eco-hypocrit gore tenn hse

mebbe belated but bag o tricks BS recycled, also good ~ celeb, hollywood linosine liberals and globalist elite

see pvt jet BS ~ COP GLOBAL ELITE

SEE MORANO

7 23 i am making this generic incl pvt jet BS

see tenn ctr --> beacon ECO-HYPOCRITE

merri ok

some ad?

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MMA

Right-wing media’s cynicism about climate leaves out ongoing global success of renewables

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 02/02/26

Right-wing media are suggesting that the energy transition has permanently fallen out of favor as a global priority, evidenced by business leaders’ and governments’ rapid shift in focus toward artificial intelligence. But other recent milestones and ambitious projects signal that long-term interest in climate action is still very much alive.

At the World Economic Forum’s annual convening of elites in Davos, for instance, which has championed corporate climate ambitions for the past several years, right-wing media claimed the message this year was that renewable energy “literally cannot be used.”

Although it’s true that U.S. financial companies such as BlackRock — whose CEO, Larry Fink, headed this year’s conference — have largely abandoned net zero goals, and the Trump administration, which has encouraged fossil fuel expansion abroad, brought thatattitude to the conference, conversations about the clean energy transition continued to take place at Davos.

And reporting from The Wall Street Journal and CNBC demonstrate that business leaders are still talking about renewables, and the European Union just hit “‘a major tipping point’ of the clean energy era” according to The Guardian, with renewables generating “30% of the EU’s electricity in 2025” compared to just 29% from coal, oil, and gas.

The Trump administration pushed its fossil fuel agenda at Davos

• In a “free wheeling special address” to the World Economic Forum, Trump said that “windmills” are “losers” and “the more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses and the worse that country is doing.”Trump has spread misinformation about wind energy for years. He also falsely claimed during the Davos speech that he has not “been able to find any wind farms in China.” According to PolitiFact, “China has about 44% of the world’s wind farm capacity, ranking No. 1 globally and almost triple what the U.S. has.” CNBC, [1/23/26; PolitiFact, 1/21/26; Media Matters, 10/2/23]

• The Financial Times wrote that during a speech at a private dinner hosted by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick “told his audience that the world should focus on coal as an energy source rather than renewables.” Financial Times, [1/21/26]

• According to The New York Times, at Davos, “the focus on climate and stopping biodiversity loss has taken a backseat” where it was once “a center for the corporate climate movement.” The shift can largely be attributed to “pushback from Republicans, the fallout from the war in Ukraine and the return of President Trump to the White House,” David Gelles wrote for The New York Times. Instead, “Panels on AI, the energy transition, and industrial reinvention were packed. Private discussions focused on expansion, deployment, and long-term prospects,” wrote CNBC. The New York Times, [1/22/26; CNBC, 1/24/26]

• While the conference has historically touted a focus on corporate sustainability, it has been rife with greenwashing and false climate solutions for years.The New Republic noted of Davos in recent years: “Oil companies were formal partners for the event, which was marketed as being carbon-neutral while it involved a bunch of corporate and governmental executives flying via private jet to an Alpine town whose signature sport climate change is currently decimating. The confab hyped ‘solutions’ like carbon credits and carbon capture that would allow corporations to keep polluting as usual—even as rigorous reporting showed a lot of carbon credits weren’t backed by real reductions and carbon capture wasn’t yet feasible at scale.” The New Republic, [1/23/26]

Right-wing media suggest climate solutions are no longer relevant, often citing Davos

• On Fox Business, climate skeptic Marc Morano said that Davos was a sign that Trump has “completely obliterated the entire climate agenda.” “This just goes to show you that the entire climate agenda, within one year of Donald Trump getting to work, … has just decimated it,” Morano said. Fox Business, *The Bottom Line*, [1/23/26; Fox News Primetime, 8/9/21]

• On One America News, Morano told host Dan Ball, “Even the billionaire class is departing from the climate agenda, including Michael Bloomberg. Washington Post editorial [board] has been doing anti-Green New Deal-type editorials.” One America News, *Real America with Dan Ball*, [1/27/26]

• On Newsmax, Morano and host Carl Higbie discussed how climate change is “nowhere to be found” at Davos and has “dropped down off the list” of priorities. Higbie said Morano “laid out that the global elites have dropped the doom and gloom of [the] climate agenda, largely because it doesn't fit with their billionaire agenda when they fly in on their private jets. … This was like the center of their agenda and now it's nowhere to be found.” Morano claimed, “They did a survey of World Economic Forum members before this conference started, and climate has just dropped down off the list. It's so bad.” Newsmax, *Carl Higbie Frontline*, [1/22/26]

• Fox host Greg Gutfeld said that Trump made the climate agenda “irrelevant.”On The Five, Gutfeld said, “Wherever Trump goes, wherever that place is is kind of rendered permanently different. Sometimes even irrelevant. … Look at the climate agenda, look at the trans movement. Davos falls into the same pattern. It looks like another small town leveled by the orange tornado.” Fox News, *The Five*, [1/22/26]

• RedState headline: “Davos Ditches Climate: Elites Now Eyeing Economy Instead.”The right-wing outlet wrote that “this year in Davos … interest in all things climate seemed to be nearing an all-time low,” claiming that “the general run of citizens - you know, the people who elect a lot of the ‘elites’ at Davos - are a lot more worried about the price of eggs than their carbon footprints.” RedState, [1/22/26]

• Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy said that while the network typically mocks “all the private planes that come into Davos,” 2026 “feels very different from other years” because “nothing starts until President Trump arrives — until daddy's home, as so many people say.” Campos-Duffy noted that Fox News usually mocks “all the private planes that come into Davos because, of course, this is the elite globalist crowd that will tell you you can't travel in your car, you shouldn't take a plane, and actually wants to limit your ability to take long-haul flights as they fly in privately.” She added, “Here you have this global conference where President Trump is about to blow it up in terms of his negotiations and stands, and yet nothing starts until he arrives. … President Trump is the leader that everyone is — that everything hinges on.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [1/21/26]

• On Infowars,War Roomhost Harrison Smith said, “It’s kind of weird how the World Economic Forum and the Davos meeting used to be so into climate change. Remember how they would talk about nothing but climate change for a long time, and now this year it’s like not even a concern?”Infowars, *War Room*, [1/20/26]

• Fox News headline: “Conservative groups declare 2025 a tipping point on ‘climate hysteria’ as Trump unleashes energy agenda.”The report highlighted several fossil-fuel advocacy groups that outlined “2025 as a pivotal year in trading climate activism for energy production and economic realism.” It also quoted American Energy Institute CEO Jason Isaac’s claim that “governments, investors, and even climate activists are abandoning the hysteria and choosing energy security, affordability, reliability, and common sense. President Trump led this shift by putting America’s energy strength first.” Fox News Digital, [12/19/25; E&E News, 2/28/25; Energy & Policy Institute, 8/5/24; Daily Kos, 11/2/22]

• Right-wing media celebrated a November 2025 memo from Bill Gates, claiming that he flipped on climate change and no longer thinks it is important.In the memo, Gates wrote that climate change will have “serious consequences” but that he does not think it will “lead to humanity’s demise.” Right-wing media presented Gates’ comments to argue that climate change is not a concern and never has been. Media Matters, [11/14/25]

Recent reporting shows continued global interest in renewable energy expansion

• In 2025, wind and solar generation exceeded fossil fuel generation in the European Union, according to a report from the U.K. think tank Ember Energy.“Wind and solar generated a record 30% of EU electricity, higher than fossil power for the first time on record,” which generated 29%, the report said. Ember Energy, [1/22/26]

• The U.K. and nine other European countries just announced plans to build 100 gigawatts of offshore wind power in the North Sea, enough to power 143 million homes. The governments signed a declaration that promises “to collectively build 5GW of offshore wind capacity every year between 2031 and 2040 by helping to support private sector investments.” The Guardian, [1/26/26]

• The CEO of German insurance and asset manager company Allianz, Oliver Bäte, told CNBC that “he disagreed with the suggestion that it may just be a matter of time before net zero is dismissed in Europe, saying short-term thinking on this issue is ‘bulls---.’” “Asked about political leaders backtracking on their much-vaunted European Green New Deal and Norway’s oil fund reportedly defending a push from companies to water down their climate goals, Bäte said anyone who has children ‘will have to worry’ about the planet’s future.” CNBC, [1/22/26]

• In a Davos interview with The Wall Street Journal, Fortescue Metals Group CEO Andrew Forrest, said he was surprised that green energy and sustainability have been dropped from the agenda because renewable energy has allowed him to “compete with the rest of the world” and “deliver … the lowest cost product.” He also told the Journal, “I’m saying to all of my fellow leaders in business and politics, to say, Hey, you are your values. … If you drop your values just because there’s pressure on them or people don’t agree with them or you get political pushback, then, well, who actually are you?” The Wall Street Journal, [1/21/26]

• The CEO of one of the world’s largest iron ore mining companies, Forrest has been vocal about keeping climate goals relevant and “convened three private meetings with between 20 and 50 CEOs” on the topic at Davos, according to Axios. Forrest acknowledged that other leaders “fear retribution” from Trump, but told Axios, “Everyone cares what the economics are, and the economics are going straight to green energy.” Axios, [1/27/26]

• Recapping the event, The World Economic Forum wrote, “Davos in 2026 will be remembered as a week when geopolitics owned the stage – yet the climate and nature crisis persisted in the wings.” Ester Baiget, co-chair of WEF’s Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders and CEO of Novonesis, a Danish biotech company, said during the convening, “Business-smart is climate-smart – they are two sides of the same coin.” Leaders spoke about the plummeting price of renewable energy and energy storage, the global electric vehicle transition, and the importance of getting ahead of climate change tipping points that will “self-amplify warming and undermine the basis for stable economies.” World Economic Forum, [1/30/26; Climate Home News, 1/21/26]

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MMA

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REBOOT 11 25 COP 30

Marc Morano

Weekly update ⋅ November 14, 2025

Brazil culls thousands of trees to make highway for climate COP30 meeting

Sky News Australia

... Marc Morano joined My Kenny to detail the events unfolding in the leadup to the summit.

