussing climate more than their liberal counterparts at MSNBC. From January through June 2019, “Hannity,” “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and “The Ingraham Angle” collectively mentioned climate change or global warming in 86 different segments. During the same period, “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “The Final Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” and “All In With Chris Hayes” ran a combined 61 segments discussing the climate crisis.

Overall, the right-wing network ran 247 segments. The vast majority — 212 or 86% — were dismissive of the climate crisis, cast its consequences in doubt or employed fear mongering when discussing climate solutions. A mere 35 segments were neutral on the issue or represented straight reporting on the climate crisis or solutions absent editorializing.  

Two programs, “Special Report With Bret Baier” and “Fox News @ Night,” accounted for 71% of segments that were neutral when mentioning climate change or global warming.

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Fox Whistles: Top Three Messages Used by Fox News to Undermine Climate Action

A common tactic Fox News uses to undermine climate science, action and advocacy is to frame the climate crisis as a political construct. In these cases, the host or guest assigns values to climate that are misaligned with the network’s largest demographic — those who identify as conservative and Republican. These commentators rarely, if ever, address the body of scientific evidence or climate events directly, but rather project the issue through a political lens. Viewers are left to form opinions about the issues in the absence of facts and evidence. 

In the past six months, the following three messages have been invoked repeatedly, in some form, across the majority of Fox News programs, but were highly concentrated in the network’s most popular opinion programs. They are intended to elicit a negative response to the climate crisis and those who advocate the changes needed to address it.

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Message 1: Climate Change Is a Vehicle for the Democrats’ Radical Big-Government Agenda

Seventy-two segments discussing the climate crisis (34%) suggested that responding to climate change, especially through policies like a Green New Deal, will result in government control over our lives.

“Hannity” had the most segments featuring this message with 18, or 56% of total segments, followed by “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with 13 (32%) and “The Five” with 12 (41%).

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Message 2: Responding to the Climate Crisis would Kill Our Economy and Send Us Back to the Stone Age

Closely associated with the “Big Government” message and often used in the same breath is the suggestion that climate action would mean extreme individual sacrifice and the demise of prosperity. Fifty-five segments (26%) equate climate action, including the transition to a clean-energy economy, with economic collapse.

“Hannity” leads again, using this message 11 times (in 34% of segments on climate), followed by “The Five” using the message 10 times (34% of climate segments). “Fox News @ Night” uses the message six times (26% of climate segments). 

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Message 3: Concern About the Climate Crisis Is Liberal Hysteria

Rounding out the top three messages is one intended to undermine the urgency of the climate crisis by painting climate advocates or climate scientists as “alarmists”, “hysterical”, “chicken littles” and a “doomsday climate cult.” These labels not only deepen the political divide; they send a clear message to viewers to interpret the latest science on climate as exaggerated and to view scientists and advocates with distrust. Twenty-six segments, or 12% of discussions on the climate crisis used this form of name calling or used the terms “hysteria” or “alarmism” when referring to climate science.

“Hannity” used these labels eight times or during 25% of segments on climate. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” used them six times or during 15% of segments and “Fox News @ Night” used them five times or during 22% of segments.

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Fox Fallacies and Tricks

In addition to these partisan signals, Fox News Network employed a number of other false arguments and tricks to keep climate denial and doubt alive during an era when climate catastrophe is becoming increasingly apparent to Americans.

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Ad Hominem Attacks 

In the past six months, those who advocate climate action have been subjected to personal attack by Fox News hosts.

U.S. Rep.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has served as a regular punching bag for Fox News hosts and their guests. In one exchange between Sean Hannity and former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile, she jabs the network for its obsession with AOC, joking that programs have mentioned ”AOC well over 3,000 times.” For Ocasio-Cortez’s acknowledgment of the climate crisis and  support for the Green New Deal, Fox News has accused her of “capitalizing on a fear” and “pushing doom and gloom day and night.” She’s been called a “radical nut job”, “Scary-o-Cortez” and “dumb and totally ignorant of everything.”

