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sparked by EID BS:

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Senior Politics & Polling Editor, RealClearPolitics

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More Terror Suspects Reaching the US: Here Are ‘Known Unknowns’ of the Border Crisis | The Epoch Times

james-varney-a0651b131

Mandeville, Louisiana,

Former Staff writer at The Times of Trenton

Went to The Lawrenceville School

Jerry Rogers

Editor, RealClearPolicy

Nathan Harden

Editor, RealClearEducation

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The Epoch Times

More Terror Suspects Reaching the US: Here Are ‘Known Unknowns’ of the Border Crisis

U.S. Border Patrol agents cut an opening in razor wire at the U.S.-Mexico border early in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Sept. 29, 2023. (John Moore/Getty Images)

James Varney

RealClearInvestigations

By James Varney and RealClearInvestigations

11/2/2023

Updated:

11/6/2023

News Analysis

Hundreds of people on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist have almost certainly slipped into the United States amid millions of other illegal immigrants during the past three years, according to former federal officials and experts.

“You have to be extremely naïve to not be significantly concerned about this,” said Rodney Scott, chief of U.S. Border Patrol from 2020 to 2021. “Regardless of what the Biden administration may claim, what it said during the campaign and the executive orders taken in January 2021 have been interpreted around the world as ‘The border is open.’ You’re insane if you don’t think terrorists will use that to their advantage.”

In the aftermath of Hamas’s terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, President Joe Biden, without mentioning the border, told “60 Minutes” that the threat the United States could face from terrorists in the country had escalated.

Although the terrorist threat linked to the border crisis is impossible to quantify, some experts find the available numbers alarming. During President Biden’s first three years in office, a record-shattering 6.5 million-plus immigrants have been “encountered” by border authorities. That pace is increasing: The most recent monthly figures, September’s, showed another record number of monthly encounters—269,735.

At the same time, federal officials have seen an alarming increase in border crossers listed on the U.S. Terror Screening Dataset, the official name for what is commonly called the “terrorist watchlist.”

pdate, March 2024:

Tuberculosis Cases Are Surging in California, Newsweek

Chicago Evicts Migrants as Measles Cases Spread, Fox News

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigations

December 27, 2023

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

Vaccination in Pakistan, one of two countries where polio is still endemic. The other is Afghanistan, source of an estimated 90,000 taken into the U.S. since America's chaotic 2021 withdrawal.

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: “The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.”

RCP

“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.

And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.

Neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the Department of Homeland Security would discuss the issue with RealClearInvestigations. Legal immigrants are required to receive vaccinations for a host of diseases, but the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged it does not have vaccination records for the millions who have entered the U.S. since the Biden administration relaxed border controls upon taking office in January 2021.

“It’s not like there is some Typhoid Mary out there, but this is something people are seeing and thinking about, even if they don’t want to discuss it publicly,” said Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the Biden administration’s border policies.

"Operation Allies Welcome" in Idaho: some of the 90,000 Afghan arrivals from a polio-afflicted land.

The reticence of federal agencies has not stopped some local officials, however, from raising public health alarms over massive immigration. New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan warned in April that at least half of the migrants who have poured into the city had not been vaccinated against polio. The potentially paralyzing and life-threatening virus remains endemic in two countries in the world, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the World Health Organization. Since President Biden ordered what proved to be a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, an estimated 90,000 Afghans have come to the U.S. under the terms of Operation Allies Welcome.

Ashwin Vasan, New York City Health Commissioner: Half of migrants are not vaccinated against polio.

publichealth.columbia.edu

It is not clear if those migrants met the polio vaccination requirement. DHS did not respond to a question about whether medical histories were reviewed in the fast-tracked entry of Afghans who got out of their country before the Taliban reimposed its control.

Vasan’s warning pointed directly to the southern border, which has seen record-shattering arrivals on the Biden administration’s watch.

“More than 50,000 people have come to New York City in the past year shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border,” he wrote in an 11-page letter. “I am writing now to underscore how critical it is that health care providers take a wide range of considerations into account when working with people who are seeking asylum.”

Citing outbreaks of chickenpox in shelters for illegal immigrants, Vasan also noted the arrival of newcomers who either began their journey in a country where tuberculosis is present or passed through such countries en route to the U.S.

The New York City Health Department did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations or to a request to speak with Dr. Vasan, but the numbers have only grown since he sent his letter. Since spring 2022, more than 100,000 migrants had arrived in the city, and more than 67,200 were living in taxpayer-funded housing at the end of November, according to the New York Times.

Poster girl, 1957: The poliovirus, long extinct in the U.S, is again being monitored by federal health authorities, via wastewater testing.

March of Dimes Foundation

Last year, the first recorded polio case in the U.S. since 2013 was diagnosed in New York State, with the victim described only as an “unvaccinated man.”Also in 2022, poliovirus was found in the water supply of four New York counties, including Long Island, and New York City. Another positive test result was recorded in Rockland County this year, according to the state.

In the U.S., polio vaccinations remain part of “the routine childhood immunization process” under which the CDC recommends four doses. Adults who grew up in the U.S. are vaccinated, the agency said.

The last occurrence prior to the New York diagnosis had been in 1979. Since November 2022, the CDC has begun wastewater testing for the poliovirus, so long extinct in the U.S., in selected areas, but the agency did not respond to questions about those investigations. It does provide information on COVID and monkeypox, the latter a disease that primarily afflicts the gay population.

A thorough investigation, exploring all avenues of transmission and trying to source a virus to its root, is common among virus hunters, and the idea that millions of people coming to the U.S. could inadvertently carry with them some infectious disease is but one possibility. For example, thus far researchers have been unable to pinpoint where the infamous Ebola virus originates in equatorial Africa.

'Historically Atypical Countries'

The situation in the United States is further complicated by the fact that DHS officials don’t know where all of the more than 7.5 million migrants who’ve arrived since Biden took office are living. Those whom Border Patrol agents have encountered and processed have immigration court dates, but those dates areyears in advance. Many people with uncertain immigration status lack health insurance and stay off the grid as much as possible, meaning even if the U.S. launched some kind of vaccination program it would not know where to concentrate its efforts.

In addition, the historic flood of illegal immigration during the Biden administration has also featured a much more global population. DHS uses the term “historically atypical countries” to describe the panoply of countries outside of Mexico and Central America from which illegal immigration has soared. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of annual encounters involving immigrants from historically atypical countries soared from fewer than 8,000 to almost 1 million. The first six months of 2023 saw more than half of official encounters – these numbers do not include what Border Patrol calls “gotaways” for whom little information is available – from historically atypical countries. But infectious diseases largely forgotten in the U.S. remain public health issues in both hemispheres, and many of those nations have much less robust vaccination programs than most modern Western nations.

Ancient scourge: Leprosy victim, 24, in a medical monograph, circa 1886.

