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morano2 blank 8/12/17

furies on ubiquity, on straight fox baier?

lost 8/12/17

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mac says last mod june 22 17 blank no that's main

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7 23 gmail paste experiment

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xxx Blowing Hot and Cold - Mishpacha Magazine Mishpacha Magazine —Greta Thunberg, environmental activist · —Marc Morano, executive editor of Climate Depot website · —Bjorn Lomborg, former director of Denmark's ...			Flag as irrelevant
Right-wing media deny climate change in face of deadly and record-breaking extreme ... Media Matters for America Fox Business host Stuart Varney indulged climate change denier Marc Morano and said climate change is “a good debate.” When discussing extreme ...			Flag as irrelevant
NY Post Covers CFACT's 8 Person, 3 Boat Offshore Wind Turbine Protest - Daily Kos Daily Kos ... of whom are Marc Morano and Craig Rucker of dark money-backed CFACT (and two more who may also be CFACT staff, although it's hard to tell).	[](https://www.google.com/alerts/share?hl=en&gl=US&ru=https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/26/2183412/-NY-Post-Covers-CFACT-s-8-Person-3-Boat-Offshore-Wind-Turbine-Protest&ss=fb&rt=NY+Post+Covers+CFACT%27s+8+Person,+3+Boat+Offshore+Wind+Turbine+Protest+-+Daily+Kos&cd=KhQxODAyNDc2OTE4NTIwMjg4OTcwODIaNDZlMTFmY2U2ZTMxZmE5Mzpjb206ZW46VVM&ssp=AMJHsmUsmAolnL6UVylc_Lrd6VHZNAewcw)	[](https://www.google.com/alerts/share?hl=en&gl=US&ru=https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/26/2183412/-NY-Post-Covers-CFACT-s-8-Person-3-Boat-Offshore-Wind-Turbine-Protest&ss=tw&rt=NY+Post+Covers+CFACT%27s+8+Person,+3+Boat+Offshore+Wind+Turbine+Protest+-+Daily+Kos&cd=KhQxODAyNDc2OTE4NTIwMjg4OTcwODIaNDZlMTFmY2U2ZTMxZmE5Mzpjb206ZW46VVM&ssp=AMJHsmUsmAolnL6UVylc_Lrd6VHZNAewcw)	Flag as irrelevant
Newsflash, Hillary: July is hot - American Family News American Family News Marc Morano of Climate Depot takes great exception to news outlets like the Associated Press claiming that "climate change leaves fingerprints on ...			Flag as irrelevant
The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...	The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...	The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...	The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...	The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...	The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...	The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...	The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...	The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...	The Suppression of Discussion Continues to Degrade Science - American Thinker American Thinker ... surprised that climate skeptic and journalist Marc Morano disagrees. ... informed and battle-ready warriors like Mark Morano and Tom Heller, ...

stank of morano? hit job

October 17, 2008

LCVs Environmental Scorecard Marred by Partisan Politics, Inhofe Says

Inhofe Fought LCV Agenda Which Would Have Driven Up Costs On Oklahoma Families

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, today commented on the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) 2008 National Environmental Scorecard. One of the three votes used by the LCV to score Senators was on the Lieberman-Warner bill (S. 2191). The Lieberman-Warner bill would have increased household costs for every family of 4 in Oklahoma by $3,298. Because of the rising cost of home heating and electricity, the average increase per U.S. household will be$1,740 per year by 2020, according to Charles River Associates. Further, Lieberman-Warner would increased costs at the pump. Read more about the high cost of Lieberman-Warner on Oklahoma.

"The LCV is one of the most liberal partisan special-interest groups that make up the Democratic Party," Senator Inhofe said. "It should come as no surprise that I and many fellow Republicans have never received high marks from this Washington, D.C., liberal special-interest group. LCV simply measures the greenness of politicians by how many federal laws they impose on the American people.

"I released a report in September that details how LCV is a funding arm of the Democratic Party. LCV takes donations given to ‘save the environment' and uses them to fund ads for Democratic candidates such as Ben Lujan from New Mexico. LCV, similar to other groups highlighted in my comprehensive funding report, disguises itself as an environmental group dedicated to saving the environment, yet it is simply an extension of the Democratic political party.

"LCV erroneously claimed that the failed Lieberman-Warner global warming cap-and-trade bill of June 2008 saw its ‘debate cut short' by opponents. In reality, Senators who opposed the doomed bill were eager for the debate to continue while the bill's sponsors wanted the bill to die a quick death. The fact is, Lieberman-Warner would have driven up costs on American families and would have put thousands of Americans out of work.

"In addition, LCV claimed that 54 U.S. Senators ‘supported taking action' with thefailed cap-and-trade climate tax bill. LCV should check its math, as nearly 30% of Senate Democrats opposed the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill. In the end, Senator Boxer only had at most 35 Democratic Senators willing to vote for final passage on the largest tax bill in U.S. history. TheBoxer Climate Tax Bill was so thoroughly disowned by Democratic Leadership that proponents of climate taxes will now be forced to start from scratch next year."

Where is NTD headquartered?

NTD is an international television network that is headquartered in New York City.

What is NTD’s history?

NTD was founded in 2001 by Chinese-born Americans who fled communist repression in their homeland. They saw how the media there was used as a weapon against the people, and conversely how crucial independent media was to a free society. They created NTD as an antidote to that censorship, as well as to be an independent voice in a media landscape controlled by corporate interests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)

mma 10 21

Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which is largely represented in the Democrat’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, would materially benefit millions of Americans through unprecedented investments in our social safety net and efforts to combat climate change. Polling suggests that the spending bill is popular among the American people. Expectedly, Fox News has characterized the package as a “socialist wish list” and picked off a litany of minor ticket items to rally outrage and opposition on the right.

Former Trump aide Stephen Miller’s description of the bill on the October 16 edition of the Fox News show *Watters’ World* is representative of how the network is using its tried-and-true dog whistles to poison and stoke fear about the bill:

STEPHEN MILLER (GUEST): It's basically the Green New Deal, combined with critical race theory, combined with massive amnesty and open borders, combined with the complete destruction of the American economy.

Among the provisions Fox has characterized as the Green New Deal and mocked or grossly misrepresented are: the Civilian Climate Corps; an initiative referred to as Tree Equity; and a program intended to redress historic inequities and environmental injustices associated with zoning decisions and highway placement, which Fox has referred to as fixing “racists roads.”

Fox’s coverage of these programs has not attempted to describe what they entail or what they would accomplish for hundreds of communities. Rather, they have been used as punchlines or set up for cheap shots that reflect Fox’s racist ethos and climate denial — all under the guise of informing Fox’s audience about the policies contained in the reconciliation package.