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While Ocasio-Cortez is by far the most vilified and attacked climate advocate, she is not the only one. Another example is provided by science communicator Bill Nye. After appearing on John Oliver’s HBO program, “Last Week Tonight,” Nye was Hannity’s “Villain of the Day.” A guest on “The Ingraham Angle” suggested that calling Bill Nye a scientist was akin to referring to “George Clooney as a doctor or Harrison Ford as an archaeologist.” Tucker Carlson suggested that Nye’s appearance was just a stunt to get his own Netflix series.

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Red Herring 

A favorite distraction tactic used by Fox News hosts is to pivot any discussion about warming to the “hypocrisy” of “elites” and “liberals” who advocate climate solutions. The argument is that, if climate change is an existential crisis, then climate advocates would reduce their own carbon footprints to zero. But because climate champions like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) fly on private jets and Ocasio-Cortez uses Uber instead of public transportation, the crisis must not be real or very urgent.

The hypocrisy argument takes many forms, but on at least 11 occasions in the past six months, Fox News hosts have referenced the use of air travel to discredit those concerned about climate or to question the reality of human-induced warming, like this example from Tucker Carlson on January 14:

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Elites love to impose gas taxes on everyone else while flying private to conferences in Switzerland, where they worry about melting ice caps. That’s obviously a scam. Let’s just be honest about it.

Whether or not driving or using other forms of private transportation is hypocrisy is not the point.  In reality, while individual action on climate is important, it is wholly inadequate for addressing the scale of the climate crisis. The crisis requires, above all, systemic policy responses that can be implemented only by governments. 

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Slippery Slope 

Another oft-repeated argument directed at climate scientists is that “they have been wrong before, so they must be wrong now.” The most common version of this argument is the myth that climate scientists predicted in the 1970s that there would be a dramatic period of global cooling. As Sean Hannity said in a typical segment, “Look at that, the big freeze, the next Ice Age is coming.” That’s what they told us in the ’70s. That then evolved into, uh-oh, the world has a fever, as Al Gore said and scaring people.” The reality is that a small pocket of scientists suggested the Earth could enter a new ice age in the next few centuries. At the time, 62% of climate scientists predicted warming. Forty years of observation and analysis have brought that number up to 97% of climate scientists agreeing that human beings are causing global warming. 

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In the past six months, Fox News has not once referenced the scientific consensus around the climate crisis. According to recent polling, one in four Americans (25%) think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening, and a mere 17% understand that there is a scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is happening. This lack of public understanding cannot be pinned solely on Fox News, but the media plays a role in public perception and understanding of issues. And no other major media outlet is pushing out climate doubt, to so many viewers, as often as Fox News.  

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Cherry-picking

Frequently during the first half of 2019, Fox News hosts latched on to singular comments by Democratic politicians and what they deemed to be extreme responses to the climate crisis. These topics were brought up and mocked repeatedly in an attempt to deny the climate crisis, discredit policymakers and vilify climate policy.

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The most common use of this tactic is the repetitive mention and mocking of Rep.  Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we do not address climate change” (a claim she later deemed “dry humor + sarcasm”). The comment was made in reference to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, which asserts that global temperature warming will likely reach 1.5°C by the year 2030. 

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Fox News hosts referenced Ocasio-Cortez’s world-ending comment 56 times in the first six months of 2019. Out of 56 references, the IPCC report was mentioned only five times. On only two occasions did the network discuss the staggering conclusions of the report that informed Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks. A premade video segment from correspondent Peter Doocy identified that the report “doesn’t call for the end of the world in 12 years, but rather irreversible damage to the planet in a decade if emissions aren’t quickly curbed” and was aired on two seperate programs immediately following Ocasio-Cortez’s comment. 

