alarmist -ism hysteria 2

PRIMARY ON AI BS 9 26 FOX

devil term used to dismiss agw ppl note top 6 in new book rheT

SEE ALT FACT EARTH2

// to fear phobia eg chemophobia entine

see morano

see gloom doom

cop 30 called doomer

aha // normalizing

misogyny

fem cuck squish

html endit1  bak 7 22

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aha see heartland inversion ~ gubmint regulation

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7 26 NOTE ALARMISM USED TO JUSTIFY GUTTING OCEAN CENSORS AND LACK OF AC IN EUR --> HEAT DEATH

at TMI claim that fear of radioactivity was more dangerous than release

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MMA

Fox is using climate denial to undermine bipartisan support for AI safeguards

Fox personalities and guests compare AI warnings to supposedly discredited climate predictions, drawing on decades of attacks on climate science to cast widely supported protections as another bid for power and control

*Special* ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 10/08/26

In September, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from the company, issuing a stark warning that increasingly powerful AI systems could threaten human survival. To date, his September 9 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper has received nearly 10 million views on YouTube, and industry insiders are calling for stronger safeguards and increased government involvement. As those warnings drew wider attention, Fox News and Fox Business hosts and guests dismissed them as the next manufactured panic from people they claimed were already proven wrong about global warming.

In addition to portraying climate change as a political hoax that has run its course (with AI now supposedly taking its place), both Fox networks have characterized calls for safeguards as an election-year scare tactic, a pretext for government control, and a threat to innovation — even as polling shows broad support for AI oversight among Republicans as well as Democrats.

Fox has already cast local opposition to data centers as a threat to American competitiveness, with many network personalities crediting foreign influence for the backlash, even as resistance has spread through Republican communities and divided conservative media. By associating AI warnings with climate “alarmism,” Fox draws on the distrust it spent years cultivating in order to now discredit calls for limits on an industry it has championed.

Warnings about catastrophic AI risks are drawing national coverage and calls for safeguards

• Former AI researchers and industry executives have warned that increasingly powerful systems could outpace efforts to control them, prompting debate over the pace of development and the need for government oversight. Public statements and television interviews have brought those concerns to wider audiences, with warnings about potential threats to human survival accompanying calls for stronger safeguards.

• • Jacob Coxon’s interview with Anderson Cooper has drawn nearly 10 million views on YouTube. Coxon warned that future AI systems capable of improving themselves could threaten human survival and called for international oversight. [CNN, Anderson Cooper 360, 9/9/26]

• • Coxon continued to raise concerns about the pace of AI development in a subsequent PBS interview. On PBS News Hour, Coxon discussed how increasingly capable systems could accelerate their own development and outpace efforts to establish safeguards. [PBS News Hour, 9/17/26]

• • Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slower AI development and independent oversight. In his September 12 essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei wrote, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” He argued that safety work needed time to keep up with advances in AI and called for companies to give “ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators.” He also called for governments to coordinate internationally on AI safety. [Dario Amodei, 9/12/26]

Climate “alarmism” has become a recurring reference point for dismissing AI warnings

• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been a frequent target of Fox’s attacks on AI safeguards since he and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) announced forthcoming legislation on September 3 to ban artificial superintelligence and pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator establishes safety rules. Hosts and guests have invoked Sanders’ past climate warnings to dismiss his proposals as another manufactured panic.

• Those attacks echo President Donald Trump’s dismissal of calls to slow AI development as a “hoax” and right-wing media’s comparisons to climate change and “COVID hysteria.” Across Fox News and Fox Business, hosts and guests have used the same claims that climate predictions had failed in order to portray calls for AI safeguards as an election-year scare tactic and a threat to innovation.

• • Fox Business host Larry Kudlow: “The AI Armageddon, like the climate hoax, is an election-year Democratic ruse.” Kudlow compared calls to halt AI development to Democrats’ “existential hysteria” over climate change, claiming climate policies would have caused “our complete economic ruination” without Trump’s reelection. He cast Anthropic and OpenAI as Democrats’ “fellow travelers” and argued that letting “free enterprise work its magic” would allow the U.S. to outpace China. [Fox Business, Kudlow, 9/14/26]

• • Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones claimed Sanders’ previous climate timeline meant “we should have already been dead.” Jones then described people warning about AI as “the same alarmists that jumped from scandal to scandal of doomsday.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/17/26]

• • Fox News contributor and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt invoked climate warnings to dismiss AI “doomerism” and argue for trusting the marketplace. Hewitt dismissed lawmakers from both parties as “not smart enough yet to tell the country what to do” and rejected business leaders’ “self-interests” in setting rules for AI. He then explained, “I’m not into AI doomerism at all because we’ve heard this all before with climate change and global warming and nuclear winter. I’m just not alarmed by anything.” [Fox News, America Reports, 9/17/26]

• • As a guest host on Gutfeld!, Lisa Kennedy Montgomery claimed Democrats were “replacing global warming heroin with tech-pocalypse fentanyl.” Attacking California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s AI safeguards, Kennedy described climate change as “the hysteria flavor those statist freaks served up to scare people into votes and higher taxes.” She added, “Well, here we are, all still here, along with the polar bears and ice caps.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 9/18/26]

• • Guest host Michael Lee argued that Democrats’ climate warnings were grounds to reject their calls for AI regulation. Lee asked why policymakers should heed “the same people that were telling you climate change was an existential threat,” then asked, “Why do we need to do something special?” He characterized AI regulation as “stifling innovation at the behest of the richest people in the world to ring fence their industry.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Fox Business, 9/21/26]

• • Fox News host Will Cain invoked supposedly failed climate warnings to dismiss AI concerns as “the boy who cried wolf.” After playing a 2019 video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) discussing the dangers of climate change, Cain said she was “exaggerating” an “end of the world prophecy” and cited increasing coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef to discredit climate predictions. [Fox News, The Will Cain Show, 9/25/26]

• • Fox Business host Stuart Varney accused “climate warriors” of linking “climate disaster to AI disaster.” On Varney & Co., he dismissed Ocasio-Cortez’s concerns about AI as “irrational fear mongering” and “blatant distortion of reality to enhance a political position.” [Fox Business, Varney & Co., 9/29/26]

Fox is recycling climate denial to discredit cross-partisan concern about AI

• Climate denial campaigns targeted public agreement that once crossed party lines. In 1997, 68% of strong Republicans and 72% of strong Democrats accepted the science of global warming. The following year, a communications plan developed by the American Petroleum Institute, fossil fuel companies, and allied groups sought to transform scientific uncertainty into conventional wisdom. By December 2009, Fox was explicitly directing reporters to question the accuracy of climate data whenever they reported that the planet was warming.

• Fox now treats climate warnings as discredited while ignoring what efforts to address global warming have accomplished. The International Energy Agency, for example, has estimated that solar, wind, nuclear power, electric cars, and heat pumps deployed since 2019 avoided 2.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually by 2024, even as global emissions continued to rise. Fox elides those benefits to portray climate warnings as an exercise in needless alarm and is now using that reasoning to argue against safeguards for AI.

• But support for AI safeguards crosses party lines. Ipsos found in March that 67% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans wanted the federal government to ensure AI outputs do not cause harm. A June Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute survey found that 88% of Democrats, 86% of independents, and 83% of Republicans wanted a “guaranteed off switch” for the most powerful AI systems. More recently, a CNN poll found that 85% of Democrats, 67% of independents, and 63% of Republicans believed the federal government was not doing enough to regulate AI’s development.

• Fox News and Fox Business are using their legacy of climate denial to undermine that bipartisan support. Decades of campaigns to discredit climate science helped turn broad agreement about global warming into a partisan divide that protected fossil fuel interests. By dismissing people raising concerns about AI as “the same alarmists,” hosts and guests draw on that distrust to portray widely supported safeguards as the work of discredited experts and advocates seeking power and control, making opposition to oversight a matter of political allegiance.

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Fox Business is framing local data center opposition as a threat to America in the AI race

06/11/26

Data center fight forced right-wing media to cover environmental justice

07/24/26

FOXLEAKS: Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science

12/15/10

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MMA

Right-wing media downplay AI safety concerns as a hoax by comparing them to climate change and “COVID hysteria”

Written by Helena Hind, Jane Lee & Evlondo Cooper

Published 09/15/26

Right-wing media are following President Donald Trump in dismissing calls to slow down AI development in the wake of multiple hacking incidents as a “hoax,” comparing concerns over AI to “climate change apocalyptic talk” and “COVID hysteria” including support for vaccines.

Reports have surfaced in recent months that rogue AI agents from OpenAI anonymously hacked into AI startup Hugging Face servers and into software service RubyGems. As Reuters explained: “Many incidents where AI agents from developers such as OpenAI and rival Anthropic have hacked or attempted to access external systems have heightened concerns over ​the increasing capacity of AI models and developers' ability to contain them.” On September 12, both Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly called for a slowdown in AI development, with Altman announcing that his company would be delaying its initial public offering until 2027.

Trump vehemently rejected the idea of an AI slowdown in a series of Truth Social posts on September 14, calling the push for caution a “hoax,” “scam,” and a “SICK conspiracy.” Trump wrote: “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change.’”

The claim that climate scientists’ predictions have failed is not borne out by the evidence — warnings about greenhouse gases causing more warming have now come to pass, with over a decade of record-breaking heat and thousands of excess deaths across Europe in climate-driven heat waves this year alone.

Nonetheless right-wing media followed Trump’s lead, comparing concerns about unregulated AI development with supposedly fabricated climate change warnings and COVID-19 pandemic safety measures like vaccines. (In reality, researchers have repeatedly proven that vaccines limited the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic, reduced the rate of severe complications and death, and continue to be a safe, effective treatment.)

On his September 14 radio show, Fox host Sean Hannity accused former President Barack Obama of “urging Democrats to fearmonger AI just like Democrats fearmongered and flat-out lied about global warming,” claiming those concerns “turned out to be bunk.” Hannity then reassured his listeners that Trump said that “the U.S. has already put guardrails in place to regulate and prosecute AI companies.”

Dismissing AI warnings on his Daily Wire podcast, Ben Shapiro stated, “This is pretty redolent of the climate change apocalyptic talk. Like all the ice caps were going to be gone, the polar bears were all going to drown, all the rest of it.”

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Citation

From the September 14, 2026, edition of the Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show.

Fox host Will Cain referenced climate change while discussing AI warnings: “Vested interests did stop nuclear [power] and set it back half a century. And that same playbook of fears played out with climate change and COVID. So now, what is so scary about AI?”

Downplaying the “AI apocalypse alarm” during Fox’s The Five, co-host Jesse Watters referenced both climate change and the COVID vaccine, asking, “If I told you the world was going to end if you didn't take this vax, what would you do? Or if the world was going to end because of global warming, what would you do? Same thing's happening here — some people get rich and we all still survive.” B/C OF LIE/HYPE?

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Citation

From the September 14, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Five

Fox’s Laura Ingraham echoed Watters’ comments later that evening, saying AI concerns reminded her of “the first several months of COVID hysteria.” She later evoked “fearmongering about climate change, same thing. Al Gore's film, Inconvenient Truth, oh my God. That still echoes in politics today.”

Hannity rounded out Fox's evening coverage with yet another comparison of AI fears to climate change and the pandemic.

Decrying “the climate alarmist cult religion,” Hannity said, “Al Gore was preaching from the pulpit of climate alarmism. … All these predictions have come and gone and the time frame he said it would happen, none of it came true.”

“We were lied to about COVID at a high level,” he added. “I just don't trust the government at all in that sense. But I trust America enough that we would use this for good.”

However, the over-the-top comparisons are not limited to Trump and right-wing media dismissing AI concerns. Joe Allen, previously the “transhumanism editor” on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, opposed AI at a debate held in Dallas during last week's GOP midterm convention by bizarrely referencing “algorithmic immigrants.” Semafor reported:

“You look at the data center, this incubator for algorithmic immigrants,” he said. “They’ve already broken out and invaded other companies. These immigrants are out of control.”

Allen was speaking at Forum, a policy discussion staged at a stylish venue fifteen minutes from the convention center to give the new American right an opportunity to debate some of the policy issues currently dividing it— in particular, the tension between populism’s activist promises and traditional small government, and the rise of artificial intelligence.

(Allen’s opponent at the debate, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, reportedly “compared complaints about AI to the ‘Black Lives Matter hysteria,’ and suggested they were driven by ‘psyops from China.’”)

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mma omg

Fox blames climate policy for Europe’s climate-exacerbated heat deaths

Fox News and Fox Business figures applied that same framing to U.S. heat coverage to make fossil fuels look like the answer to deadly heat

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 07/09/26

As Europe reeled from a deadly heat wave, coverage on Fox News and Fox Business made air conditioning the story, claiming that climate policy had made it harder and more expensive for Europeans to survive the heat.

However, extreme heat is becoming more dangerous because of fossil fuel-driven warming, which makes climate policy more necessary. Fox networks instead used Europe’s deaths to argue against climate action, doubling down on the fossil fuel economy that is exacerbating dangerous climate impacts.

That argument is already being adapted to U.S. heat coverage. As American heat waves expose the strain on infrastructure built for a less dangerous climate, Fox figures blamed climate policy for making cooling more expensive, attacked climate mitigation and resilience planning, and defended more fossil fuel infrastructure. It is a convenient reversal: Fox casts fossil fuels as the answer to deadly heat, while eliding their role in making extreme heat worse.

Europe and the U.S. are both facing deadly heat made worse by climate change

• Extreme heat is killing people on both sides of the Atlantic, and scientists have connected both events to fossil-fueled warming.

Reuters reported at least 3,700 excess deaths during the June 20-28 heat wave that gripped France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. World Weather Attribution found that climate change made the European heat wave hotter and more likely, with a similar weather pattern now producing temperatures that would have been “virtually impossible” in June 1976 and still “highly unlikely at any time of the year.”

Europe’s lack of widespread air conditioning — which is shaped by its historically cooler climate, higher energy costs, and concerns about rising power demand from cooling — helps explain the death toll, but not in the way right-wing media suggest.

Much of Europe was built for a cooler climate baseline that no longer exists. As Mark O’Connell wrote in The Irish Times, “Our societies are not built, either figuratively or literally, for the world we now inhabit.” Europe is now the fastest-warming continent, warming more than twice as fast as the global average, and extreme heat is exposing the gap between the climate its systems were designed for and the climate people are now living in.

The American heat wave showed why the story cannot stop at air conditioning. Even though the U.S. has far more air conditioning than Europe, deadly heat is still outpacing the energy infrastructure that keeps people safe.

The New York Times reported that World Weather Attribution scientists also determined that the recent heat and humidity across the northeast U.S. and eastern Canada would have also been “virtually impossible” without human-caused warming, while Axios reported the event killed at least two dozen people, including 22 heat-related deaths in New Jersey.

Air conditioning saves lives during extreme heat, and more people will need it as heat waves become more frequent and deadly. However it does not solve the underlying danger. Instead, it moves part of the risk onto the power system, which is already being stressed by hotter summers, higher cooling demand, and climate-driven disruptions. During the recent heat wave, the Department of Energy issued an emergency order for PJM, the nation’s largest grid operator, as extreme heat pushed electricity demand toward possible shortfalls.

In addition, widespread air conditioning cannot protect people working outside, people without stable housing, people who cannot afford reliable indoor relief, or people who lose power when demand peaks. The scale of the risk is already visible in the American Southwest. In Maricopa County, Arizona, home to Phoenix, heat killed at least 579 people in 2023, the county’s deadliest year on record. As United Nations climate assessments link rising extreme heat to worsening health risks in the region, more of daily life is becoming harder to sustain safely without major adaptation.

Right-wing media coverage strips this context away. Global warming is making dangerous heat more frequent, but their answer is to attack climate policy while directing people back to the fossil fuel economy that has already made extreme heat worse. More cooling will be essential, but expanding air conditioning alone is not the solution. It will need to be paired with clean power, more energy efficiency, and heat adaptation to mitigate stress on fragile grids and reduce the burning of fossil fuels that are driving these harmful impacts.

• ## Fox claimed Europe’s heat deaths were caused by climate policies that limited access to air conditioning

• Fox’s coverage turned Europe’s heat wave into a story about air conditioning, energy restrictions, and green ideology.

• • Climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg pitted air conditioning against climate action during an appearance onAmerica’s Newsroom. After anchor Dana Perino asked whether “government policies have failed the people,” Lomborg argued that Europe needed “much more air conditioning,” questioning whether governments wanted to help vulnerable people “a tiny bit in 100 years” or help “old and vulnerable people right now.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [6/26/26; DeSmog, accessed 7/7/26]

• • The Ingraham Anglecalled European heat deaths “the true cost of the green energy scam.” Over a chyron that read “Sweating the green agenda,” guest host Charlie Hurt said “Europe spent years treating air conditioning as the problem and now we’re having a reality check,” while guest Lawrence Newport, co-founder of U.K.-based group Looking for Growth, claimed air conditioning is “essentially banned” in “a vast number of homes across this country.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [6/26/26]

• • Fox News host Sean Hannity used Europe’s heat wave to attack “climate alarmism” and European climate politics. Hannity said Europe was blaming U.S. emissions for the heat wave after embracing “socialism” and “radical climate alarmism,” while his guest, Outnumberedco-host Emily Compagno, argued that Europe was making “a ridiculous stance against climate change” rather than protecting elderly people from deadly heat. Fox News, *Hannity*, [6/29/26]

• • Discussing heat deaths in Europe onThe Five, Fox’s Greg Gutfeld suggested “this is a way for Europeans to unload the elderly and blame it on climate change.” Co-host Dana Perino argued that the “so-called science” has been “debunked” and said European officials had a “tool” that could alleviate the problem but “would rather their people suffer and die.” Fox News, *The Five*, [6/30/26]

• • Hannity blamed Europe’s deaths on “climate alarmism” and an “anti-air conditioner crusade.” He said the “brutal heat wave now gripping Europe” had caused more than 1,300 deaths, “which by the way is all thanks to the climate alarmism and the anti-air conditioner crusade that’s taken place in Europe.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [6/30/26]

• ## Fox is also turning American heat waves into an argument against climate policy

• Fox figures treated the burden of surviving extreme heat as proof that Americans need fewer climate rules, not stronger climate actions to mitigate worsening heat.