Fox has grossly misrepresented the Civilian Climate Corps -- “climate cops” is not a thing KOCH FORK 4]

The reconciliation bill includes $8 billion earmarked for the Civilian Climate Corps -- modeled after the depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps -- which would establish a government jobs program that would put Americans to “work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice.” The current funding for this program represents .4% of the $3.5 trillion spending in the bill.

On October 12, the Republican Study Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) released a memo on policies contained in the reconciliation package, claiming that while the bill is polling favorably, support would tank if the American people understood what was in it. It lists among the “policies to wreck America” the Climate Civilian Corps, which the memo characterizes as “a cabal of federally funded climate police … who will conduct progressive activism on taxpayers’ dime.”

There isn’t even a grain of truth in how the committee characterized the program: “Climate police” is to the reconciliation bill what “cow farts” was to the Green New Deal. But that won’t stop conservative media from running with it.

The Republican Study Committee wasn’t the first to characterize the program this way -- during the early stages of drafting the bill, climate denier Marc Morano suggested on Fox & Friends Firstthat participants could resemble “climate cops” -- but the memo certainly reinvigorated the idea on Fox.

On the October 12 edition of *The Ingraham Angle*, Banks said the bill would “create a climate police department. This was a wacky idea that AOC came out with a couple of years ago. We all laughed at it because we thought it would never happen and now it’s on the brink of happening.” The following day, at least four programs described the program this way. On October 14, Banks appeared on both *Kudlow* on the Fox Business Network and Fox News' Faulkner Focus, claiming that the bill contains billions to create a “climate police department or a militia to go out and enforce Green New Deal policies."

[vid

October 14, 2021, episode of Fox News' Faulkner Focus]

Fox mocked and belittled provisions to address environmental injustices

Notably, during the Faulkner Focus segment Banks also referred to a program to fix “racist roads.” In fact, what he’s referring to is a $4 billion fund intended to address historic inequities and environmental injustices associated with zoning decisions and highway placement, which in some cases have divided once-thriving communities of color. The fund represents about .1% of the spending in the reconciliation bill.

Biden’s original infrastructure plan called for a $20 billion fund to “reconnect” neighborhoods cut off by old transportation projects. This would benefit communities like one in New Orleans whose residents have lived under the Claiborne Expressway for decades and remember how vibrant their community was before “The Monster” was built. After construction began on the highway in the 1960s, the once-thriving Tremé community, a center of Black cultural and commercial life, was divided and diminished. When the program was first introduced as part of the infrastructure plan, Fox’s Tucker Carlson suggested, in a blatantly racist rant, that the program was a form of reparations. This plan was cut in the bipartisan infrastructure bill negotiations, and a drastically reduced version is funded by the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. Also among the litany of “controversial” items in the bill, often cited by Fox News hosts and anchors, is an initiative to plant trees, particularly in urban areas with less canopy cover to reduce the effects of extreme heat.

For example, during the October 13 edition of *The Ingraham Angle*, host Laura Ingraham fearmongered that the bill will “bankrupt the next generation, steal the next generation” before listing the “priorities” embedded in the legislation:

Eight billion bucks for a Civilian Climate Corps. It’s going to act basically as ataxpayer-funded leftist police force.$4 billion for equity — I love that word — in electric vehicle charging and tree planting.$643 million would go toward procuring culturally appropriate foods — I kid you not — for school lunches. Forget chicken tenders and Friday pizza, I guess.Free community college for illegals, of course. They’ll be eligible for child tax credits as well.My personal favorite, though — this is a drop in the bucket for the federal government. $15 million for national resource centers focused on providing services for older individuals who are underserved due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The tree equity initiative Ingraham refers to is a commonsense solution to addressing the heat island effect, which disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities across the US. Communities without sufficient canopy cover can reach temperatures up to 10 degrees higher than those that do, and one proven solution is to plant more trees in those neighborhoods.

On September 27, the day the reconciliation package was revealed, America’s Newsroomincluded the tree equity plan as one of the “doozies” that was buried in the bill while the Faulkner Focus also referred to it as one of the bill’s “hidden goodies” and mocked that there was “$3 billion for tree planting and so-called tree equity. Important that the trees feel equal to one another.”

In fact, there has been no shortage of “equity” jokes -- Greg Gutfeld on the September 29 edition of his late-night show Gutfeld! suggested that the program was meant to address “foilage privilege” (he meant “foliage”). And on the October 2 edition of *Fox & Friends Saturday*, in response to the program, Pete Hegseth quipped, “The oak trees feel like they have been too dominant for too long.” But for all the punchlines, there has been little attempt to understand what the program is or explain the issue it is proven to address.

Predictably, Fox has not scratched the surface of what the reconciliation bill means for climate mitigation

While the climate and environmental justice provisions that Fox has featured in its reconciliation bill coverage represent just a fraction of its spending, they are not an insignificant part of the Biden administration’s larger climate agenda, of which addressing environmental injustices and creating green union jobs are core pillars. They should be reported on. But Fox has framed the reconciliation bill as a radical-socialist wish list of trivial programs -- in fact, it represents, from a climate perspective, possibly the last chance to enact meaningful U.S. policies for the foreseeable future, which could make or break the global response to the climate crisis. But as long as Fox keeps its viewers revved up over “cow farts” and “climate cops” its base will never see the burning forest for the equitable trees.

Marc Morano

Weekly update · October 8, 2021

NEWS

Google's Climate Crackdown: A conversation with Marc Morano | Washington Examiner

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In this interview, ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano tells Doug McKelway, the tactic is another step that big tech and its progressive allies have ...

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Marc Morano Debunks #COP26 Climate Extortion in "Green New Deal: The Great Regret ...

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Marc Morano will debunk COP26 climate extortion in his presentation "Green New Deal: The Great Regret" on Oct. 6, 2021, at 7 p.m. MDT for part two of ...

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Marc Morano, who is anti-vax, anti-mask and pro-insurrection, is suddenly worried about (left ...

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Marc Morano, who is anti-vax, anti-mask and pro-insurrection, is suddenly worried about (left) political violence? 0. Published on October 4th, 2021.

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Representatives, sparked by critical federal report, express frustration with leaders of ...

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7h ago. More From. Washington Examiner. Washington Examiner. Google's Climate Crackdown: A conversation with Marc Morano. 31m ago. Washington Examiner ...

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White House wants Central America to step up as new wave of migrants heads north - Yahoo News

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Google's Climate Crackdown: A conversation with Marc Morano. 29m ago. Washington Examiner. Most of world agrees to set 15% global minimum tax as holdouts ...