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The video clip of Ocasio-Cortez’s claim was played eight times during the remainder of January and continued to be replayed 12 more times, with the last showing on June 4. 

Sixteen references to the world ending in 12 years did not reference Ocasio-Cortez. These mentions were used to mock advocates of climate policy, deny the climate crisis and criticize Democrats’ attempts to enact climate policy.

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Fox News Climate “CON”tributors

Assisting Fox News Network in climate denial and misinformation is a roster of long discredited climate contrarians whose views are solicited only by Fox News.  None of the following men have appeared on other major television news networks to speak on matters related to climate.

When discussing climate change in the first half of 2019, the Fox News Network repeatedly featured and legitimized contributors whose climate views contradict the consensus of the climate science community. Many of these contributors have ties to the fossil fuel industry and have been criticized for spreading misinformation about climate change. Notably, none are climate scientists. The following contributors each appeared on the Fox News Network to discuss climate change at least twice in the first six months of 2019.

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Joe Bastardi is a meteorologist and a climate skeptic. He is currently the chief forecaster for WeatherBell Analytics LLC. He also works as a senior advisor at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (formerly known as American Tradition Institute), a group denounced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributing to an “environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas.” Bastardi insists that carbon dioxide is not a major player in determining global temperatures: “I believe the sun, ocean cycles and stochastic events play a much more significant role.” He has been a contributor on Fox News Network for more than a decade. 

In March, while appearing on “Hannity,” he suggested that human activity is not  “controlling the climate,” which is effectively contrary to the conclusion of nearly 200 worldwide scientific organizations and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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Justin Haskins is an editorial director and a research fellow at the Exxon Mobil and Koch Foundation-funded Heartland Institute. With a background in communication and political science, Haskins is largely involved in publications and productions by Heartland. In 2017, he published a piece detailing six reasons he was a climate skeptic and was criticized for the falsehoods they presented. 

In April 2019, Haskins told a Fox Business reporter that he saw “no evidence that modest warming is creating any sort of a [sic] environmental crisis.”

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Chris Horner is a senior legal fellow for theEnergy and Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal). Horner formerly served as a senior fellow for Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), one of Washington, D.C.’s top conservative think tanks. CEI has received at least $2.1 million from fossil fuel giant Exxon Mobil. Bankruptcy filings for Alpha Natural Resources in 2015 exposed Horner’s deep financial ties to the coal industry and work he has done on behalf of big polluters. 

In March, he went on “Hannity” to revive the debunked argument, intended to discredit climate scientists, that the same scientific community that is predicting warming predicted global cooling in the 1970s.

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Rush Limbaugh is a conservative political commentator and host of the radio talk show “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” He does frequent segments on his radio show pushing his conspiracy theory that climate change is the creation of agenda-driven scientists who develop computer models that exaggerate scientific findings in efforts to prove climate change. He has proclaimed himself as “an expert in debunking this whole leftist political argument in man-made climate change.” 

In February, he appeared on “Fox News Sunday” again asserting that climate change is a hoax. “Climate change is nothing but a bunch of computer models that attempt to tell us what’s going to happen in 50 years or 30,” Limbaugh stated. “Notice the predictions are never for next year or the next ten years. They’re always for way, way, way, way out there, when none of us are going to be around or alive to know whether or not they were true.” 

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Bjorn Lomborg is a political scientist, author, and the founder and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Lomborg has published three books that downplay the risk of climate change, despite having no background in climate science. Lomborg has frequently asserted that the risks of climate change are not great enough to justify large-scale policies to reduce carbon emissions, instead arguing that “drastic carbon cuts would be the poorest way to respond to global warming.” Claims made by Lomborg in his books have been frequently criticized. His first book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” drew criticism for failing to “meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis” and his second book, “Cool It,” for being “riddled with small inaccuracies” and “displaying a pervasive bias in its coverage and evaluations of climate issues.” Lomberg has ties to both the Heartland Institute and CEI and received an award from CEI in 2003.  