Pierre Arents/Wikimedia

In 1988, when the World Health Organization launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, wild poliovirus was evident in 125 countries, but the zone where it remains endemic has shrunk to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with most recent cases occurring along the countries’ nearly 1,600-mile border, according to the CDC. Vaccination campaigns have proved problematic under the militant Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, according to the CDC. Oral vaccines in “parts of the south and northeast regions” are “allowed only at health facilities, mosques, and polio vaccination sites.”

In March, Al Jazeera reported that the Taliban would allow a polio vaccination program for children, but precise figures on the country’s overall vaccination rate remain unclear. The World Health Organization estimates that 76% of Afghanistan’s children have received a polio vaccine.

But some countries have even lower vaccination rates. On Nov. 30, for instance, some 700 people, including many from Senegal and Nigeria, walked into the U.S. at the Texas border. Only 63% of Senegal’s children have been vaccinated for polio, and various fevers, hepatitis, and malaria are endemic there. Measles, which the U.S. declared eliminated here in 2000, are an issue, too. The WHO estimates 22 million children missed their first measles vaccine last year and more than half of them live in just 10 countries, all of which fall in the “historically atypical” immigration list.

Ashley St. Clair, conservative commentator: “All the pilots, airline staff, and passengers want to know is: what medical screenings are being done?”

Measles cases have risen in the U.S., from 13 individual cases in 2020 to 121 in 2022, according to the CDC. Recent outbreaks in Ohio and Illinois have all occurred among unvaccinated children, according to state health officials. The age and nationality of victims is not made public, but the measles vaccination rate is below 70% in many countries that have sent immigrants to the U.S. recently.

While few are publicly pushing the panic button, some public health officials worry that a creeping mistrust of vaccines in the wake of the pandemic may make more Americans vulnerable to dangerous and even deadly scourges. Syphilis, for example, has been on the rise for many years but rose sharply during the pandemic.

COVID-19 has drawn the lion’s share of attention from the public health bureaucracy since 2020, leading to shortfalls in other areas, some experts said.

“All of these diseases are more prevalent in part because of lockdown policies which diverted public health resources and attention worldwide away from its traditional priorities of controlling the spread of these deadly infectious conditions,” Dr. Bhattacharya said, referring to measles and other maladies.

And just as there is no cure for polio, there is no vaccine for some infectious diseases. Malaria, for example, the mosquito-borne fever that killed more workers than yellow fever did when the Panama Canal was built, remains endemic in tropical zones, and its path to rare outbreaks in the U.S. usually follows either a trip made abroad or someone moving here, according to health officials in Florida.

Department spokesman Jae Williams told RCI the exact sources of many infectious disease outbreaks in the Sunshine State remain unknown, but the huge increase in illegal immigrants could be a clue.

“It’s always a possibility, and our most recent malaria cases appeared to be a strain from Central America,” he said. In other words, the malaria could have been brought by a newcomer or picked up by someone who traveled there and returned.

Central Florida this summer saw leprosy return, although the exact source remains a mystery, Williams said. Information about the age, sex, and nationality of victims is not public, and most of those who contracted the infectious, skin-disfiguring disease were described only as “landscapers.” Various accounts have speculated armadillos are to blame, but armadillos are not newcomers to the region. The theory holds that somehow the leprosy bacteria, which generally requires prolonged contact and against which most humans have developed immunity over millennia, is in the dirt armadillos wallow in, and the cases that broke out among landscapers then would be linked to the animals they encounter.

But leprosy is not endemic in Florida. It is most common in parts of southeast Asia, equatorial Africa, and Brazil.

“The influx of people, sure it’s a problem and it’s always a possibility,” Williams said. “But we don’t really know.”

Nevertheless, the questions are being asked with more frequency. On Dec. 19, Ashley St. Clair, a conservative commentator, set off a firestorm on X, formerly Twitter, that her Delta flight from Phoenix to New York was filled with people who had recently been processed, released, and brought to the airport by Border Patrol.

“All the pilots, airline staff, and passengers want to know is: what medical screenings are being done?” she wrote.

Delta did not respond to questions from RCI about what knowledge it had been provided about its passengers.

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not actually rci, just came up in ggl srch

https://mfgaccountabilityproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/MAP-Beyond-the-Courtroom-FINAL.pdf?cs-from=6abe546d-7abf-4894-a455-d6c548bd14f3

https://mfgaccountabilityproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/MAP-Beyond-the-Courtroom-FINAL.pdf

54 pp

Climate litigation in the United States has been a nearly 20 year-old effort to turn climate change into a tort litigation issue, not a matter of national energy policy. The litigation campaign has garnered a great deal of media attention, and lawyers continue to pursue plaintiffs to file claims. But every court to consider the substantive merits of these cases, including the U.S. Supreme Court, has rejected them. As these courts have explained, producing and selling energy people need and use every day is neither unlawful nor a public nuisance, and therefore, not a liability concern.

Climate change is a global challenge that needs to be addressed, but this litigation is neither a viable legal option nor productive to bringing about meaningful progress. So, why are these public nuisance lawsuits still being pursued? In short, this litigation is driven by politics and profit. In Beyond the Courtroom, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project follows this political and money trail. After providing a look back at the first round of climate litigation in the early 2000s, the report focuses on the re-launch of these cases in 2017, who has been funding this litigation campaign and how they have recruited cities, counties, state attorneys general and a private industry group as plaintiffs. As the report shows, a handful of nonprofit foundations are providing money to law firms and public relations consultants to generate the litigation. Their goals are to use media attention from the lawsuits to drive the debate on climate public policies and harm energy manufacturers and their supporters politically by publicly blaming them for climate change.

For these parties, winning the litigation is secondary, though the lawyers have secured huge contingency fees in hopes of generating personal wealth from a successful outcome in these cases. This report is designed to serve as a resource for reporters and others following the litigation. The information contained within is well-sourced and contains several previously unreported revelations.

Chapter One provides an overview of the climate litigation campaign, tracing its history and focusing on the key organizations and plaintiffs’ attorneys active in environmental litigation. This chapter also provides an explanation for why these lawsuits have been unsuccessful. The original climate tort lawsuit, American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut (AEP), reached the United States Supreme Court where the Justices unanimously decided that such cases were beyond the judiciary’s purview.

Chapter Two delves into the complex web of organizations that are driving the litigation. The law firms representing the plaintiffs’ in these cases rely on this tightly knit network of academics, foundations and activists to assist with the legal research and generate media attention for the litigation. Although they present themselves as a grassroots movement, as this report shows, they are actually highly coordinated and funded by the same sources.

Chapter Three details the organizations and media outlets operating as the public relations arm of the climate litigation campaign. Their objective is to normalize for political leaders the idea that suing energy manufacturers is an appropriate way to help combat climate change and then to leverage the lawsuits to associate blame with the energy companies.