• • Discussing the European heat wave on Fox News, Environmental Protection Administration head Lee Zeldin portrayed climate policy as a threat to Americans’ access to air conditioning. On America Reports, Zeldin dismissed the idea that Americans should feel “guilt or shame” over air conditioning use and attacked new environmental rules that could leave “grandma” without a working air conditioner during the summer. He added, “There’s no more hoax where we are saying that the world is about to end.” Zeldin ended by claiming Europeans were “seeing the implementation of their standards, and it’s destroying their economy.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [6/30/26]

• • On Fox Business’Mornings with Maria, Energy Secretary Chris Wright framed extreme heat-driven stress on power grids as a reason to loosen climate constraints on utilities. Wright said peak demand would test the PJM grid, blamed “the previous administration” for leaving too little capacity, and argued that the Trump administration was “letting utilities run their business” to prioritize reliability and ratepayers over “climate cult gods.” Fox Business, *Mornings with Maria*, [7/2/26]

• • Perino connected New York City’s thermostat guidance to Europe’s lack of air conditioning and blamed “liberals” for weakening the grid. After co-host Greg Gutfeld said New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was “coming for your thermostat,” Perino pointed to Europe’s heat wave and said that at an European Union building, lower floors “were not allowed to have air conditioning” while “all the fancy people” above them could keep air conditioning. “You start rationing things,” she said, before blaming New York’s vulnerability on “liberals who took away Indian Point” nuclear facility and “only want renewables.” Fox News, *The Five*, [7/2/26]

• • Hannity defended fossil fuels as the source of lifesaving air conditioning during heat waves. The Fox host attacked New York City’s thermostat guidance as “a small taste of socialism,” saying “the same fossil fuel industry” Democrats want to challenge provides the electricity for “the very air conditioning systems that are protecting all of us from heat waves.” He warned that “new regulations will make everything a struggle” and drive energy bills “through the roof.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/2/26]

• • OnJesse Watters Primetime, longtime climate contrarian Marc Morano recast New York City’s heat wave and air conditioning guidance as “climate communism.” After guest host Charlie Hurt mocked New York City’s 78-degree air conditioning guidance and referenced a New York Times report linking the heat wave to fossil fuels, Morano claimed “climate communists” were relying on “scientifically fabricated fears” to “control every aspect of our lives.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/6/26; DeSmog, accessed 7/8/26]

• ## Deadly heat is exposing the lie at the center of right-wing climate politics

• The recent heat waves in Europe and the U.S. show the contradiction in right-wing media's response to deadly heat. They defend the fossil fuel system that is making extreme heat more dangerous, then cast fossil fuel energy as the only practical way to survive it. Their coverage gives audiences a simpler story: The real danger is climate policy, not the fossil fuels driving the heat. But each devastating heat wave makes that story harder to sustain because the crisis they blame on climate action is the crisis climate action is meant to contain.

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MMA

Newsmax host defends Trump's “weaponization” fund

One senator called the arrangement “a $1.7 billion slush fund for right-wing political violence and subversion”

Written by Media Matters Staff

:{Published 05/19/26

The New York Times reports:

The Trump administration announced on Monday the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the Biden Justice Department and Democrats, forging a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to President Trump’s allies.

The highly unusual “anti-weaponization” fund was denounced by critics as a slush fund and as a brazen misuse of a once-independent Justice Department to carry out the president’s personal and political agendas.

The announcement provided few details of how the disbursement would work or who would be eligible. But the arrangement raised the possibility that American taxpayers might end up writing checks to those prosecuted for the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, and others the president has cast as victims of Biden administration actions.

“This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit legal watchdog group that has been critical of the administration.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) criticized the arrangement as "a $1.7 billion slush fund for right-wing political violence and subversion.”

Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) issued a statement calling the arrangement the most serious misuse of taxpayer funds by a sitting president. In his statement, Wyden focused specifically on the Anti-Weaponization Fund, including its apparent purpose of compensating third-party claimants for alleged harms unrelated to the IRS data leak claims at the heart of the dismissed lawsuit.

“Regardless of whether Trump filed this lawsuit with a personal payday or a slush fund in mind, he deserves no credit for dropping it,” Wyden said, adding that the fund represented “a stunning act of corruption.” He described it as “a $1.7 billion slush fund for right-wing political violence and subversion” and said that if Trump follows through, “it will be the most brazen theft and abuse of taxpayer dollars by any president in American history.”

:{Video

Citation

From the May 18, 2026, edition of Newsmax's Carl Higbie: Frontline

CARL HIGBIE (HOST): So the latest freak out from the left is because Trump dropped — he dropped — his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for a $1.776 — 1776 — billion dollar fund set up for truth and justice compensation for people who were victims of Biden's weaponization of government, which there are a lot of.

It's apparently, though, a scam according to Democrats. Keep in mind, Trump and his family will get $0 in exchange for just simply an apology from the IRS and a fund set up for every other person who Biden targeted, but not himself. Kinda like the Trump org when they couldn't get any COVID money whatsoever, but everyone else did. But the left is still freaking out. Wow. Trump's enriching himself off the taxpayers. No. Wrong. But here's a US senator saying it anyway.

...

Hey, Chris — my senator, unfortunately — Trump's not making billions of dollars off the government. In fact, he's not even taking a paycheck. So, technically, you, Chris, are taking more money from the government than he is.

But let me explain why Trump was suing the federal government in the first place. And I'll do it like you're five because clearly you aren't winning any IQ tests recently. See, when the federal government was run by idiots and Democrats like you, Senator Murphy, there was this guy named Charles Littlejohn who used to work for the IRS. He had high level access, who is, by the way, now in jail for five years. And why is that? Well, Carl, I'll tell you. Because he accessed secure lock specific need to know information that were in fact Trump's tax returns. Actually, the whole family's tax returns, about a 100 other people from the Trump organization along with 400,000 other people's tax returns. Then he leaked it to the New York Times and ProPublica. Yeah. He was convicted of that. That's not an opinion. That's a proven fact in court. And under US code 26 7431, it's a $1,000 fine per disclosure.

//

1. ### Media Matters weekly newsletter, May 15

:{05/15/26

2. ### Newsmax's Greg Kelly says “it does disappoint me” that Sean Duffy made a reality show; Kelly claims that “the deep state” set Duffy up

:{05/14/26

3. ### Newsmax host on Hantavirus: “They are doing it all over again on purpose. COVID started in March 2020, impacted the November elections. Hantavirus started in May of 2026.”

05/13/26

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kickass WH reso ocean warming yt 5 13/26

alaam chicken lil not denier, i am envrnist want clean water aor and ---- same spiel as last time on sea level rise

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[## NEWSMAX'S GREG KELLY SAYS THE “HYSTERIA” ABOUT HIGH GAS PRICES IS “ARTIFICIAL”

05/05/26

https://www.mediamatters.org/greg-kelly/newsmaxs-greg-kelly-says-hysteria-about-high-gas-prices-artificial)

MMA

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UP FOR AG? OMG AT HEARTLAND CONF 4 26 2024?

MOJO GUK

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave the keynote speech at a conference on Wednesday morning, one which was hosted by a prominent climate-denying think tank that previously compared those concerned about the climate crisis to the Unabomber on billboard posters in 2012.

“No longer are we going to rely on bad, flawed assumptions instead of accurate, present-day facts, without apology or regret,” Zeldin said at the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change in Washington, DC, referring to well-established climate science.

Zeldin has been widely criticized by climate experts. Last month, more than 160 environmental and public health organizations called for him to resign or be fired, saying no EPA administrator in history “has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission.”

In his speech, Zeldin poked fun at the media for calling him “controversial” for not “following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom and gloom position of the day is from John Kerry or Al Gore or AOC”—referring to the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s controversial that we won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” he said.

He derided previous administrations’ heeding of climate scientists’ warnings about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, and for ignoring “what’s good and necessary about carbon dioxide for the life of the planet.”

“What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” he said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”

“Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on Earth…is not a pollutant and never was.”

Ahead of Zeldin’s Wednesday-morning speech at the Heartland conference, Environmental Defense Fund Action put up posters around Hotel Washington critiquing the EPA administrator’s participation and saying climate denial does not improve Americans’ lives. “Lee Zeldin is executing on the playbook of denial written by the Heartland Institute,” Joanna Slaney, a vice-president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said.

The Heartland Institute has accepted money from big oil companies including Shell and ExxonMobil, and from the Mercers, a family of Republican mega-donors. The thinktank was a contributor to Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration.

The Heartland Institute rejects the scientific consensus that the climate crisis is real, human-caused and urgent. Since the early 2000s, it has been a leading promoter of climate doubt, even branding climate science as “fake news.”

Experts agree that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet, resulting in dangerous increases in temperatures and in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Scientists have long warned that the world must quickly phase out fossil fuels in order to preserve a livable climate.

Donald Trump has repeatedly dismissed the climate crisis as a “hoax” and dismissed environmental policies as a “scam.” And under Zeldin, the EPA has exempted polluting facilities from regulations, shuttered climate and environmental research offices, and shrunk its workforce. It has also rolled back dozens of environmental and climate protections.

“What we are doing in the last 14 months is no surprise,” Zeldin said in his speech. “It is what I pledged during my confirmation hearing, and it is what the American public voted for when they put Donald J Trump back in office. And thank God they did.”

:{:{The EPA administrator also spoke about his most controversial environmental rollback: the shredding of the legal finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations, known as the “endangerment finding.” Scientists and other experts widely condemned the repeal, but the Heartland Institute has celebrated it.}:

“Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on Earth and happens to result from every single bit of human and animal activity on the planet, is not a pollutant and never was,” Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the thinktank, said in a February statement praising the repeal.

References to the rollback were met with cheers at the conference in Washington on Wednesday morning, and Zeldin expressed “admiration” for the Heartland Institute’s advocacy against the endangerment finding in his speech.

Craig Rucker, the president of CFACT—a right-wing group which complains about“climate exaggeration,” introduced Zeldin at the conference as a “friend of sound science [and] climate realism, a real rock star.”

Another panel at Wednesday’s conference convened the authors of a contentious Department of Energy report that was written to back up the repeal of the endangerment finding. The publication was derided by climate scientists as making a “mockery of science,” and was not used in the justification for the final repeal of the finding. “While the world warned, a lot of things improved and got better, and continues to do so,” said Ross McKitrick, an author of the report, at the conference.

Another report author, Judith Curry—a climatologist who rails against climate “alarmism”—criticized the “monolithic consensus” on climate science that is “presented to the world.” Though the US government disbanded the group which produced the controversial report on the endangerment finding, Curry said the authors were currently reviewing comments on the report and preparing a new version to release this year.

Earlier on Wednesday morning, the Heartland Institute’s president, James Taylor, kicked off the conference with a rousing speech in which he invoked the debunked climate myth that increased carbon emissions are good for plants: “Restoring CO2 and restoring warmth to our world is…a restoration to more ideal conditions,” he said.

“The truth is clear: there is no climate crisis,” said Taylor. “The science is very clear.”

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Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington

A conference near the White House drew hundreds of people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change. The mood was triumphant.

A man stands in front of a crowd with a slide on a screen. The slide reads, “More CO2 will be a very significant benefit to agriculture and forestry!”

William Happer, a Princeton professor emeritus of physics who has argued that global warming is good for humanity, during a presentation at the Heartland Institute’s International Climate Change Conference in Washington on Wednesday.Credit...Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

Maxine Joselow

By Maxine Joselow

Reporting from Washington

April 9, 2026

Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by “leftist politicians.” Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless.

These were some of the false claims made at a conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of President Trump’s possible choices for the next attorney general.

“We aren’t just following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom-and-gloom prediction of the day is,” Mr. Zeldin said at the conference, which drew around 220 attendees to the basement ballroom of a hotel in downtown Washington.

“We won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” Mr. Zeldin added, drawing applause from the crowd, which had given him a standing ovation before his speech.

The event made clear that climate change deniers are experiencing a triumphant resurgence in Mr. Trump’s Washington after years of feeling sidelined by the scientific and political establishments.

A man holds a pamphlet that reads, "Fossil Fuels are the Greenest Energy Sources."

A vast majority of scientists agree that climate change is real and that it is caused by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. They expect average global temperatures to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels within the next decade, unleashing dire impacts that include more deadly heat waves, coastal floods, water shortages and crop failures.

Earth has already warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) since the Industrial Revolution, scientific estimates suggest.

Mr. Trump, however, has derided the scientific consensus on global warming as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” And Mr. Zeldin has said that the E.P.A. is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” by rolling back dozens of regulations that burdened the fossil fuel industry.

The conference on Wednesday brought together people with varying levels of skepticism of the scientific consensus. Some attendees flatly denied that the planet was warming, while others recognized the trend but argued that it was not an emergency and that the potential solutions were too costly.

The event was organized by the Heartland Institute, a research organization that says it promotes free-market solutions and that has attacked mainstream climate science for decades. Other sponsors included the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit group that claims falsely that planet-warming carbon dioxide is beneficial to humans.

The influence of both groups waned under the Biden administration, which embraced the science behind climate change and pushed policies designed to address it. Mr. Zeldin’s appearance at the conference underscored how the groups’ sway has grown in the Trump era.

Image

A sign reads "thank you for emitting/"

:{A display at the event.

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute poses for a portrait.

Last month, the CO2 Coalition successfully nominated an eye doctor with no background in air pollution science to a committee that advises the E.P.A. on the latest air pollution research. On Wednesday, the group gave out tote bags, pamphlets, mints and blue-and-green stress balls that resembled miniature Earths to conference attendees. The white lettering on the stress balls read: “Don’t stress. There is no climate crisis.”

Next to the CO2 Coalition’s booth, a chemist and businessman from Wisconsin, Stephen Einhorn, was distributing copies of his own pamphlet, whose cover promised to reveal “what the climate activists don’t know or don’t want you to know.”

Threats to library funding end with a settlement by Trump Administration.

Anna Paulina Luna calls for the quick expulsion of Eric Swalwell from the House.

:{Trump’s explanation for the image of him as Jesus: “I thought it was me as a doctor.”

“I’m very happy that Trump appointed Zeldin,” Mr. Einhorn said in an interview. “I’m surprised at how much progress he’s made toward informing the American people what the actual science is, which is that we have a wonderful climate. We’re blessed. There’s nothing to worry about.”

The Heartland Institute does not disclose its funders. In the past, it has received financial support from oil and gas interests as well as the Mercer Family Foundation, an influential donor to conservative causes.

“Because we’re not as well-funded by industry as people think, we don’t have a fancy green room,” James M. Taylor, the president of the Heartland Institute, said in an interview outside the main ballroom.

The group receives around $4 million each year from foundations and individuals, Mr. Taylor said. If the Heartland Institute had recently received funding from the fossil fuel industry, he added, he wasn’t aware of it.

Pausing to reflect, Mr. Taylor said the second Trump administration had done more for the climate change denial movement than any other administration in history. He pointed to the E.P.A.’s extraordinary move in February to renounce the federal government’s legal authority to combat climate change.

“This is absolutely a moment of triumph,” Mr. Taylor said, adding, “It’s nice to be winning.”

Image

A stack of books including "Climate Change Reconsidered."

Patrick Morrisey, the governor of West Virginia, stands behind a podium.

:

In addition to Mr. Zeldin, the speakers at the conference included West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican who has built a career opposing federal climate regulations.

“I’m very hopeful that we’re going to keep the White House for a number of terms, but let’s take advantage of where we are now,” Mr. Morrisey said.

William Happer, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University who has argued that global warming is good for humanity, delivered the lunchtime address. He dismissed concerns about rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over a relatively carbon-intensive lunch of roasted chicken breast, cannellini bean ragù and ricotta cheesecake.

EDF Action, the political arm of the Environmental Defense Fund, put up posters outside the conference that protested the event and highlighted the effects of climate change nationwide.

“Climate denial won’t lower insurance costs,” one poster read, referring to high home insurance premiums in areas prone to wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters fueled by rising global temperatures.

The conference was set to continue on Thursday with a speech by John Clauser, a Nobel physics laureate who has claimed, falsely, that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet.

Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2026, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Gathering Shows Upswing of Climate Denial Groups. Order Reprints | Today’s

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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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media Climate Hoax Collapses As 2025 Has Fewest Extreme Weather Deaths Ever

News Radio 1200 WOAI - iHeart

KTRH-AM covering local news from Houston and across Texas.

WHY? CBS Evening News Pushes Young Adults Pondering Climate Doom Before Having Kids

Newsbusters

Climate Depot founder and executive director Marc Morano unloaded on CBS leadership following the climate-doom segment in comments to MRC Business.

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Kamala speaking

Right-wing media falsely claim that Kamala Harris is telling Americans not to have kids because of climate change

07/31/24

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MOJO

This story was originally published by theGuardian and is reproduced here as part of the*Climate Desk*collaboration.}:

The Trump administration is breaking up a research center praised as a “crown jewel” of climate research after accusing it of spreading “alarmism” about climate change.