Brazil Carves Through Amazon Rainforest for New Highway to Ferry Global Climate ...

AMAC

... Marc Morano, Director of Communications for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, told the Just the News, No Noise TV show. CFACT promotes a ...

Tens of thousands of trees in the Amazon rainforest have been wiped out to prepare for a global summit on saving the environment, the latest in seeming climate-change hypocrisy.

In northern Brazil, near the city of Belém, a strip of rainforest about eight miles long was cleared to build a four-lane highway in advance of the COP30 climate summit that began on Monday. The highway, dubbed Avenida Liberdade, is intended to handle the surge of delegates and dignitaries expected for the gathering, but has drawn sharp rebuke from climate activists and fueled perceptions of hypocrisy about climate change concerns.

“But It’s Sustainable,” Say Defenders

Defenders of the project say it includes “sustainable” features like solar-powered lighting, bike lanes, and wildlife crossings that will provide a climate-friendly example for future projects. However, critics are pointing out the blatant irony of cutting down a protected rainforest for a climate conference that is itself aimed, among other things, at halting deforestation.

“They ripped the hell out of the Rainforest of Brazil to build a four-lane highway for Environmentalists to travel. It’s become a big scandal!” U.S. President Donald Trump, who has long been a critic of climate change activism, posted to Truth Social on Sunday.

Unlike his predecessor, Trump’s administration is not sending an official delegation to the United Nations-backed conference. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told the *Daily Mail* that the president would “not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”

The clearing of the forest has raised the ire of both climate change activists and skeptics alike.

Eight Miles of Rainforest Chopped Away

“We’re looking at eight miles of a virgin tropical Amazon rainforest were clear cut there, so that they could put in this highway to allow the private jets and to allow all the SUVs and limousines of all the world leaders and celebrities that are pumping in here the next two weeks, they could have a freer time getting around the city,” Marc Morano, Director of Communications for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, told the Just the News, No Noise TV show.

CFACT promotes a “positive, alternative voice” on the environment and advocates for market forces and technological innovation to overcome environmental challenges. “So they had to cut, in other words, they had to cut the forest down so they could bring more people to show…you can’t make these kinds of absurdities up,” he added.

Even those on the other side of the climate debate spectrum slammed the move. A Canadian climate activist who advocates for a Green New Deal pointed out that “A new four-lane highway that cuts through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest was cut for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém,” Mike Hudema posted to X. “You can’t be a climate leader if you’re cutting down one of the world’s greatest climate solutions to do it.”

“Do as I Say, Not as I Do”

This is not the first time that climate leaders have drawn criticism for failing to live up to their own standards. For example, former Biden administration climate czar, failed presidential candidate, and former Secretary of State John Kerry, has frequently come under fire for his family’s heavy use of a fuel-guzzling private jet while he attended climate conferences aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

A Fox News investigation found that Kerry’s family jet had released more than 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just a year into the Biden administration. President Biden had appointed Kerry as his administration’s climate czar shortly after he took office in January 2021.

At the same time, Kerry called the “climate crisis” an “urgent national security threat” and proposed shutting down power plants and implementing a carbon credit system to limit emissions.

Most famously, former Vice President Al Gore, who made millions on global warming hysteria, like Kerry and so many liberal media figures, doesn’t practice what he preaches. The National Center for Public Policy Research, a 501(c)3, nonpartisan, independent conservative think tank, reported that “Al Gore’s Nashville home consumed 20 times more electricity than the average American household” and that “Gore guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.”

Locals Left Without Compensation for Losses

Local residents say the damage is immediate. One acai berry harvester, Claudio Verequete, told the BBC that trees he relied on for income “have already been cut down” and he has “no compensation.”

Conservationists also warn about the “fish-bone effect” of the road: once the main corridor is carved through the forest, new access routes follow, fragmenting the ecosystem and increasing deforestation risks, the BBC reported.

The Brazilian state government of Pará, where the conference is being held, has floated such a highway since at least 2012. However, prior attempts were shelved primarily due to environmental concerns.

The infrastructure project only overcame the backlog after Belém was chosen as the site of the climate conference. In addition to the new highway, the government is expanding airport capacity and building a new city park.

Steven Richards joined Just the News in August 2023 after previously working as a Research Analyst for the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in Tallahassee, Florida.*}:

Reprinted with Permission from Just The News – By Steven Richards

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.*

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Biden 'doubling down' in the face of 'absurdity' with latest climate push, expert says

Fox Business

Climate Depot executive editor Marc Morano reacts to comments from a Senate hearing on climate concerns and sounds off on the Biden ...

december 19, 2024

05:29

mclean va

foghorn

Biden ‘doubling down’ in the face of ‘absurdity’ with latest climate push, expert says

Climate Depot executive editor Marc Morano reacts to comments from a Senate hearing on climate concerns and sounds off on the Biden administration's latest climate push on 'The Bottom Line.'

nyt ben keys}:

ditch home; extremiest arent you? cli hypoc on blast hdline; cli obsession ethos; expose absurdity; wharton prof; un says exteme wether not increasing; own hse in flood zone; nyt long hist gone aftr home racism, cli emergency, houses more dang to cli than cars; doing all the things they tell us not to do giant homes oprah

kerry pvt jet and ---?]

lame duck joe pedal to metal on his cli agenda; new emission targets; cuts GG 60 percent by 2035; gum up sys w new regs; very easy to undo; climate agenda hates us hates am way, 2x down in face of ... magical thinking paperwork climate agenda get us out of pais treaty by going to congress woman fear based agenda, requruers their intervation; misnamed IRA is really the grn new deal; get rid of epa endangerment finding; day 1 reverse agancy pentagon abolish every climate agy and goal do fast and rapid, do in 2 wks

dr_benjamin_jkeystestimonysenatebudgetcommittee

Testimony of Benjamin J. Keys, Ph.D. Rowan Family Foundation Professor, Professor of Real Estate and Finance,

The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania Hearing

on “Next to the Fall: The Climate-Driven Insurance Crisis is Here – And Getting Worse”

United States Senate Committee on the Budget December 18, 2024 Chairman Whitehouse, Ranking Member Grassley, and Members of the Committee:

Thank you for inviting me back to address the turmoil in insurance markets, its connection to climate change, and its effect on housing, mortgages, and household well-being. My name is Ben Keys and I am a Professor of Real Estate and Finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

My research agenda examines how households interact with the financial system and how the financial system manages risk. I first testified before this committee in March 2023. In the last year and a half, the situation in the homeowners insurance market has gone from bad to worse.

Both affordability and accessibility issues have reached a crisis point in many communities across the country. In terms of affordability, my new research with Professor Philip Mulder uses mortgage escrow data to build a dataset of 47 million homeowners insurance premiums from 2014 to 2023.

Our dataset shows rapidly increasing premiums across the country, but especially in the highest-risk areas.1 We attribute this increase to a combination of inflation and financial frictions associated with the pass-through of rising reinsurance costs to homeowners policies. Insurers are responding to larger realized disaster losses, better data and risk models, and growing reinsurance costs.2

While raising premiums is one margin of adjustment, insurers also change where they are willing to write policies. Some of the largest insurance companies have exited markets, deciding that they cannot charge premiums that adequately reflect this growing risk.3 While many of these high-profile departures have be...

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cop 28 note recycled BS: global elite

Marc Morano

Weekly update ⋅ December 8, 2023

Marc Morano: China is getting a pass | Fox News Video

Fox News

Climate Depot's Marc Morano discusses John Kerry's remarks at the U.N. COP28 climate conference in Dubai on 'The Ingraham Angle.'

ingraham, extra AC units kerry jetsetter india does not care what we think new plants permitted end global coal production, china 1/2 of production open 1 plant/wk; getting cty to cut back on naty gas lead the world in reducing emissions; greta will protest german plant but not in china; on x ingra how much does greta fam make?; li jets from mansion to mansion kite surfing ridiculous; 17m$ budget pvt jet potentate unelected; hillary says --- killing, studies show coal kills more? ej climate fund keep africa locked in poverty, then crush US decree global dictatorship vs trump 99 perent drop in 20 yrs? kery and hillary never fact checked; green reset summit; keruy not senate confirmed, how is that ok? US must take tougher approach on tech to China, says US House committee

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OMFG // antifa BLM BS oregon a couple years back?

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 climate John 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"):}:, [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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PJ Media

Climate Depot's Marc Morano went on Fox Business Thursday and discussed how the Democrat and globalist push to replace gas cars with electric ...

pj no lnx pix

NEWS & POLITICS

Climate Expert: Gas Car Cancellation Is Intended to End Private Transport

BY CATHERINE SALGADO 3:01 PM ON JULY 15, 2023

Climate Expert: Gas Car Cancellation Is Intended to End Private Transport

Soon after a World Economic Forum partner was caught calling for an “end” to private car ownership, a climate expert is warning that the push to cancel gas-powered cars is just a ploy to end private transport. The climate crisis is a hoax, but it’s such a darn useful hoax for authoritarian globalists.

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano went on Fox Business Thursday and discussed how the Democrat and globalist push to replace gas cars with electric vehicles (EVs) isn’t about helping the environment but restricting Americans’ freedom of movement.“This really isn’t about them driving an electric car,” Morano said, highlighting how this is a top-down decision not based on popular demand. “This literally is — the banning of gas-powered cars — is being done just like a COVID lockdown without a vote,” he added. From California to the Biden Environmental Protection Agency to Australia, leftists are trying to force ordinary citizens into a corner with their gas car restrictions.

Indeed, Pew Research Center published the results of its new survey on June 28, which found that “Less than half of the [U.S.] public (40%) favors phasing out the production of gas-powered cars and trucks.” It’s also significant that EV batteries actually generate lots of toxic waste, so they’re not better for the environment.