Chapter Four describes how plaintiffs’ attorneys have traveled the United States to try to convince municipalities and other entities to hire them to file these lawsuits. Trying to get manufacturers to pay for local infrastructure projects aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change may seem appealing to municipalities, but history shows that they are unlikely to succeed and that the litigation could result in wasted time, resources and taxpayer money.

Chapter Five explains the use of contingency-fee arrangements and other financing mechanisms as the plaintiffs’ lawyers seek life-changing wealth from the litigation—all while getting paid by the foundations to bring the litigation in the first place.

Finally, Chapter Six discusses the flawed public nuisance legal arguments, the true motives of the proponents behind the climate litigation and how such lawsuits are often contradictory to their advocates’ asserted goals. This litigation and the efforts to expand public nuisance law are of concern to all manufacturers—not just energy manufacturers. First, energy is critical to manufacturing. Second, all manufacturers are at risk of getting caught up in this public nuisance litigation trend. If one of these lawsuits succeeds, activists and plaintiffs’ lawyers will no doubt target many other manufacturers for these ill-conceived lawsuit...

concl:

There is a disconnect between this rhetorical and the legal claims. For starters, their own pleadings undermine this argument. The pleadings detail broader societal knowledge dating back to the Johnson Administration in the 1960s about climate change, its causes and its impacts. Thus, they acknowledge the U.S. Government, United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and world scientific community had the same or greater knowledge as the manufacturers. In addition, the lawyers are telling the judges that they are not seeking to change the companies’ promotion and sales of fossil fuels. The Rhode Island complaint demonstrates this hypocrisy perfectly. It states that the companies should be liable over “the extraction of raw fossil fuel products . . .; the refining and marketing of those fossil fuel products; and the placement of those fossil fuel products into the stream of commerce.”

But, then says the State is not seeking to “restrain Defendants from engaging in their business operations.” So which is it? Is promoting and selling these fuels unlawful, thereby giving rise to liability? Or, are these actions lawful and can continue? The litigants are trying to have it both ways. In an effort to message this inconsistency, New York City’s lawsuit downplays the allegations of wrongdoing, stating in its briefs that the energy manufacturers should be liable for global climate change merely because their products cause climate change.499 The city suggests the companies should be allowed to continue promoting and selling energy so long as they pay for the damages caused.500 However, the notion that a person or a company can be liable for lawful, reasonable conduct is a non-starter. What this lawsuit is trying to do is impose—not enforce—a penalty on carbon, which is a decision that must be made in Congress or federal agencies, not the courts.

Only the other branches can determine whether to impose such a penalty, how much it should be and what should be done with the funds collected. Judge Alsup, who dismissed the San Francisco and Oakland cases, pointed out this tension.He noted that in the pleadings, plaintiffs’ counsel seemed to limit liability to those who had promoted allegedly phony science to deny climate change.501 But at oral argument, plaintiffs’ counsel said any such promotion remained merely a “plus factor.”502 Vic Sher has clearly made the strategic decision to double down on the demonization message, both publicly and in court. In arguing before the Ninth Circuit in the Oakland and San Francisco cases, Sher suggested that the energy manufacturers can be blamed for climate change because only they—and not the government— knew of the potential impact fossil fuels have on the climate. That simply is not true—even according to his clients’ own pleadings, which detail the government’s knowledge about climate change back to the 1960s. Also, in the Juliana case, the Ninth Circuit found that the federal government has been aware of the relevant climate science theories since at least President Johnson’s administration in 1965. Even beyond the lawsuits, the allegations have demonstrated no legal merit. In 2015, the climate activists, following up on another La Jolla strategy, sought to get their friends in government to “delegitimize” the companies, their workers and supporters as political actors.503

They met with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey to pursue enforcement actions over the alleged misrepresentations. First, the SEC dropped all of its charges.504 Next, the New York attorney general’s case fell apart entirely. The justice hearing it called the allegations of deceit, fraud and other misrepresentations “hyperbolic.”505 Before trial, the justice weeded out the most incendiary claims, and after trial, the New York attorney general’s office withdrew all of its fraud claims.

The justice confirmed this fact, stating, “ExxonMobil would not have been held liable on any fraud-related claims.”506 In ruling for ExxonMobil, the justice noted that the company turned over millions of documents and there were no material concerns. Again, repeating false accusations does not make them true. But climate activists and litigants continue to try to get judges and the public to buy into their mischaracterizations, regardless of how inconsistent they are. As discussed, their goal is to leverage lawsuits for political gain, with demonizing energy manufacturers central to that effort.

Conclusion These contradictions are the most pronounced inconsistencies in the climate litigation campaign, underscoring the weaknesses of the legal cases. As the La Jolla report shows, this litigation was never about winning in court, but leveraging the media surrounding litigation to achieve political reform. They want to “delegitimize,” “weaken,” and “bring down” energy manufacturers.507,508,509 They also, asDavid Bookbinder of the Niskanen Center said, want to control the public’s consumption of fuels by making fuels more expensive: “Given that companies are agents of consumers, however, holding companies responsible is to hold oil consumers responsible.”510 Rather than subjecting consumers—every person, business and government—to these reckless and baseless lawsuits, they should go back to the other option discussed in La Jolla and collaborate with manufacturers oninnovations needed to source and use energy more efficiently. Collaboration and innovation, not litigation, are the only ways to mitigate climate change.

notes start p 36

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pro disinfo

https://nypost.com/2021/12/14/hypocrisy-of-media-censors-claim-to-be-against-misinformation/

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shillenberger

https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2020/6/29/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare

no lnx

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

The author in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995]

Lire en français ici. Leer en español aquí.

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level

We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California.In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputationand career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

:{:{}:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”

Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes,Apocalypse Nevercovers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress

The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land

The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium

100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%

We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities

Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%

Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did

“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions

Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon

The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

Why were we all so misled?

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism

Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.

Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.

The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.

The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.

Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.

The invitations from IPCC and Congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. "Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.

I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

---

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/03/washington-post-wants-facebook-to-shut-down-pj-media-and-others-for-climate-denial-n1529542

pj media r spencer

no lnx [banner about silence rt so give us $ radical agenda bs?]

while the Washington Post piously reminds us that “democracy dies in darkness,” it’s busy shooting out the lights: On Tuesday it published a lengthy call to Facebook to shut down dissident media, including PJ Media, because, you see, the non-Leftist publications are daring to spread “climate change denial” on the platform. Not just democracy, but also the freedom of speech will die in darkness if the Post gets its way.

The Post article focuses upon a newly published study from one of the endless stream of far-Left advocacy groups masquerading as think tanks, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which the Post hastens to assure us is a nonprofit. Of course. What else could it possibly be called?

Disagree with the Leftist establishment about the causes of and/or remedies for climate change, and what else could possibly be your motivation but “hate”? You don’t want to see your country voluntarily impoverish itself and empower the People’s Republic of China in service of unproven assumptions and selective application of accountability? Come on, man! You’re just a bigot!