Russell Vought, the director of the White House’s office and management budget, said the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, would be dismantled under the supervision of the National Science Foundation.

“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” he wrote in a social media post. “A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

The announcement was the latest in a series of climate-skeptic moves by the administration, which has vowed to eliminate what it calls “green new scam research activities.”

It drew fierce condemnation from climate experts, who said the Colorado center was renowned for advances in the study of weather patterns, including tropical cyclones.

Roger Pielke Jr, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank, told *USA Today*, which first reported the story, that the facility was “a crown jewel of the US scientific enterprise and deserves to be improved not shuttered.”

He added: “If the US is going to be a global leader in the atmospheric sciences, then it cannot afford to make petty and vindictive decisions based on the hot politics of climate change.”

The move was also criticized by Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, who said it put “public safety at risk.”

“Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science,” he said. “NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families.”

The center employs approximately 830 staff and includes the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, which Vought said would be shut. It also operates two aircraft for atmospheric research and manages a government-owned supercomputing facility in Wyoming.

The decision to dismantle it is consistent with Donald Trump’s frequent characterisations of climate change as a “con job” or a “hoax.”

The White House has accused the centre of following a “woke direction” and identified several projects that administration officials say are wasteful and frivolous, USA Today reported.

These include a Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences that seeks to “make the sciences more welcoming, inclusive, and justice-centered,” as well as research into wind turbines, an innovation that Trump has repeatedly denounced.

The administration has already proposed a 30 percent cut to the funding of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, slashing spending on its climate, weather and ocean laboratories, which work to improve forecasting and better understand weather patterns.

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

mma

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

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

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Research contributions from Ilana Berger

Published 11/14/25

• Ahead of COP30 — the United Nations climate summit which began November 6 in Brazil — Bill Gates released a memo targeted at the international climate community which argued that “although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise” and called for a “strategic pivot” on climate change to prioritize “human welfare.”

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

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

• > President Trump, of course, has called climate change a, quote, con job. That's despite the overwhelming evidence of its reality and the very real threat it poses. President Trump seemed to get an assist recently from Bill Gates, who argued that resources actually should be shifted away from the battle against climate change. It's a move that experts have said is just flat out wrong.

• In fact, in response to Gates' memo, Trump posted on Truth Social that “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax” because Bill Gates had “finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.” Gates said that Trump and other right-wing media reactions that echo his remarks are a “gigantic misreading of the memo,” while he has also pushed back at “climate scientists who said he was setting up a false dichotomy pitting climate efforts against foreign aid.”

• ## Right-wing media celebrate Bill Gates’ shift on climate, misrepresent his memo to downplay the climate crisis

• The Associated Press reported that Bill Gates remarked: “If you think climate is not important, you won't agree with the memo. If you think climate is the only cause and apocalyptic, you won't agree with the memo.”

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

• • The New York Post editorial board concluded, “If Gates wants any credit for belatedly seeing the light, he needs to put maximum effort into getting the left’s climate warriors to wake up, too.” NY Post, [10/28/25]

• • Former Fox News host John Stossel used Bill Gates’ memo to push his climate change denial content on social media, writing, “Welcome to the club, Bill. Here 3 climate scientists debunk several of the doomsday myths.”Stossel shared one of his videos featuring three climate skeptics, Willie Soon, David Legates, and Patrick Michaels, from an event at The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has received funding from fossil fuel interests. Twitter/X, [10/28/25; Media Matters, 1/16/24, 8/14/25; NPR, 9/12/20; Desmog; accessed 11/10/25]

• • Hannity.com: “CLIMATE KOOK FLIPS! Bill Gates Suggests Rethinking Climate Change 'Doomsday Outlook'”Hannity.com, [10/28/25]

• • Fox host Jimmy Failla claimed that Gates’ memo proves climate change is a “grift” and pushed the misleading narrative that the climate is always changing. Failla continued:“What an about face. And it really gives up the whole entire grift we always knew it was. It drives me crazy because, you know this, the movement has not only changed again but changed in name three times before we got here. We were going to freeze to death in the ‘70s. Can you give me some money? We were going to melt in the ‘80s. Can you give me a few bucks? Then they were like, we're not freezing or melting, but the weather changes every day. How about a couple of bucks.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [10/29/25; climatefactcheck.org,

6/22/22]

• • Glenn Beck, founder of TheBlaze, wrote on his website that Gates did a “strategic pivot” because “the ruling class” finds AI “more useful than fear of the weather.”“Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people,” he later wrote. [Glennbeck.com,

10/29/25]

• • In an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt, conspiracy theorist and U.S. Agency for Global Media senior adviser Kari Lake said, “When we get documents declassified on the climate hoax, he’s probably trying to get ahead of what happens then.”Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight,* [10/29/25; Media Matters, 12/12/24]

• • OnAmerica’s Newsroom, co-host Bill Hemmer used the memo to falsely claim that “rising sea levels just ain’t happening.” “He says it will not lead to the humanities demise. … Maybe an asteroid will, but the rising sea levels just ain’t happening as Al Gore warned us back in 2005.” The World Economic Forum has said that “rising sea levels caused by climate change are impacting 1 billion people worldwide,” while “2024 saw an unexpectedly fast rising of sea levels, which are already unprecedented.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [10/29/25; World Economic Forum, 3/25/25]

• • OnOutnumbered, Fox News contributor Kaylee McGhee White said “climate change doomerism” was a ploy to “drive young adults … to leftist activism.” “This is the least surprising development ever. I think that the climate change doomerism, it was always a ploy, the real purpose of which was to drive young adults my age into leftist activism, that is all it was a vehicle for. And you know, what’s frustrating about this is Bill Gates is suddenly switching his position, but there is no new science behind." Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [10/29/25]

• • Fox’s Will Cain hosted Alex Epstein, author of the petroleum-promoting bookFossil Future, and suggested that fossil fuel advocacy is the “potential explanations for the change of heart of Bill Gates.” He claimed, “It is really most of the thoughtful scientists and thinkers through the last several hundred years who have understood the power of fossil fuels and economic growth in helping the vast majority of people across the world. Maybe that finally broke through to Bill Gates. Maybe just seeing the writing on the wall in modern America and under President Donald Trump.” Fox News, *The Will Cain Show*, [10/29/25; Media Matters, 11/4/25]

• • OnThe Five, Greg Gutfeld claimed that “people were told to stop having kids” and that Gates' shift is akin to admitting the “climate models … are fraudulent.”Gutfeld said, “It was a lie that impacted the mental health of generations and the physical health of a civilization. People were told to stop having kids. If you had kids you were hurting the planet. But it is hopeful that Gates and others are ceding to reality. We saw it happen already. Nobody is talking about data anymore because the data, the climate models, they are finally admitting are fraudulent, they were retrofitted so that they matched the results they were getting, and now that is out in the open.” Fox News, *The Five*, [10/29/25]

• • Fox host Joey Jones claimed that Gates’ memo meant that Trump “won the climate change war.”“I think Trump has won another war. He won the climate change war now. Americans are coming around. You want to talk about petroleum products, think about how much oil is used to make all of those syringes for all of those vaccines during Covid. I mean just the impact and imprint of petroleum on our lives is endless,” Jones claimed. Fox News, *The Five*, [10/29/25]

• • Contributor Katie Pavlich told Fox Business’Kudlowthat she wants “reparations for damage this guy [Bill Gates] did on the climate change front.”She claimed, “There were years of groups that were funded by Bill Gates, foreigners doing fact checks on conservative web sites like TownHall, demonetizing us for talking about climate change and that it’s not going to destroy humanity and in fact a lot of the science has been bought and paid for and has been debunked on this issue. I would get laughed at when I would point out I am from Arizona, and you can find sea shells, fossils at the top of the Grand Canyon because yes, climate change has been happening for billions of years.” Fox Business, *Kudlow*, [10/29/25]

• • Frequent Fox guest and climate denier Marc Morano on Fox Business’The Evening Editsuggested that Bill Gates “knew” all along that climate change was nonsense.“Bill Gates knew in the year 2000 that the climate agenda was complete bleep. He knew in 2010 it was nonsense, he knew in 2020 it was nonsense, but only in 2025 is he willing to tell the truth. And the reason is he needs connections. He needs energy.” [Fox Business, The Evening Edit,

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

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

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

]}:

• • Fox & Friends Weekendguest and Republican strategist Mehek Cooke claimed Gates shifted on climate change because he realized “we're not going to pay for this green climate change hoax.” She said, “We're not all going to die at the end of the day. So farmers can increase their herd share, I can eat more meat. I mean, all the things that Bill Gates said to the American people, he realized he was losing because we're not going to pay for this green climate change hoax. I also think he's listening to President Trump. It's about innovation and not more regulation.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [11/2/25]

• • Power The Future Founder and frequent right-wing media guest Daniel Turner wrote that Bill Gates’ “climate crusade was always a grift.” Twitter/X, [11/3/25; Media Matters, 5/8/24;

3/25/24]

• ## Climate scientists push back on Gates pitting poverty reduction against efforts to reduce carbon emissions

• During a segment on CNN News Central, Bill Weir highlighted concerns from “the chorus of top climate scientists who spent the week trying to debunk the billionaire's confusing new message that rich cities will be immune from the worst effects and that technology can save us.”

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

• • In comments to NBC, Jeffrey Sachs, who leads Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development, “called the memo ‘pointless, vague, unhelpful and confusing,'" adding that there’s “no reason to pit poverty reduction versus climate transformation.’" NBC, [10/28/25]

• • Climate scientist Michael Mann has been outspoken about Gates’ memo, pointing out that it coincided with the landfall of the climate-driven Hurricane Melissa and that it was defended by former Fox News star Megyn Kelly. Mann also wrote a rebuttal of the memo in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, making the point that “Gates’ latest missive … plays like a game of climate change-diminishing bingo, drawing upon nearly every one of the tropes embraced by professional climate disinformers.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25, 10/29/25; The Bulletin, 10/31/25; The New York Times, 11/6/25]

• • Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles, said of the memo: “Despite agreeing with some points therein, I still think its framing is fundamentally flawed and thus also its key conclusions.” Twitter/X, [11/3/25]

• • Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote: “There are a lot of things I agree with in Bill Gates’ new memo on climate change. … But in other areas I feel that it needlessly sets up a conflict between laudable goals.” Hausfather said that “we can both mitigate emissions and alleviate poverty, disease, and hunger. While there are some tradeoffs it is more a question of policy priority than a zero sum game. Similarly, I feel that Gates is a bit too cavalier in his treatment of climate risk.” The Climate Brink, [11/5/25]

• • Katherine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, also criticized Gates’ memo. She said, “‘I have not seen a single scientific paper that ever posited that the human race would become extinct … it’s a straw man, the way he’s proposing it.” The Guardian, [11/6/25]

---

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3 25

aha note stoke righteous manly fear but ridicule left reaction [irrational] rage

MRC Business in June 2024, “Net zero in the climate agenda is really nothing short of Soviet-style central ...

Who Ate Your Milk-Bone? New Republic Rages DOGE 'Could Kill Your Dog' - Newsbusters

Newsbusters

Climate Depot founder Marc Morano shredded Aronoff's nutty take on DOGE in comments to MRC Business: This is the same old canard we have heard for ...

Thanks Captain Obvious! Reuters Admits Pursuit of 'Net Zero' Emissions 'Resounding Failure'

Print Page | Newsbusters

As Climate Depot founder Marc Morano told

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MMA 2 25

Fox News has largely dodged reporting President Donald Trump’s February 15 declaration that he is above the law as long as he “saves his Country,” with much of the network’s sparse coverage focusing on how the president’s nakedly authoritarian statement triggered the libs.

When Trump posted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” midday Saturday, the response was fierce. Trump’s remark — a quote “often attributed” to Napoleon Bonaparte, who overthrew France’s post-revolutionary republic and crowned himself emperor — followed calls from his allies to defy court rulings that strike down administration actions as illegal.

Numerous critics on the left and a handful on the right pointed out the danger inherent in Trump appearing to place himself above the law. MAGA influencers like Jack Posobiec (who recently received special access to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first overseas trip) cheered. “America will be saved,” the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theorist wrote. “What must be done will be done.”

It should go without saying that a similar remark from Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris would have triggered days if not weeks of apocalyptic coverage from Fox. But the right-wing propaganda network’s response to Trump’s comment has been notably muted, with only about 6 minutes of discussion through noon ET on Tuesday.

The bulk of Fox’s coverage — more than 4 and a half minutes — came from a Sunday segment on The Big Weekend Show in which anchor Griff Jenkins and his panel mocked Democrats and journalists for criticizing Trump’s statement.

Jenkins introduced the discussion by reading Trump’s quote and describing it as “the left’s latest ammunition for vilifying Trump.” Jenkins then aired a series of criticisms of the remark as a chyron read “left melts down over out-of-context Trump post,” before providing the purported missing context: “Trump said only days ago that he does in fact plan on abiding by the law.”

Video

Citation

From the February 16, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Big Weekend Show

Jenkins, having awarded the president credit for saying he would follow the law before saying that actions aren’t illegal if done to save the country, then added: “In fact, many people wonder if the ones not following the law are actually those on the left who have relentlessly gone after Trump over the past four years with questionable cases.”

The segment’s panelists celebrated Trump’s remark as a deliberate act of misdirection aimed at his political opposition.

“I am really grateful that President Trump did troll them on this, and I think he knew this was going to be their reaction,” offered Fox contributor Sara Carter.

Medical contributor Nicole Saphier added that Trump “puts up tweets like this because he knows that they are going to lose their mind. He has Democrats and left-wing media in such a tizzy.”

Fox prime-time host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity also responded by mocking Trump’s critics, tossing in a reference to the remark during a Monday recitation of purported instances of the media’s anti-Trump hysteria.

“It's like Nazi, fascist, racist, now it's Napoleon, now it's Margaret Brennan, now it's Saturday Night Live,” he moaned. “I mean, to be honest, it's like 10 years of this and they still haven't learned a thing.”

Fox contributor Andrew McCarthy offered a more cautious take on Monday’s edition of America’s Newsroom, suggesting that Trump’s comment could undermine his administration’s legal fights before the Supreme Court.

“Look, I think that some of the things the president said over the weekend about his, you know, authority, that — like, you don't violate the law if you are saving the country, and some of the stuff that has gone on with the Justice Department — I hope they haven't spooked the justices,” he said. “Because if you are going to ask the justices to uphold the law, you have to act like the law is important.”

But Trump’s remarks undermining the rule of law are not anomalous. He vowed during the campaign to act as a “dictator,” though only on “day one” of his presidency, and promised to unleash the Justice Department on his political enemies and journalistic foils. He has cited as his model the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban, a self-described practitioner of “illiberal democracy.” Trump regularly praises murderous authoritarian rulers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and even touted the “strength” China’s leaders deployed in violently suppressing the Tiananmen Square uprising.

And Trump’s actions suggest he means what he says: He regularly signaled during his first administration that he wanted law enforcement to act as an extension of his will, and now he has put that into practice in his second term.

Pushback from the Justice Department stymied his efforts to take authoritarian steps like prosecuting his political foes and overturning the 2020 election. But since he returned to the White House, Trump has issued mass pardons to the January 6 convicts who attacked law enforcement in a bid keep him in power; purged federal prosecutors and FBI leadership; and nominated his own former personal lawyers to lead the Justice Department and a sycophant with an enemies list for FBI director. His appointees have overseen an effort to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his support for Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts and an attempt to open a probe into a Biden-era contract, both of which triggered resignations from career prosecutors.

Trump has functionally ensured that his allies will remain beyond the reach of federal law enforcement for the next four years. What a troll!

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aha alarmist is rubber glue reverse (fear is unmanly, women are hysterical/emotion irrational) it is rational to fear gubmint and commies

mma 12 23

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): It really has nothing to do with the environment when you hear "Green New Deal," does it?

MARC MORANO (GUEST): No, absolutely nothing. And as you mentioned, they freely admit that, whether it's AOC's architect or even the UN. They've actually said, they said, "You thought climate treaties had something to do with environmental policy? This is about redistribution of wealth. This is about empowering the bureaucrats." What they're trying to do, it's all about power. It's about making fewer and fewer decisions by fewer and fewer individuals -- more decisions by fewer individuals.

...

All of this is happening so that you can have a regulatory state that we've never experienced in America -- in our American history -- as they take over more and more swaths. This is the intentional collapse of energy, food, transportation, and as a bonus, our free speech, because remember, the UN last year announced, "We own the science on climate change, and that's why we partnered with Google to make sure only UN-approved results on climate science are returned."

This is a frightening world in which we're entering now. And, you know, we really need to push back hard because they are crushing the middle class, and they are literally doing everything they can with 15 minute cities to keep us locked in, the banning of gas-powered cars -- which, by the way, no one's ever voted to ban.

Fox News platforms climate denial and the Great Reset conspiracy theory during COP2711/14/22

2. ### Fox brings on climate denier to downplay landmark IPCC climate report

:{:{08/09/21}:

3. ### Merchant Of Doubt Marc Morano Concerned Google Won't Promote His Website's Climate Change Denial03/06/15 }:}:

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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 paris treaty by going to congress; woman: fear based agenda, requires 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”

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8 24

KTRH Local Houston and Texas News

The Climate Crisis Isn't Real

By

Ethan Buchanan

Aug 5, 2024

Massive protests and banner with the message SAVE THE PLANET

Photo: Moment RF

The media loves to tell us that climate change is one of our biggest threats, but data shows that the climate has changed less than 2 degrees since 1960. As it turns out, this entire crisis has been manufactured by the media.

Marc Morano with the Climate Depot told KTRH, "All these statistical tricks, the scale of the temperatures, the color, the start point, the endpoint, this is how you get the climate crisis." Morano says this is all just data being manipulated for political purposes.