“The intent is not to necessarily force people into an electric vehicle,” Morano went on. “The intent is to collapse our plentiful freedom of movement and force us to use mass transit. They want us on the subway.” It’s a global collusion. “They want us on buses. That is what this is about,” Morano insisted. “[Former UK PM] Boris Johnson’s transportation secretary said owning a car was outdated ’20th-century thinking’. They are rationing vehicle use. It’s very simple. You can look at Cuba to see how that turned out; you are going to have a lot of used cars.”

Morano also called out the hypocrisy and deception of U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, who just testified to Congress and denied owning a private jet (though his family owned a private jet for years):

Now, keep in mind when John Kerry was confronted publicly last time was in Iceland. He flew on a private jet to Iceland to pick up an environmental award, and he gave the original defense, the equivalent of ‘Do you know who I am? I am so important I have to fly a private jet. I am trying to save the climate.’ But he doesn’t have time to be with the masses on a commercial airplane.

What he said today was, ‘I don’t own a private jet’, and ‘We don’t own one,’ meaning his wife owned one — until last year. And now he says he has been on only one flight and that goes against a lot of contradictory evidence. There is evidence that shows that since the Biden administration started, he has been on several dozen private jet flights.

Bill Gates was asked the same thing, and he said he gives to carbon offset funds when he flies a private jet.  Al Gore actually had the same exact line about 20 years ago, he said he didn’t own a private jet without addressing whether he flew in them. This is Bill Clinton-level parsing.

Related: Electric Cars Are a Scam

Climate alarmists have been wrong for 50 years,and they’re not right now. But many of the top-level climate propagandists don’t believe their own lies (which is why they fly private jets). As Morano emphasized, climate hysteria is a political tool to end private transport and thus give governments ever more control over people’s lives.

Catherine Salgado

Catherine Salgado is a contributor for PJ Media. She also writes for The Rogue Review, Media Research Center, and her Substack Pro Deo et Libertate. She received the Andrew Breitbart MVP award for August 2021 from The Rogue Review for her journalism.

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interesting update /case study/ cross section ~ BBB?

coastal elite = hollywood celeb eco-hypocite gore pvt jet

coastal US elie --> davos global elite pvt jets?

mma 8 22

on August 16, Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the single biggest climate package in history, into law. With its historic investments in clean energy, the IRA is widely considered a surprise win for Democrats ahead of November’s midterm elections, despite major fossil fuel concessions in the bill that will expand drilling and ultimately harm vulnerable communities.

While some oil and gas companies went so far as to publicly celebrate the legislation, Republicans and right-wing media mobilized against it.Now, in an attempt to distract from the realization of one of President Joe Biden’s key campaign promises, right-wing media are capitalizing on a tried and true tactic — trying to discredit the climate movement, and government climate action as a whole, by vilifying certain wealthy advocates for their personal consumption habits.

On August 15, FoxNews.com published emails suggesting that theLeonardo DiCaprio Foundation may have helped fund state and local lawsuits against oil and gas companies that seek to hold them accountable for climate change impacts, which occurred as a result of the industry lying about the consequences of burning fossil fuels. This should come as no surprise, given that DiCaprio has long been an advocate for climate action and a donor to climate-related causes.

In 2017, his foundation awarded $20 million in grants to 100 environmental organizations, a small fraction of which went to the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience and Adaptation. The fund “supports precedent-setting legal actions to hold major corporations accountable for costs associated with the effects on climate of their pollutants,” and was associated with the Resource Legacy Fund, an environmental conservation and grant-making 501(c)(3) organization. Fox alleges that the emails prove the money went through the fund to support Sher Edling, the law firm representing the cities and local governments suing big oil. It’s unclear how much DiCaprio donated to Resource Legacy Fund, but Fox labeled it a “dark money” group in the August 15 piece, suggesting that both DiCaprio and the law firm were unethically forcing taxpayers to cover lawsuits, which would force an industry Fox constantly champions to pay up for decades of deception. The Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, and New York Post all picked up the story.

Fox attempts to tie big oil lawsuits to liberal elitism

Fox News picked up the story, contrasting DiCaprio’s activism, which they framed as deceptive, with his carbon-intensive lifestyle. On Hannity, host Sean Hannity claimed the lawsuits further justified right-wing media’s fixation on DiCaprio: “The climate litigation and Dicaprio's arrangements specifically raises a whole host of legal and ethical concerns, but hypocrisy and bad optics are nothing new for this climate activist.”

On Outnumbered, co-host Kayleigh McEnany recalled DiCaprio’s “apocalyptic quote” from his 2016 Oscars speech on the urgency of climate action while discussing the lawsuits. "He doesn't act” as if climate change is an existential threat, McEnany said, “It has not kept him from traveling across the world ongas-guzzling private jets.”

Jesse Watters Primetime featured Brian Claypool, a lawyer and frequent guest, who told correspondent Christina Coleman that it was “ironic that Leonardo DiCaprio and his foundation is funding a law firm to sue big oil companies for alleged deception when he him very self is deceiving the public on where these charitable contributions are going.”

During the August 16 episode of The Five, co-host Dana Perino even suggested DiCaprio's donation was “behind the collusion and price gouging of increasing gas prices on Americans,” because oil companies pass on the costs of hiring a legal team to consumers. (Meanwhile, these companies have seen record-breaking profits.)

In general, climate activists on the left have not been shy to criticize the use of private jets by the rich. After the release of DiCaprio’s climate change-themed movie Don’t Look Up, climate journalist Molly Taft wrote in Earther:

"Whenever DiCaprio is in the news for his climate charity work, a right-wing outlet always smugly runs a piece about his private jet use. While these critiques are in bad faith, they do point out their own inconvenient truth that DiCaprio is part of the sliver of rich people who could actually make a real carbon dent if they changed up their lifestyles or gave away more of their money … The actions DiCaprio is promoting as part of Don’t Look Up fail to properly confront power. Celebrity activism is inherently a strange, slippery slope."

Right-wing media appoints climate spokespeople and projects fossil fuel corruption onto the climate movement

It is naive to think that those elevating the story are really concerned about taxpayers, especially when extreme weather driven by climate change costs taxpayers billions every year. Similar lawsuits against oil companies have been moving through courts for years now, and many are currently pending, embroiled in disagreements over whether there is state or federal jurisdiction. According to PBS, “some recent federal court decisions show support for state jurisdiction” in similar climate suits. On August 17, a federal appeals court panel said that two of these two lawsuits belong in state courts, which is considered a win for plaintiffs. One of the plaintiffs is being represented by the law firm Sher Edling.

The same people attacking the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation have brazenly supported fossil fuel industry corruption. According to Daily Kos, Chris Horner, the person who gave FoxNews.com the emails, “is better known forgetting paid by fossil fuel companies to target climate scientists with baseless or frivolous and harassing or vexatious FOIA lawsuits demanding they release their emails in an attempt to rerun the Climategate disinfo playbook.”

Michael Krauss, a George Mason University law professor who Fox quoted extensively in the piece on DiCaprio, has previously gone after Steven Donziger, a human rights lawyer who was confined to one thousand days of house arrest after winning a $9.5 billion lawsuit against Chevron after the company deliberately contaminated the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest and poisoned the Indigenous communities that live there. Krauss called Chevron, which spilled 16 billion gallons of toxic wastewater and 17 million gallons of crude oil into open, unlined pits, “courageous” for its “persistence” in “defending itself against Donziger,” after it launched a massive smear campaign against him. Notably, George Mason University accepted an estimated $50 million from Koch foundations between 2005 and 2015.

Leonardo DiCaprio is not and has never been an accurate representation of who is the most concerned about climate change, and it is deeply misleading to portray him as such. Nonetheless, Fox keeps attempting to appoint politicians like John Kerry and wealthy celebrities like Prince Harry, Thom Yorke, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the face of the climate movement, obscuring the role of the activists on the ground who have worked tirelessly to pass legislation like the IRA and the millions of people around the world harmed by climate change and environmental injustice. 

According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from June, Black and Hispanic Americans and women are among the groups most likely to be “strongly concerned about the impact of climate change on them personally and about how their personal choices affect the climate.”

When things don’t go your way, blame far-left infiltration or a teenager

Right-wing media’s fixation on “dark money” and celebrity activism is not new. When Republicans face scrutiny, they try to paint Democrats as beholden to radical, hypocritical elites who are out of touch with real Americans. On August 16, FoxNews.com also published an article attempting to frame Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC) John Kerry's office as radical because some officials who work there have previously worked for other large environmental organizations.

Additionally, the article quotes Myron Ebell, who calls large green groups and those affiliated with them the “climate aristocracy.” Ebell, a noted climate denier who led Trump’s EPA transition team, is the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) Center for Energy and Environment. Chris Horner was also a CEI fellow, and the organization has filed briefs and launched campaigns defending the oil companies being targeted by the lawsuits discussed above, and has also received funding from the industry.

related

Fox's attacks on John Kerry shows how specious the network’s argument against climate action really is

02/05/21

In 160 days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Fox networks mentioned the Green New Deal 564 times

08/08/22

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfolds, right-wing media is pinning the blame on Greta Thunberg and climate activists

03/08/22

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SEE DREW JOHNSON ,TPA, invented eco-hypocrite kinda limosine liberal, elitist

MADE HIS BONES ON

It is, apparently, impossible to satisfy the public appetite for gotcha journalism - a point of some satisfaction to the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research .

Although you likely never heard of the TCPR before February 26, 2007, you may have heard since that the "independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization" was the source of a story about Al Gore's personal energy consumption. According to the TCPR news release - fired out, coincidentally, the day after Gore's movieAn Inconvenient Truthwon an Oscar - the Gore family home inNashville consumes energy at a rate equivalent to roughly 20 times the national average.

Gore's defence, that he has been purchasing "green energy" that is carbon neutral, was not part of the TCPR release, nor is it of much interest to Drew Johnson, the articulate young president of the TCPR (inset photo). In an interview earlier today, Johnson said the TCPR cares mostly about public hypocrisy. The TCPR's usual target is Republican politicians who call themselvs fiscal conservatives but spend an inordinate amount of time raising taxes and running up deficits. This, Johnson said, is the TCPR's first real attack on a "left-wing" target....