The CCDH study supposedly shows that “10 publishers, including RT and the Federalist Papers, are responsible for nearly 70 percent of interactions with climate change misinformation on the platform.”The CCDH has labeled these publishers the “Toxic Ten,” and they comprise virtually all of the major dissident platforms operating today: Breitbart, the Western Journal, Newsmax, the Media Research Center, the Washington Times, the Federalist Papers, the Daily Wire, and the Patriot Post, along with Russian State Media (what’s a Leftist conspiracy theory these days without the Russians) and of course Townhall Media, including PJ Media, Townhall, Red State, and Twitchy.

These publications, the Post claims, put out “a broad range of climate disinformation, including articles that undermine the existence or impacts of climate change or misrepresent data in ways that might erode trust in climate science experts.” They’re out there exercising the freedom of speech, utterly heedless of the looming apocalypse: “The study comes amid increasing political concern about the catastrophic impact of climate change, as global leaders gather in Glasgow for the United Nations-brokered COP26, described as the last chance for nations to hammer out a unified plan to significantly cut greenhouse gases.”

The Post hopes that the CCDH report will put an end to all that and bring about still more ideological conformity on Facebook: “While the report doesn’t provide a comprehensive look at all misleading climate change content promoted on Facebook, it has the potential to inspire political action as the CCDH has historically captured policymakers’ attention.”

It notes that the CCDH’s earlier report, which targeted the “disinformation dozen” who supposedly spread “anti-vaccine content,” was repeatedly cited by the White House along with numerous lawmakers in Congress, and it was used as a proxy for questions about the role of social media in aggravating vaccine hesitancy.”

Related: Lefty Website Calling for Canceling Conservatives Is Stunned When YouTube Comes for Them]

:{:{}:

The need to act is urgent, or so the CCDH and the Post would have you believe. CCDH chief Imran Ahmed wants you to know that he is thoroughly petrified: “When you put it all together, you’ve got these two industries, Big Oil and Big Tech, and they are the two industries that pose the greatest threat to the survival of our species.”

Facebook, however, is not being cooperative, and not exercising enough censorship: “Earlier this year, Facebook promised to start adding informational labels to some climate posts, much like it does with election or coronavirus posts. But CCDH researchers found that of the posts they surveyed containing climate misinformation, just 8% carried Facebook’s informational label.” Nor does it look as if this is going to change anytime soon.

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone called the methodology of the CCDH study “flawed.” Facebook previously, according to the Post, “pushed back on the structure of the CCDH’s disinformation dozen report, arguing it was based on ‘narrow data’ that wasn’t representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people shared about coronavirus vaccines on Facebook.”

That’s not to say that Facebook doesn’t interfere in climate change discussions at all. Nick Clegg, the social media giant’s vice president for global affairs and communications, noted that Facebook “reduces distribution of posts that its third-party fact-checkers say are false.” That’s not enough, as far as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Gestapo) is concerned. “Facebook and other social media companies make money when they send users down rabbit holes of climate change denial,” Whitehouse thundered. “That’s a very dangerous business model for the future of the planet. It’s hard to tell which is more disgusting: Facebook propagating this disinformation, or the fossil fuel industry funding it.”

So far Facebook isn’t cooperating, but fascists such as Whitehouse and the Post editors aren’t going to give up their efforts to silence all dissent and destroy the freedom of speech. As Paula Bolyard noted the other day regarding another controversial issue where PJ Media is telling truths that others fear to enunciate, “In 21st-century America, truth is considered a revolutionary idea….We’ve sacrificed a lot of revenue over the last few years because we refuse to cave to the social-media censors, but we will continue to tell the truth. If you want to support us in this mission, please consider becoming a VIP member. For the price of a cup of coffee per day, you can partner with us to make sure the Left isn’t the only voice out there.”

The Left is working hard to make sure it is the only voice out there. That’s why we must raise our voices all the louder.[$ ask]

---

interesting this is axios, good news [for planet anyway] tho they think it will be read as bog tech censorship?!

google's new policy of demonetizing climate denial content marks a significant step in its efforts to rein in climate misinformation.

Why it matters: Videos promoting clear falsehoods about the existence of global warming or its causes have long found a home on YouTube, which Google owns.

Meanwhile, on search, ads for climate contrarian websites have consistently appeared next to search listings for sites offering politically neutral and scientifically rigorous evidence.

Driving the news: The company's announcement Thursday that the new policy takes effect Nov. 1, during the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, could cool the political polarization around climate in the U.S.

How it works: Per a Google statement, the policy affects the monetization of "content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change."

"This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change."
Google plans to use "automated tools and human review" to put the policy into practice.
The system does not seek to limit policy debate, making Google's job easier but potentially allowing the promotion of partisan assaults on established science.
Discerning denial can be tough. Google says it will "look carefully at the context in which claims are made, differentiating between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim."

Our thought bubble, from Axios' Scott Rosenberg: Facebook and Google have both faced censorship accusations from conservatives who object to measures that have sought to limit misinformation on COVID, elections and other topics.

YouTube's move on climate is likely to encounter similar objections, given the politically polarized views on this issue, especially in the U.S.

Between the lines: The policy also brings Google's ad revenue strategy more in line with its sustainability agenda.

The company aims to run on 100% carbon-free energy by 2030.
On Wednesday, Google rolled out new features to help travelers limit the carbon footprint of their flights via Google Flights.

What's next: The policy will immediately be put to the test with COP26 taking place.

Spikes in social media activity around climate change over the last six months coincided with major news events, according to data from Keyhole.
Peaks in search activity also tend to occur around news events, including climate summits, according to Google Trends.

What we're watching: Whether Google's move boosts pressure on Facebook to modify its efforts to limit climate misinformation.

Facebook expanded its Climate Science Center last month and steers users there when they search for climate-related terms. Facebook also pledged $1 million to a grant program to combat misinformation.
But activists say the platform still allows denial to flourish.

---

wfb

no lnx

POLICY

Swiss Billionaire Bankrolling Dark Money Group Pushing for Biden Climate Initiative

Alana Goodman

November 12, 2021

A Swiss billionaire is bankrolling a leading dark money group lobbying for the Biden administration's Build Back Better plan and green energy jobs initiatives, according to corporation and lobbying records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Climate Power, one of the main groups pushing for the White House's climate agenda, has billed itself as a traditional advocacy organization, with an advisory board featuring John Podesta, Stacey Abrams, and former senator Harry Reid. But the group doesn't actually exist independently—it is owned and operates as a front group under the Fund for a Better Future, a Democratic dark money organization that has received the majority of its funding from Swiss health care mogul Hansjorg Wyss's foundation since 2016, according to corporation records.

Wyss has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Fund for a Better Future and other progressive dark money groups and has been the subject of controversy since his opaque web of donations was detailed by the New York Times last spring. The connection between the Wyss-funded Fund for a Better Future and Climate Power has not been reported until now.