In April, Lomborg appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and stated, “They’re telling us global warming is a problem. But it’s also a moderate one…”

Steve Milloy is the founder and publisher of junkscience.com and self-described as exposing “faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special interests and hidden agendas.” In addition to spreading doubt about the science of the climate crisis, he is a senior policy fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute and former director of internal policy and strategy at Murray Energy, the largest privately held coal producer in the U.S., and the co-founder of “Burn More Coal.” Milloy has financial ties to the tobacco, chemical and oil and gas industries, having gotten his start as a denialist for the tobacco and chemical industries in the 1990s. In 1998, he helped write the American Petroleum Institute’s strategy to challenge climate science. Milloy previously served as an adjunct scholar at both the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and currently serves as a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute. 

In February 2019, Milloy appeared on “Special Report with Bret Baier” and claimed that climate change was just the Democrats’ pretext for advancing radical political agendas. “We always knew climate was a stalking horse for socialism, communism, totalitarianism, whatever you want to call it,” Milloy said.

Patrick Moore is a nuclear energy advocate and the founder of Greenspirit Strategies, a PR company that works “with many leading organizations in forestry, biotechnology, aquaculture and plastics, developing solutions in the areas of natural resources, biodiversity, energy and climate change.” Moore self-identifies as a founding member of Greenpeace, but the organization has denied this claim, stating that Moore “often misrepresents himself in the media as an environmental ‘expert’ or even an ‘environmentalist,’ while offering anti-environmental opinions on a wide range of issues and taking a distinctly anti-environmental stance.” Greenpeace also  identified him as “a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 years.” Moore denies the role of carbon dioxide in climate change and has previously encouraged the celebration of carbon, stating, “carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth.” 

While a guest on “Fox News @ Night” in March, Moore claimed a lack of evidence that carbon dioxide in contributing to climate change, stating “the climate crisis is not just fake news, it’s fake science.”

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Marc Morano is the front man of the anti-climate-science websiteClimateDepot.com and author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.” Morano has no scientific training nor educational background in climatology. The website is a fabrication of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a conservative and anti-regulation think-tank based in Washington, D.C., where Morano works as thecommunications director. CFACT receives funding from the Koch Brothers, ExxonMobil and Chevron, and gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from foundations associated with dirty energy tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife. Morano was in Rolling Stone’sarticle, “The Climate Killers,” listed as one of “17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming.” 

In May he appeared on “Special Report With Bret Baier” attempting to discredit the United Nations’ climate reports, claiming their sole interests reside in politics and not science. He called the U.N. “a self-interested lobbying organization.” 

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Mark Steyn is a Canadian author and columnist of SteynOnline.com. Steyn attended the King Edward’s School in Birmingham, U.K., leaving in 1978 when he was 18 years old. Steyn is often a featured speaker at climate denial conferences hosted by groups such as the CO2 Coalition, The New Criterion and the Heartland Institute. These events, with titles such as The Climate Surprise: Why CO2 Is Good for the Earth and the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change, are funded by Exxon Mobil, DonorsTrust and the Koch Brothers. He is infamously known for attacking Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” graph, which predicted a sharp rise in global temperatures as carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increased. He went on to call Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science” and claim he “has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and the planet.” 

While a guest on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” on April 22, Steyn deflected the climate crisis while claiming Democrats merely use it as a platform to appeal to voters. “Climate change is essentially a boutique issue, it’s almost like an accessory for Western liberal politicians to flaunt how much they care while actually doing nothing about the people and the jurisdictions for which they’re actually responsible.”

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Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power the Future, an energy advocacy organization that supports the fossil fuel industry. Despite its focus on energy, the nonprofit has no official stance on climate change. However, Turner previously told climate change campaigners in a blog post that if they “are so anti-energy, don’t use it.” Turner is an alumnus of the Charles Koch Institute and previously worked for the Koch-tied non-profit, Generation Opportunity. After earning a degree in Philosophy, he went on to specialize in communications and public affairs. He is also an affiliate of the Heartland Institute.