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pvt plane BS recycled

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10152027/Hypocrite-airways-Jeff-Bezoss-48m-gulf-stream-leads-parade-400-private-jets.html

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Tomorrow, the ultra conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) will launch a new round of television ads attacking former Vice President Al Gore for his leadership on climate change.The right-wing Washington Times gleefully reported on CEI’s ad buyon Saturday:

Al Gore’s opulent lifestyle and his virtuous plea to save the planet from global warming don’t mesh, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which announced plans yesterday for a new national advertising campaign to showcase the contrast before the American public.

In fact, Al Gore has worked diligently to reduce his own carbon impact. After a thorough renovation of his house —complete with a fight to obtain zoning permission for solar panels — Gore has one of the first 14 homes in the United States to receive the LEED gold certification for efficiency and green practices. The renovations “cut the home’s summer electrical consumption by 11 percent compared with a year ago.”

CEI’s campaign simply recycles old partisan smears. According to the Times, CEI is relying on “research released last year by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research,” a conservative group founded by Drew Johnson, who previously worked for the right-wing National Taxpayers Foundation and interned for the Exxon-funded American Enterprise Institute.

CEI is hardly a neutral player either:

– The Washington Monthly reported, “The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been a particularly aggressive advocate of the notion that global warming is a ‘theory not a fact.’” [LINK]

– CEI “adjunct analyst” Donald Boudreaux said in 2006: “the best policy regarding global warming is to neglect it– and let capitalism continue to make us healthier and wealthier.” [LINK]

– CEI has received more than $2 million from ExxonMobil since 1998. [LINK]

– CEI’s global-warming denying position is so radical that last year, ExxonMobil announced it had ceased funding CEI, in an effort to improve its corporate image. [LINK]

– CEI belongs to the State Policy Network, a “voluntary and by invitation-only” coalition of free-market think tanks that includes both the Tennessee Center for Policy Research and the Heartland Institute, which ran last week’s global warming denial conference. [LINK, LINK]

This is not the first time CEI has tried to distract attention from global warming science in order to attack Gore. Last year, it produced two ads asserting the of. The ad campaign had the Orwellian title, “They call it pollution. We call it life.”

UPDATE: Desmog blog notes that CEI is trying to fundraise off its Gore campaign.

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ref mar 2008

Below is a fundraising letter one of our loyal readers sent along, penned by Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

It’s quite the vitriolic and desperate pitch for money – something the CEI is no doubt in need of after their fall from grace with oil giant ExxonMobil. This vast government, media, science conspiracy theory stuck in Smith’s head isn’t going to save any shred of credibility he and his organization might have left.

And it won’t endear him with media, who he describes in the letter as being “remarkably gullible.”

The letter also outlines the CEI‘s plans to run a national TV campaign to expose the “… hypocrisy and distortions of global warming mania.”

Wow, a national TV campaign by CEI!? Hopefully it goes as well as their last one.

Here’s the intro:

… about Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”?

… about how we’re supposedly killing the planet?

… about how we Americans must drastically cut back our standard of living to avert an alleged catastrophe?

Here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, we’re the leading group in the country telling the “real” truth about global warming.

And the hard-left environmentalists don’t like it one bit. That’s because their agenda is not based on science but on ideology – an ideology that opposes human technology and progress.

An ideology that is anti-growth, anti-capitalist, and anti-American.

Unfortunately, the global warming movement has become incredibly powerful. It has convinced many Americans that global warming is a catastrophe in the making.

More dangerously, they have recruited powerful allies in a remarkably gullible news media, which have dropped all pretense of balance and instead are committed advocates for the global warming agenda.

Have you noticed, for example, how every heat wave results in more media hysteria, while record cold waves are brushed aside as irrelevant?

And remember the dire predictions that the record 2005 hurricane season was a trend that would continue because it was fueled by global warming?  Remember how it was followed by an embarrassed media in 2006, when not a single hurricane hit the U.S.?

But theradicalenvironmentalists won’t be deterred.

On the contrary, aided by Hollywood elites, pop culture icons and political opportunists like Al Gore, the global warming movement is on the brink of turning its agenda of fear into actual public policy that will do enormous harm to our prosperity and to our freedom.

That’s why I need your help today.

As President and Founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market public policy group established in 1984. Mr. Smith is also a frequent guest on national television including such shows as CNN‘s “Crossfire,” PBS‘s “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” and “Now with Bill Moyers,” ABC‘s “20/20” and “This Week,” NPR‘s “Talk of the Nation” and “The Diane Rehm Show,” and “The G. Gordon Liddy Show,” among many others.

A prolific writer, Mr. Smith’s works have been published in leading newspapers and magazines such as the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Economic Affairs, and the Washington Times.

Letter from Smith:

My name is Fred Smith. I am founder and president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

My colleagues and I are doing everything we can to fight the reckless politics of the global warming movement. And to speak out about the dangers that their radical agenda poses to you, to me and to every single American.

For years now, pro-free market, pro-limited government individuals and organizations have warned of the growing threat posed by unfounded global warming hysteria.

But, as I’m sure you agree, they’ve been unable to actually stop the radical green political juggernaut we see today. That juggernaut that is now a dominant force in American politics thanks to the results of last year’s elections.

That is, until now.

At the Competitive Enterprise Institute we’re ready to do more than just TALK about the hypocrisy and distortions of global warming mania; we’re ready to DO SOMETHING about it.

That’s why we are launching a national TV ad campaign to expose Al Gore and the global warming alarmists. We have produced two hard-hitting 60-second television ads that we have already aired on a limited basis.

TV ads can be expensive, but it’s the best way to reach millions of Americans.

And remember, these ads are only the first step in a massive new public education campaign to stand up to the wild hysteria of the global warming fanatics

These ads are important because they represent a truly new strategy in combating the junk science, scare tactics and blatant propaganda of today’s radical green movement.

That strategy is to take our case directly to the people. These first two ads remind people of how biased the media are in presenting the alleged science behind global warming alarmism, and of how reducing CO2 emissions can’t be achieved without a massive loss of individual freedom and drastic reductions in the living standards of ordinary Americans;

These ads – and the new ones we hope to produce and air soon with your help –are not aimed at scholars and “policy wonks,” but at ordinary Americans.

You Can Help Us Show These Ads by Going Here Now

Let me tell you a bit about CEI.  We are not a traditional “think tank.” Our work does not stop with groundbreaking research. We realize it is not enough to simply identify the flaws in the arguments of those who think massive government is the solution to every problem.  Instead, we have to actively reach out – not just to other scholars and to policy makers – but to the public and the media to ensure that our ideas are heard.

This approach has made us one of the nation’s most effective and powerful forces for economic freedom, and against global warming alarmism.

We’ve been called “the best environmental think tank in the country” by The Wall Street Journal.

The Weather Channel named CEI as one of the ten most influential participants in the global warming debate in 2006. No other non-profit group made the list. Not one of the big environmental groups, with annual budgets twenty or fifty times CEI’s, was named to the list. Not the Sierra Club. Not Greenpeace. Not the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Only CEI.

Two liberal U.S. Senators were so upset with our efforts that they wrote a letter which threatened one of our corporate supporters unless they cut off our funding. These two senators even mentioned CEI by name in this outrageous attempt to stifle free speech.

That just tells me we are effective.

CEI has done a tremendous amount of research on global warming alarmism. I invite you to explore our website (www.cei.org) and review the many papers we have published that challenge the so-called “proven” science behind global warming.

But research alone isn’t enough to win this fight.

That’s why we need your help today – Go Here Now

The truth is most of the papers we publish – while enormously influential in policy circles – will never be seen by the general public. And thanks to a biased news media, they will go largely unreported.

This means that we have to go beyond the usual arenas of academic debates, and reach out directly to the public.

The messages contained in our hard-hitting TV ads are the first step in our plan to do this.

IF we can raise the funds we need from concerned Americans like you, we can take those messages to a far wider audience.

I admit that this will be one tough fight.  Our adversaries have been masterful at manipulating public opinion.

Because of films like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Hollywood thriller, “The Day After Tomorrow,” and countless unquestioning TV news reports and newspaper articles, more than 8 out of 10 Americans now believe that human-induced global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions threatens our planet.

Thanks especially to Al Gore and his movie, which has been called one of the “slickest science propaganda films of all time,” ordinary people are now haunted by visions of droughts, floods, disease, famine, mass extinctions, ferocious storms and catastrophic rises in sea level.

But in reality Gore’s movie is more science fiction than science.  Most of his claims are not even backed by the scientists that he claims support him.  (I urge you to read our point-by-point rebuttal of Al Gore; just look for Al Gore’s Science Fiction at www.cei.org.)

In fact, a growing body of evidence demonstrates how little basis there is for claims that we face a global warming catastrophe:

Yes, there has been a slight warming trend (about 1 degree Fahrenheit) in the 20th century.  This was to be expected, since the Earth was still recovering, after all, from a multi-century cold spell known as the Little Ice Age.

But it’s highly uncertain that CO2 had much to do with that slight warming.  From 1940 to 1975, the global temperature fell even as CO2 emissions rose. Since 2001, global temperatures have only gone up a statistically insignificant .03 degrees Celsius.

And as for whether mankind played a role in that slight warming, two new scholarly books have just been published throwing new doubt on this claim.

[]

In “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years,” scientists Fred Singer and Dennis Averypresent evidence of 600 global warming and cooling periods in the last million years.

In “The Chilling Stars,” Professor Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder discuss how cosmic rays amplify small changes in the sun’s brightness, creating 1- to 2-degree increases in temperatures on earth.

Global warming alarmists would have you believe that, until now, the Earth has always had a stable climate.  But in fact, over the millennia, the earth has warmed and cooled repeatedly.  The reasons for this are unclear, but they were certainly unrelated to human activity.  Yet Al Gore and the other alarmists want us to ignore this.