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EXCLUSIVE: Experts BASH Big Tech for Reported Demonetization of So-Called 'Climate Denial'

NewsBusters

Climate experts Steven Milloy and Marc Morano bashed Google/YouTube for reportedly vowing to prohibit ads on videos questioning climate change.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/catherine-salgado/2021/10/08/exclusive-experts-bash-big-tech-reported

no lnx

EXCLUSIVE: Experts BASH Big Tech for Reported Demonetization of So-Called ‘Climate Denial’

Catherine Salgado

October 8th, 2021 12:48 PM

The atmosphere for content creators with Google just reached a new freezing point. YouTube and parent company Google reportedly plan to demonetize all content from so-called “climate deniers.”

Climate experts Steven Milloy and Marc Morano bashed Google/YouTube for reportedly vowing to prohibit ads on videos questioning climate change. “This is Big Tech Collusion with the government,” Morano stated. “Google’s demonetization is an admission that we are winning, a treasure far more valuable than Google ad revenue,” Milloy said.

Climate Depot publisher Morano said, “Google is simply doing the bidding of the federal government and global groups like WHO and the UN. Google is implementing a policy that says you officially cannot disagree with the claims of your government or quasi-government organizations. This is Big Tech collusion with the government.”

Morano compared the Google/YouTube climate video ban to recent COVID-19 restrictions: “They have labeled as ‘misinformation’ any COVID claims that were not in line with WHO, and now they will do the same with any climate claims that are not in line with the UN climate panel.” Morano said, “For decades the progressive movement has tried to impose and sought a one-party state in America.Climate activists [like] Tom Friedman on the pages of The New York Times extolled the virtues of China’s one-party system.”

He continued: “When COVID came along, they were able to achieve their long-sought vision of no dissent under essentially a one-party state in the once free West. John Stossel has already faced the wrath of the climate censors of Big Tech.” Morano warned, “Big Tech has shut down COVID lockdown dissent [and] vaccine mandate dissent, and now they have their sights set on climate ‘denial.’” Morano also indicated he fears his video series, the Morano Minute, will soon be banned.

Milloy, founder of JunkScience.com, told MRC Free Speech America, “Demonetization of websites that expose the climate hoax does nothing but validate what climate realists have been saying for years: It’s not about the climate; it’s about the political power. If what we were saying was wrong, we would have been laughed off the Internet long ago. Instead, reality is validating us and public support for climate idiocy is going nowhere.”

Milloy even added that “Google’s move will have no effect on climate realist web sites for the simple reason that the ad revenue is pretty trivial.” “We do it because we oppose the abuse of science, especially as it is being used to advance totalitarianism.”

Google and YouTube will no longer allow ads or creator payments which allegedly contradict “‘well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,’ the company’s ads team said in a statement,” reported Axios. Google promised to consider “context” and said it consulted “experts,” including from the United Nations, Axios wrote. Axios called the move “one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken” regarding climate change.

Google and YouTube are increasing censorship through demonetization. YouTube has also reportedly demonetized fishing and hunting videos. Grabien, “which provides a suite of tools for newsmakers and curates its own original news content,” had its channel on YouTube demonetized in August. Google also demonetized a Daily Mail column from Piers Morgan criticizing gymnast Simone Biles for abandoning her fellow U.S. gymnasts at the Tokyo Olympics in August.

Conservatives are under attack. Contact YouTube here or send feedback and contact Google at (650) 253-000 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

Google

Marc Morano

Weekly update · October 1, 2021

NEWS

Greta's blah blah blah will be Countered by Marc Morano's "Green New Deal - WFMZ

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Marc Morano, author, and climate realist activist will counter many of Greta's claims to phase out fossil fuels 'immediately' in his presentation "Green New ...

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Marc Morano, American author, and long-time climate realist will present “Green New Deal: The Great Regret” on Oct. 6, 2021, at 7pm MDT, with live Q&A to ...

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In the two-part free online event, Dr. Guus Berkhout of CLINTEL presents Oct. 2, 2021, and Marc Morano presents “Green New Deal – The Great Regret” on Oct.

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Twin Attacks on Science and Freedom | FreedomFest 2021 - The New American

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Marc Morano is the founder of ClimateDepot.com, one of the most popular and informative sources of information debunking climate alarmism.

kpvi local nbc tv

COVID-19 Called a Model for the Climate-Change Agenda in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons

By Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) Sep 20, 2021 Updated Sep 20, 2021 0

By Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)

TownNews.com Content Exchange

TUCSON, Ariz., Sept. 20, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared, "Climate change is the greatest health challenge of the 21st century, and threatens all aspects of the society in which we live." Now COVID-19 has top billing as the existential health threat, but the proposed response is the same, writes Marc Morano in the fall issue of issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

The response entails global governance by appointed "experts," central planning, and heavy regulation of virtually all human endeavors. UN Secretary General António Guterres said the pandemic "could create an opportunity to rebuild the global economy along more sustainable lines."

Disappointed at the tepid response to their exhortations, climate activists "praised the response to COVID with almost palpable jealousy," Morano writes. The regime they advocate is very similar to the COVID-10 response. "If you like living under coronavirus fears and government-mandated lockdowns, then you'll love living under a climate emergency," Morano states.

The entire world shut down. Airline travel ground to a halt. Morano quotes Spanish scientist Martín López Corredoira: "Neither Greenpeace, nor Greta Thunberg, nor any other individual or collective organization have achieved so much in favor of the health of the planet in such a short time…. A miracle happened…. It is certainly not very good for the economy in general, but it is fantastic for the environment."

Both with climate change and COVID-19, science has been co-opted to support policy. Morano states. "The National Climate Assessment…picks years and data points as needed to justify a policy. With COVID-19, the public must be kept in fear in order for the public health bureaucracy to exert the kind of control they have wanted for decades." Constantly publishing death tolls is a tactic climate activists would like to mimic, Morano suggests, citing a list of conditions, including cancer and car crashes, which might be linked to climate change.

"The response to COVID-19 has mutated into totalitarianism,"Morano concludes. He asks whether there is any hope for overcoming the symbiotic public health/climate change agenda. Massive amounts are invested in it. But, he writes. "We have reason, logic, and science on our side. We need only courage, resolve, and hard work, and we will prevail."

The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties since 1943.

Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/covid-19-called-a-model-for-the-climate-change-agenda-in-the-journal-of-american-physicians-and-surgeons-301380890.html

SOURCE Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)

This article originally ran on curated.tncontentexchange.com.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/wake-hurricane-ida-fox-doubling-down-climate-denial-order-attack-bidens-infrastructure

Fox News is using Hurricane Ida to downplay the seriousness of climate change and attack President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including the infrastructure bill which contains measures to make us more resilient in the face of extreme weather.