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During a June appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Turner criticized Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden’s announced climate plan which aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, calling it “nonsensical.” He went on to claim that “every proposal that involves climate change, usually enriches their donors and their donor base, or it takes away individual rights and individual liberty.”

Conclusion

This year we experienced the hottest June ever recorded. In India, deadly temperatures reached and stayed above 120 degrees for days. France experienced its most brutally hot day in recorded history, at nearly 115 degrees.  

The rapid overheating of our planet from the burning of fossil fuels is a clear and present threat. There is no debate that the climate crisis is now.

One should be hard pressed, in this era of climate catastrophe, to find climate denial in legitimate media sources. In fact, the presence of regular deniers and dissemination of misinformation about the climate crisis should disqualify a news outlet as a fair and balanced source of information – and most importantly, should not be trusted. 

The Fox News Network and its hosts, with few exceptions, are peddling climate denial to millions of Americans on a regular basis.

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This review began with the hypothesis that Fox News Network might be using newer, more nuanced and sophisticated forms of climate denial to keep audiences doubting the reality playing out before their eyes. This hypothesis was wrong. This review shows that Fox News’ denial handbook has not been updated. The misinformation the network is pushing out and the deniers it gives a platform to are long debunked and well exposed. The tactics they use, from naming calling to mockery, are transparent and inflammatory.   

More than that, denial, like our rapidly warming climate, is becoming increasingly dangerous. By keeping doubt alive and deniers in business, Fox New Network is contributing to U.S. climate inaction.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/dozen-times-right-wing-media-said-something-ridiculous-about-climate-change-2021

no lnx mant vids

A dozen times right-wing media said something ridiculous about climate change in 2021

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY TED MACDONALD

PUBLISHED 12/23/21

1. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro doesn’t think that 4 degrees Celsius of warming is an emergency

On the April 14 edition of The Daily Wire’s The Ben Shapiro Show, host Ben Shapiro stated that “I do not consider it a quote-unquote ‘emergency’ if the climate were to warm 4 degrees Celsius over the course of the next century. … It’s just a way for them to create a certain level of alarmism that is unjustifiable by the facts on the ground."

It’s a good thing that Shapiro, whose publication is backed by fracking billionaires, has no authority or credibility within the climate science community: 4 C of warming would be literally catastrophic for large swaths of the globe. As The Guardian reported in 2019, at 4 C of climate change, we’d have sea levels that would be around 2 meters higher than today (which would render many coastal areas obsolete), destruction of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, oceanic dead zones, temperatures in the equatorial belt so high that would make for impossible living conditions for most of the year, and the beginning of a potential mass extinction for many species. This is not the first time that Shapiro has said something ignorant about the climate crisis; he once theorized that people affected by rising sea levels could just sell their inundated homes and move.

2. Fox’s Dagen McDowell thinks that cold temperatures in certain parts of the U.S. entirely disprove global warming

Fox News personalities regularly conflate climate with weather, and they generally do it to dismiss global warming. On the April 21 edition of The Five, co-host Dagen McDowell mockingly suggested that “they stopped calling it global warming” because of abnormally cold U.S. temperatures.

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CitationFrom the April 21, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Five

In reality, our warming climate has not eradicated cold weather, and in some cases, it has even made cold weather more severe and unpredictable. Nor have abnormally cold temperatures caused a dent in the Earth’s alarming warming trend, in which the past decade was the warmest on record.

3. Ex-coal lobbyist Steve Milloy lies about warming temperatures on One America News: “The June 2021 temperature was actually below the 40-year average”

On the August 2 edition of OAN’s The Tipping Point, former coal lobbyist and Fox News contributor Steve Milloy stated: “The June 2021 temperature was actually below the 40-year average. … There’s just so much bad information going on around, and you know, you’ve just got to be careful with climate alarmists.”