He said, "Everything has to be the worst you've ever seen. It's all designed to get people to support political action, and not question the claims of the climate crisis."

Morano also said that eventually, all this climate alarmism will just become white noise, and people are already starting to simply tune it all out.

// biden offshore? wind...

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new am mag

morano

1 24

subscribe: Google Podcasts | Android | RSS | More

The United Nations “climate” agreement reached at the COP28 in Dubai represents a “psychotic” and “anti-human” scheme that is a break from reality, but the danger of the merging “climate” hysteria with health and medical power grabs is a real threat, warned ClimateDepot.com Editor Marc Morano in this interview on Conversations That Matter with The New American magazine’s Alex Newman.

Morano, who has attended 18 of the last 20 UN climate summits, said that UN climate alarmists are happy about Biden’s commitments to shut down most U.S. electrical power generation. Huge land grabs and much more is on the agenda, too. In the second segment, Morano explains how Americans can work to stop this—and why it is so essential.

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Exclusive: Circuit Court Ruling on Biden DOE's Appliance Regulation 'a Win' for Americans

PJ Media

Climate Depot's Marc Morano called the DOE's revoked regulations “a complete bypassing of democracy through the unelected regulatory state” and ...

Exclusive: Circuit Court Ruling on Biden DOE’s Appliance Regulation ‘a Win’ for Americans

CATHERINE SALGADO | 6:52 PM ON JANUARY 09, 2024

The Biden Department of Energy (DOE) just lost a case on its heavy and damaging regulation of laundry and dishwashing machines, and a consumer advocate is celebrating the move as “a win” for Americans’ “consumer choice.”

Fifth Circuit Court judges Clement, Wilson, and Oldham ruled on Jan. 8: “In 2022, the Department of Energy tightened the regulatory regime surrounding America’s dishwashers and laundry machines. Petitioners sued. The Department’s actions were arbitrary and capricious. So we grant the petition and remand to the Department.”

The Biden administration has been attempting to wage a war on appliances on multiple occasions and fronts, partly due to its radical and unscientific climate alarmist agenda.

Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild is one expert who sees the court ruling as a victory. Consumers’ Research is a consumer advocacy organization that says it is “focused on educating consumers on the policies, products, and services of concern to them and to promote the freedom to act on that knowledge and understanding.”

This new ruling against the DOE appears to be pro-freedom and pro-consumer. “This is a fantastic ruling for American consumers,” Hild said in exclusive comments to PJ Media.

Hild explained that the DOE appliance regulations came out of the Biden administration’s Environmental, Social, and Governance goals (ESG, or woke standards poisoning our government and businesses). “These regulations were part of Biden’s ESG agenda, that was more about pushing a radical environmentalist agenda than protecting and serving consumers, and today is a win for consumer choice and our standard of living,” Hild said.

*For Our VIPs:I’m So Glad I Have a Gas Stove Right Now

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/response-wildfire-smoke-choking-new-york-city-fox-news-trots-out-tired-climate-denial

June 7, as smoke from hundreds of wildfires raging across Canada turned New York City into a dystopian climate change movie, MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted: “I always thought there would be *some* kind of climate reckoning when it got bad enough but Covid has taught me that, no, people will just step on the gas and happily mow people down so they never have to admit taking a wrong turn."

Too little TV news coverage connected the code red air quality in New York and other impacted U.S. cities to climate change, but Fox News and other right-wing media figures retreated even further from a reckoning, stepping on the climate denial pedal by dismissing the link between global warming and wildfires, attacking those that did, and insisting on alternative explanations for why Canada is having its worst-ever wildfire season.

In fact, at 2 hours and 41 minutes of coverage, Fox News covered the wildfire story more than either CNN (2 hours and 19 minutes) or MSNBC (41 minutes) on June 7 and mentioned climate change (to deny it) more times in its coverage than its counterparts.

Fox News dismisses the link between wildfires and climate change, mocks those that do make the connection

Scientists say wildfires are becoming more severe as “forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate”, a fact even observed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. Experts further note that Canada’s wildfire season is a “harbinger of our climate future” with the United Nations warning that by 2090, “global wildfires are expected to increase in intensity by up to 57% thanks to climate change.”  But no amount of evidence, either experiential or academic, changes the tone of the reporting at Fox News when it comes to extreme weather and climate-fueled events.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade mocks AOC, climate change czar John Kerry, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for connecting the dangerous air quality to climate change: “Every time it’s real hot, climate change. Every time it’s real cold, climate change. When it rains a lot it’s because of climate change. And you guessed it, Canada, with burning forests, 400 separate fires, it’s because of climate change. AOC said it. Of course climate change czar John Kerry said it, and [Karine Jean-Pierre] KJP has one note, listen.” Fox News, Fox & Friends, [6/8/23]

:{:{Fox News host }::{Laura Ingraham}::{ suggests that coverage of the event is }::{overblown }::{and mocks those reporting the air quality from a climate angle: “Is this really a novel occurrence for our country or is it getting the coverage of the type it’s getting because it's happening along the East Coast where all the elites live?” Ingraham continued: “The}::{ apocalyptic coverage in the New York Times today was just absolutely knee-slappingly hilarious. }::{… CNN's Bill Weir, no stranger to hyperbole himself, used the event to call for action to electrify every car in the United States for humanity’s sake." Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/7/23]}:

Fox News host Sean Hannity accuses Democrats, including AOC, of politicizing the crisis to push their climate agenda: “Tonight, smoke from the Canadian wildfires, they blanketed the entire East Coast of the U.S. creating a scary martian-like scene in New York City especially. And as usual, Democrats, they wasted no time. They went right to politicizing the crisis, AOC using the wildfire and heat wave in Puerto Rico to once again push her radical Green New Deal or the climate alarmist religious cult agenda.:{” Fox News, Hannity, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/7/23:{]}:

On Jesse Watters Primetime, climate denier and frequent Fox guest Mark Morano dismissed climate change and accused those making the connection of weaponizing the weather while smoking a cigar:“This is exactly what you would expect to happen. This is Canadian natural disaster mismanagement and now they are trying to blame global warming which makes it, what? Our fault. It's our SUVs. It's our gas stoves which, by the way, didn't New York ban them? Shouldn't we have -- shouldn't wildfires be a thing of the past? I thought they were banning them.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [6/7/23]

On The Five, Jeanine Pirro accuses AOC and Democrats of “pumping up climate hysteria”: “While Americans choke on the smoke, the far left smells an opportunity. AOC thinks this is a great time to push her Green New Deal. She says that we must, ”Adapt our food systems, energy grids, infrastructure and healthcare to prepare for what's to come". Other Democrats are pumping up climate hysteria and bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.:{” Fox News, The Five, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/7/23:{]}:

On Outnumbered,the panel mocks AOC for connecting the crisis to climate change while Fox contributor Kennedy suggests that because wildfires existed before “we started talking about the climate crisis” then the science is not settled: “There are a lot of reasons for wildfires. Wildfires have been happening for a long time. Before we started talking about the climate crisis. So, I want to make sure that the science is settled before we completely turf our economy and flush any innovation we have down the toilet because of a tweet from AOC.” Fox News, Outnumbered, [6/7/23]

Fox turns to its go-to explanation for catastrophic wildfires: It’s poor forest management. And it’s environmentalists’ fault.

Forest management has played some role in the unprecedented wildfire season in Canada — while the role of climate change is also evident and clear. But from watching Fox’s coverage of the fires, you would probably come away with the idea that it’s been Canada’s forest management policies alone driving the worsening fires.

Fox’s jump to shift blame to poor forest management as a tactic to downplay climate change goes back to at least 2018 when Trump first blamed California’s forestry policies while touring the aftermath of the deadly Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. Fox revived the tactic in full force during California’s apocalyptic 2020 wildfires.

Helping drive the swift move to blame forest management and environmentalists this time around is News Corps darling, Fox News contributor, and New York Post columnist Miranda Devine who wrote a June 7 column, “Smoky New York isn’t climate change — it’s bad forest management,” which has been cited by Fox News personalities and amplified by right-wing media figures online.

:{:{Fox News host }::{Rachel Campos-Duffy on Outnumbered}::{: “The real blame is on the climate}::{ cult. }::{…}::{ They are an anti-human group and they want to shut our forests and close them off to humans and to industry who know how to manage it. And that's what's happening right now.” }::{Fox News, Outnumbered, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/8/23]}:

On the Faulkner Focus, Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz insists that poor forest management is liberals' fault: I hate to tell it you folks but there have been big forest fires for eons probably since the beginning of time. It's ironic to me because the same people who claim they want the Green New Deal, they fight us every single time on the mitigation efforts to manage the forests, clear out the underbrush, clear out the dead trees and clear out the fuel that makes these things so ignite in such big fashion. They will not do that as Democrats and these left-leaning liberals. Fox News, Faulkner Focus, [6/8/23]

Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy dismissed climate change and redirected the blame to “bad forest management”: “Climate change does not start a fire. It can create dry conditions, and they have really bad dry conditions up in Canada right now. In Canada they are blaming bad forest management because of a very dry winter and they did not get a lot of snow. … Apparently behind the scenes they have not been doing the controlled burns that they should have been doing. And back in 2024 environmentalists wrote a paper and said not enough is being done to fund this kind of forest management and there is going to be hell to pay.” Fox News, Fox & Friends, [6/8/23]

Sean Hannity also suggested that forest management is the main culprit:“Here's what nobody talks about. There is a science. You can get an advanced college degree in forestry. There's something called the controlled burns that climate alarmist cult members:{are all dead set against. And you see, if you have a controlled burn that prevents the bigger fires like the one they're experiencing in little Justin's neighborhood in Canada that's now making it smoke all the way down here.” Fox News, Hannity, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/7/23:{]}:

Host Jesse Watters claims that there are fewer wildfires now than 100 years ago to dismiss the role of climate change and prop up the forest management argument:  “You might be surprised to find out over the last 100 years, there have been less wildfires, not more. The Wall Street Journal says in the early 1900s about 4% of land worldwide burned every year by 2021 that was down to 2.5%. So instead of obsessing over climate change they should take a look at forest management.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [6/7/23]

On The Five co-host Dana Perino blames wildfires on forest management and liberal policies: “Canada is experiencing really bad wildfires on their public lands. We have a similar problem, and it has to do with forest management. The Biden administration has policies that are in direct conflict with one another. … Wildfires can occur naturally of course, but if you are actively managing your forest, then you can prevent some of these things. The left has never wanted to do that.”  Fox News, The Five, [6/7/23]

Pirro suggests that since only half of Americans believe in climate change that Democrats shouldn’t be linking it to wildfires: Agreeing that poor forest management is the main cause of severe wildfires, Pirro questions why climate change is even part of the discussion: “We’re at a point when I think 49% of Americans believe climate change is caused mostly by human actions, the lowest reported apparently in many years.So why are Democrats, why do they keep pushing climate change over something that could’ve been prevented?:{" Fox News, The Five, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/7/23:{] HUH?! oh she means rake th floor // trump}:

Related

National TV news chokes out the climate angle in coverage of Canadian wildfires

06/08/23 2:57 PM EDT

With Canadian wildfires, Fox News follows its COVID playbook

06/08/23

Fox News host Jesse Watters says it’s “normal” for the Northeastern United States to be engulfed in smoke from Canadian wildfires

06/08/23

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rogan tiktokescalator boost amplify conspiracy clickbait

see david sacks VC new rep natcon musk twit BS well suited for edgelords

https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/climate-change-conspiracy-theory-about-cataclysmic-changes-earths-magnetic-field-goes-viral

mma 5 23 no vid

joe Rogan’s podcast is fueling a bizarre TikTok conspiracy theory that falsely attributes climate change impacts to cyclical changes in Earth’s magnetic field, seemingly violating the app’s new climate misinformation policy.

The conspiracy theory’s viral spread on the platform highlights TikTok’s persistent climate misinformation problem, even as it has begun implementing a new policy banning content that “undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.”

Inspired by the January 18 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, content creators have latched onto claims made in a pseudoscientific book called The Adam and Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms. (Along with pushing the cataclysmic pole hypothesis, the book claims that Jesus Christ lived in India for nearly 18 years and was abducted by aliens in a “space vehicle” after his crucifixion.)

Between January and April, Media Matters identified seven viral clips from the Joe Rogan Experience episode discussing the conspiracy theory, which garnered over 20 million cumulative views on TikTok. The videos feature clips of Rogan discussing the book with “independent researcher” Jimmy Corsetti, who runs the YouTube channel Bright Insight, and Ben van Kerkwyk, who runs the channel UnchartedX.

Joe Rogan keeps platforming conspiracy theorists and skeptics of human-caused climate change, driving misinformation

In the January 18 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the host brought up “the Adam and Eve” theory and asked Corsetti, “How much of that is agreed upon, that there could be a time where the magnetic poles actually shift?”

Corsetti replied that “This is science,” explaining, “The Adam and Eve Story", the theory on that is that it happens in cycles of 6,500 years and that it’s a 90-degree flip, but six days later, around the seventh day, it corrects itself.” He continued to describe “a planet flip, 90 degrees, and that because of it the Earth essentially does a standstill, the sun will be direct — will basically stay in the same spot, causing heating like we’ve never experienced — and that the wind and the waters continue with their momentum, because essentially the wind travels at approximately 1,000 miles an hour at the equator, so the theory is that when that event happens it’s going to be cataclysmic.:

[vid]

corsetti’s nonsensical explanation was widely shared on TikTok, with one viral clip receiving nearly 11 million views.

In reality, NASA reports that pole reversals, when Earth’s North and South Poles swap locations — which “take place over hundreds to thousands of years,” not a mere seven days— have occurred “183 times in the last 83 million years, and at least several hundred times in the past 160 million years.” Notably:

Plant and animal fossils from the period of the last major pole reversal don’t show any big changes. Deep ocean sediment samples indicate glacial activity was stable. In fact, geologic and fossil records from previous reversals show nothing remarkable, such as doomsday events or major extinctions.

Additionally, there's “no evidence” that any magnetic excursion event (periods of “shorter-lived but significant changes in the magnetic field’s intensity”) has impacted the Earth’s climate within the last 2.8 million years. Scientists aren’t sure when the next pole reversal will occur, but a recent study suggests that won’t be anytime soon. And if it is, a doomsday scenario is unlikely.

Corsetti acknowledged this but claimed that scientists “don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Rogan has previously drawn criticism for leveraging his massive reach and influence to amplify climate denial, and his podcast has catered to guests such as Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg, who use cherry-picked and decontextualized talking points to downplay the devastating impacts of climate change and to attack climate solutions. He has also hosted figures who downright deny the fact that fossil fuel consumption is driving climate change, such as Steve Koonin, Jordan Peterson, and Randall Carlson, who has appeared on the podcast at least six times and said that and that actions.

In their discussion of The Adam and Eve Story, Rogan and his guests also downplayed the impacts of climate change that millions of people are experiencing and praised Donald Trump for suggesting that the Earth is actually cooling. 

“Right now we should be grateful that it’s nice and cozy because we can live when it’s warm,” Corsetti said.

Rogan then cited  r Carlson, saying, “Global warming’s not scary. It’s global cooling, that’s what’s really scary.” The host further suggested that climate change is “ this narrative that just gets repeated over and over and over and thisfearmongering and everyone gets freaked out. It’s not to say that we aren’t polluting, we certainly are, and it’s not to say that we shouldn’t improve, we certainly should, but if the fucking magnetic poles might shift and we might get hit by a giant rock from space, we might have bigger problems.If we’re going to be concentrating on nonsense, which is really par for the course with human beings, we’re going to be concentrating on these things we’re really not going to fix over the short-term, when something might happen that makes all of it a moot point.”   PSEUDO LOMBORGIAN BS

Media Matters also identified two viral clips of this exchange on TikTok with 2 million and 2.6 million views, respectively.

What is The Adam and Eve Story?

The book was written in 1965 by Chan Thomas, who worked in the aerospace industry and claimed to be a psychic. The book was not available to the public until 2013, however, when 57 pages were released by the CIA, and this censorship has captured the imaginations of conspiracy theorists. Since its declassification, The Adam and Eve Story has worked its way into the broader conspiracy theory ecosystem.

Thomas argued that the Earth’s magnetic poles shift every several thousand years, causing cataclysmic events such as tsunamis that destroy civilizations and drastically alter Earth’s geology — one example he used was the flood in the Noah’s Ark narrative in the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Chan predicted that such an event would occur in the near future, and some are now framing increasingly extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts as evidence that the next cataclysm is approaching.

A TikTok account for a podcast called No Regulars posted a March 1 video that has been viewed nearly 18 million times in which host Darris Watkins says that the book’s explanation of cataclysmic magnetic pole shifts actually “makes sense” in describing climate change and “explains a lot” because “the Sahara desert used to be green and like Antarctica used to have forests … So now like some places turn cold, some places turn hot.[pix?]

the popularity of these conspiracy theories among TikTok users may indicate one way that climate misinformation is evolving to reach young people.

Climate misinformation disguised as ancient civilization conspiracy theories

At the time Thomas wrote The Adam and Eve Story, the public at large was not informed of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Despite fossil fuel companies being aware of the potential for human-caused global warming as early as the 1950s, people weren’t yet experiencing the ecological effects of increasing temperatures. But when the book was declassified in 2013, it was released into a world grappling with the dire effects of climate change.

While it was not written to provide an alternative explanation for climate change, The Adam and Eve Story provides a framework for interpreting its effects outside of an anthropogenic explanation. This narrative, which shifts blame away from our fossil fuel economy onto planetary forces beyond human control, can serve as climate misinformation.