We won’t. Help us expose Al Gore – Go Here Now

In fact, the green lobby pretends that there is an absolute “scientific consensus” on a coming climate disaster, and they want to shut down the debate altogether.  In Mr. Gore’s words, “the debate in the scientific community is over.”

Those scientists and analysts who disagree are under increasing professional and personal attack.

For example, Heidi Cullen, an “expert” for the Weather Channel, declared that meteorologists who disagree with her about global warming should not be certified to report the weather on television.

More outrageously, liberal newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman wrote, “We’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.”

But if global warming alarmists are so certain of their position, then why do they react so harshly when anyone challenges their views?

I believe the answer is that they’re not all that certain at all.  They know full well that many of their claims can’t withstand critical review.

And they know that once their pretense of a consensus starts falling apart, their radical political agenda will collapse as well!

In short, we can win this debate.

And, in fact, we must win it.

Too much is at stake for our children’s future, our nation’s prosperity, our way of life, our freedom, to do anything less than our utmost on this issue.

We need to take the battle of global warming hysteriato the next level.

And I must ask for your most generous financial support to make this happen.

We need to run our new series of hard hitting ads, not in just a few cities, but in every media market in the United States. And we need to air them often enough and continuously enough to change public opinion.

Our initial budget for this massive undertaking is $6.5 million dollars. This budget allows us to create and air a series of ads challenging the false claims of the global warming crowd with indisputable scientific evidence.

I am convinced these ads will get results.

Our goals with this campaign are clearly ambitious. Nothing on this scale has ever been tried before. $6.5 million is a lot of money.

But it is really a very small amount when you consider the potential danger our economy faces from ill-advised, politically-motivated global warming legislation. Some have estimated that the cost to enact panic legislation to curb carbon emissions will be in the TRILLIONS of dollars.

If the alarmists get their way you could end up paying twice as much as you do now for gasoline or electricity.  Great Britain is considering limiting the number of personal plane trips that a “regular” person can take to one a year.

I believe we can succeed in turning this debate around. But we are absolutely dependant on the generous financial support of Americans like you.

You can make a difference today – Go Here Now

Will you become a Friend of the Competitive Enterprise Institute by sending a tax-deductible donation of $1,000 or more today?

Your $1,000 donation can pay to run as many as 20 – or perhaps more – of our ads on television stations and cable channels around the country.

While I hope you will consider a gift at that level, please know your donation today of $100, $250 or $500 is also most welcome and urgently needed.

Rest assured, at whatever donation level you feel comfortable, your tax-deductible contribution will be much appreciated and put to immediate good use in our campaign against global warming alarmism … and for affordable energy and economic freedom around the world.

I have enclosed a donor information page detailing the benefits of giving to CEI at a number of levels.

Remember, no one does what we do. No other public policy group is duplicating the work we are doing to counter the global warming fanatics. And if we don’t succeed now in changing public opinion, we will lose this debate and America will be changed forever.

For 20 years CEI has been at the forefront of the struggle for liberty. And despite modest resources, we’ve succeeded time and time again! But we cannot succeed alone.

Time is short. Ill advised, global warming legislation is being introduced and debated right now. We have very little time to get the truth out about global warming.

Please make your most generous possible contribution

to CEI without delay – Go Here Now.

Sincerely,

Fred L. Smith, Jr.

President and Founder

P.S. Please, do not put this letter aside thinking one person can’t make a difference. Your $100, $250, $500 or hopefully $1,000 or more, tax-deductible contribution to CEI today can truly have an impact on public opinion. As a thoughtful and concerned American, your personal commitment to our crusade to tell the truth about global warming is important to our success.

Take a minute to help us fight back – Go Here

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/0H3vp2oz1tV3svXi2suaaZ

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/episodes

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Making Republicans Environmentalists Again

HOW TO SAVE A PLANET

The Republican Party has been almost uniformly opposed to climate action for years – nobody more so than President Donald Trump. But it wasn’t always like this. On today’s episode, we look back at how conservatives came to see the denial of climate science as a kind of badge of honor – and we talk to two conservative activists who are trying to change that. rachael waldholtz (sp)

afp bus tour gas, heat house tired of al gore hypocrisy, "cap and Tax" --> policy fight to threat to your way of life;  kochs take advantage of crisis --> culture war /part of identity 2008 high tide of gov't distrust, so small am't of money (goes over sea wall and flooded agw action machinery metaphor Inglis;  [RepublicEN inglis talk to crazy uncle]

am conservation coalition  ACC10yo gop activist noted at cpacs nothing on envir except to trash/denial;  testimony w/ greta so press but he called out both side i call BS dems have not tried to work w/ gop [b/c preserve as an issue to beat up?] benjy backer

see refs

bk  What explains the dramatic change in the Republican Party's approach to environmental protection? One recent effort to answer this question is The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump by James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg.  https://www.amazon.com/Republican-Reversal-Conservatives-Environment-Nixon-ebook/dp/B07DGC3VX8

rev https://reason.com/volokh/2020/07/07/what-explains-the-republican-reversal-on-environmental-protection/

BS

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https://www.mediamatters.org/bret-baier/foxs-flagship-straight-news-show-has-troubling-record-climate-crisis

no lnx many vid

Fox’s flagship “straight news” show has a troubling record on the climate crisis

Nearly 88% of Special Report’s climate segments since 2009 either spread misinformation or perpetuated false or misleading narratives

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALICIA SADOWSKI

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALLISON FISHER, REBECCA MARTIN, NIKKI MCCANN RAMIREZ & JANE LEE

PUBLISHED 06/16/21 12:01 PM EDT

Fox News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier is heralded as the network’s flagship “straight news” program that firmly embodies the show’s motto of “fair, balanced, and unafraid.” Under Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier’s direction, however, Special Report has failed to meet its own standards in covering the climate crisis and environmental protection, instead providing a platform for many of the same climate denier guests and fossil fuel industry talking points featured on the network’s opinion side. 

Media Matters examined Special Report with Bret Baier’s coverage related to climate change and the environment between January 1, 2009, and May 3, 2021. We counted and analyzed segments devoted to climate change or the environment and those in which a network figure discussed the issue or engaged with a guest who brought it up. We then broadly categorized the show’s misinformation and misleading narratives into five different angles of attack -- regarding climate science, the economy, the efficacy and public demand for domestic climate action, global cooperation, and the urgency of the crisis. These narratives undermined, doubted, misrepresented, or otherwise dismissed climate science and/or drives for climate action or environmental protection. We counted each angle once per segment even if it arose multiple times; segments often included more than one angle.

Jump to a section

KEY FINDINGS

SPECIAL REPORT IS PART OF THE DECADESLONG AND ONGOING CAMPAIGN TO DELAY CLIMATE ACTION

BAIER’S “STRAIGHT NEWS” COVERAGE OF THE CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT ECHOES THE LIES OF FOX’S OPINION PERSONALITIES

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES CLIMATE SCIENCE

SPECIAL REPORT SETS UP A FALSE CONFLICT BETWEEN A HEALTHY PLANET AND A THRIVING ECONOMY OR MISREPRESENTS THE EFFICACY AND PUBLIC DEMAND FOR CLIMATE ACTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS

SPECIAL REPORT FUELS NATIONALISTIC AND MISLEADING NARRATIVES OPPOSING GLOBAL CLIMATE EFFORTS

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES THE SERIOUSNESS AND URGENCY OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

CONCLUSION

METHODOLOGY

Key Findings

From January 1, 2009, to May 3, 2021, Special Report aired at least 972 segments covering stories related to climate change or the environment.

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}:

At least 851 of those segments -- more than 87% -- featured false or misleading narratives and misinformation. 

Since 2009, Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier, guest anchors, correspondents, and guests on Special Report have undermined, doubted, misrepresented, or otherwise dismissed climate science and the urgency of climate action at least 1,333 times.

Of the 851 Special Report segments that attacked or misrepresented climate change or environmental protection:

14% undermined climate science.

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}:

29% set up a false conflict between a healthy planet and a thriving economy.

43% misrepresented the efficacy of climate action or the public demand for environmental protections.

8% fueled nationalistic defenses of climate inaction and/or misled viewers about global climate efforts.

more than 5% undermined the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis.

Special Report’s specific attacks undermining climate science were most frequent at the start of Baier’s run as anchor, which began in January 2009. The show spread nearly four times as much misinformation or false or misleading narratives attacking climate science during President Barack Obama’s first year in office (when climate legislation was being considered in Congress) than during President Donald Trump’s first year.

During President Joe Biden’s first four months in office, Special Report was already spreading climate-related misinformation and false or misleading climate narratives at more than three times its weekly rate of 2020.[SO BS SIDE EFFECT COLLATERAL DAMAGE TO FOX RAISON D'ETRE ATTACK DEMONIZE LIBS/DEMS?!

Special Report is part of the decades-long and ongoing campaign to delay climate action

In reviewing over a decade of Special Report’s climate coverage, Media Matters found at least 851 segments that featured misinformation or false or misleading narratives that undermine efforts to address the climate crisis or environmental degradation. Many of these same attacks are also heavily promoted by Fox’s opinion shows, which points to the shared talking points of the network’s “news” division and some of its most toxic prime-time personalities.

These attacks on science are not isolated incidents -- they can be contextualized within the clear template of industry-funded science denial. As early as 1977, Exxon scientists were aware of the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels, but the company spent the next two decades leading misinformation campaigns to question the scientific basis of climate change, lobbying congressional representatives to reject domestic environmental regulations and international climate treaties, and spreading narratives to falsely pit the health of the economy against the need for environmental protections.