The fingerprints of climate change on the recent Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive damage from the Southeast to the Northeast U.S., were clear. One was its rapid intensification over very warm Gulf waters before pummeling Louisiana. Another was the amount of heavy rainfall that the storm brought in the Northeast that broke records in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and caused major flash flooding. Beyond clearly showing that climate change is happening now, Ida’s devastating impacts, particularly in the Northeast, exposed how ill-prepared we are for it. And much of the coverage of Hurricane Ida was permeated with the theme that “??the infrastructure in place today was built for a climate that no longer exists.”

In fact, with increased media coverage of events such as Ida, the public is beginning to increasingly understand the dangers of climate change and the need for actions that not only reduce climate-causing emissions, but make our communities less vulnerable to the climate impacts that are already happening. But as the public and more media outlets are starting to connect extreme weather to the need for climate action, Fox News coverage seeks to break those links.

Fox networks downplayed climate change and accused Biden of politicizing Hurricane Ida to push a climate agenda

Since September 2, the day after Ida’s remnants ravaged the Northeast, Fox News and Fox Business have aired at least a dozen segments, combined, that claimed that the Democrats are using Ida as a pretext to implement a massive climate agenda including through the infrastructure bill [W/ CORP Tax increase]. These attacks, coupled with instances of climate denial, show the network’s ultimate goal is to stop the implementation of Biden’s climate agenda by all means necessary.

Fox’s favorite new climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on two Fox programs to downplay climate’s impact on Ida and to argue that the climate crisis is actually overblown, first on the September 2 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, and later on the September 7 edition of The Ingraham Angle. In both segments, Shellenberger accused Democrats of using climate change only as a cover to make the economy more dependent on renewable energy sources like solar power, which he has a history of attacking. (Shellenberger is useful for Fox News because he doesn’t outright deny that climate change is happening; he only -- and falsely -- suggests that it’s not a major problem. In this sense, he provides the perfect cover for the fossil fuel industry to keep polluting the planet.)

Perhaps one of the more egregious examples came during a discussion of Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida during the September 3 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria. Guest Patrice Lee Onwuka of the Koch-funded Independent Women's Forum accused Biden of using the “fallacy” of climate change to get his agenda passed:

[vid]

paTRICE LEE ONWUKA (INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S FORUM): I think President Biden is absolutely looking out for what kind of a legacy he wants to leave behind, and he will try his best to get his agenda passed, using whatever fallacy that he can find. I mean, it’s remarkable that we're talking about, you know, a hurricane, and people who’ve lost livelihoods, some who’ve lost their lives, and we’re still pivoting to this idea that it’s all driven by climate change, when frankly, the facts dispute that. So it is unfortunate that the American people are subjected to this every single day, but this is going to continue.

There is no “fallacy” here and she is wrong on the facts -- climate scientists know that climate change has an impact on hurricanes, from things like rainfall to intensity level to how slow they move, and these impacts will only get worse in the future unless carbon emissions are rapidly cut.

There were many other examples that attacked Democrats for politicizing extreme weather events and threw cold water on the infrastructure bill. On the September 3 edition of Fox News’ Your World With Neil Cavuto, correspondent Chad Pergam began a segment on the infrastructure bill by stating, “Democrats are using the storm to justify their push for the infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion bill. It's loaded with environmental provisions.”[which are obviously inherently bad?!]

During the September 4 edition of Bongino Unfiltered, host Dan Bongino began a segment on Ida by also claiming, “Democrats wasted no time demanding action against climate change.” The segment which displayed chyrons like “Democrats’ Climate Power Play” and “Dems Push Climate Alarmism After Deadly Storms” also featured a Democratic strategist squaring off against longtime climate denier Marc Morano. Morano used his time to argue that the climate crisis is overblown. Although climate “both-sides” debates should be a relic of the past as they were promoted solely by polluting interests wanting to advance the narrative that climate change is “debatable,” Fox had no qualms in reviving it here despite overwhelming evidence of climate’s impact on Ida.

In addition, Fox invited climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi on the September 8 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight. The segment began with guest host Brian Kilmeade claiming that Joe Biden is “using these disasters for political purposes” in order to pass the infrastructure bill. Bastardi then backed up Kilmeade’s claim by dismissing the climate impacts of Ida, simply noting that other bad storms have happened in the past. He also falsely claimed, “The sun, the oceans, the events, the very design of the system, always try to fight back, and at the very least you can't tell what CO2 is doing.”

During an interview with U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) on the September 4 edition of Fox News Live, co-anchor Anita Vogel referenced Biden’s and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) comments on Ida and climate change, and asked Malliotakis if “it's appropriate to blame this on climate change. … Should he be bringing politics into this when people are suffering?” Malliotakis responded, “We all need to do our part to be more environmentally friendly and reduce our footprint, but at the end of the day, you know, they're using this to push their radical-left agenda to try to pass a $3.5 trillion socialist wish list.”

Some Fox hosts also made similar comments in the wake of Ida. On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity began a segment that ultimately downplayed the climate impacts of Ida by stating, “The left is blaming climate change for the heavy rainfall, severe weather and using it as another pretext to push their Green New Deal socialist agenda.” On the September 5 edition of Fox News’ The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton, host Steve Hilton did a short segment on Democrats using Ida to implement the Green New Deal.

Although the infrastructure bill is not the Green New Deal, that hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets from trying to compare the two. Fox is utterly obsessed with the Green New Deal and is using it to undermine basically every climate action that is proposed, however modest. This time, it’s the infrastructure bill the costs of which would pale in comparison to what unchecked climate change would do to the global economy.

Ida hit the U.S. against the backdrop of the recent report from U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that conclusively linked climate change “to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial times.” It also followed a summer of harrowing extreme weather events that also had climate fingerprints all over them, including Western U.S. wildfires and drought, and a brutal Pacific Northwest heat wave. The fact that, despite all these events, Fox continued to diminish climate’s impact on Ida and argued for continued delayed action on climate change shows how much of a dangerous threat the network is to the discourse on climate change.

a piece written back in 2019, after the last big climate report, joking that “in a desperate, perhaps final attempt” to stop climate change, the report “includes nothing more than the whereabouts of top oil executives and directions to secret weapons caches.”...“‘It may not seem like a lot on its own,’” a supposed excerpt reads, “‘but if everyone comes together and does their part, we can make a tremendous difference.’”<...>While it may be funny to turn Big Oil’s propaganda that climate change is a problem that can be solved by personal sacrifice and individual action on its head, by taking some personal action and making them sacrifice, in all seriousness the Onion should be ashamed.

Because it’s not just oil executives who may need to do some sacrificing, but also coal executives, lobbyists, billionaires who have funded anti-regulatory think tanks, and of course those who staff said think tanks and peddle deadly disinformation for a living, who are responsible for the climate crisis we’re in...Okay, okay, really seriously, while the idea of bad things happening to bad people may be appealing and cathartic, it’s not healthy to dwell on violent fantasies, and violence is of course not the answer to climate change.