Rogan’s guests and other proponents of this conspiracy theory purport to be interested in its ramifications for scientific understanding of ancient civilizations, but climate misinformation often serves as a backdrop for their discussions. At one point in their interview, Rogan suggested “that there was incredibly sophisticated technology that existed and … was wiped out. And that we’re talking about a really advanced civilization that lived a long time ago that’s more advanced than we are today but moved in a different direction, like we moved in the direction of combustion engines and electronics and they moved in some other direction but achieved maybe many thousands of years more sophistication in that direction than we have with our internal combustion engines.”

While climate change may not take center stage in these speculations, the implications that humans are not having any influence over our warming planet and that near-apocalyptic events are always inevitable as a result of natural cycles in the Earth’s magnetic field are nonetheless harmful misinformation that lets politicians and fossil fuel companies off the hook for their role in the climate crisis. (Meanwhile, the world’s biggest oil and gas companies just raked in record first-quarter profits.)

Cataclysm narratives as climate sedatives

Narratives that frame climate change as an inevitable disaster caused by forces beyond our control are a key argument of climate denial: If climate change is caused by changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, then there is no point in implementing sweeping action to curtail fossil fuel emissions. In the past, the Earth’s orbit, the sun, and cosmic rays have all similarly been used to provide alternative explanations for climate change.

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels. The only way to avert increasing social, political, and ecological effects of climate change is by transitioning away from a fossil fuel economy.

Despite its appearance as a conspiracy theory about ancient civilizations,The Adam and Eve Story is being used to undermine the scientific consensus regarding the cause of climate change. As TikTok ramps up the enforcement of its new climate misinformation policy, the platform should account for the ways climate denial is often incorporated into seemingly harmless conspiracy theories.

Finally, Spotify still has no clear policy regarding the promotion of climate misinformation on its platform. Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for exclusive rights to Rogan’s show, which was the top podcaston its platform in 2022. As Rogan’s contract is expected to expire in 2023, Spotify will have to decide whether platforming his misinformation and hate speech is worth the profit.

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gmail

andrew lawton cda bs

15 min no one in cda gov't listens to MM; slide from John Kerry pix of him yawning // covid

teen vogue climate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK_gpajGWI

public health emergency

1,015 views  Apr 22, 2023

Canada’s public health officials have recently added “climate change,” “capitalism,” and “colonization” to an ever-growing list of public health threats, in a report written for Dr. Theresa Tam. Climate Depot’s Marc Morano joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the potential consequences of this move, including the possibility of climate lockdowns and authoritarian restrictions

jamie margolis  teen vogue testify DC, if shut for virus than we can for covid he means climate

creepy eerie

drop 7%/yr boom lockdown --> 7% drop; your cda fauci in 2 peer rev jrnl NeJM climate spreads pathogens; follow template public health authroitrtian bureaucracy; ppl like clean air in lockdown cynical?; not net zero but absolute zero, gov't wants us to live in stone age but not them [elite] heartland talk ant-human, tyranny

greatest bad act emergency powers

natl climat merge 130 new powers bypass democ

NYT praise one party rule china; jane fonda climate is gift to left

harv school public health more viruses gma killer;

WHO pandemic treaty biden admin push

[patriot solar pwr gen ad] keep you alive in worse case coffemaker]

revisionism on lockdowns trump desantis

govt wants to trample rigjts, but ppl gave up jeffrey tucker --- ctr

rat out neighbor for bbq

india new covid variant --> mask mandate dunno if ppl caved

gas stoves, rice, not ban take over every aspect of our lives trash earth create inequities, manage our money digital currency // bank of england

use scares terrorism, young ppl cheer on,  OCT juliana go full marxist, kids as young as elem school

freedom nit built in

captive audeince sweden kip school met w/ king

paris cop 2 degrees sharmel shakedown 1.5, then will go lower, no victory, just stepping stone

paris our kids will thank us, kerry on lap

infl act b/c manchin caved, gates sweetheart deal reintro GND, never enough, no criteria

goes back to UN we own the sci partner w/ ggl, self serving lobbying org so must prove co2 problem

gutierrez pres of socialist int'l, agw or planet will die

fonda and dicaprio want you to head for the hills

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aha: recall heartland rev engr if AGW is real, req gobal action thus not real

aha2 note that action esp climate /enviro by ANY branch, even the agency in charge of it is being called overreach = tyranny/loss of FFFRrrreeeeeedumb!

aha 3: jeez they call US alarmists, but purpose of fox / infowars is hype /attack Dems

london protests 7 22 break glass in emergency so they did

wow omg ingraham? 1100 dead

an 7 22

with thousands dying from extreme global heat in recent days, and as President Joe Biden announced new executive actions to address the climate crisis, right-wing media figures and climate deniers are downplaying the heat wave and the threat from human-caused climate change.

In Europe, extreme “red” heat warnings were issued in the United Kingdom for the first time, and Wales recorded its highest-ever temperature. Railroad lines, major highways, and airport runways in the U.K. buckled under the extreme heat. Multiple regions of Germany also set all-time highs, as did at least part of Denmark. Over 2,000people have died in Spain and Portugal due to the extreme heat, which has fueled wildfires there and in parts of France. These record-setting events are not contained to Europe. Parts of the U.S. and Central Asia are suffering from extreme heat as well.

Even though the extreme heat event in Europe is truly exceptional, and its connections to the climate crisis are unquestionable, multiple right-wing media figures used the extreme heat event to downplay and criticize any possible action to address the climate crisis.

Right-wing media also attacked Biden for considering declaring a climate emergency during this deadly heat wave. Instead Biden unveiled much more modest steps to address climate impacts, such as putting $2.3 billion toward community resilience and infrastructure and bolstering offshore wind development. The Federalist falsely declared that “Biden has no right to declare a ‘national climate emergency,’' though The Washington Post explained that such a move would “tap a variety of long-standing emergency authorities under the National Emergencies Act and other laws.” LifeSiteNews fearmongered thatthe emergency powers would result in “climate lockdowns.” And other right-wing media suggested that there is no crisis at all.

Right-wing media denied the existence of the climate emergency

Fox News host Dan Bongino questioned whether the planet is getting warmer and whether humanity played a role in it, asking: “What kind of a dunce believes that? Come on. Is it [the planet] getting warmer? The answer is maybe. … The question isn’t is it getting warmer; the question is what’s human beings' role in it.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/19/22]

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton wrote on Twitter: “There is obviously no ‘climate emergency'.” Twitter, [7/19/22]

Fox host Tucker Carlson devoted a monologue to undermining the existence of climate change, reducing climate predictions to: “It’s gonna be hot and then it’s gonna rain hard.” “No one really believes in global warming,” he continued, “and that’s why all of the liberals in the United States live on the coasts – because they don’t believe it… The entire theory is absurd and they know it. … The whole thing is a joke.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [7/20/22]

On Fox, conservative British political commentator Douglas Murray dismissed the urgency:{ of the climate crisis, saying, “Whenever there is not an absolutely vital recent emergency, we can always fall back on – oh and the climate emergency.” Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:*Fox & Friends*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[7/20/22:{]}:

Fox anchor Dana Perino asked: “What has changed with the science that would lead a president to need to declare an emergency?” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*[, 7/20/22]

Fox host Todd Piro said that climate impacts, particularly the ones affecting the most vulnerable communities, did not meet his criteria for an emergency: “While we all love clean air and clean water — I, in fact, use both … this is not an emergency that we need to focus on today. We got a lot of other problems in the world.” Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [7/20/22]

Fox host Sean Hannity responded to new actions by the Biden administration to address climate change by dismissing the role of human influence over global warming saying, “I think these might be acts of nature, and God, and way out of the realm of something that human beings can prevent.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/20/22]

Conservatives also downplayed the deadly extreme heat

Climate change denying author Bjorn Lomborg dismissed the dangerous extreme heat event, writing on Twitter: “Standard climatescare.:{” Twitter, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[7/17/22:{]}:

Climate denier Steven Milloy on Twitter dismissed a Washington Post article linking the Europe heat wave to climate change, writing: “Hot in some places. Cool in others. Just weather. Not climate.” Twitter, [7/19/22]

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed the dangers extreme heat poses to human health, saying: “Don’t panic. It is summer. If it was December and this was happening, then I would say, this is a little weird. But it's just a little bit hotter than usual.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [7/20/22]

Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro said on his radio show that the heat wave and wildfires were being reported so fervently because “you always know that it’s the slow season newswise when you start getting weather reports from Europe. … The thing that they will never tell you, the media, is that more people die of cold every year than die of heat every year, but the cold narrative doesn’t tend to play into the climate change narrative that they wish to progmulate.” The Daily Wire, *The Ben Shapiro Show*,[7/19/22]

Fox host Jesse Watters dismissed the extreme heat event as regular seasonal weather, saying: “Joe Biden has seen more seasons than a lot of us. He knows that it gets cold in January and hot in July.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/20/22

Watters followed this up with an interview during which an on-screen graphic read: “Dems worried about weather, not real problems.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/20/22]

Fox host Greg Gutfeld said: “We are in a full-blown heat wave hysteria.” He said that while he does believe “it’s getting warmer,” climate advocates should “think about the opportunity cost of all the zealotry. You know? Panic didn’t work.” Fox News, *The Five*, [7/20/22]

Right-wing media also attacked the Biden administration for considering a climate emergency declaration

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed on his Infowars show that a climate emergency would be orchestrated by a “scientific global dictatorship whose aim is 90% world depopulation,” and that it would lead to a “dystopia”: “You’re gonna live in a 200-square-foot coffin apartment, you’re gonna be given forced inoculations five, six times a year, you’re gonna be sterilized, you’re gonna be killed.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*,[7/20/22]

The Wall Street Journal editorial board called a possible emergency declaration “a serious abuse of power.” The Wall Street Journal, [7/19/22]

Kilmeade called Biden’s executive orders tone-deaf and “agenda-driven,” insisting that they “will do nothing but hurt the price of oil and gas.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*,[7/19/22]

Hannity quoted climate denier Joe Bastardi, saying on his radio show that Democrats’ response to climate change is the“systemic dismantling of the American way of life.It’s not a rational response to a climate crisis.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [7/19/22]

Hosts of Fox’s Outnumbered claimed a possible climate emergency declaration from Biden “could cause a global depression,” is “suicide,” and is “going to kill the economy.” Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [7/19/22]

related: Tucker Carlson tells idiotic lie that “no one really believes in global warming”

07/20/22

Fox contributor calls for more coal plants as a solution to extreme heat

07/20/22

National TV networks mention climate change in 32% of segments on global extreme heat

07/19/22

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public cit 2019 Foxic

note interock?:

• ...In absolute terms, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” ran the most climate denial segments with 41 or approximately seven per month, followed by “Hannity” with 32 and “The Five” with 29.
• Fox News programs had 10 contributors who commented on climate related issues at least twice during the six-month period.  None of these contributors is a climate scientist and none has appeared on another network.   
• The Green New Deal, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and the Democratic primary were the main drivers prompting discussion of the climate crisis on Fox programs in the first six months of 2019. Combined, they provide the context for 62% of the 247 segments.

Denial Is Alive and Deadly on Fox News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Message 3: Concern About the Climate Crisis Is Liberal Hysteria

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

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

Fox Fallacies and Tricks...

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fear / crisis used to justify one-world gubmint takeover, loss of freedumb/ democracy eg

ggl alert 5 22

https://thenewamerican.com/report-links-climate-change-to-a-future-increase-in-pandemics/

james murphy new am may 4

study published on April 28 in the scientific journal Nature makes the claim that so-called climate change may greatly increase the odds that species-jumping viruses such as Covid-19, which may have moved from bats to humans, could become pandemics.

The study, Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk, makes the highly speculative point that space competition driven by climate change will cause humans to interact with different species, thus increasing the risk of another coronavirus-type pandemic in the near future. The abstract of the study states:

At least 10,000 virus species have the capacity to infect humans, but at present, the vast majority are circulating silently in wild mammals. However, climate and land use change will produce novel opportunities for viral sharing among previously geographically-isolated species of wildlife. In some cases, this will facilitate zoonotic spillover—a mechanistic link between global environmental change and disease emergence.

The study speculates that new incidents of “viral sharing” between humans and animals will increase due to climate change, particularly in “biodiversity hotspots” and in areas of high human population density, such as Africa and Asia.

Climate change-driven geography shifts may promote “more than 300,000 first encounters” between humans and possible carrier species, the study claims.

“We are probably well into those changes. We are not keeping a close eye on them and they make pandemic risk everyone’s problem,” said the study’s lead author, Colin Carlson of Georgetown University.

“Our study shows that unequivocally, in every simulation we do, climate change is creating innumerable hotspots of future and present-day zoonotic risk right in our backyard,” he said.

According to Carlson, wet markets such as the one in Wuhan, China, are especially ripe for this type of risk, as unhealthy animals are often distributed in such places.

“We worry about markets because bringing unhealthy animals together in unnatural combinations creates opportunities for this stepwise process of emergence — like how SARS jumped from bats to civets, then civets to people. But markets aren’t special anymore; in a changing climate, that kind of process will be the reality in nature just about everywhere,” he said.

As Carlson pointed out, researchers believe that the process is already underway, even though the planet has not yet reached the 1.5° Celsius global temperature increase that the United Nations Paris climate agreement calls for the world’s nations to stay under by switching from fossil fuels to so-called renewable energy sources.

“Even now, this process has likely been taking place, mostly unobserved and below the surface,” said co-author of the study Gregory Albery, a postdoctoral fellow in biology at Georgetown.

Great, yet another “unobserved” consequence of climate change that we just need to take on faith is occurring.

“This is happening. It is not preventable, even in the best-case climate change scenarios. And we need to put measures in place to build health infrastructure to protect animal and human populations,” Albery claimed.

It’s yet more bad news driven by climate change: “This mechanism adds yet another layer to how climate change will threaten human and animal health,” he noted.

But according to Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, it’s just another way to sell climate fear to the masses.

“The climate movement is now merging their focus on linking viruses to ‘climate change’ and thus making fighting climate change a part of fighting deadly viruses. Global warming promoters know that they should never let a crisis go to waste.They are pouncing on any opportunity toinjectclimate change into the COVID-19 issue,” Morano said. He explained:

They want to keep both climate and COVID fears humming along to push their so-called solutions, so what better way than to merge the two issues? Worried about COVID-19, then support theUN Paris climate pact, theGreen New Deal, carbon taxes, etc., or else you are a gramma killer!

The same globalist political entities have spent decades warning us of overpopulation, global cooling, the supposed hole in the ozone layer, and global warming and its rebranding, climate change. To date, their success in generating fear has yielded sparse results.

As Morano points out: “Theclimate establishment spent decades trying toscare us about overpopulation, global cooling,the amazon [sic] rainforest (allegedly disappearing), and finally, climate change and they utterly failed. A virus came along in 2020 and they realized that this cut across ideologies, cut across political affiliation and they were able to declare an emergency and suspend normal democracy. They were able to achieve their one-party state with an unelected bureaucracy.”

Climatistas have long envied the terrorizing effect that the Covid-19 pandemic had on the planet’s population, with millions of people ready and willing to give up their freedom for the illusory safety of masks, social distancing, and risky, under-tested vaccines. Now it seems that theclimate hystericswish to join the virus-scare bandwagon and make it their own.[do not mention 1m dead US, new study 15m in world?]

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yahoo may 5

the end of last year was nearly15 million—triple the amount previously thought, according to new estimates by the World Health Organization.

The new 14.9 million figure is calculated based on the number of excess deaths, or the difference between the average death rate recorded before the pandemic and the number of deaths that occurred during.

Excess mortality includes deaths directly linked to COVID-19 through infection of the disease and indirectly from the pandemic’s impact on health care systems and society.

Previous estimations by the WHO reported only 5.4 million people deaths.

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2016

Sarah Palin Doesn't Think Bill Nye the Science Guy Is a Real Scientist - The Wrap

The Wrap

According to the Huffington Post, her statements came after a screening of “Climate Hustle,” new anti-climate change documentary. Producer Marc Morano ...

Sarah Palin Doesn’t Think Bill Nye the Science Guy Is a Real Scientist

”Bill Nye is as much as scientist as I am,“ says the former Alaska governor

Beatrice Verhoeven, PWSBeatrice Verhoeven | April 15, 2016 @ 8:00 AM

Sarah Palin about Bill Nye

Getty Images

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin not only doesn’t believe in climate change — she doesn’t believe Bill Nye the Science Guy is a real scientist.

“Bill Nye is as much as scientist as I am,” Palin said at an event in Washington, D.C., according to The Hill. “He’s a kids’ show actor; he’s not a scientist.”

She specifically targeted Nye for his claims that climate change was man-made, stating that scientists who believe that climate change is caused by mankind are trying to shut down human progress and fueling “alarmism.”

Also Read:

Azealia Banks Snarkologizes to Sarah Palin for Raunchy Twitter Rant

Additionally, Palin asked parents to “not just believe what Bill Nye the Science Guy is trying to tell them.”

According to the Huffington Post, her statements came after a screening of “Climate Hustle,” new anti-climate change documentary. Producer Marc Morano interviews Nye in the film.

Also Read:

'The View': Raven-Symone Vows to Quit Biz if Sarah Palin Gets Acting Gigs (Video)

Nye began his career at Boeing and later worked in the aeronautics industry. He began his professional entertainment career on a local sketch comedy television show in Seattle, Washington. He famously hosted an education television program called “Bill Nye the Science Guy” from 1993 to 1998, and he also wrote several books on scientific topics.

Among his science-based accomplishments is assisting in the development of the MarsDial, a small sundial that has been used in NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover missions.