More than four decades after Exxon’s initial discovery, Fox News has scrupulously parrotted its successful misinformation campaigns, despite international and domestic studies overwhelmingly warning of the dire consequences of fossil fuels’ contributions to climate change.Special Report’s complicity in promoting these industry narratives is part of the larger, systemic failure of the U.S. to grapple with the climate crisis, which also includes denying communities equitable access to healthy environments, often at the expense of people of color, as well as the failure to pass meaningful climate and environmental legislation in the last decade. And the same science-denial talking points featured on Special Report have even been recycled by Fox News opinion shows and other bad actors (following a similar blueprint to the fossil fuel industry’s strategy to undermine climate science) to deny the existence and seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic and to dismiss the urgency of finding solutions for this public health crisis.

Baier’s “straight news” coverage of the climate and environment echoes the lies of Fox’s opinion personalities

Media Matters’ extensive review of Special Report’s coverage of the climate crisis and environmental protections since 2009 found a persistent theme of the program sowing doubt about the existence of climate change and the efficacy of climate solutions.

Of the 851 climate or environment-related segments on Special Report that included such instances, 477 occurred during correspondent segments, 174 occurred during guest segments, and 200 were perpetuated by Baier or guest anchors. Excluding segments featuring guest anchors, Baier himself espoused or allowed 1,116 instances of climate misinformation and false or misleading narratives during the studied time period.

Week after week, year after year, Special Report viewers -- who are promised an objective and unbiased analysis of the issues -- have been inundated with misleading statements that reflect Fox’s opinion-side rhetoric: denying climate science, shirking responsibility for environmental degradation, downplaying the severity of climate change, and recklessly casting solutions as too costly or leading toward a slippery slope of tyranny. Here are the types of attacks we found.

Special Report undermines climate science

The overwhelming consensus from scientists, both domestic and abroad, is clear: Warming trends over the past century are extremely likely to be caused by human activities emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In 2007, just two years before Bret Baier took the helm of Fox's flagship news program, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international coalition of scientists who assess peer-reviewed scientific papers to summarize knowledge of the causes of climate change, released a report stating that the “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that oceans and other ecosystems were “being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases.” The report said anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions were “very likely” the cause of global average temperature rise, and it also urged policymakers to consider “a wide variety of policies and instruments” to “create the incentives for mitigation action.” These findings were strengthened in the IPCC's next six-year review in 2013, emphasizing that changes in the climate since the 1950s were “unprecedented over decades to millennia.”

Despite these direct warnings from the world’s scientific experts, Baier’s viewers have heard a different story: Special Report’s coverage of climate change and environmental degradation has flatly denied science, focused on debunked, concocted controversies that attempted to dismantle scientific consensus, and selectively reported cool weather events to dismiss warnings of dire climate change consequences. 

Overall, 14% of the misinformation and misleading or false narratives about climate change spread by Special Report since 2009 have undermined the consensus and conclusions of climate science, with nearly half of that misinformation -- 46% -- occurring within the first three years of Baier's run. In fact, throughout Obama’s first term, Special Report spread two and a half times as many instances of misinformation and false or misleading narratives undermining climate science as it did during Trump’s term.

Within just his first month as anchor, Baier ran a misleading climate segment on January 28, 2009, which cited David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank funded in part by the fossil fuel industry.Kreutzer suggested that scientists were moving to use the term “climate change” instead of “global warming” to distract from cooling trends and make it “easier” to blame humans for natural environmental variation. In February 2010, Baier himself even claimed that “‘global warming,’ the phrase, has been changed really to ‘climate change’ by supporters,” and he hosted current Fox prime-time star Tucker Carlson to lament that “there’s nothing that can’t be explained by the phrase ‘climate change.’” (While Fox News is still undermining climate science by conflating weather patterns with long-term climate disruption, the term “climate change” was actually championed by longtime Republican strategist Frank Luntz in an infamous 2002 memo advising the GOP on how to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that human activity was warming the planet.)

Baier has continued to attack the science of climate change by giving climate skeptics’ opinions equal weight to peer-reviewed scientific consensus. In February 2015, Baier ran a segment that cited a “retired accountant, blogger, and self-described climate historian” who baselessly claimed that climate data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been modified to be “more supportive of those who say the planet is warming and that man is directly responsible.” The segment also cited another Heritage Foundation representative, Nick Loris, who cast doubt on the human-made drivers of climate change and falsely suggested that scientists do not believe policies restricting greenhouse gas emissions would be effective. 

In October 2018, the next IPCC report estimated that human activities have caused approximately 1 degree Celsius of global warming above preindustrial levels, which is already wreaking havoc on communities, causing more extreme weather events and rising oceans. The report also gave a more dire warning of the urgency of climate change, telling policymakers they had as little as 12 years to limit warming to 1.5 C before climate change and the ensuing environmental degradation reach an irreversible tipping point. The report gave special note to a change in the “frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and timing of weather and climate extremes,” yet Baier’s reporting has failed to note the potential impact of climate change on extreme weather events. The program even flatly denied the existence of climate change as recently as February 2019.

Special Report dismissed the IPCC’s warnings once again, and Baier ran a segment in May 2019 that quoted Marc Morano, a fossil fuel industry-funded climate skeptic who has been described as “a central cell of the climate-denial machine.” In the segment, Morano dismissed another U.N. report warning of mass species extinction as “politics, not science.” 

Video file

Citation From the May 6, 2019, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier

Between 2009 and 2021, Morano’s climate denial was highlighted in at least 10 segments on Special Report, similar to his frequent visits on Fox opinion shows such as Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Morano appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight in April of this year, responding to Carlson’s opening question on the Biden infrastructure bill: “How much of this bill is geared not toward cleaning up the environment, which we could badly use, but toward this global warming theory that they have? How much of it is climate-based?” Morano again argued that a focus on climate change was not due to necessity or scientific consensus, but claimed that it was simply a maneuver to accrue political power.

Video file

CitationFrom the April 1, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Special Report's undermining of climate science wasn’t just left to his guests or correspondent segments -- Baier himself recently engaged in the same rhetoric to doubt climate science as a figure from Fox’s opinion side, The Five’s Jesse Watters. On May 3, Watters complained that “the worst part about the whole story” is that “Biden isn’t certain schools are gonna be open this fall, because, you know, he does not have a crystal ball. But at the same breath he says if we don't spend a trillion dollars on green energy, he knows the Earth's temperature, to a degree, in a hundred years. It’s hard to square those.”

Video file

Citation From the May 3, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Five

Baier attempted to make the same point in the next hour, asking why the Biden administration was being cautious in making predictions about school openings while citing scientific unknowns, but “they don’t have that same phrasing when talking about climate change.”

Video file

Citation From the May 3, 2021, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier

Special Report sets up a false conflict between a healthy planet and a thriving economy or misrepresents the efficacy and public demand for climate action and environmental protections

Fox News figures and other right-wing media personalities have often falsely pitted the economy against the environment, demonizing climate solutions as either too expensive or a waste of money that will not bring adequate returns in the green economy, in an effort to justify a lack of congressional action. Special Report’s coverage was no different throughout the last decade, with 29% of the misinformation or misleading narratives that it spread perpetuating that false dichotomy or failing to consider the cost of climate inaction, and 43% misrepresenting the efficacy and public demand for climate action.

Special Report often emphasized the immediate cost of climate solutions while also pushing narratives that depicted environmental regulations as ineffective or decried the supposedly “socialist” implications of climate legislation. Almost one in three of the problematic segments identified by Media Matters -- around 273 -- both undermined the efficacy of climate action and portrayed potential environmental protections as hurting the economy.

Scientists and policy experts have repeatedly warned that transitioning to a clean energy economy -- often incentivized through legislation -- is not only necessary to ensure a livable planet, but will also reduce the price of mitigation after irreversible climate impacts take hold. In 2018, the Fourth National Climate Assessment warned that the “continued warming that is projected to occur without substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions is expected to cause substantial net damage to the U.S. economy throughout this century, especially in the absence of increased adaptation efforts.” Another recently published study in Scientific Reports estimated that the cost of failure to keep warming to a 1.5 C threshold rose “from 1.3 trillion dollars per year of inaction in 2010 to over 5 trillion dollars per year in 2020.”

Yet despite the long-term economic suffering promised by increasingly extreme weather and climate disasters, regional temperature changes reducing crop yields, and environmental degradation reducing tourism and recreation, much of Special Report’s climate coverage since 2009 has been fed by fossil fuel industry talking points emphasizing short-term -- and often biased -- economic costs.

Beginning during the Obama administration, Special Report relentlessly attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, framing its mitigation efforts as executive overreach without regard to the economy. 

In April 2009, then-chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle declared on Special Report that the EPA’s finding that carbon dioxide could be restricted under the Clean Air Act “could hardly be more sweeping because it could affect everything from airliners to lawnmowers and almost every corner of the U.S. economy,” fearmongering that it “has the potential for shutting down or slowing down virtually all economic activity” without mentioning the environmental benefits of the proposed regulations. 

In a June 2011 segment on Special Report, disgraced former Fox correspondent Doug McKelway cited the Heritage Foundation's Nick Loris, who argued that President Obama and then-Commerce Secretary nominee John Bryson's carbon emission reduction policies “are intended to raise energy prices, and lower-income families pay a disproportionately higher percent of their income on energy prices,” resulting in the policies “hurting those people more than helping them.” In reality, Loris was pushing an oversimplified view of carbon pricing legislation. A study by the World Resources Institute found that legislation addressing either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program does not “inherently help or hurt lower-income households.” Its impact depends on how the policy is designed; for example, a small portion of the revenue raised from carbon pricing could be offered as rebates to protect low-income households from increasing energy prices.

A month later, Angle appeared in another segment quoting both Loris, who claimed that the Obama administration’s plan to increase fuel efficiency standards would “be a significant ramp-up,” and the former chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association, who fearmongered that the change would be costly to business and result in hundreds of thousands of job losses. In April 2014, Baier himself responded to the announcement that a federal appeals court upheld stricter emission standards from the EPA by citing complaints from anonymous “state and industry groups'' that the “new limits on toxins” would “cost billions of dollars annually to comply.”