The link raises questions about foreign influence on the climate debate and the prominence of dark money groups in the Biden administration's public advocacy campaign for the Build Back Better legislation. While foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to federal campaigns, lawmakers and watchdogs have raised concerns about foreign donations to nonprofit political advocacy organizations—so-called dark money groups—which could be used as a legal loophole to influence elections.

Americans for Public Trust, a conservative watchdog group, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in May, calling for an investigation into whether some of Wyss's donations amount to "campaign contributions from a foreign national, running afoul of federal law."

The group told the Free Beacon that Wyss's contributions to groups leading the climate legislation lobbying add to concerns about his political funding.

"Hansjörg Wyss has been indirectly funding American politics for years, so the news that his foreign money is tied up in this latest dark money campaign to pass President Biden's legislative agenda comes as no surprise," Americans for Public Trust executive director Caitlin Sutherland told the Free Beacon. "Americans for Public Trust has previously filed an FEC complaint against Mr. Wyss calling for an investigation into his political spending, and we look forward to the commission taking action."

Wyss, a Swiss citizen born in Bern who has declined to clarify his citizenship status in the United States, has become one of the most prolific donors to progressive advocacy groups in recent years. His foundations, the Berger Action Fund and the Wyss Foundation, have poured over $200 million into organizations supporting Democratic policies since 2016, the New York Times reported in May.

Since last summer, Climate Power has emerged as one of the most active lobbying arms of the Democratic Party's climate agenda. The group rolled out a $10 million ad blitz in June, aimed at pushing lawmakers to support the Biden administration's American Jobs Plan and Build Back Better legislation.

Climate Power also hired a lobbying firm, Pioneer Public Affairs, last February to press lawmakers in the House and Senate on "climate provisions of the American Rescue Plan (H.R.1319) and the American Jobs Plan," according to lobbying disclosure records.

Climate Power is not an independent entity, according to records reviewed by the Free Beacon. The group operates under the ownership of the Fund for a Better Future, according to business records filed in Sacramento, where the fund is based.

The Fund for a Better Future received $44,468,000 from Wyss's foundations between 2017 and 2020, according to the latest available financial disclosure records. Wyss's contributions to the Fund for a Better Future make up "the majority of its funding" during this time, the Times reported in May.

Between 2017 and 2018, Wyss's financial support accounted for 80 percent of the Fund for a Better Future's total receipts, according to financial disclosure records.

According to Climate Power's website, the group was founded "by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, League of Conservation Voters, and Sierra Club" and "integrates hard-hitting research, polling, state and national earned media, digital and paid media to influence the national conversation, embolden leaders to take immediate, bold climate action, and expose climate deniers and their oil and gas lobby allies."

Climate Power launched another front group in August called the "Great American Build" to promote the Biden administration's Build Back Better agenda. The Great American Build's website describes it as a "public awareness campaign launched by Climate Power, League of Conservation Voters and their allies to build the momentum necessary to create millions of good clean energy jobs and give our economy the boost it needs."

Climate Power did not respond to a request for comment. The Wyss Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.

---

mostly $ ask?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/david_desrosiers/#!

https://protectourpower.org/advisory-panel/david-desrosiers/

protect our power ~ cyber attack what is his cred?

advisor

david DesRosiers is the Publisher of the premier independent political website RealClearPolitics.com and its sister sites, twelve verticals covering Policy, Markets, Books, History, World Events, Education, Sports and more. Updated every morning and throughout the day, RealClear culls and publishes the best commentary, news, polling data, and links to important resources from all points of the political compass and covering all the important issues of the day.

Mr. DesRosiers is also the Founder and President of Revere Advisors, a policy and opinion consulting boutiquewith a diverse client base made up of for- and not-for-profit organizations, think tanks, and media. Revere provides strategic counsel to those organizations whose success is necessary for the health and vitality of our political, economic, and cultural institutions.

Prior to his current roles, Mr. DesRosiers served for ten years asExecutive Vice President at the Manhattan Institute. For part of that time, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Institute’s Center for the American University, which is dedicated to promoting intellectual pluralism and the appreciation of free institutions in the American academy.

Mr. DesRosiers has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Assumption College and a Ph.D. in political science from Fordham University. He is married to Dr. Fabiana DesRosiers, a developmental psychologist, and has two children, Ryan and Maggie. They reside in Scarsdale, New York.

---

off bs

New Destination for Investigative Journalism

Welcome to RealClearInvestigations. It is both the latest addition to the RealClear family and an original new voice in investigative journalism.

Our mission is three-fold: curate the best investigative reporting found anywhere, produce our own in-depth journalism, and make this original work available to other news organizations. Our work is supported by the RealClearFoundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. (See below).

That last detail reflects a by now well-established shift in how news is financed and produced: from profit-based models to donor-supported nonprofit endeavors. The area most affected by this transformation is investigative news -- journalism’s most vital work, and typically its most expensive and labor-intensive.

Since the Internet’s disruption of media revenue streams, newspapers and other legacy news outfits have cut back drastically on the kind of in-depth, long-form reporting that distinguished them in their glory days. Donors have stepped into this void, using tax-deductible contributions to finance a robust new marketplace of nonprofit news startups, many with an investigative focus. They occupy different points across the political spectrum and often partner with traditional media outlets.

In addition, advocacy groups and others are increasingly using the tools of investigative reporting – especially freedom of information act requests – to uncover government secrets and drive news coverage.

All this ferment has created the need for a trusted arbiter of investigative news, whether reported by newspapers or digital upstarts. Enter RealClear, with 18 years of balanced, widely admired news aggregation under its belt.

Launched in 2016, RealClearInvestigations is more than a seasoned observer of the action on the field. It is also a player. Its vantage point as news aggregator leaves it well-placed to identify and fill gaps in investigative coverage, including blind spots in media itself.

After spending 28 years as an editor at the New York Times, I am excited about the opportunity to create a new brand that will both highlight and produce the time-honored work that attracts reporters, editors and readers to quality journalism.

The more people feel bewildered by what is happening to the world around them, or betrayed by those they trusted, the more we need investigative journalists to ask hard questions and insist on real, clear answers.

---Tom Kuntz, Editor, RealClearInvestigations

Please send article links and other suggestions to submissions@realclearinvestigations.com.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2016/10/18/a_new_destination_for_in-depth_journalism.html

The RealClearFoundation

Every day, RealClear’s aggregated news sites facilitate conversations between rival ideas, authors, and institutions. Today, the RealClear brand is recognized for its impeccable credibility, political nonpartisanship, and true ideological diversity.

The RealClearFoundation is a donor-financed 501(c)(3) philanthropy. Its purpose is to expand the RealClear experience into areas of public interest that cannot be sustained by profits from advertising.

As newsrooms across the country are shuttering their investigative units, the Foundation has committed itself to raising the considerable amounts of money needed to support long-form investigative journalism--typically the most expensive and labor-intensive news to produce.

In short, investigative journalism, the vital work of news, demands a nonprofit expression and we aim to provide it.

But we can't do it alone. We invite you to put your money where your mind is and help us foster a better society through better informed readers.