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• MILLOY: Earth Day — Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off – ‘Environmentalism has become totally unhinged as it is all in for climate hysteria’

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shillenberger on realclear investigations

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]

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. 

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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.

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aha mask vaxxer?

new mutant varient mix with coddle ? safe space BS

3. Safetyism

The sacralization of physical and emotional safety is a worrying trend. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the inability of public health officials to consider the tradeoffs between physical safety and personal freedom.

Progress in science and technology is impossible without physical risk. Progress in ethics and politics is impossible without emotional risk. Yet, society and government seem to be becoming more risk-averse.

CSPI welcomes work investigating the origins, nature, and effects of safetyism. We are also interested in policies and practices that reduce risk aversion or encouragebetter cost-benefit analysis.

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mashey 2012 heartland bs:

2,160 EPA (except OK during Bush administration when fending off CA)

1,476 activis (-t or –m, as in environmental, anti-smoking; some are OK)

1,474 California

880 alarm: 556 alarmist, 94 alarmism, 51 alarming 405 IRS-3E 10

761 renewable

719environmentalist (except “free-market” or “common-sense” ones)

599 ethanol406

470IPCC

352 Gore (Al) also appears in cartoons, such as Z.2006.07-14.

333 wind farm407

277 wind power

216 myth (as in global warming real, or radiation bad, or solar/wind useful)

209 CAFÉ (standards, or generally, anything that improves fuel economy)

209 solar power

201 lobby (anti-smoker, anti-technology, anti-market, environmentalist.)

If fossil or tobacco lobbies exist, E&CN does not mention those.

199 Obama (Barack)

188 wind turbine

174 Greenpeace

135 junk science (conflation of poor science with mainstream), IRS-3E

124 extremis (-ists, m, as in environmental)408

117 McCain (John, as in McCain-Lieberman bill)

104 Schwarzenegger (usually)

103 Hansen(James, of NASA GISS)

101 fraud (and –ulent, as in scientific, solar, fraudulent data) IRS-3E

100 World Wildlife Fund, WWF

99 so-called (as in greenhouse gases, renewable sources, etc)

94 propaganda (as in alarmist, green, anti-pollution)

94 solar energy

63eco-imperialism

59 sustainability

57 eco-terror: 31 ecoterrorist (conflated with environmentalism)

70 inconvenient (as in An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore)

69 hockey (as in hockey stick temperature graph)

59 mongers (as in scaremongers, fear-mongers) IRS-3E

47 solar panel

44 corrupt (and –ion, as of science in thinking AGW real) IRS-3E

42 GISS (NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies)

35 Waxman (Henry, D-CA)

35 Markey (Edward, D-MA)

25 indoctrinate, indoctrination (as in An Inconvenient Truth)

22 Rachel Carson 409

22 nonsmoker or non-smoker

19 NCAR (flawed, institutionally committed to alarmism)

18 CFL (bad, since deemed major source of mercury)

11 carbon cartel

10 Michael Mann

7 crony, cronyism (as in IPCC or crony capitalism for renewables)

5 anti-smoker lobby

4 warmist(not so common, apparently Heartland message is “alarmist”)

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aha alarmist/  fear phobia plus indoctrination [ Greta]; proto- CRT? --> pink pill?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/2021-fox-news-still-spreading-dangerous-climate-denial

no vids

on a near-daily basis, Fox News hosts, anchors, and guests spew misinformation and false narratives aimed at tanking efforts to address the climate crisis. These tactics to delay climate action or downplay the seriousness of our warming planet have often been referred to as the new climate denial -- since the actual denial of the scientific consensus that climate change is happening has mostly been pushed to the fringes of both politics and the traditional media landscape.

Fox deploys the new denial so often, it’s easy to forget that the network is one of the few highly influential media outlets that still promote one of the most dangerous lies of our time: Human activity is not overheating our climate.

This lie has existed for over five decades and for five decades has been repeatedly debunked. Its origins and merchants have been exposed; those who have continued to perpetuate it have been discredited; and our own experience during each unprecedented storm, historical heat wave, and apocalyptic wildfire has proven again and again what science has told us to expect from a warming world.

But in 2021, you can turn on Fox News and watch prime-time host Tucker Carlson quip that “not even climate experts understand the climate” or watchFox contributor Dagen MacDowell suggest that climate change is a hoax because it is cold in April.

And in 2021, there is still no federal response to the climate crisis on the books, despite decades of warnings from scientists and with mounting support for climate action even among the largest companies and businesses in the U.S.

Fox is still fueling the lie that our planet is not warming

From insisting the science on climate change is not settled to deliberately misconstruing weather with climate, Fox News is still pushing the idea that human-made climate change is not real, despite overwhelming evidence and consensus in the scientific community.

In a segment on the April 28 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, host Tucker Carlson andFox News contributor Sean Duffydiscussed how the “critical environmental movement has infiltrated” schools and colleges, is scaring children about the climate crisis,and is convincing them to not have children. At the end of the segment, Duffy claimed that climate change is a “political movement, not a scientific movement” and that it is wrong to assume “the science is settled in climate”.

the segment aired just a week after Carlson and ultra-conservative political commentator and Fox contributor Mark Steyn mocked comments made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) linking climate change and racism. (For the record, experts say the two are “inexorably” linked.) Steyn, not satisfied with mocking the relationship between climate and racism, went on to attack the scientific consensus that warming is human-made, by invoking a defamation suit filed against him by climate scientist Michael Mann:

MARK STEYN (GUEST): This is supposed to be science. I've been in a 10-year lawsuit in Washington, D.C., up against the guy who invented the climate change hockey stick, and he is a scientist and his position is that in the last millennium -- nothing happened for nine centuries and then you, Tucker, got into your SUV and fried the planet. And that is a completely idiotic theory. But at least he's not trying to sell the world on the idea that somehow climate change correlates to racism.

[vid]

not to be outdone, the following night, prime-time hostLaura Ingraham focused her April 22 monologue on “the big climate con.” Ingraham’s “climate con” list included misleading arguments against the benefits of climate action like job creation; attempts to discredit the role of -- and the need for -- global cooperation in dealing with the crisis; and false claims that the scientific warnings on climate are not sound or well understood. For good measure, Ingraham closed her monologue by mocking and attacking young climate activists.

in back-to-back shows on April 29 and April 30, Ingraham suggested that the climate crisis along with other pressing issues have been manufactured to “justify the left’s brazen efforts to take more of our money and more of our liberty” and they “only exist in the minds of leftists ideologues who hate America anyway.”

Denial paired with fear-mongering about the “left’s radical agenda” exemplifies the brand of climate denial Fox has peddled for years, and some network figures disingenuously equate weather with climate to push that narrative.

On the April 21 edition ofThe Five, Fox News contributor Dagen McDowell ended a rant against the Paris Climate Agreement by suggesting that abnormally cold April weather from Texas to the Great Lakes somehow disproves that global warming is occurring.

DAGEN MCDOWELL (CO-HOST): Here is your forecast today and why they stopped calling it global warming. April 21, 2021: Freeze warnings from Texas to the Great Lakes. Record low temperatures engulfing the heartland. Oh, and Indians/White Sox game in Cleveland had to be postponed for snow and cold.

This bit by MacDowell is both painfully stupid and reminiscent of a body of tweets by then-President Donald Trump, who conflated weather with global warming while suggesting that the term “climate change” was adopted by scientists and advocates to hide the incongruity between major winter storms and the idea of warming.

Interestingly, the term “climate change” was promoted by the Republican strategist Frank Luntz as part of the infamous 2002 memo advising the GOP on how to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that human activity was warming the planet.

Fox Nation host Lara Logan made the same inane claim on the February 19 edition of Outnumbered, in a segment about the winter storm that caused the deadly power failure in Texas:

“It's time for us to have an honest conversation about renewable energy and about global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it,” said Logan. “This is the first time in Texas’ history that it has had a winter storm warning. So this is — this means that it is not getting warmer and warmer and warmer, simply.”

Fox has long been a platform for climate deniers

Fox News hosts and contributors not only push climate denial but regularly feature discredited deniers on their programs. Notorious climate denier Marc Morano -- who has no scientific background -- and Bjorn Lomborg -- whose spiel is dangerously claiming that climate change is happening, but not a big deal -- have both appeared on Fox for more than a decade. Just this year, both have appeared across Fox programming at least six times from January through April. Notably, Fox hosted both the day after President Joe Biden took office to attack his agenda on climate change.

Larry Kudlow, a long-time climate denier who formerly served as economic adviser to Trump and now hosts a show on Fox Business, has also been one of Fox’s go-to commentators on policies related to climate change across both the network’s so-called “news” and “opinion” programs.

But Morano, Lomborg, and Kudlow are far from the only climate deniers and contrarians on Fox’s roster. Over the past several yearsRush Limbaugh, Joe Bastardi, Steve Milloy, and Patrick Moore all appeared regularly on Fox to push climate denial and misinformation. (In 2019, Moore said on Fox & Friends that “the climate crisis ... is not only fake news, it’s fake science”, and the line was picked up by Trump and tweeted to his millions of followers.)

Importantly, like Morano and Lomborg, none of these commentators are climate scientists, many have strong financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, and all have made a living out of obstructing efforts to address the climate crisis. With the exception of the late Rush Limbaugh, none would have had a megaphone to spread their lies absent Fox News.

Supported by advertisers, Fox runs cover for climate inaction

Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that if immediate and bold actions are not taken, then we will face dire climate disruption -- ever-increasing extreme and abnormal weather that threatens our homes, our food, our livelihoods, our economy, and our lives.

The stakes could not be higher.

The purpose of Fox hosts’ and contributors’ climate denial is to maintain an air of doubt about the existence and reality of our dangerously changing climate to provide cover for Republicans, who actively work to do nothing to stop the climate crisis, and the Big Polluters that bankroll their campaigns. This climate denial is also the foundation of the network’s persistent attacks -- across “opinion” and “straight news” programming -- on any proposed actions to reduce our carbon emissions and transition to a clean-energy economy. By extension, companies that advertise on Fox are party to climate inaction.

Publicly, many of these companies that run ads on Fox, including big insurers Allstate and Liberty Mutual have acknowledged the severe threat of the climate crisis. While others like General Motors, which is also among the network’s biggest advertisers, are actively calling for significant reduction in climate pollution. On the same day Dagen McDowell mocked global warming because it was cold in Texas, General Motors, along with 407 other corporations and businesses, issued a press release for an open letter to Biden supporting his goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. By continuing to sponsor Fox, these brands expose the cavern between their words and actions and associate themselves with a dangerous hostility to facts and science.

To be sure, Fox News is an accomplice to the impending climate emergency we face as a country and as part of the global community -- and so are those that support its programming with ads.

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ccdh tox 10 gets two?!

Media Research Center (MRC) is a think tank founded in 1987 by political activist Brent Bozell.54 It bills itself as “America’s Media Watchdog” and attacking “leftist bias in the news media and popular culture”.55 The group has attacked media coverage of climate science.56 MRC’s revenue comes from contributions, gifts, and ad revenue. According to tax documents, it earned over $11 million in revenue in 2019, including $604,000 from ads.57

Between 2010 and 2017, MRC received nearly $19 million from hedge fund billionaire and Republican donor Robert Merceraccording to tax documents.58

In 2017, MRC sponsored a conference by climate denier think tank the Heartland Institute, which was also attended by Robert Mercer.59 Other funders include fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil, which has a record of donating to climate sceptic organizations.60

 MRC uses its NewsBusters website to criticize media coverage of climate science.61 The site often uses the phrase “climate alarmist” to refer to people who highlight the threat of climate change.62

MRC also operates the media outlets CNSNews.com and MRCTV.63

[eg pix] this NewsBusters article brands climate science as “alarmism” and promotes the suggestion that “so-called ‘hottest year’ claims… are political statementsdesigned to persuade the public that the government needs to take action on man-made climate change.”64 This article has carried Google ads for the tech giant’s own Chrome web browser.

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toxic ten

ccdh

RT.com is part of a Russian state-controlled news network. Founded in April 2005 as Russia Today, RT is “publicly

financed from the budget of the Russian Federation”, with additional revenue from advertising and sponsored

content.93 Sputnik.com was founded in November 2014 “by the Russian media group Rossiya Segodnya”, another

state-funded broadcaster.94

According to a 2020 report from the Oxford Internet Institute, RT.com “is one of the most important organizations

in the global political economy of disinformation.”95 A 2016 NATO report alleged that Sputnik spread a “fake story”

regarding asylum seekers in Germany.96

Disinformation campaigns waged by RT.com include coverage ahead of the US 2020 election that “amplified voices

of chaos” with headlines such as “The term ‘American democracy’ needs to be retired” and “election teeters on

the verge of chaos”.97 RT has also propagated so much vaccine misinformation that YouTube took the rare step of

suspending RT’s German account following its posting of anti-vaccine misinformation.98 According to King’s College

London research, both RT and Sputnik played an instrumental role in spreading misinformation about the poisoning

of Sergei Skripal, incorporating the views of a “parallel commentariat” and amplifying Russian government sources.99[screengrab]

This Russia Today article claims that the pandemic provided a convenient

opportunity for professional “doom-mongers” to spread fear by linking the

virus to climate change and overpopulation. It calls on people to not pay

attention to the “alarmist predictions for the planet.”100 Articles on RT.com

carry digital ads from Taboola, a “discovery platform” that typically promotes

content at the bottom of news articles and that states it has a commitment

to “minimizing [its] environmental impact”.101

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this is ~ am exceptionalism, 2 stories

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https://newrepublic.com/article/158797/climate-change-alarmism-greta-thunberg-naomi-seibt

no lnx

Stella Levantesi, Giulio Corsi/August 6, 2020

Climate “Realism” Is the New Climate Denial

Climate change deniers like Naomi Seibt claim to be fighting Greta Thunberg’s “alarmism,” but their real target is climate action itself.

Climate skeptic Naomi Seibt at Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2020.]

Going by headlines and poll results, climate change awareness has never been higher. While social media provides fertile ground for propaganda techniques, smear campaigns, fake experts, and conspiracy theories, the increasingly visible proof of climate disruption, along with movements such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, seem to be persuading more people by the day. Climate change denial—the multitude of strategies deployed by the fossil fuel industry and its political allies to downplay the threat of global warming and suggest an ongoing debate on the existence of climate change—appears to be in retreat.

But climate change denial has not disappeared. Instead, it has shifted—its adherents adopting new language and tactics. The denial machine has a new communications strategy and an “us versus them” narrative: not climate deniers versus climate believers but climate “realists” versus climate “alarmists.”

It’s a canny approach to discrediting a legitimate scientific warning. By associating themselves with the term “realist,” those employing this rhetoric reiterate a longstanding principle of climate change denial: that those who warn about the catastrophic impacts of the climate emergency are out of touch with reality, “alarmists” who want us to “panic” rather than “think,” as 19-year-old German YouTuber and prominent climate skeptic Naomi Seibt has put it. “Evidence is growing that climate alarmists—those peddling the delusion that human-caused climate change is destroying the Earth—are growing ever more desperate,” an article at the libertarian and climate denial-promulgatingHeartland Institute, which has employed Seibt,declared in January. These sorts of sentences present climate science as emotional and deniers as grounded and rational.

Curious about the development of this new communicative strategy on social media, we recently collected all English-language tweets that contained a set of keywords linked to climate alarmism and realism since the launch of Twitter in 2006. That amounted to a total of 66,561 tweets, with a tweet matching the keywords first appearing in December 2007. While the use of both expressions on Twitter was negligible until 2016 (an average of fewer than 200 tweets per year), the use of the two terms started increasing in 2016. Not until 2019 did the terms climate “realism” and “alarmism” become commonplace: Between January 2016 and March 2020, the use of these terms grew by 900 percent, with the largest yearly increase recorded between 2018 and 2019.

This obviously wasn’t a peer-reviewed statistical study, which would need to investigate how these trends compared to broader trends on Twitter: the growth of tweeting overall, for example. But we were interested in what these tweets, laid alongside rhetoric shifts from prominent institutions and individuals, suggested about the way this narrative was developing and being deployed in reaction to individual events. The jump from 2018 to 2019, for instance, corresponds to another trend: 2019 represented a watershed year for climate action and public awareness on the climate crisis, so much so that it has been defined on more than one occasion as “the year the world woke up to climate change.”

Peaks in tweeting activity on alarmism and realism often correspond to high-profile speeches by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg; the highest level of alarmism/realism tweeting activity came on the day of Greta’s famous “How Dare You” speech during the U.N. Climate Summit. This is consistent with a longstanding pattern others have observed as well: The climate change denial machine always goes in full gear just as global action on climate change becomes a higher priority for government policies, much like the tobacco industry and its misinformation campaign reached a peak as government regulation of it was about to be enacted.

The term “alarmists” has been used by deniers in the past, mostly to denigrate climate scientists. But today, the dichotomy of alarmism and realism appears to be carefully constructed around Thunberg, whom deniers consider a stereotypical “alarmist.”

While some use of the term “alarmist” may be organic, some of it seems more deliberate.Over the past year, the Heartland Institute has enlisted Naomi Seibt as a counter-figure to Thunberg. Seibt denounced the scientists’ and Thunberg’s “climate alarmism,” contrasting it with the “climate realism” of those who, Seibt and Heartland would have it, are merely skeptics grounded in reality. In March,Friends of Science, a notorious climate change denial website, published a video with a title that all too clearly summarized the communicative strategy: “Greta or Naomi: Climate Alarmism v Realism.”