And to be clear, neither are threats of violence.

For example, Marc Morano recently posted a... “I WISH YOU DEAD.” 53 times. (Not to be glib but wishing someone dead x53 seems like… overkill?)...This isn’t the first time someone’s been mean to Marc, and we get it. For over a decade, Morano’s whole job has been to sabotage climate action on behalf of his billionaire benefactors, even though he won’t put his own money where his mouth is. And sending him hatemail might be considered fitting, since one of his publishing scientist’s email addresses to subject them to a torrent of hate and abuse from his followers.<...But not only is violence, and threats or celebrations () wrong morally and of questionable legality, they’re also just fodder for Marc’s persecution complex, as evidenced by how he always posts the emails under his “hatemail” tag.

So we condemn in the strongest possible terms the sending of hate mail to Marc’s email address, greentrolling, so we’ll just point out that there are plenty of alternatives to violence that can be much more effective at sabotaging online disinformation.

For example, reddit users recently took it upon themselves to render the subreddit for people looking to eat horse deworming paste instead of getting a COVID-19 vaccine totally inoperable by flooding it with horse-themed pornography. Most drawn, some real, all of it extremely graphic, and enough of it to basically make the subreddit unusable for those who wanted to read up on how to take deworming medicine for horses instead of a COVID-19 vaccine for humans.

And after the Supreme Court let Texas essentially overturn Roe v Wade (which is not at all funny) and set up a website to put bounties on people seeking abortions, TikTokers flooded the website with fake submissions, Rickrolling, excerpts from “Twilight,” and, for some reason, Shrek porn. Gen Z activist-troll Olivia Juliana told NBC that she “found out about this website and thought, ‘We have to do whatever we can if they’re going to use the internet against us — the very people who were raised on the internet.”

But it just goes to show that there are much more entertaining ways to blow off steam than with threatening violence or sending intimidating messages.

And given how scared Marc is of wearing a mask for COVID-19, maybe that’s all you need to send?

(Originally appeared at DailyKos)

beware wt

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/30/conservative-conference-cancels-book-signings-afte/

no lnx

Conservative conference cancels book sales after bookseller balks at ‘Green Fraud’

STEAMBOAT INSTITUTE

By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Monday, August 30, 2021

BEAVER CREEK, Colorado — The Steamboat Institute canceled its book sales at last weekend’s annual Freedom Conference after a bookseller refused to offer a title critical of the Green New Deal.

At the center of the dispute was “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal is Even Worse Than You Think,” released in March and written by Marc Morano, publisher of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow’s Climate Depot website.

Steamboat Institute CEO and Chairwoman Jennifer Schubert-Akin said organizers concluded that “either you’re going to sell all of our books, or you’re going to sell none of our books.”

“Steamboat Institute is traditionally proud to partner with local bookstores to sell the latest compelling books by Freedom Conference speakers at the event,” she said in a statement. “Yet we will never allow partner bookstores to censor by picking and choosing which speaker books they sell based on their political preferences. We look forward to working with local bookstores committed to robust and open debate at our future events.”

Conference attendees who brought their own books were still able to have them signed by authors featured at the event.

Off the Beaten Path, the Steamboat Springs bookstore, declined to comment on its refusal to offer “Green Fraud,” but Mr. Bruneau cited an email from the company saying it was unwilling to be “associated with a title that disputes the reality of climate change.”

“They said, ‘Look, Colorado’s wildfires, we can’t sell this, we can’t give credence to this belief,’” Mr. Bruneau said. “So Jennifer said, ‘We don’t support censorship, we can’t accept your services.’ They still wanted to come but they wouldn’t sell that one book.”

He added that it was “disappointing in the sense that it missed out on an opportunity to make some profit, and for the attendees.”

Ironically, censorship was one of the topics at the 13th annual conference, which included panels and speakers discussing the battles over conservative content in social media, publishing and academia.

Mr. Morano, who spoke at the conference, said the flap over his book was “no surprise.”

“Climate activists have been gunning for me for years,” said Mr. Morano. “Any dissent is seen as an assault on their messaging. A one-party state view must be imposed!”

He said that activists have pressured Amazon to remove the book from its website, so far without success, prompting an offer from conservative author and pundit Mark Steyn, who wrote the book’s introduction.

“Mark Steyn has offered to sign any copy of ‘Green Fraud’ that you buy on steynonline.com,” Mr. Morano said. “This is literally about free speech.”

Kicking off our morning session with @ClimateDepot talking about the hypocrisy of the #climatechange movement. #Freedomconference pic.twitter.com/mK20r0sV4Q

— The Steamboat Institute (@Steamboat_Inst) August 28, 2021

Mr. Morano is not the first to lock horns with progressive booksellers.

Earlier this year, Powell’s Books in Portland drew headlines for refusing to stock “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy” by local journalist Andy Ngo. Even so, the bookstore was beset by protesters upset with its decision to offer the title online.

Mr. Bruneau said that other bookstores contacted by the institute were unable to staff the conference due to labor shortages.

“There were a couple we contacted that wouldn’t make a staff member available to be here because of the expanded unemployment benefits,” he said. “Everyone’s going through staffing shortages right now. That was another hurdle we had. We hope next year we can get a bookseller back.”

The Steamboat conference, held at the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek, Colorado, drew 370 attendees, the largest in its history.

The Steamboat Institute promotes “limited taxation and fiscal responsibility; limited government; free market capitalism; individual rights and responsibilities, and strong national defense.”

no lnx pix

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/03/23/its-here-moranos-new-book-green-fraud-why-the-green-new-deal-is-even-worse-than-you-think-foreword-by-mark-steyn-arrives-march-23/

BOOK REVIEW

It’s Here: Morano’s New book: ‘Green Fraud: Why The Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think’ – Foreword By Mark Steyn – Arrives March 23

8 months ago Charles Rotter

Reposted from Climate Depot

Foreword by Mark Steyn!

By: Admin – Climate Depot March 21, 2021 3:10 PM

Book release date is March 23rd: Green Fraud: Why The Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think.Here is a promotional video from the publisher on the book: https://twitter.com/Regnery/status/1370512451322716160

“If you care about America’s future, read this book.”—Mark Levin

“A must-read book that shows how the Green New Deal is dangerous, impractical, misguided, and guaranteed to fail with disastrous results for the American people.”—Sean Hannity

A New Lockdown to “Save” the Climate

That’s what’s in store for us if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democrats pass their radical climate plan—the Green New Deal.

It is packed with guarantees so completely irrelevant to the problem it purports to “solve” (like “free college” and incomes for everyone “unable or unwilling to work”) that even its boosters have admitted it’s not really about the climate.