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Tax identification number: 52-2128875

---

links to EID

https://eidclimate.org/failure-to-disclose-new-report-exposes-academics-with-financial-ties-to-law-firms/

pix of text]

FAILURE TO DISCLOSE: NEW REPORT EXPOSES ACADEMICS WITH FINANCIAL TIES TO LAW FIRMS

MAY 24, 2021 | WILLIAM ALLISON

Just a week after the bombshell admission that a Harvard academic is working under a retainer agreement with a top plaintiffs’ attorney firm without any previous disclosure, a new report puts the spotlight on this practice happening at universities across the country.

The report, “Private Funders, Public Institutions: ‘Climate’ Litigation and a Crisis of Integrity,” published by Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. (GAO), uncovers the coordination taking place between public officials, activist organizations, wealthy donors, and university faculty to bring climate change-related cases against energy companies, with a specific focus on the lawsuit filed by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in June 2020.

Why the Naomi Oreskes-Sher Edling Retainer Presents Multiple Conflicts of Interest

The GAO report’s release couldn’t have come at a more apt time. Earlier this month, news broke that Harvard professor and longtime climate litigation activist Naomi Oreskes is on retainer with Sher Edling, LLP, the environmental plaintiffs’ law firm representing the majority of municipalities and states, including Minnesota, that have filed climate change lawsuits against the energy industry in recent years.

When Oreskes and fellow Harvard researcher Geoffrey Supran released a new study focused on climate change communications (that was just as flawed as their previous work), they did not seem prepared for the news that Oreskes is on retainer with Sher Edling to break. Notably, this wasn’t disclosed via a game of telephone, either, but Oreskes herself said so while under oath in a recent deposition.

It now appears that Oreskes sought to redefine her business relationship with Sher Edling after it hit the press, as she and Supran provided several different explanations to reporters when asked about her retainer disclosure. While Oreskes may be uncertain about the nature of her involvement with Sher Edling and its implications, others are not.

Academics took to Twitter to point out that this relationship should absolutely been disclosed:

A significant (an undisclosed) conflict of interesthttps://t.co/IPX2PgtsJ8

— Judith Curry (@curryja) May 14, 2021

Shot ‘n Chaser

LEFT – Authors of new paper about Exxon-Mobil complicity in downplaying climate states they have no relevant financial ties

RIGHT – Same author disclosing in a recent deposition (Mann vs CEI) that she is on retainer for a law firm suing Exxon-Mobil

This is fine pic.twitter.com/UGTxjAPizf

— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) May 14, 2021

The Academic-Activist Behind the Curtain in Minnesota

The report shows that Oreskes is far from the only academic who is working directly with top attorneys involved in the climate litigation campaign.

In Minnesota, the report outlines the critical role that University of Minnesota law professor Alexandra Klass played in orchestrating Attorney General Ellison’s lawsuit. In April 2019, she signed a memo titled “Potential Lawsuit against Fossil Fuel Companies for Minnesota Climate Change Damages” to be shared with the newly sworn-in Ellison.

Newly released documents in the report show that Klass was approached by an outside activist group that provided funding for her students to write the memo, reviewed by other attorneys supporting climate litigation, and backed by the Rockefeller network that has manufactured entire national litigation campaign.

None of this involvement by Klass was ever disclosed to the public, whether when moderating a forum on campus with Ellison, providing quotes in local newspapers, or in podcasts discussing the lawsuit.

Highlighting emails obtained through public records requests, the report shows that in late 2018, Klass was approached by Michael Noble, executive director of local activist group Fresh Energy about enlisting her help with potential litigation in Minnesota. In conversations with Klass, Noble spoke of a “big idea” and sent along climate pleadings from previously filed cases, and that he was looking for Klass’s “reaction (and hopefully enthusiasm).”

Roughly one month later, in December 2018, Noble asked if Klass wanted “to do a phone call with the lawyers advising the Rockefeller family fund” (sic) and the climate case was off to the metaphorical races.

Image via GAO

By early 2019, Klass had a contract through Fresh Energy to hire several law students to assist her in drafting the legal memo focused on a potential Minnesota climate change lawsuit that was eventually sent to Ellison.

Image via GAO

In October 2019, Klass helped to host a panel discussion at the University of Minnesota Law School on “the legal and scientific case for recovering climate change damages in Minnesota from fossil fuel companies” which featured both Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Sher Edling’s Vic Sher, whose law firm now represents Minnesota in its climate change deception case.

At the time, the event was framed as an academic discussion. But what the public didn’t know was that Klass had already written a memo to Ellison earlier that year laying out the proposed legal theories that could back a climate change-focused lawsuit targeting the energy industry. Furthermore, the event was coordinated by Sam Duggan – one of the students who helped write the memo.

Despite her direct involvement in the drafting of the lawsuit, Klass has continued to present herself as an impartial expert on Minnesota state law. When Ellison initially filed his climate case last summer, Klass was quoted in news stories, including coverage from the Minneapolis Star Tribune as a professor of environmental law and thus, a neutral third-party expert. To date, she has not publicly spoken about her lack of disclosure regarding her involvement in helping put the idea of climate litigation in front of Ellison.

Efforts to keep government actions hidden from the public has even extended to Ellison’s office. Earlier this year, Ellison wrote an op-ed in the Star Tribune touting his office’s transparency, but the hiring of two Bloomberg-funded Special Assistant Attorneys General from another university – the NYU Law School’s State Energy & Environmental Impact Center – raises serious questions. Ellison’s claim that these SAAGs “report to me and no one else,” and thus solely loyalty is to Minnesota taxpayers, is hard to believe when the job description for a similar position with the New York Attorney General explained:

“Fellows hosted by the OAG as special assistants will have responsibilities that include… preparing periodic reports of activities and progress for the State Impact Center.”

The Group in the Middle of It All? The Rockefellers

To the surprise of no one who has is even remotely familiar with the climate litigation campaign, the Rockefellers are one of the common threads between Oreskes and Klass.

The Rockefeller Family Fund supported all three of Oreskes’ major studies focused on the energy industry, and if there was any doubt that the wealthy foundation that supports climate litigation wouldn’t have any subjective effect on this research, then let Oreskes herself explain how the source of a researcher’s funding can lead to unconscious bias.