Accumulating proof of anthropogenic global warming and climate disruption within our ecosystems has made it increasingly difficult even for deep-pocketed deniers to argue against emissions-curbing laws. In the face of record-high temperatures, melting ice caps and rising seas, and more intense, frequent fires, floods, and extreme weather events, how do you keep convincing people that climate change is not an immediate priority and also not humanity’s (or, more specifically, the fossil fuel industry’s) responsibility?

Results from our data analysis show that between 50 and 60 percent of the top users most frequently tweeting on climate realism and alarmism follow the Heartland’s Twitter account. The think tank also frequently used the terms both on its Twitter account and website and, around the end of 2019, went so far as to launch the website climaterealism.com.

The Heartland Institute has received extensive funding from the fossil fuel industry. Most of Heartland’s income comes through Donors Capital Fund and its affiliated organization Donors Trust, both described as the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement for their ability to funnel funding while concealing identities. Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets reports that the Heartland Institute has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998 and at least $55,000 from Koch Industries. But the total today might be even higher. A 2019 Influence Map report found that “the five largest publicly-traded oil and gas majors (ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total) have invested over $1Bn of shareholder funds in the three years following the Paris Agreement on misleading climate-related branding and lobbying.”

While Seibt reportedly chose not to renew her contract with Heartland as of April 2020 after facing potential fines from a regional broadcasting authority, the Heartland’s YouTuber phase is crucial to the understanding of the climate denial machine. Seibt offered a strong online presence to counter Thunberg, creating the perception of an ongoing debate on climate change and the degree and timing of its impacts. Transforming climate change into a political issue rather than a scientific one, and making sure it stays that way, allows the denial machine—the fossil fuel industry, the conservative think tanks, the ultra-conservative politicians and their media platforms—to exploit public polarization and to keep telling “their side of the story.”

Framing the debate as “realism” versus “alarmism” feeds off emotions and exploits the public’s fear of an altered planet and the sense of losing control over our future. Who doesn’t want to hear that worst-case scenarios—the loss of beloved cities, the collapse of biodiversity and agriculture, deaths through severe weather and starvation—are mere hysteria? But the deniers’ campaigns are fundamentally economical—it’s about power and money. By spreading doubt and misinforming, the fossil fuel industry can delay emission-control measures and continue to pursue its billion-dollar profits undisturbed.

Current denial tactics, from climate to vaccination or the coronavirus, share fundamental dynamics. The issues are rooted in science, but denial makes them political. Experts who have warned about the dangers of the coronavirus and the importance of acting on the science have also been called out as “alarmists”; those who fear for their assets and their position—including the president of the United States—initially denied the existence of the problem and then downplayed its threat, with dire consequences for the people.

This is what denial does: It reshapes reality, like a funhouse mirror. Calling various activists “alarmists” shouldn’t necessarily be seen as softer than outright denial. Calling those worried about worst-case scenarios “alarmists” denies one of the fundamental principles of climate science: that scientists can predict a range of scenarios but don’t yet know exactly which one will play out. Crucially, that’s not the same as saying scientists have no idea what will happen. And as report after report emerges, suggesting global warming is happening faster, not slower, than earlier projections, the case for so-called alarmism is only growing.

Stella Levantesi @StellaLevantesi

Stella Levantesi is a journalist based in Italy and New York.

Giulio Corsi @gcorsi_

Giulio Corsi is a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University. He studies climate change disinformation.

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1020 tom d

In an all-too-literal fashion, The Donald is indeed proving to be history's "fire and fury" president.

And don't for a moment think that there was no warning about the over-the-top burning now underway in this country. After all, in 2019, parts of Australia were singed to a crisp in a way never before seen, killing at least 25 humans and possibly more than a billion animals. And that country, too, was headed by a climate-change denier, a man who once brought a piece of coal to parliament and handed it around while soothingly telling other legislators, "Don't be afraid, don't be scared."

https://yyy.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/09/scott-morrison-brings-coal-to-question-time-what-fresh-idiocy-is-this

In addition, in recent years, the Arctic (of all places) has been smoking and burning in an unprecedented fashion, heating its permafrost and releasing staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Oh, and this June, the temperature in a small town in Siberia crossed the 100-degree mark for the first time.

By the way, Russia, too, is run by a leader who until recently was a climate denier.I mean, what is it about the urge of so many of us in such a crisis to support those dedicated to quite literally destroying this planet as a livable place for... well, us? (Hey there, Jair Bolsonaro!)

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david n

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-fascism-ascends-2020-election-may-be-the-crisis-of-democracy-that-opens-the-door-to-a-coup/

...trump] refused to say that he would make a peaceful transition, and threatened to “get rid of the ballots”—loses the popular vote on Nov. 3 to Joe Biden, as polls currently indicate, he appears poised to dismiss millions of mail-in votes. He would likely do this through the courts that he has assiduously packed over the past three years, particularly via the Supreme Court seat he and his fellow Republicans are intent on seizing just prior to the vote. The legitimacy of both our system of elections and the foundational courts that embody the rule of law will have been not just undermined, but potentially destroyed.

Fascism, historians tell us, has only ever arisen in mature democratic states, and the main condition that permits it to seize power is a crisis of legitimacy for its major democratic institutions. The election of 2020 may well bring the crisis that does the trick for America.

Many observers—notably including authors Jason Stanley and Jared Yates Sexton—have remarked that the nation’s path under a Trump presidency has much more than a passing resemblance to the descent into fascism that has befallen other societies, the best-known examples being prewar Germany and Italy. The correlations are powerful:

• Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal, and has been from the start. His opening salvo in the campaign—the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race poll-wise and proved wildly popular with Republican voters—was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course, the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language he used to justify such plans—labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease—was classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination. This became more refined and pronounced over the course of his presidency, as when he attacked four women Democratic congressmembers of color: “If somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave!”
• Trump’s palingenetic ultranationalism is his central theme. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidency and its neverending campaign, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.”) That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis—that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but in the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.
• Trump’s deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts: “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
• Trump constantly proclaimed America to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world during the 2016 campaign, and insists that this occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians.During his presidency, the crises varied according to Trump’s political needs—an immigrant caravan’s arrival on the border with Mexico was portrayed hysterically by Trump during the 2018 midterm elections as an existential threat, while this year, America is in grave danger (according to Trump and his fellow Republicans) from a largely imaginary “antifa threat.” The coronavirus pandemic that the world knows his incompetence allowed to kill 200,000 Americans—not so much.
• He himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.
• Trump’s contempt for weakness (another classic fascist trait) is manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war) as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his mockery of a New York Times reporter with a disability, and more recently to his decision not to attend a ceremony at a World War II gravesite near Paris because the American soldiers there who had died in the war were “losers” and “suckers.”

Some of have argued—myself included—that Trump is not a fascist ideologue in the classic mold, but rather a living model of a right-wing-populist demagogue. But fascism, properly understood, is itself a species of right-wing populism: one that has simply turned metastatic, a cancer raging out of control in the body politic. If, as it seems, he is nonetheless leading America into fascism, it would be a distinction without a significant difference.

But, as one Twitter wag adroitly observed recently: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.” Conservatives (see, for example, claims byFox News’ Tucker Carlson and right-wing punditthat the threat of white nationalism is a hoax concocted by Democrats) and centrists have unsurprisingly dismissed such observations as undue alarmism and hyperbolic exaggeration. But then, movement conservatism, as I explored in some depth more than 15 years ago, is in many regards the source of the problem, as it has been the all-too-hospitable host for the fascist cancer. Centrists and some liberals, meanwhile, seem so emotionally wedded to a belief that underneath our ongoing chaos all these things are still normalthat they’re incapable of comprehending that there is nothing remotely normal at all about them.

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random grab 920

'Climate Clock' Reveals Decades of Premature Doom Prophecies

Daniel Payne, JTN

Kids Have Low Risk of Covid, Are Harmed by Precautions

Snape & Viner, Science

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level of fear itself has become pt of contention 320?

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--> rw conspir agenda 21 BS that greens rejoice at fail/crisis to ram agenda thru:

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michaels whine on FB deplatform: The arbiter of climate truth is a group contracted to Facebook called Climate Feedback, itself funded by professional climate alarmist Eric Michelman.[Michelman  is an experienced entrepreneur in the software industry. He is the Founder of the Climate Change Education Project and the Director of the More Than Scientists campaign.] It gets exercised about anything deviating from its apocalyptic religious view of climate change. It was particularly upset by Michael Moore’s recent film on the true environmental and financial costs of wind and solar projects, which turn out to be anything but “renewable.” In fact, as Moore showed in his folksy "Believe me; I’m an amateur" style, these boondoggles require massive fossil fuel energy inputs to build the infrastructure that provides their intermittent and costly power and so don’t even reduce net carbon dioxide emissions.

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omg covid delingpole zinc grift

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/08/10/how-uk-climate-science-deniers-turned-their-attention-coronavirus-covid-19

no pix twt

on  December 31, 2019 many of us were reflecting on the past year and thinking about what opportunities lay ahead. Few were paying close attention to early reports ofunexplained cases of pneumonia thousands of miles away in Wuhan, the large capital city of China’s Hubei Province.

But less than three months later, on March 23, Boris Johnson was ordering anational lockdown to try and stop that virus, by then known worldwide as COVID-19, from raging across the UK. This came 52 days after the chief medical officer of England hadconfirmed the nation’s first two cases.

The coronavirus crisis once again saw the UK divided — between those putting their trust in public health experts and their recommendations, and those quick to question the science on which the government claimed to base its decisions for controlling the pandemic. For those who have watched the decades-long efforts to slow climate action, this was a familiar phenomenon. And the coronavirus pandemic seemed to give fresh ammunition to some familiar faces.

A close look at commentary on both COVID-19 and climate change reveals significant crossover between unqualified voices casting doubt on experts recommending action.

Why?

“There’s nothing mysterious about this,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive science, who studies the persistence of misinformation in society at the University of Bristol.

“I think COVID is just climate change on steroids in a particle accelerator,” he says. “The same forces are happening: You have the inevitability of a virus which is the same as the inevitability of the physics. And opposing that you have politics which motivates some people to deny the inevitables and instead resort to bizarre claims.”

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Find out more about the crossover between COVID and climate science denial in DeSmog's special series

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'No need to panic’

Commentators with a history of casting doubt on established climate science first turned their attention to COVID in the days just after Chinese authorities ordered the 11 million residents of Wuhan, a city the size of London, intolockdown.

On January 24,Ross Clark, a columnist for The Spectator who has lamented“hysteria” around COVID-19, said there was “no need to panic about coronavirus” despitewarnings from leading epidemiologists about the potential spread of the outbreak.

On January 29, British economistRoger Bate similarlyargued on the website of theAmerican Enterprise Institute (AEI), a climate science denying free-market lobby group, that news reports around COVID-19 were unnecessarily sparking a major political reaction.

“A contagion will happen at some point, and it’s important we recognize it and react. Unless the coronavirus mutates into something far more dangerous, this isn’t it,” he wrote[spectator pix]

the idea that governments and the media were overreacting to the coronavirus threat was echoed by libertarian online magazineSpiked,which has takenfunding from notorious backers of climate science denial theKoch family, and hasincluded Bate and other AEI scholars among its contributors. It published an article as early as January 30 saying there was“mass hysteria in the newsrooms” around COVID.

By mid-February, the World Health Organization had declared that the threat of COVID-19 spreading across the world was“high” — yet a relaxed attitude continued to prevail among some commentators.

On February 19, centre-right blog ConservativeHome published an article byDaniel Hannan, a columnist and former Tory MEP,claiming that COVID-19 was unlikely to be as lethal as the common flu.

Hannan, a leading figure in the UK’s campaign to leave the EU, haslinks to various American lobby groups that have spread misinformation on climate change including theCato Institute and theHeritage Foundation. He encouraged ConservativeHome readers to “cheer up” and discouraged “panic” over the virus. That message was taken up by Clark in anotherSpectator article, arguing that “coronavirus hysteria” was “the latest phenomenon to fulfil our weird and growing appetite for doom"

[pix]

clark told DeSmog he stood by his analysis but acknowledged: “Clearly, COVID-19 took off more than I, or virtually anybody imagined it would at that stage.”

“There is a very broad range of opinions among virologists, epidemiologists and others who might be regarded as expert in this field,” he said, “so the idea that I am at odds with some mythical consensus of expert opinion is false.”

“I have been around long enough to know there is no such thing as scientific consensus on either issue [climate change or COVID], nor indeed on any matter where evidence is still emerging and open to wide interpretation,” he added.

Even after the World Health Organizationdeclared the contagion to be a pandemic in early March, commentators who have long cast doubt on warnings issued by climate scientists continued to deny that COVID-19 was a major threat.

Mail on Sunday columnistPeter Hitchensclaimed that Britain was infected by a “bad case of madness,” arguing that restrictions were bein and “unreason.”

The language was familiar: Hitchens has previouslyrejected science showing human activity is responsible for global warming, and labeled measures to tackle climate change such as environmental taxes asa “sort of madness.”

For Lewandowsky, this “hysteria” narrative is part of a wider phenomenon of undermining expertise across the board, from Brexit, to climate change, and now COVID-19.

Lewandowsky points out that this also extends to many on the fringes of the political debate, such as controversial commentatorKatie Hopkins, who had over a million Twitter followers before the platform banned her, and has said the public were being“played” by the government for being asked to wear face masks. Or Brexit Party leaderNigel Farage, who described a police visit to his home as “lunacy” after he apparently broke lockdown rules.

Both have also cast doubt on the reality an of climate change.

“They’re quite explicit about saying that one person’s fact is another person’s lie, because that then enables them to avoid accountability,” Lewandowsky argues.

Miracle cures and conspiracy theories

These commentators’ contributions to the debate haven’t been without consequence. Some have spread conspiracy theories that have had real-world impact, while others have admitted to ignoring official safety guidelines, putting the public at risk of catching the disease.

ColumnistJames Delingpolewrote in a March 28article for the Spectator Australia titled ‘Wu Flu Notes’ that he had gone about his daily business despite having symptoms that align with coronavirus and that it was possible he had “infected lots of graduates.”

Some days later, Delingpole posted a tweet claiming a “high-powered zinc formula” had helped him recover from the illness without the need to go into intensive care – despite little being known about whether any such formula can be a cure for the virus.

He went on to write, “what I’d like more than anything is for this stuff to be available on the open market for everyone. But to mass produce it my friend needs ££££. If I crowdfunded it who’d be interested?” He concluded his request by asking for “potential big money backers."

[twt]

delingpole’s zinc promotion was comparable to comments made by US conspiracy theoristAlex Jones, who, a few weeks prior, hadreceived a cease-and-desist letter from a top New York attorney based on claims he had marketed and sold fraudulent COVID-19 treatments on his conspiracy website. US President Donald Trump was also widely criticised for suggesting that disinfectant taken internally could be a treatment for the virus.

Theories about miracle cures can take hold partly as a result of personal politics, Lewandowsky argues. Under lockdown, “you’re asked to stay at home and to look after other people by not doing what you’d like to do, and that is very challenging if you’re a believer in personal freedom and autonomy,” he says.

The same can be said of the motivations for spreading misinformation on climate change: “A lot of climate denial is very high-pitched, frenetic, emotional, angry, toxic – and that’s all triggered because people’s identity is at stake.”

The desire to reach for conspiracy theories may also stem from a need to feel that individuals still retain some control, says Evita March, a senior lecturer of psychology at Federation University Australia. “Conspiracy theories offer the believer some comfort in that there is still behavioural predictability,” she says.

And there were plenty of conspiracy theories flying around, pushed by long-time climate science deniers.

Piers Corbyn, brother of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, was quick to promote the idea that coronavirus was thefault of politically liberal billionaires, and that it was related to theChinese-developed 5G mobile network.

The latter conspiracy, alsopromoted by Infowars’ Jones, had significant real-world consequences. Over the Easter weekend it wasreported that 20 phone masts had been subject to arson attacks. According to Mobile UK, the trade association for four mobile network operators, an estimated 50 masts had beentargeted by April 15

[bbc pix]

david Lawrence, a researcher at campaign group Hope Not Hate, told DeSmog that theories around 5G have existed for a number of years, so “the stage was already set.” ”When the global COVID-19 outbreak occurred, there was both a susceptibility to be exploited and a ready-made explanation to hand,” he said.

“In some ways this is similar to climate change,” said Lawrence, “in that people who work in industries that would be negatively affected by efforts to reduce carbon emissions might be more likely to find reasons to reject the scientific consensus.”

Such conspiracy theories become popular — whether in relation to climate change or COVID-19 —  because they are a means of “simplifying and attributing blame,” particularly during a time when “people feel that they have lost control over their lives,” says Lewandowsky.

“Some will seek comfort in the idea that there are bad people out there causing the pandemic because, for some, knowing there are bad people responsible for terrible things is more comforting than to assume that these things are uncontrollable,” he says. “It allows people to direct anger at someone.”

Distrusting modellers

Many commentators directed their fire at a familiar foe — scientific models.

On April 1, the same day the United Nations announced thepostponement of the annual UN climate change conference, two prominent UK climate science deniersargued in The Wall Street Journal that the pandemic had “dramatically demonstrated the limits of scientific modelling to predict the future.”

Benny Peiser andAndrew Montford, the Director and Deputy Director of the UK’s principal climate science denial campaign group theGlobal Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)**,  criticised policymakers for using academic research that was subject to a “lack of quality control.” “In normal times this doesn’t matter much, but it’s different when studies find their way into the policy world,” they wrote.

They did not mention that the GWPF’s own approach to ‘peer-review’, which undercover reporters in 2015 showed operated on the basis of sending reports to its members of its own advisory council. The model has been described by UK charity Sense About Science, whose Advisory Council included GWPF advisor Matt Ridley, as “a way of trying to give scientific credibility to certain claims in the hope that a non-scientific audience will not know the difference.”