The intrepid Marc Morano, author of the bestselling Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, breaks down the science and the politics to expose the truth about the Green New Deal:

• The science is settled: copious evidence—and prominent defections from the “climate consensus”—make clear we are not facing a man-made climate disaster

• “Climate change” is the perfect Trojan horse for the socialist agenda of the Left

• Fossil fuels lifted the West out of poverty—but our elites now want to deny them to the world’s poor

• The Green New Deal is on a collision course with self-government and our fundamental rights

Climate change has already been “solved” multiple times over the past two decades—with highly touted international agreements—and yet it never goes away as an excuse for leftist policies that will cripple our economy, impoverish the world, and take away our freedoms.

Packed with telling statistics, damning quotations, and real science, Green Fraud is your source for all the facts you need to understand—and resist—the threat.

Review

“Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think is the ultimate guidebook to exposing and fighting this Marxist plan masquerading as environmental policy. . . . If you care about America’s future, read this book.” —Mark R. Levin, author and nationally syndicated TV and radio broadcaster

“This is a must-read book that shows how the Green New Deal is dangerous, impractical, misguided, and guaranteed to fail with disastrous results for the American people.” —Sean Hannity,host of Hannity on Fox News and of the nationally syndicated radio program The Sean Hannity Show

“In Green Fraud, Morano shows that the growing movement from the Left isn’t about the climate at all—it’s about controlling every aspect of American lives and implementing broad, socialist policies.” —Senator James Inhofe

“The Green New Deal is one of the gravest threats facing America. This indispensable book is the most comprehensive takedown of the plan you will ever read.” —Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center

“Don’t be climate hustled, read this book.” —Kevin Sorbo, actor and narrator of the film Climate Hustle 2

“Marc Morano’s book Green Fraud provides a factual scientific and political account of the Green New Deal and other misanthropic and self-serving schemes of the global elite and their opportunistic or deluded acolytes.” —Will Happer,Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics emeritus, Princeton University

“Morano is truly the Pete Rose and Hank Aaron of climate contrarians.” —Steven Hayward of Power Line

“Morano’s probably single-handedly, in a civilian sense, the guy (other than me, of course) doing a better job of ringing the bells alarming people of what’s going on here.” —Rush Limbaugh, nationally syndicated radio host and bestselling author

About the Author

MARC MORANO is a former senior staff member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, publisher of ClimateDepot.com, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, and producer of Climate Hustle (2016) and Climate Hustle 2: Rise of the Climate Monarchy (2020).

Product details

Publisher : Regnery Publishing (March 23, 2021)

Language : English

Hardcover : 256 pages

ISBN-10 : 1684510856

ISBN-13 : 978-1684510856

Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl’s book review of Morano’s Green Fraud: ‘Amazing…entertained…sourced in a perfectionist way’

Former Harvard University Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl: “There is a lot to be learned from this new Morano’s book, you will be often entertained as well, and you will also find this book to be a great source of arguments and quotes – a fountain that is sourced in a perfectionist way.”

“Morano really is the world’s #1 consequential climate skeptic from many perspectives.”

“So you can really find out where various pieces of information and quotes came from. He is amazing in this stuff and I actually believe that he really remembers many of these things, too.”

“I surely recommend you to pre-order and read the book, especially if you think that you depend on the political decisions shaped by the climate arguments.”

Morano’s upcoming book ‘Green Fraud’ on Green New Deal is#1 in “Amazon Hot New Releases” in U.S. National Govt category- With foreword by Mark Steyn

921

http://redgreenandblue.org/2021/09/03/organized-climate-denial-machine-fighting-action-state-level/

kos

by Climate Denier Roundup

Which perhaps is why they appear to be setting their sights a little closer to home, attempting to run the denial playbook at the state level.

For example, Pennsylvania has been moving towards joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a carbon market that’s driving down emissions and power bills across the Northeast. In response, industry has set up a web of front groups, and over the summer, even brought in the big guns of career deniers like Steve Milloy and Marc Morano to speak at a House committee meeting.

The state’s Republican party has been working hard on behalf of its fossil fuel benefactors to try and prevent the Democratic governor Tom Wolfe from joining RGGI, and even national-level professional denial lackey Kevin Mooney wrote up the situation for the Daily Signal, the Koch/Mercer/tobacco/polluters-funded Heritage Foundation’s fake news website.

While RGGI started as a Northeast and Mid-Atlantic initiative, in 2020 Virginia announced that it would be the first southern state to join. And like its northern counterparts, the state’s seen an influx of disinfo carpetbaggers. For example, the industry-funded CFACT’s Collister Johnson Jr. recently bragged in Koch-funded RealClearEnergy that Republicans in Virginia oppose the Virginia Clean Economy Act thanks to CFACT’s hard work and dedication of publishing “a series of articles” starting in 2021. VCEA passed with only Democratic support the year before, but thanks to CFACT’s lobbying on a bill that had already passed, Johnson wonders to what extent the 2021 Virginia state elections will be influenced by their “Repeal VCEA” message.

(Given that the only other big thing Collister has to brag about in life besides being frequently wrong on purpose is that he was given a seat on the board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation by his Yale roommate, George W. Bush, we’ll forgive his eagerness to brag about the amazing feat of turning Republicans in 2021 against climate action passed in 2020.)

Across the country, but just a click away at the organized denial clearinghouse RealClear, Duggan Flanakin, also working for CFACT, describes the effort in Washington state to oppose a Spokane city council ban on new methane gas hookups.

Now, what Flanakin definitely won’t tell you is that, like it is across the country, the gas industry in Washington is pouring at least a million of dollars into opposing these individually small but collectively mighty moves to kick the fossil fuel addiction, with Washington being home to at least one of the trade groups working nationally to fight electrification.

So if you’re looking at the reconciliation fight, and wondering where the climate deniers vocal opposition is, you might want to check a little closer to home!

new 821

commentary: 'Foxitis' can be dangerous to your health, democracy and our planet

Austin American-Statesman

Fox invited Marc Morano, one its favorite climate deniers, to undermine the report by ridiculously claiming it was just intended to “scare everyone.”.

last week, President Biden signed an Executive Order encouraging U.S. leadership in the clean car sector with a goal of half of all new car sales in the U.S. being zero-emission by 2030. It took them a few days, but deniers seem to have assembled their response by cobbling together a mix of old lies, new misrepresentations, and bizarre logical fallacies.

For example, a response that in any sane outlet might be praise for Biden’s plan was published in the Koch-funded RealClearEnergy as an attack: President Biden’s Electric Car Future is Union Made. Bruce Yandle, a fellow at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is upset that Biden invited three major U.S. car companies to attend the announcement because they were the largest employers of workers in the United Auto Workers union, and didn’t invite non-American companies with non-union workers to his event promoting good American jobs.