As Oreskes stated in published a letter she co-authored in 2015:

“But the issue is deeper than one of obeying rules; the important question is why those rules are necessary. The answer is that even if we think of ourselves as honest, objective, and independent, scientific evidence demonstrates that our research can be influenced by the sources of our funding… Many of us are reluctant to accept this funding because it seems to imply that our colleagues—including individuals we may know and respect—have been corrupted. Corruption exists, but the funding effect may more often be the result of unconscious bias.” (emphasis added)

In Minnesota, the Rockefeller Family Fund has been just as active. The group, and its director Lee Wasserman in particular, put the idea of a climate lawsuit in front of Michael Noble right after Ellison was elected in November 2018, as the report shows:

Image via GAO

In turn, Noble then went to Klass where he explained the Rockefeller Family Fund’s role in supporting a climate lawsuit in Minnesota:

Images via GAO

The “lawyers advising Rockefeller family fund” that Noble mentions is the Center for Climate Integrity, an activist group that’s supporting climate lawsuits across the country and which has received more than $3 million from the Rockefeller Family Fund. The group was also a sponsor of the 2019 panel that Ellison and Klass attended, and two senior officials from the group, Judith Enck and Alyssa Johl, provided feedback on Klass’s memo:

Images via GAO

With the memo prepared, Noble then went about bringing all the threads togethers by arranging a meeting of the key players, including Klass and officials with the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Center for Climate Integrity:

Finally, shortly after Ellison introduced the lawsuit, Noble couldn’t help but tout his own work when he admitted on a public webinar that he and the Rockefeller-funded Center for Center for Climate Integrity convinced the attorney general to file the case.

West Coast Edition

The coordination among academics and law firms is indeed happening from coast to coast, including Ann Carlson, the UCLA Law professor taking a leave of absence to serve in the Biden Administration.

Previously, Carlson has worked as a consultant with Sher Edling, the same firm that has Naomi Oreskes on retainer. Carlson also appeared on a panel discussion on climate litigation alongside Vic Sher at the University of Hawai’i Richardson School of Law in May 2019, just ten months before the City & County of Honolulu filed its own climate lawsuit.

The report outlines Carlson’s work at the UCLA Law School and the financial support she received:

“Consider another relevant example, revealed in a recent public-record production obtained from UCLA Law School by Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. That production of documents revealed certain details of how donors named Dan Emmett and Ralph and Shirley Shapiro gave a combined $1.5 million to a ‘Carlson discretionary fund’ which, according to the Shapiros’ instruction, is ‘to be used at the discretion of Professor Ann Carlson… in her sole discretion as she deems appropriate.’” (emphasis added)

Conclusion

As Energy In Depth as shown for years, the Rockefellers have manufactured the entire climate litigation campaign and their work hasn’t slowed down.

This new paper from Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. uncovers the role that academics have played in supporting these lawsuits with Minnesota the latest example of the lack of disclosure between government officials, activist groups, and college professors.

Added on top of the bombshell news that Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes is on retainer with a top plaintiffs firm, this nationally coordinated campaign becomes more interconnected by the day.

---

search climate 3 22

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/search/?q=climate

no lnx

Investigative Issues: The Misreporting of 2021--A Retrospective December 14, 2021

From COVID-19 and public health, to climate and the environment, and race and polarization, the media in 2021 shaped favored narratives in new and unique ways. Here, a retrospective: ...

Media COVID-19 Race Environment Climate

Undisclosed: Academics in the Pay of Climate Litigants June 01, 2021

Just a week after the bombshell admission that a Harvard academic is working under a retainer agreement with a top plaintiffs’ attorney firm without any previous disclosure, a new report puts the spotlight on this practice happening at universities a...

Climate Minnesota Naomi Oreskes

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PTSD Climate Trauma Camp Fire Health Care Psychological Trauma Psychiatry Mental Illness Mental Health Mental Disorder Environmentalism Environmentalists

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Energy Transition Aramco Gas Pipelines Co. Gas Pipeline Larry Fink Blackrock Saudi Arabia Saudi Aramco Petroleum

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Hansjorg Wyss Dark Money Mogul Hansjorg Wyss's Foundation Biden Administration Lobbying

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United Nations Malaysia Greenhouse Gas Emissions Global Warming UN Carbon Dioxide

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Natural Disasters Climate Change Foreign Worker Migrant Worker

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WaPo Calls on Facebook to Censor 'Climate Denialists' - Robert Spencer, PJM November 04, 2021

Journalism Other Investigations

Inside Google's Demonetization of 'Climate Change' Dissent - Andrew Freedman, Axios October 08, 2021

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Facing a reckoning over their contribution to the climate emergency, companies are coming out with a record number of pledges...

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Extreme Weather Pacific Northwest Weather

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Behind a rising number of outages are new stresses on the system caused by aging power lines, a changing climate and a power-plant fleet rapidly going green...

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A new federal climate mitigation program that targeted small, impoverished communities has fallen short of its equity goal and gave its largest single grant — $50 million — to a rich California city that is home to Facebook's corporate headquarters....

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Researchers admit there are absolutely no current examples of low-energy societies providing a decent living standard for their citizens....

Fossil Fuels Nuclear Power Economic Growth Energy Climate Change Energy Use Carbon Dioxide World Energy Resources And Consumption Vogel Global Warming

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Politics News Pacific Northwest Climate Change Science Seattle PORTLAND Oregon World Weather Attribution Donald Trump Yale University Cliff Mass Seattle Times Associated Press-NORC Center For Public Affairs Research Energy Policy Institute University Of Chicago Media

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Climate Crisis Cannabis Colorado Greenhouse Gas

Biden Climate-Justice Picks Tie Energy to Bigotry April 14, 2021

Seven members of Biden’s environmental justice council were signatories to a July 2019 Equitable and Just National Climate Platform....

Energy Social Justice Environmentalism Racism Biden Administration United States Environmental Protection Agency

RealClearInvestigations' Daily Top 8 February 07, 2022

RealClearInvestigations Daily Top 8Monday, February 7, 2022 Climate Scientists Confront Limits of Computer Models Wall St Journal Biden's Top Science Adviser Bullied Women, Probe Finds Politico Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room New York ...

Realclearinvestigations' Daily Top 8

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no lnx

aggregator? cherrypicked?

3 /22 random grab

latest Investigations

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

The Editors, RealClearInvestigations

Iran Used Secret Finance System to Skirt Sanctions Ian Talley, WSJ

U.S. Quietly Passing Intel to Ukraine Ken Klippenstein, Sara Sirota, The Intercept

Why Ukraine Has Created a Rush to Hoard Nickels Saahil Desai, The Atlantic

New Sex Assault Cover-Up at a Virginia School Inez Stepman, National Review

Jan. 6 Trial Hinges On: Where Was Pence? Kyle Cheney & Josh Gerstein, Politico

What's Van Jones Doing With Bezos’ $100M? Noah Kirsch, Lachlan Cartwright, DB

Trump’s Ex-Chief of Staff Investigated for Voter Fraud Staff,The Guardian

Instead of Boon, Bitcoin Mine's a Bane of Small Town Kevin Williams, WashPost

State Investigations

Texas: Lack of Poll Workers Crimps Primary

Akela Lacy,The Intercept

NY: 4,100 Nursing Home Deaths Hidden Under Cuomo Luis Ferré-Sadurní, NYT

Liberal Cities Change Course and Clear Homeless Camps Sara Cline, AP

Calif.: Can It Do More Than Talk the Talk on High-Speed Rail? Jill Cowan, NYT

Pa.: Industrial Lehigh Valley Now Logistics Hub Charles McElwee, City Journal

Iowa: Post-'Defund,' Why Some Schools May Still Shun Cops Vince Bielski,RCI

Minn.: Big Fed Pandemic Food-Aid Probe of Nonprofits David A. Fahrenthold, NYT

Wash.: Seattle, Case Study in US's Violent Surge Dan Frosch & Zusha Elinson, WSJ

Colo.: GOP Rep.'s Oddly Focused Stock Trades William Bredderman, Daily Beast

Videos

NYT Reporter Goes Mute Under Questioning About Dubious Reporting: Project Veritas