In March 2016, current Fox prime-time host Laura Ingraham appeared on Special Report and mocked people “losing sleep over the environment every night,” declaring that the Obama administration’s environmental regulations were actually “about redistributing wealth and making America poorer.” Baier failed to push back on this absurd framing.

During the Trump administration, however, it became clear that Special Report was complicit in the demise of the network’s “news side,” serving as an echo chamber of misinformation to advance the GOP agenda. In Obama’s first term, Special Report worked to oppose the administration’s efforts to curb climate change, spreading one and a half times more misinformation and false or misleading narratives about than it did during the Trump presidency, when the show championed positive coverage of the short-term economic benefits of rolling back Obama-era regulations. During Trump’s final year in office, Special Report -- seemingly sympathetic to the president’s apathetic stance on the climate -- spread the least amount of misinformation or misleading narratives about climate change during the studied time period, with only 52 instances.

One segment from December 2016 demonstrates how the show used misinformation and dubious claims to pave the way for Trump’s deregulatory agenda. Correspondent James Rosen cited the conservative American Action Forum’s claim that “recent EPA rules on heavy trucks pushed the total regulatory price tag over the next 10 years over the $1 trillion mark,” requiring “every man, woman, and child in our regulation nation to cough up $3,080 a piece to satisfy it.” The heavy trucks regulation in question -- an increase in the fuel efficiency standards -- would ultimately have reduced global warming emissions by 1.1 billion tonnes and saved the trucking industry $170 billion per year. Despite AAF Director of Regulatory Policy Sam Batkins admitting that the group does little research to check whether cost estimates fit reality, Rosen assured viewers that “Mr. Trump has vowed to carry a war of attrition to the regulatory beast.”

Special Report’s focus on the perceived economic disruption and “socialist” implications of climate legislation has dogged Democratic efforts at climate mitigation, demonizing all legislation -- from Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal to the Green New Deal to Biden’s more moderate 2021 climate plan -- as radical attempts to wreak havoc on the American economy and livelihoods. 

Attacking and spreading misinformation about the Green New Deal has been Fox News’ priority for the past two years; when it was first introduced, the network aired far more segments than its cable network counterparts on the proposal. As the flagship program of Fox’s “news” division, Special Report made no effort to differentiate itself from the network’s opinion coverage, with Baier characterizing the deal as “one of the most controversial political manifestos” and suggesting that the expensive price tag would lead to wasteful spending as part of “the Democrats' campaign against the prosperous.” 

In February 2019, Baier hosted Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemmingway to complain that “there is not really a case being made for why you would need to upend your lives, destroy life as you know it, destroy wealth, destroy job opportunities, get rid of massive industries that employ thousands and millions of people, and for what?” Hemingway concluded that polls showing American support for the deal could only be attributed to pollsters asking people if they “want free things,” referring to the Green New Deal’s proposed guaranteed “economic security." Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York dismissed public support for funding the deal, claiming that “the idea that most Americans would think that climate change is a World War II-like crisis is really unlikely.”

Video file

Citation From the February 7, 2019, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier

These pointed attacks on the Green New Deal reflect the rhetoric often espoused on Fox opinion shows, such as by Sean Hannity, who referenced the Green New Deal in relation to Biden on April 20, 2020, claiming that “there are no moderates in today's radical, extreme Democratic socialist party.” In July 2020, Hannity lambasted Biden for “taking his cues from the most radical, the most extreme socialist extremist that this party has ever embraced, the Democratic modern socialist party.” Hannity then complained about the price tag of the climate proposal, exclaiming that it would “turn America into a socialist, bankrupt hellhole.”

Baier did not push back in January after Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel used language similar to Hannity’s rants to attack the incoming Biden administration and the climate bill, stating that she would not “cede our country to the far left who want to turn toward socialism, institute the Green New Deal, and remake America as we know it.”

Video file

Citation From the July 14, 2020, edition of Hannity

Special Report fuels nationalistic and misleading narratives opposing global climate efforts

Efforts to prevent and counter the worst consequences of global climate change have to be negotiated at the international level and require unprecedented cooperation between countries in order to succeed. But in covering those efforts, such as the U.S. signing on to the Paris climate agreement under Obama, Baier and his guests on Special Report insteadechoed isolationist narratives to undermine global mitigation efforts. Like Fox opinion-side personalities, they suggested that international mitigation efforts are detrimental to the U.S. economy, that they favor China and India over America, and that global cooperation would fail to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Statements that fueled these nationalistic and misleading narratives opposed to global climate efforts constituted 8% of the total misinformation and false narratives spread on Special Report during the studied time period.

In an appearance on Special Report in December 2009, the late conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer repeated one of the most prevalent talking points used to oppose climate action, suggesting that an international climate agreement would “mean a serious constriction of the U.S. economy, a lowering of our standard of living.” This claim is false and driven by a flailing fossil fuel industry attempting to distract from its own “terminal decline” by scapegoating climate mitigation efforts. 

This line of attack was echoed on the network’s opinion side as recently as this year, when climate denier Marc Morano appeared on the January 21 episode of Fox & Friends First to claim that rejoining the Paris agreement is “climate virtue signaling” that will “hammer middle America, blue-collar America, [and] Americans on middle class and lower income.” In reality, committing to Paris emission reductions and building a 100% clean energy economy would create up to 25 million well-paid American jobs, and clean energy jobs are “more likely to be unionized and come with health care and retirement benefits than the rest of the private sector.”

In a May 2014 appearance on Special Report, Krauthammer pushed the idea that international agreements, specifically the Paris climate accord, would benefit China at the expense of American prosperity because China lacked a legally binding commitment to emissions reductions. Krauthammer stated, “As we dismantle the coal plants in our country, China and India together are adding one coal fire plant every other week. The net effect is to shift the U.S. coal energy generating industry from here to India and China. It will have zero effect.”

This argument was repeated on the May 31, 2017, edition of Fox & Friends, when Fox Business host Stuart Varney denigrated the Paris climate accord as an “unequal” agreement meant to “take money and resources off Europe and America” to “give it to other countries,” including China. More recently, Fox opinion host Laura Ingraham expanded upon this argument in April, characterizing global cooperation on climate as tentative at best, with each nation pursuing “what’s in its best interest.” Ingraham then dismissed Biden’s “grand” climate plans as ineffective for failing to reduce global temperatures “at all.”

These are bad-faith arguments and they do not account for the fact that not only has the U.S. caused more global warming than any other country and maintains the higher per capita emissions rates, but it also lags behind China on substantive commitments to renewable energy and technology. Furthermore, climate change and its disruptions transcend national borders and are intrinsically linked to the public health, socioeconomic well-being, and growth of every nation.

In yet another appearance on Special Report in May 2017 dismissing the impact of Trump’s promise to pull out of the Paris accord, Krauthammer advanced the argument that U.S. participation in the “extremely weak” agreement was inconsequential, and he claimed it only made a “marginal difference” if “we are in it or out of it.” This sentiment on climate policy efficacy was also echoed this year on Fox’s opinion side by Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg on the January 21 edition of Fox & Friends. He argued that rejoining the Paris agreement would “cost a fortune and cut almost nothing, so basically achieve almost nothing to fix climate change.”

These arguments exploit legitimate concerns of the Paris agreement --that measures agreed to at the accord will not be enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius -- not to garner support for the strengthening of global commitments, but to gripe about the inherent complexities of any global treaty and ultimately erode support for addressing the climate crisis on any level. Despite Paris’ shortcomings, the U.S.’s participation in the agreement — as the second biggest greenhouse gas emitter — represented a critical step toward global climate mitigation. As international markets transition toward clean energy, it is imperative that the United States can advocate for American jobs and workers. Moreover, global emissions reductions work -- in 2016, global emissions flat-lined for the third year in a row even as the global economy grew, partly because the U.S. and China cut their emissions.

Special Report undermines the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis

Baier and his guests made statements that undermined the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis in more than 5% of Special Report’s misinformation and false or misleading narratives around climate change.

These bad-faith arguments have also come from Fox’s opinion side, which has framed the idea of addressing climate change as requiring personal sacrifice from individual viewers. Special Report suggested climate-conscious consumers should not own pets, should limit their hamburger intake, should accept rougher toilet paper, and should feel guilt for using water at hotels or pumping gas for their car. These segments’ reckless linking of personal consumer choices to environmental protection lets the real culprits -- the 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions -- escape responsibility for the worst impacts of climate change, while discouraging popular support for climate action.

Special Report also followed Fox’s signature strategy of focusing on some prominent people’s actions to deflect from those individuals’ concerns about the climate, using charges of hypocrisy as a smokescreen for climate inaction. Baier dedicated segments to personal carbon footprints, pointing to Obama traveling to an Earth Day rally; first lady Michelle Obama flying to Copenhagen to advocate for Chicago to host the Olympics; Prince Charles encouraging environmental awareness; Hillary Clinton traveling during her presidential campaign; and, most recently, Biden administration climate envoy John Kerry using a private jet.

On the February 4 edition of Special Report, correspondent Kristin Fisher noted that Kerry was “not necessarily leading by example by taking a private plane to Iceland to accept an environmental award.” Later in the episode, Fox contributor Byron York said that “he's got a government plane now, and you don't marry into a billionaire family if you want to fly commercial.”

This coverage on Fox’s flagship “straight news” show echoed a line of attacks on Kerry from Fox’s opinion hosts, such as Sean Hannity’s January 28 statement that “it’s almost as if John Kerry isn’t that concerned about the environment after all” and Tucker Carlson’s February 3 accusation that Kerry was being “hypocritical.” These personal attacks and red herring arguments serve dual roles -- to villainize and discredit specific activists while trivializing the urgency of the climate crisis. It is a well-worn tactic, as demonstrated by Special Report, that is used across the network’s opinion and “straight news” programming.] GORE TENN HOUSE]

Video file

CitationFrom the January 28, 2021, edition of Fox News' Hannity

Video file

CitationFrom the February 3, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Conclusion

Climate scientists have overwhelmingly warned for years that unless immediate action is taken to address the climate crisis, irreversible environmental consequences will impact every aspect of our daily lives -- ranging from an exacerbated refugee crisis to devastating economic impacts to irreversible environmental degradation.