By Climate Denier Roundup

Obviously, it’s no surprise that a Koch crony is anti-union and anti-EV, unless you confuse organized labor with organized denial.

Speaking of organized denial, while the once-Koch-funded Daily Caller has since basically given up on regular climate denial reporting, and its IPCC story was a straightforward rip-off of the AP’s “code red” coverage (sans any Koch-network denial quote, because no-pay, no-play, we assume). The Caller still occasionally publishes guest opinion pieces and ran one from Charlotte Whelan of the (pro-Covid) Independent Women’s Forum and Steamboat Institute (which is hosting Marc Morano and a slate of other rightwing pseudostars at an upcoming festival).

Whelan is also upset the White House invited union workers to its pro-union-jobs event, and adds (with a deliberately misleading citation) the claim that “it could take more than 15 years to recoup the upfront extra costs in fuel savings. The average American certainly can’t wait that long to ‘make back’ the additional upfront cost” But the work cited (an NRDC post based on a peer-reviewed study) doesn’t even measure how long it would take to recoup the upfront cost of an EV with cheaper charging and a more efficient propulsion system. The study did, however, use 15 years as the unit of measurement for a car’s life. So the calculations show that over an average 15-year lifespan of ownership, it can be almost $15,000 cheaper to go with an electric car.

Over at the Koch-funded Heritage foundation’s media arm, their policy analyst Katie Tubb makes a similar claim about EVs being for rich people, which we’ve addressed before as part of their propaganda campaigns, as well as the old racist dog whistle about China.

Finally, we get to a new name to us, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who wrote that Biden’s move was “costly and counterproductive” in the industry-funded Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

After a column defending the auto industry from 5G in January, and another in March with the phrase “nothing beats personal vehicles for social distancing.” Furchtgott-Roth makes similar points to the other professional disinformers in her most recent City Journal piece, but she also adds a particularly baffling claim that because “the United States has achieved energy security by becoming a net exporter of oil and natural gas,” then “mandating sales of electric vehicles would weaken that security.”

But if exporting oil makes us stronger (by her logic) then wouldn’t having more of it to export because our own cars are using less of it be a good thing, that would make us stronger?

Why would someone write something so inane and illogical, despite a byline that includes “former deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation” and “adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University?” Those are both legitimate organizations, not industry-funded disinformation operations!

Well it turns out that the DOT appointment was made by notoriously-bad-hiring-manager Donald Trump, and prior to that, Furchtgott-Roth was an economist for the American Petroleum Institute, proving once again that when someone says something stupid about EVs, it’s probably on purpose.

(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)

disaster cap'lism:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/07/climate-supervillain-creating-new-tv-channel-to-report-on-weather-he-helped-fuck-up/

we’ve reached the final boss level of climate irony. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon whose News Corp. owns Fox News, plans to launch a full-time channel focused on the weather called Fox Weather.

Apparently, viewers are hungry for weather content — the Weather Channel’s viewership was up 7% in the first half of this year, while viewership fell for big cable networks. And looking at the historic heat waves gripping much of the country this summer — caused partially by stalled climate action aided by Fox News working in tandem with oil companies and the Republican Party to spread climate misinformation — it’s not hard to see why.

The irony of Fox creating a weather channel, of all things, is as deep as the rapidly heating ocean and as wide as our swiftly overheating country. As much of the rest of the world ponders how to dig ourselves out of this mess we’ve made, Fox News is still clinging desperately to denial.

Last month, star Tucker Carlson used his show to allege that climate activists want to “experiment to make children smaller” to fix global warming (spoiler alert: that is, uh, not true), while in May, climate denier Steve Koonin was invited to not one, but two Fox News programs to promote his book claiming that other scientists are getting too worked up about this global warming thing....Even the supposedly nonpartisan evening news show hosted by Brett Baier has a distinct denier slant: A Media Matters analysis of Baier’s climate coverage from 2009 to 2021 found that a whopping 88% of it ran the gamut from misleading to promoting bad-faith narratives to flat-out lies.

“It’s not just the bigger climate denial,” said Allison Fisher, the director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters. Fox News, Fisher said, “specifically use[s] weather to push climate denial. That is a long-worn tactic of Fox News, even before Trump was tweeting out, like, ‘where’s your global warming now?’ during a snowstorm. That’s a very classic Fox move.”

Fisher pointed out that as recently as this year, Fox News contributors used an April cold snap to claim climate change was a hoax. “They’re emphatic about dismissing the relationship between climate change and weather, whether it’s during a megastorm or the wildfires last year or the record-shattering heat this week, and then also mocking the idea of global warming during moments of abnormally cold weather,” she said. “They’re the ones who have made weather political.”...News Corp owns the denier-friendly Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as several right-wing outlets in Murdoch’s home country of Australia. While Murdoch...;released last year found that News Corp’s coverage of the devastating 2020 Australian wildfires drove a “viral misinformation campaign” intended to spread misinformation on the causes of the fire and protect the coal industry in Australia. The company’s explicit and implicit endorsement of climate denial has even led to a fracture in the Murdoch family: during the wildfires, Murdoch’s younger son, James,...issued a rebuke of the company on its handling of climate, and he...According to Fisher, Fox News has meteorologists on staff who report on the weather, but they mostly do “straight reporting” of what is going on. “They’re not contextualising” that weather, she said — despite the fact that other networks are ...tting their meteorologists discuss how extreme weather is shaped by climate change. “That contextualisation of these events as climate is what makes Fox’s entry into this space really suspect and troubling.”

All of this raises the question of how, exactly, Fox is planning to go about reporting the weather when it keeps getting more extreme thanks, in part, to a mess they helped create. As Deadline reported a few weeks ago, Fox has tapped at least six meteorologists from different local markets — Britta Merwin, Jason Frazer, Craig Herrera, Bridgit Mahoney, Stephen Morgan, and Nick Kosir — to flesh out the basis of its news team. Earther was able to find just a few tweets from three of them that mentioned climate change.

“Climate change is real and it is a fact,” Merwin, a future Fox morning host and formerly of KPRC-TV in Houston, responded in February to a Twitter user using Merwin’s report of snow on the beach to claim climate change was a hoax. “It is about science,” she wrote. Her future morning cohost, Frazer of WKYC-TV in Cleveland, thanked a meteorologist in 2017 for “sharing … expertise on climate change” and mentioned climate change in 2018 when discussing the size of a tropical storm. (“You could argue Climate Change but I am not touching that hot potato,” he wrote.) Meanwhile, Herrera, who covered weather for Seattle’s KING-TV and will serve as another coanchor, tweeted about climate in 2013 and 2014, when he covered an IPCC report and did a piece on California’s drought. “We have a long way to go but education and facts are key,” he responded to one user thanking him for his coverage. “Can’t dispute the science or numbers.”