Activism Uncensored, From the People's Convoy: TK News

RCI's Paul Sperry Discusses Cast of Characters in Durham Probe: The Megyn Kelly Show

Coronavirus Investigations

How Schools' COVID-Aid Joy Ride Could Send New Hires Off a Fiscal Cliff -- Again

Steve Miller, RealClearInvestigations

Correction, Mr. President: It's a Pandemic of the Vaccinated TooClayton Fox, RCI

Are Second Booster Shots Effective? Rachel Gutman, The Atlantic

Hong Kong Goes From 'Zero-Covid' to World's Top Death Rate Ezra Cheung, NBC

For Covid, Some Choose Vitamins Over Vaccines Laura J. Nelson, LA Times

At 26, She Struggles After Life-Threatening Covid Case Elizabeth Chuck, NBC

How COVID-19 Ravaged Ecuador's Largest City Daniel Alarcon, The New Yorker

How Did 1 Million Pandemic Deaths Become Normalized? Ed Yong, The Atlantic

Pandemic Causing Maternity Wards to Shutter Across U.S. Dylan Scott, Vox

Race, Sex and the 'Woke' Era

Even With ‘Defund the Police’ Discredited, Some Schools May Still Shun the Police

Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigations

How Wokeism Could Become a Requirement to Be a Doctor John D. Sailer, NAS

How Fringe Trans Ideas Prevail in Courts and Law Leor Sapir, City Journal

Hollywood’s Cancel-Culture Consultant Maggie Shannon, Intelligencer

Wisc.: Hiding Student Gender Identities From Parents Ryan Mills, Nat'l Review

How an Academic Grudge Turned Into a #MeToo Panic Katie Herzog, Reason

Women Driving Big Gains in Black Business Ownership Jasmine Garsd, NPR

Letters Blacks Wrote Their Former Enslavers Gillian Brockell, Washington Post

Race Hoaxer Jussie Smollett Gets Jail Megan Crepeau, Jason Meisner, Tribune

Technology, Privacy and Censorship

Bad News: You're in Debt. Worse News: You're in Phony Debt.

John F. Wasik, RealClearInvestigations

Who's Driving That Food Delivery Robot? Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times

Alleged Google Retaliation for Dissent Over Israel Work Suhauna Hussain, LAT

Obstacles to Musk-Style Uncensored Satellite Internet Isaac Reese, Reason

Banks Disown Fraud on Own Zelle System Stacy Cowley, Lananh Nguyen, NYT

Twitter Banned Trump but Lets Putin Keep Account Elle Reynolds, Federalist

India's Caste System a Force in Silicon Valley Sonia Paul, Wired

Is Social Media Giving Girls Tourette's? Helen Lewis, The Atlantic

SEC Probes Trading by Elon Musk and Brother Dave Michaels, Wall St Journal

Trump, Biden and the Beltway

The Curious Case of Stefan Halper, Longtime 'Zelig' of American Scandals Who 'Crossfired' Trump

Mark Hemingway, RealClearInvestigations

NYT Finally Admits: Hunter Biden Laptop Is Real Editorial Board, New York Post

Money-Laundering, Foreign-Agent Scrutiny of Hunter Biden Benner et al., NYT

Schools' Covid-Aid Joy Ride Speeds New Hires to a Fiscal Cliff Steve Miller, RCI

Bad Bet: Ukraine Colluded With Dems vs. Trump to Stop Putin Paul Sperry, RCI

Related: Election Overseer Goes Soft on DNC and Chalupa Paul Sperry, RCI

Will ‘Trump Enablers’ Eat Lunch Inside Beltway Again? Michael Schaffer, Politico

U.S. Prosecutor Seats Unfilled as Crime Skyrockets Thomas Hogan, City Journal

Biden Supreme Court Pick Championed CRT Advocates Tim Pearce, Daily Wire

International Investigations

Famed Alzheimer's Researcher John Hardy Is a Knight ... but Not in Shining Armor

Eric Felten, RealClearInvestigations

Britain: Fame and Fraud of Newly Knighted Alzheimer's Scientist Eric Felten, RCI

Brazil: Expressway to Amazon Destruction Terrence McCoy, Washington Post

Russia: American Fugitive Turns Propagandist Justin Ling, Daily Beast

Why the Russian Military's Botching Ukraine Thomas Grove, Stephen Fidler, WSJ

CIA Secretly Trained Ukrainians for Russian Invasion Zach Dorfman, Yahoo

Ethiopia: On Battlefield, 3 Rescuers Executed Simon Marks, Declan Walsh, NYT

China's Busted Plot to Silence Tiananmen-Protesting NY Pol Justin Rohrlich, DB

5 in U.S. Accused of Helping China Spy Unit Crush Dissent Robert Legare, CBS

Other Investigations

Police Use Ancient 'Witching' To Find Corpses Rene Ebersole, Marshall Project

Classical Music Forces Musicians to Rebuke Russia Heather Mac Donald, CJ

How the War on Sprawl Caused High Housing Prices Randal O'Toole, Reason

Burning Tire Dump Choked Louisiana Prisoners Alleen Brown, The Intercept

'Crack 2.0': War Against Deadly Fentanyl Copycats Renuka Rayasam, Politico

America's Most Weather-Battered City Lauren Stroh, Longreads

The Billion-Dollar Cost of Repeat Police Misconduct Alexander et al., WashPost

Inside Louisiana’s Harshest Juvenile Lockup Beth Schwartzapfel, Marshall Project

Investigative Series

Where Wokism Is a Oui Bit Different (Europe Series, Part 1)

Richard Bernstein, RealClearInvestigations

In Scotland, They'll Take the Woke Road (Series Pt. 2) Richard Bernstein, RCI

Series: Climate Change Makes Prison Even Worse Alleen Brown, The Intercept

The Facebook Files (Parts 1-17) Horwitz et al., Wall Street Journal

Loudoun County's Culture War (Parts 1-4) Matt Taibbi, TK News by Matt Taibbi

Medicine's Big Injections of Woke Ideology (2 Parts) John Murawski, RCI

Pulled Over: Deadly Police Traffic Stops (Parts 1-3) Kirkpatrick et al., NY Times

Jan. 6: Before, During, and After (Parts 1-3) Staff, Washington Post

Pegasus Project: Global Democracy Under Attack Journalism Consortium

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