Eight days later, Breitbart’s Delingpole similarly criticised scientific modelling,dismissing research from the University of Washington forecasting more than150,000 deaths from the disease across the US as “operating in the realms of purest fantasy.” Whether on climate change or the pandemic, “we have no idea whether or not we can trust” scientific experts and their modelling, Delingpole argued[pix BB]

clark takes a similar view, telling DeSmog: “on both COVID-19 and climate change there are a lot of people who seem to favour the results of modelling over real-world observation.” Those who want action “will latch on to any model” that suits their ends, he claimed, and will “decide that is 'the science', that it is fact, beyond all challenge.”

Anarticle in Spiked likewise argued in April that “worst-case scenario thinking” and “doomsday forecasts” from models had clouded political judgement, referencing the obesity crisis, swine flu, and climate change.

This process of regularly casting doubt on models represents the “weaponisation of the scientific method,” says Imran Ahmed, founder of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. “Those sorts of sly tactics that have been used by these groups have amounted to an entire culture of how they spread information, spread ideas, and build audiences for their groups.”

“It’s expressed through philosophical strands which are anti-expert, faux-populist and conspiracies” and can include the “incel movement, climate denial, vaccine denial, identity-based hate,” he argues.

“As new facts emerge and as the understanding of the scientific movement changes,” says Ahmed, “these actors look back at previous consensuses and say, ‘see, they were lying back then.’”

Attacking environmentalists

As well as attacking coronavirus experts on their response recommendations, many commentators who oppose climate action also attacked those looking further ahead by putting forward proposals to ensure recovery plans were consistent with governments’ environmental pledges.

For months, commentators who regularly question the veracity of mainstream climate science denounced environmental activists for supposedly distracting the world with climate change amid the threat of pandemics.

On March 12, Telegraph columnistSherelle Jacobsargued that university funding should be redirected away from climate change research and towards “the scientifically uncontested problem of pandemics.” The day after, when the UK was effectively put under a national lockdown, Dutch climate science denial groupCLINTEL published anopen letter titled “Fight virus not carbon.”

Greenpeace,The Climate Group, and many other environmental organisations believe that the government should include environmental policies in coronavirus economic recovery measures to “build back better,” particularly as the country seeks to position itself as a climate leader ahead of hosting the UN climate talks in November 2021.

Some commentators spun this argument to imply that the environmental movement was happy that the virus has spread.

On March 22, former Top Gear presenterJeremy Clarksonclaimed in the Sunday Times that “greens just can’t stop smiling” because COVID-19 was “their idea of a wet dream.” Spikedcontributor Ross Clark echoed this position in a response to DeSmog’s questions, saying that “there is a strand of opinion on the left which wants these crises — climate change and COVID — to be as big as possible because they see it as a way of undermining capitalism, and other aspects of our lives, and reforming society in their own dream vision.”

On March 25, a couple of days after Clarkson’s polemic appeared, Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill similarly argued that the pandemic was “a glimpse of the dystopia greens want us to live in.”

“The truth is that if the COVID-19 crisis has shown us anything, it is how awful it would be to live in the kind of world greens dream about. Right now, courtesy of a horrible new virus, our societies look not dissimilar to the kind of societies Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, green parties and others have long been agitating for,” he wrote.

[pix] o’Neill reiterated this position when contacted by DeSmog, saying both the “green movement” and the reaction to COVID represented “privileged Westerners taking political decisions and actions” to the detriment of some of society’s most vulnerable. “Progressives should be questioning the impact of the reaction to COVID-19 on working people and poor people,” he said.

In June, 57 charitieswrote to Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking him to put the creation of jobs in low-carbon sectors at the forefront of his economic recovery plans. They also asked the government to cancel the debts of developing countries struggling with both the impacts of the pandemic and the climate crisis.

Delingpole later wrote in acolumn for Breitbart saying environmentalists were celebrating the lockdown as a blueprint for a “new world order.” The GWPF took this argument one step further,publishing an image of a crying woman with the text, “net zero, like lockdown but permanent” — a reference to the UK government’s plans to slash the country’s emissions.

As these pieces were appearing, a Twitter account claiming to represent the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the East Midlandsposted an image of an XR-branded sticker on a lamppost with the words, “corona is the cure, humans are the disease.”

Official XR accounts were quick to condemn the tweet andsaid that they were not affiliated with the newly created account, which has since been deleted. But various outlets and commentators used the tweet to condemn the protest group.

Gaia Fawkes, the environmental section of political blog Guido Fawkes,suggested the post showed that XR was “in favour of extinction,” though it acknowledged coordinators of the organisation had “distanced themselves” from the supposed splinter group. A spokesperson for the site told DeSmog it stood by its reporting despite well-publicised doubts over the authenticity of the East Midlands organisation, stating it was “unaware of any publicly available list of ‘official’ [XR] groups at the time.”

The GWPF likewise claimed the Twitter account’s “anti-human sentiment” was “widely shared” among environmentalists,rejecting claims that the East Midlands account was fake.

Author and Guardian columnist George Monbiot suggests that while it is predominantly money that is behind climate science denial or tobacco industry lobbying, “with COVID-19, the motive definitely varies,” but the outcome is essentially the same.

“There are a lot of very well-paid people who are very professional and they’re using the expertise that they’ve gathered in other areas of dispute about scientific facts and the policies arising from them, and applying those directly to the pandemic,” he argues.

“Take their power seriously, but don’t take any of their arguments at face value,” Monbiot concludes. “It’s not worth trying to deconstruct the nonsense they come out with.”

Political impact

Unlike in theEU referendum or Trump’s presidential campaign, pushing anti-expert rhetoric may no longer be a winning strategy in the wake of COVID-19. Polling shows that despite worry about the pandemic and its impacts, the public still wants governments totackle climate change. And politicians attaching themselves to the anti-science bandwagon are now struggling in the polls.

For the Centre for Countering Digital Hate’s Ahmed, attacking the concept of expertise around COVID-19 is “the first truly great strategic mistake by those who espouse this radical world view.”

The US and UK are two of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, and both have leaders “who have been denying evidence and fact,” says Lewandowsky. “Johnson and Trump are creating a situation in which the very thought that we could establish a common truth is under attack,” he says. Both are regularly backed by commentators who also openly question the concept of expertise, whether on climate change or coronavirus.

But these positions have begun to hurt both leaders. Johnson has plummeted from a position of public popularity prior to the UK’s lockdown to anegative approval rating almost four months later. And the gap between the majority of Americans who disapprove of Trump’s leadership and those keeping faith with the president now sits ataround 15 percent, numbers that could see him lose November’s election.

That may reflect a wider shift in the public mindset, Lewandowsky argues: “My hope is that the COVID crisis has kind of given us a reset here, and there’s some evidence that people are beginning to say that we do need experts and data.”

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aha rw pundits have an almost perfect record of being wrong, yet somehow paul Ehrlich gets to be poster boy punching bag for inaccurate prediction (did not help he lost long bet).  Club of Rome? greens get tarred with that brush.

common ploy / complaint is that left is rooting for catastrophe (motive?  if capitalist system crashes we get to build a better one? We hate America and thus want it to fail for pure spite?

related to alarmist Alare Scare chemophobia, manly stoic clear-eyes scientists and engineers are not scared b/c they see reality and are masters of the physical universe. eg nuclear power

Relates to to American Exceptionalism: we are not bound by rules/history, if we run out of X we'll just use Y (or as in peak oil, frack our way out).

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example

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https://www.nationalreview.com/**2017/04/**judicial-watch-lawsuit-seeks-obama-white-house-records-controversial-global-warming/

 former scientist at the NOAA has exposed a shoddy report on global warming. Judicial Watch is suing to learn more.

:{:{}:

following allegations of impropriety over the handling of a controversial climate change report, a government watchdog group now wants to know whether there was any collaboration between the report’s lead author and a key Obama adviser. On March 27, Judicial Watchfiled a lawsuit seeking “all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement.”}:

The FOIA specifically requests correspondence between Tom Karl, the former head of the climate-data program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and John Holdren, the director of Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren is from that species of Baby Boomer global catastrophists who make changing predictions each decade about how we will all die. He also happens to be the science guy who had the president’s ear for eight years.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/02/23/meet-anti-greta-young-youtuber-campaigning-against-climate-alarmism/

no lnx vid

Climate and Environment

The anti-Greta: A conservative think tank takes on the global phenomenon

How a group allied with the Trump administration is paying a German teen to question established climate science.

Naomi Seibt poses for a portrait near her home in Munster, Germany. Seibt, 19, uses YouTube to denounce “climate alarmism,” countering the arguments of young climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Naomi Seibt poses for a portrait near her home in Munster, Germany. Seibt, 19, uses YouTube to denounce “climate alarmism,” countering the arguments of young climate activist Greta Thunberg. (Sebastien Van Malleghem for The Washington Post)

By

Desmond Butler and

Juliet Eilperin

Feb. 23, 2020

For climate skeptics, it’s hard to compete with the youthful appeal of global phenomenon Greta Thunberg. But one U.S. think tank hopes it’s found an answer: the anti-Greta.

Naomi Seibt is a 19-year-old German who, like Greta, is blond, eloquent and European. But Naomi denounces “climate alarmism,” calls climate consciousness “a despicably anti-human ideology,” and has even deployed Greta’s now famous “How dare you?” line to take on the mainstream German media.

“She’s a fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism,” said James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, an influential libertarian think tank in suburban Chicago that has the ear of the Trump administration.

In December, Heartland headlined Naomi at its forum at the UN climate conference in Madrid, where Taylor described her as “the star” of the show. Last month, Heartland hired Naomi as the young face of its campaign to question the scientific consensus that human activity is causing dangerous global warming.

“Naomi Seibt vs. Greta Thunberg: whom should we trust?” asked Heartland in a digital video. Later this week, Naomi is set to make her American debut at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a high-profile annual gathering just outside Washington of right-leaning activists.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Heartland’s tactics amount to an acknowledgment that Greta has touched a nerve, especially among teens and young adults. Since launching her protest two years ago outside the Swedish parliament at age 15, Greta has sparked youth protests across the globe and in 2019 was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” the youngest to ever win the honor.

The teenager has called on the nations of the world to cut their total carbon output by at least half over the next decade, saying that if they don’t, “then there will be horrible consequences.”

“I want you to panic,” she told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

Naomi, for her part, argues that these predictions of dire consequences are exaggerated. In a video posted on Heartland’s website, she gazes into the camera and says, “I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think.”

Graham Brookie directs the Digital Forensic Research Lab, an arm of the nonprofit Atlantic Council that works to identify and expose disinformation. While the campaign “is not outright disinformation,” Brookie said in an email, it “does bear resemblance to a model we use called the 4d’s — dismiss the message, distort the facts, distract the audience, and express dismay at the whole thing.”

Brookie added: “The tactic is intended to create an equivalency in spokespeople and message. In this case, it is a false equivalency between a message based in climate science that went viral organically and a message based in climate skepticism trying to catch up using paid promotion.”

Naomi said her political activism was sparked a few years ago when she began asking questions in school about Germany’s liberal immigration policies. She said the backlash from teachers and other students hardened her skepticism about mainstream German thinking. More recently, she said that watching young people joining weekly “Fridays For Future” protests inspired by Greta helped spur her opposition to climate change activism.

“I get chills when I see those young people, especially at Fridays for Future. They are screaming and shouting and they’re generally terrified,” she said in an interview. “They don’t want the world to end.”

Naomi said she does not dispute that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but she argues that many scientists and activists have overstated their impact.

“I don’t want to get people to stop believing in man-made climate change, not at all,” she said. “Are manmade CO2 emissions having that much impact on the climate? I think that’s ridiculous to believe.”

Naomi argues that other factors, such as solar energy, play a role — though the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth has actually declined since the 1970s, according to federal measurements. A slew of peer-reviewed reports, from scientific bodies in the U.S. and elsewhere, have concluded that greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant cause of warming since the mid-20th century, producing a range of devastating effects from massive marine die-offs in South America to severe wildfires in Australia and sinking ground in the Arctic.

In addition to climate change, Naomi echoes far-right skepticism about feminism and immigration. The German media have described her as sympathetic to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the biggest opposition party in parliament, whose leaders have spoken of fighting “an invasion of foreigners.” Naomi says she is not a member of AfD — she describes herself as libertarian — but acknowledges speaking at a recent AfD event.

Her path to Heartland began in November with a speech at EIKE, a Munich think tank whose vice president is a prominent AfD politician.By then, Naomi was already active on YouTube, producing videos on topics ranging from migration to feminism to climate change. In the audience was Heartland’s Taylor. He said he immediately recognized her potential and approached her about working with Heartland.

Founded in 1984 and funded largely by anonymous donors, Heartland has increasingly focused on climate change over the past decade. Its staff and researchers enjoy ready access to the Trump administration, and one of its senior fellows, William Happer, served as a senior director on the White House National Security Council between September 2018 and 2019.

An emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, Happer has repeatedly argued that carbon emissions should be viewed as beneficial to society — not a pollutant that drives global warming. During his time with the Trump administration, he sought to enlist Heartland’s help in promoting his ideas and objected to a U.S. intelligence official’s finding that climate impacts could be “possibly catastrophic,” according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Why would an American think tank want to get involved in German politics? Because it worries that Berlin’s strong stance on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions could be contagious, according to a recent investigation aired on German television.

For two decades, Germany has been a leader in pressing other nations to curb carbon output and shift to renewable energy. Though it is falling short of its ambitious goals, Germany has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions this year by 40 percent compared to 1990 — and by up to 95 percent by mid-century.

In December, during the Madrid climate conference, two undercover staffers from the nonprofit investigative newsroom CORRECTIV approached Taylor and claimed to work for a wealthy donor from the auto industry who wanted to give Heartland a half-million euros. Taylor took the bait, and followed up with a three-page proposal outlining a campaign to push back against German efforts to regulate emissions.

“These restrictive environmental programs are largely unnecessary,” says the document, a copy of which was obtained by The Post. “Worse, other nations — including the United States and European Union nations — are increasingly being influenced by unwise German policy.”

The proposal described Naomi as “the star” of a “Climate Reality Forum” organized by Heartland during the Madrid talks. With “over 100,000 people viewing her talk on climate realism,” the proposal said, Naomi was well-positioned to fight German climate policies.

“Funding for our Germany Environmental Issues project will enable Heartland to provide Naomi with the equipment and the sources she needs to present a series of effective videos calling attention to the negative impacts of overreaching environmental regulations,” the proposal says.

CORRECTIV aired its report on Heartland earlier this month on German TV. Taylor dismissed the report, saying, “Heck, I would have spoken with them if they told us who they were, and the answers would have been pretty much the same.”

The investigators filmed Naomi at a public event, posing as would-be donors. She struck back with her own video response. Invoking Greta, she said, “To the media, I have a few last words: How dare you?"

Greta Thunberg confronts world leaders at the U.N. climatre summit: 'How dare you?'

Despite echoes of Greta’s style, Naomi has objected to the comparison.

“The reason I don’t like the term anti-Greta is that it suggests I myself am an indoctrinated puppet, I guess, for the other side,” she says in one video. Asked if she meant that as a criticism of Greta, Naomi says: “That sounds kind of mean, actually.” She added: “I don’t want to shame her in any way.”

Taylor said the tendency to associate Naomi with Greta is “kind of natural” — and benefits Heartland’s message.

“To the extent that Naomi is pretty much the same, just with a different perspective, yeah, I think that it’s good that people will look at the two as similar in many ways,” he said.

Still, Naomi has a long climb to reach the level of global attention lavished on Greta. While Greta measures her social media following in the millions, Naomi counts slightly under 50,000 YouTube subscribers.

Through her spokespeople, Greta declined to comment.

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mma 3/20 4 min montage of bs

several fear alarm eg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wusreLZ9g-Y

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/furious-trump-fans-barrage-conservative-columnist-who-admitted-coronavirus-is-a-real-problem/

no lnx

Furious Trump fans barrage conservative columnist who admitted coronavirus is a real problem

Written by Brad Reed / Raw Story March 2, 2020

A conservative columnist who is generally a supporter of President Donald Trump recently found himself getting barraged by the president’s fans because he admitted coronavirus could be a real problem for the global economy.

As the New York Times reports, Republican Rob Maness recently wrote a column for the conservative LifeZette website that outlined potential negative economic impacts from coronavirus, including the disruption of supply chains.

“The most significant major concern in America is the impact on pharmaceutical supply,” Maness wrote in his column. “Large numbers of drugs used to treat serious medical conditions are manufactured or their key components are produced in China. Medicines such as antibiotics amoxicillin, doxycycline, penicillin and other’s availabilities will be impacted as China continues its lock-down of factory workers because 90% of their sourcing is in China.”

While this analysis was fairly straightforward in breaking down the economic risks of a viral pandemic, Maness tells the Times that many Trump supporters were furious with him for bringing up unwelcome facts.

“I got accused of being alarmist and trying to hurt the president,” he said. “I actually said the government’s doing a pretty good job.”

Trump spent the last few days attacking media coverage of the virus andaccused the Washington Post of being the “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE” after it published a devastating report showing his administration was scrambling to respond to the outbreak.

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point man on covid 19 but got blindsided on podium by vp pick "alarmist"

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an 220

'An outrage’: HHS chief refuses to vow coronavirus vaccine will be affordable for all — not just the rich

Jake Johnson / Common DreamsFebruary 27, 2020

“This is what happens when you put a Big Pharma CEO who doubled the price of insulin in charge of regulating Big Pharma.”

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