The stakes for news media to cover this issue seriously and responsibly could not be higher as Biden attempts to simultaneously reestablish United States' leadership in global mitigation and advocate for bold climate legislation, while the deadline to limit global warming to 1.5 C draws closer.

Yet climate coverage on Special Report with Bret Baier has been characterized by blatantly false, biased, and desperate attempts to undermine climate change action and environmental protections. Ultimately, Special Report is another extension of Fox News’ climate denial machine, serving to sow misinformation and doubt to defend the politicians who actively prevent any climate mitigation.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the Nexis database for Fox News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier for any of the terms and any derivations of the terms climate change, global warming, climate, global temperatures, climate science, climate scientist, Paris climate, climate accord, Paris accord, climate agreement, Paris agreement, climate deal, climate crisis, environment, Environmental Protection Agency, green new deal, climate conference, climate plan, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, green, Keystone Pipeline, Dakota Pipeline, or energy from January 1, 2009, through May 3, 2021.

We included any segment when climate change or environmental protection was the stated topic of discussion...

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wiki BS

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ref 13

https://www.heritage.org/commentary/the-left-wing-echo-chamber

town hall, daily signal

death threats. Harassing phone calls. Threatening e-mails. Such was a day in the life of Drew Johnson a few weeks ago.

His crime? Johnson is president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a free-market think tank that broke one of the juiciest stories of 2007. A day after the Academy Awards, on Feb. 26, Johnson's organization reported details of Al Gore's enormous utility bill. The former vice president had consumed nearly 221,000 kilowatt hours of electricity in a single year -- more than 20 times the national average.

The story skyrocketed to the top headline on the Drudge Report, sending tens of thousands of visitors to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research's Web site. With Gore facing charges of hypocrisy just a day after winning an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth," the news traveled fast.

Unfortunately for Johnson, it meant enduring days of attacks from liberals -- even though the facts of the story came directly from public records.

Last week he visited Washington, D.C., to share his story. Johnson told a group of conservative bloggers at The Heritage Foundation that he heard from hundreds of angry callers, many of whom used profane language. The research center's vice president, whose phone number was listed on the Web page, eventually had to change her number when the attacks became so persistent and threatening.

The phone blitz was only one avenue liberals used to intimidate. Johnson said his organization received thousands of e-mails, the vast majority of them negative and hate-filled.

Shortly after the story made headlines, popular liberal blogs Daily Kos and Huffington Post, laid out their plan of attack. A blogger called NeuvoLiberal wrote on Daily Kos, "please post any specific (action oriented) ideas you have for fighting back…. We'd like to target every person out there that is spinning in various rightwing and other outlet for this kind of smear job (the damage is done before you wake and smell the coffee)."

Over at Huffington Post, bloggers Dave Johnson and James Boyce issued another call to action: "Al Gore is a hero. Even heroes need help - join us, add to the comments, let's find out everything we can about these guys and stop them in their tracks. Now."

Their pleas were answered. Liberal blog Think Progress led the way with 655 comments on a post about the Gore story. Daily Kos was close behind with 481 comments. And 125 comments are attached to the Johnson-Boyce call-to-action post.

All this added up to one giant headache for Drew Johnson, who didn't know where to turn to respond to the attacks being lodged at him personally, his employees and the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.While the initial Gore story received favorable coverage from conservative bloggers, these same people were silent when liberals began to distort the record.

One of the most outrageous charges, Johnson said, had to do with his background. The liberal "watchdog" Media Matters dug into Johnson's past, noting that he had been a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. Since ExxonMobil has contributed to AEI, that bit of information was enough for Media Matters to assert that Johnson was bought and paid for by ExxonMobil. Immediately, the liberal echo chamber began to hype the allegation, though Johnson swiftly denied it.Johnson had merely interned at AEI.Neither he nor the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has ever received money from ExxonMobil. But that didn't stop MSNBC's Keith Olbermann fromplaying up the mythical connection.Instead of backing down and retreating, the episode has inspired Johnson. His three days of meetings in the nation's capital introduced him to a wider network of contacts and left him eager to help build a network of bloggers who could defend conservatives under attack.

He has also hired an investigative reporter to produce more stories similar to the one about Gore -- an unorthodox tactic for a think tank. But Johnson said sometimes that's what it takes to discover the truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be for him personally.

Robert Bluey is Director of the Center for Media & Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

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ref 14 note no specific evidence of death threats, whilst others are quoted

no lnx

https://www.nationalreview.com/2007/04/wheres-tolerance-deroy-murdock/

National Review

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POLITICS & POLICY

Where’s the Tolerance?

By DEROY MURDOCK

April 9, 2007

Hateful reactions from the Left.

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research (TCPR) recently generated headlines when it announced that former Vice President Al Gore’s Nashville estate “devoured nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours” of electricity in 2006, “more than 20 times the national average.” This free-market think tank’s phones lit up when it analyzed Nashville Electric Service’s public records and identified an inconvenient gap between Gore’s conservationism and his energy consumption. TCPR’s one-page press release was greeted with enough megawatts of hatred to power the South.

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“I was accused several times of being a ‘stupid, redneck bitch,’” recalls TCPR’s vice president Nicole Williams, who fielded numerous calls. “I repeatedly was called a ‘whore’ and asked ‘Whose whore are you?’ for three days straight, almost as if those were talking points… I was shocked by these sexist insults — basically attacking my gender.”

‘I believe very strongly that if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl,’ Governor Kay Ivey said.

The calls continued beyond Williams’s Nashville office.

“I had to change my home number and get an unlisted number,” Williams tells me. “I got about 10 death threats by phone that made an impression on me. I got the ‘I’m gonna get you’-type threats more than 100 times…I was worried that I would get shot walking to my car.” Williams discovered her obsolete address posted online. “If they could find my old home address, it would not be so hard to find a current one.”

Gore’s defenders also spewed venomous e-mails. They sent TCPR nearly 3,000 Gore-related messages that exhibited the very bigotry the Left routinely denounces. Warning: These offensive, often-vulgar, and occasionally unschooled comments reveal the vitriol behind much of today’s “progressive” rhetoric.

‐ Many e-mails displayed Dixiephobia — an intense disdain for the south and southerners.

After TCPR President Drew Johnson discussed his story on cable news, Kevin Lafferty objected: “Johnson said Gore’s home has gas lamps lining his driveway, a heated pool and an electric gate — all of which would be easy to do without. Well sure, that’s easy enough for you to say when you live in a frickin mobile home in Tennessee, eh Johnson?”

“F**k you, and for that matter, f**k Tennessee,” wrote Thomas Brown. “I’ll never go there again.”

“Why don’t you all go back to shooting one another across the hollows instead of trying to make people think anyone in Tennessee has an ounce of intelligence?” Roger Miller insisted. “Or better yet, get your snaggle tooth grins capped and learn to read and write…Someone who’s traveled the world here, and never ever wants to even fly across your state again.”

“W.T.F. difference would it make if he was [sic] using 1000 times more energy than the average household if it came from clean energy?” Thomas Grinnell wondered. “Don’t think about that too much. It will give your southern mullet a headache.”

“You really should concentrate on what Southerners do best,” D. Hunter advised. “Sodomizing and impregnating little children!”

“You are the most despicable and pathetic types of people of all time,” Christopher LaBarge declared. “I hope you all die slowly and have your hearts and brains trampled to pieces you small-minded, ignorant, backwoods ideologues.”

“GO-F–K-YOURSELVES! GO-F–K-YOURSELVES! GO-F**K-YOURSELVES! GO-F**K-YOURSELVES!”

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“Well it’s like I’ve always said, ‘we should have flattened the South when we had the chance!” wrote Mount Laurel, New Jersey’s Robert Dodelin. “If ever you confederates [sic] want to leave the Union please do. We Nothen [sic] states would love to stop having to subsidize you with our tax dollars.”

This anti-southernism mystifies TCPR’s Johnson.

“Some people must believe the Mason-Dixon Line runs between our office and Gore’s mansion,” Johnson says. “No one would call Gore a redneck, but when we uncovered his hypocritical energy use, it somehow made me a sister-dating hillbilly. That’s quite amusing, since Gore and I live in Nashville, less than five miles apart.”

‐ Some e-mails, like Benjamin Greuel’s, reflected anti-religious bias: “Go f**k yourselves you neo con, non-secular, bible thumpin, anti-science dumb f**k pricks.” Similarly, Anthony Black wrote:

You bunch of stupid hick red-necks. I am sure you are quite religious, yet you have no problem destroying His creation with pollution; and, rather than addressing that, you cast dispersions [sic] on Al Gore’s home energy use. Absurd.

Seriously, find one of those nice Tennessee hardwoods, get a nice stick from it, and stick it up your white-bread ignorant a**.

Have a nice day, you ignorant red-neck.

‐ “How about you have a do [sic] humanity a favor and have a stroke,” Russ Smith recommended. “You silly metrosexual twit, need some more hi-lites in your hair?”

Another gay-hater wrote: “You guys are the faggiest fags I’ve ever come across. How do you get any work done, what with all the c**k sucking and such?”

“Keep licking Bush and Cheney’s privates,” Burton Ogle suggested. “Your time is up and we’re moving you’re a**es out.”

‐ Two e-mails feature chillingly violent imagery.

“You people are such slime,” T. J. Williams noted. “You are a total waste of skin and air. Help the environment and jump off a cliff.”

Bob Beaver urged: “Find a hole and stick a knife in it.”

Such anti-intellectual intimidation reflects the high-octane hate that fuels so much Leftist discourse. Rather than simply argue that Johnson, Williams, and their colleagues are misguided or misinformed about global warming, these bullies call them barefoot, same-sex-loving, Winchester-wielding whores, and evangel-yokels. Remember this whenever liberals crow about diversity, tolerance, and open-mindedness.

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