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CitationFrom the August 2, 2021, edition ofOAN's The Tipping Point

In reality, the U.S. suffered through its hottest June on record, while it was the fifth-warmest June on record globally (followed by the hottest July ever recorded in earth’s history). Milloy is a longstanding figure in the climate denial community, and viewers have really “got to be careful” with his objectively false information.

4. Fox's Laura Ingraham suggests that climate change is really “about controlling the people” and fearmongers that climate action will lead to pandemic-style lockdowns

On both the May 18 and 19 editions of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham theorized that Democrats will use climate change to control Americans’ lives through pandemic-style lockdowns.

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CitationFrom the May 19, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

This is a dangerous conspiracy theory being pushed by prominent climate deniers that has taken hold among far-right media figures. To be clear, the way to fight climate change is not via lockdowns (COVID-19 lockdowns “only marginally reduced greenhouse gas emissions”), but by bringing about systemic change in our energy system and reimagining our economy and the way we live.

5. Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo doesn’t believe in “proof” that CO2 emissions are contributing to climate change

There were multiple times this year when Newsmax host Chris Salcedo went on a perplexing rant claiming there’s somehow no proof that rising CO2 emissions affect temperatures in any meaningful way. On the August 18 edition of The Chris Salcedo Show, Salcedo called global warming a “religion” that “has not been proven through science” before going on to say, “There's no mathematical proof out there that states that X amount of man-made CO2 yields Y amount of temperature change.”

Then on the December 14 edition of his show, Salcedo stated: “From experts I have read and interviewed over the years, I can say that there is no proof that man's C02 emissions are destroying the planet.” Salcedo must be interviewing some pretty fringe climate deniers as “experts,” as there is effectively unanimous scientific consensus that “humans are changing Earth's climate, primarily through greenhouse gas emissions.”

6. Fox’s Tucker Carlson rants that climate change is somehow a conspiracy to shrink your children

While Tucker Carlson is no stranger to promoting weird conspiracy theories about climate change, one of his segments from June went completely overboard. On the June 22 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox prime-time host accused climate scientists of wanting to use “human engineering” to “make human children smaller than they are now” and thereby reduce their lifetime greenhouse gas emissions: “All we need to do is experiment on human children and we can solve climate change.”

Tucker Human Engineering

Carlson’s claim was based on a speech given by a bioethicist nearly five years ago. As Gizmodo reported, “The ideas are bad, but they’re utterly fringe. Activists are clamoring for transforming society, not individual humans. You’d never know that from watching the segment, though.” But taking a fringe remark out of context and repurposing it to claim that the government will take over our lives seems pretty on-brand for Fox News.

7. Dennis Prager thinks the simple solution to a warming climate is to just use more air conditioning

Conservative commentator Dennis Prager, who leads a nonprofit online “university” that promotes climate denial, among other conservative talking points, offered his own absurd “solution” to climate change during a talk on September 22: “Did you know that there is a solution to a warm climate? It's called air conditioning. It's very effective.”

Prager’s comments follow a concerning new form of climate denial in right-wing media: acknowledging the climate is changing but claiming there’s nothing we can do to prevent it -- we must learn to live with it instead. In Prager’s case, he suggests that well-off people can just adapt to the warming climate by using air conditioning when it gets hot (which would only increase emissions even further), while those without access to air conditioning will suffer.

8. On Fox News’ The Five, Greg Gutfeld claims that the data to prove climate change is “never there”

On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld criticized those who connect climate change to extreme weather events -- specifically to the destructive Hurricane Ida. He stated that the data is “never there,” and that “the severity” of such storms “has been on the decline.”

LOMBORGIAN?

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CitationFrom the September 2, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Five

For one, science has shown that climate change is affecting hurricanes in a number of ways as storms are dumping more rain, moving slower, and rapidly intensifying -- all hallmarks of Hurricane Ida. Secondly, the data is indeed “there,” as climate models have been correct over the past 50 years. Additionally, Gutfeld talks about “severity” only in terms of decreasing deaths from natural disasters. However, focusing on this statistic obscures the many other reasons that climate change is a serious and deadly threat. As one scientist puts it, “climate change kills, from poor nutrition status and poor health linked to episodes of drought and harvest failures, the spread of infectious diseases, … increasing violent conflict, … and of course the impact of extreme events like tropical cyclones and flash floods.”

9. On Newsmax, Republican commentator Ford O’Connell claims that “climate change is the ultimate Trojan horse for socialism” before stating that the Earth “may or not be warming”

Newsmax had a wild year of promoting climate denial, and right-wing pundit Ford O’Connell’s claim that the Earth “may or may not be warming” on the October 25 edition of American Agenda is just another sad example.

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CitationFrom the October 25, 2021, edition of Newsmax's American Agenda

The context behind this segment is noteworthy -- Newsmax was attacking its much larger rival Fox News for “going woke” and “making a permanent hard-left turn” by suggesting that the newly launched Fox Weather streaming service is taking climate change too seriously. In actuality, Fox Weather is just ignoring the issue altogether, but it’s funny to see Newsmax melt down over the fact that Fox is apparently not right-wing enough.

10. On Fox Business, Patricia Lee Onwuka of the Independent Women’s Forum claims that climate change is a “fallacy”

Discussing President Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida on the September 3 edition of Fox Business' Mornings With Maria, right-wing commentator Patricia Lee Onwuka suggested that climate change is a “fallacy” that Biden is using to advance his agenda; she also said that “the facts dispute” the idea that extreme weather events like hurricanes are connected to climate change.

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CitationFrom the September 3, 2021, edition of Fox Business' Mornings With Maria

As noted above, we already know the ways in which climate change is affecting hurricanes and worsening their impacts on our warming world. Those facts don’t seem to matter to Onwuka or the Independent Women’s Forum, which has received both Koch and tobacco industry money and has a history of climate denial.

11. On OAN, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) says that “we have the cleanest environment anywhere in the world” because of the fossil fuel industry

A lot of stupid things were said by right-wing media regarding this year’s United Nations climate conference, known as COP26. One of the more head-scratching comments came from Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who was featured on a November edition of OAN’s In Focus With Stephanie Hamill to downplay the seriousness of climate change. He went on to hype up the U.S. fossil fuel industry by stating that “we have the cleanest environment anywhere in the world” because of “clean energy practices” like fracking.

While Cawthorn was alluding to the fact that natural gas obtained by fracking is cleaner than coal (it emits much less CO2 than coal when burned), it’s important to remember that fracking also releases methane, which is about 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. And like coal, there are numerous water and air pollution problems associated with its use. In any case, the side effects of fossil fuel operations involve literally polluting our air and waterways, so in no way are they responsible for making our environment clean and safe. Additionally, despite Cawthorn’s boast that “I’ll put our air [quality] up against anyone’s,” the U.S. is nowhere near the top of global environmental rankings by any metric.

12. Fossil fuel lobbyist Daniel Turner thinks concern about climate change is “so overblown that it is hyperbolic and silly”

On the November 1 edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, Daniel Turner of the fossil fuel shill group Power the Future tried to throw cold water on COP26 by claiming that “climate change panic is so overblown that it is hyperbolic and silly” and suggesting that the U.N. tries to scare people by publishing “nonsense reports.”

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CitationFrom the November 1, 2021, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

We’re not sure what’s so “silly” about being concerned with a planet that’s on track for over 2.5 C of warming, which will have devastating consequences for billions of people around the world. Turner, who has spent almost his entire career working for Koch-backed groups, has made similar ludicrous statements in the past, including claiming that climate activists are somehow thrilled with the COVID-19 pandemic because it’s supposedly accomplishing their goals of implementing a Green New Deal.

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