Gizmodo reached out Frazer, Merwin, and Herrera, along with another of their future coworkers, to ask how they planned to handle climate coverage. We will update when we receive any responses.

According to the Times, Fox is dipping a toe into this space because it’s so profitable; it quotes a TV executive saying that “climate change and the environment will be the story of the next decade,” while a spokesperson for Fox told the Times the network will offer “in-depth reporting surrounding all weather conditions, and we are excited to showcase to viewers what a full-service comprehensive weather platform can deliver beginning this [spring].”

Some of Fox’s future competitors making hay out of the climate crisis could goad the network into figuring out ways to cover it: The Weather Channel, the Times reported, has a whole host of climate change programming planned, including a show about miners looking for minerals in Greenland exposed by newly melted ice (sorry, what?).

But Fisher sees a darker possibility for the new weather service.

“It’s the content they’re producing that’s going to get amplified,” she said. “If they bring on a denier like Marc Morano, if he starts to get a platform there — that content is going to go on his website, it’s going to go into other right-wing media infosphere, it’s going to bounce back on Fox, it’s going to go on social media, and they’re going to push that out in moments when everybody else is saying, ‘this is climate change’–they’re going to be able to tell this right-wing media bubble, it’s not.”

More From Gizmodo Australia

Why Can’t We Call It an Emergency?

Joe Biden Is Not Coming for Your Poorly Cooked Hamburger

The Social Cost of Methane Is Much Higher in the U.S. Than Current Government Estimates

What’s the Most Climate-Safe Place in the World?

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/07/cnn-smears-sen-ron-johnson-as-climate-denier-for-not-bowing-to-climate-alarmism/...Gabe Kaminsky...CNN’s Chris Cuomo opened his Tuesday monologue smearing Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson for refusing to bow down to climate alarmism after a new “KFILE” report found a video of Johnson calling climate change, “bullsh-t.”

KFILE reported Johnson told attendees at a June Republican Women of Greater Wisconsin luncheon, “I don’t know about you guys, but I think climate change is — as Lord Monckton said — bullsh-t.”

Cuomo blasted Johnson for his comments. “We need to call out garbage in the form of the game,” he said. “The target tonight, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson … Sounds like a denier, no?” He continued:

Now many see Johnson as just selling stupidity. I see something worse. I know this guy. I remember him when he came to the Senate. Businessman, and he said, ‘I don’t know anything about this politics, I’m just here to make things happen.’ …He wanted to come on my show and show economic theories and principles and do charts to justify policy. Now he’s this. This is how he responds to a heatwave gripping North America.

Johnson failed to walk the politically correct line, so CNN thought they scored a win. But in reality, the senator provided a full comment to the outlet that it did not include in its story. Reporters Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski included the first four sentences of Johnson’s response.

“My statements are consistent. I am not a climate change denier, but I also am not a climate change alarmist. Climate is not static. It has always changed and always will change,” Johnson said.

The rest? Deemed irrelevant to the narrative, as spokeswoman Alexa Henning indicated to The Federalist. Here’s what they left out:

I do not share Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s view that the “world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Or President Biden saying the “greatest threat” to U.S. security is climate change. I consider those to be extreme positions — to say the least. At some point, all the Malthusian predictions that have not come true should begin reducing the credibility of the scaremongers. But that would take honest reporting by mainstream media, so I’m not holding my breath.

Marc Morano and other seasoned energy experts have consistently exposed climate alarmism as another way for the left to expand government regulation on false premises.

Cuomo connected the heatwave across the country to climate change. But Morano, the author of “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think” and a former George W. Bush administration staffer in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told The Federalist this is false.

“Any heatwave, hurricane, tornado outbreak, etc., are always used by the media and other climate activists as some kind of ‘proof’ of a climate emergency,” Morano said. “At least these claims are more plausible than claims that building collapses or illegal immigration is caused by ‘climate change.'”

Morano said the current global satellite temperature for June 2021 is below the 30-year average, and that in addition to the U.S. heatwave, there are ongoing record cold temperatures elsewhere.

“The media gaslight anyone who mocks ‘global warming’ on a record cold or snowy day but has no problem doing the exact same thing whenever it’s hot. As University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy’s research has found: ‘About 75% of the states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955, and over 50 percent of the states experienced their record cold temperatures after 1940,'” he said.

Johnson said climate change is “bullsh-it,” and he is not wrong. He even told CNN “climate is not static” and that he is “not a climate change denier,” but the outlet wants to mold a narrative.

Gabe Kaminsky is an intern at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, The American Conservative, the Washington Examiner, and other outlets. He has also appeared on Fox News, Hill.TV, and various radio programs. Follow him on Twitter @Gabe__Kaminsky or email gkaminskycontact@gmail.com.

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

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

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

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALICIA SADOWSKI

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

PUBLISHED 06/16/21 12:01 PM EDT

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

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

Jump to a section

KEY FINDINGS

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

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

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES CLIMATE SCIENCE

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

SPECIAL REPORT FUELS NATIONALISTIC AND MISLEADING NARRATIVES OPPOSING GLOBAL CLIMATE EFFORTS

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES THE SERIOUSNESS AND URGENCY OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

CONCLUSION

METHODOLOGY

Key Findings

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

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

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

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

14% undermined climate science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Report undermines climate science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video file

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

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

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

Video file

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

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

Video file

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

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

Video file

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video file

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

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

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

Video file

Citation From the July 14, 2020, edition of Hannity

Special Report fuels nationalistic and misleading narratives opposing global climate efforts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Report undermines the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis

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

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

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

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

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

Video file

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

Video file

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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

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https://www.nationofchange.org/2021/01/09/climate-deniers-moved-rapidly-to-spread-misinformation-during-and-after-attack-on-us-capitol/

Climate deniers moved rapidly to spread misinformation during and after attack on US Capitol

The disinformation-fueled movement backing him is extremely unlikely to simply fade away...

By Sharon Kelly -January 9, 2021 147

SOURCE DeSmogBlog

Prominent climate science deniers moved rapidly to spread false and misleading conspiracy theories online during and after the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters this week.

Some climate deniers, including some with ties to the Heartland Institute and other organizations that have historically helped to create the false impression that there is sizeable scientific disagreement on climate change, also directly expressed support for the attackers and called for more violence.

“Striking fear in politicians is not a bad thing,” the @ClimateDepot Twitter account tweeted on the afternoon of January 6 in a message describing the Capitol as then-“under siege.”

“Thomas Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” @ClimateDepot tweeted seconds later.

“What’s needed next is mass protests to storm state Capitols and the CDC to end Covid lockdowns once and for all,” the thread continued, referring to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The @ClimateDepot Twitter account, created in April 2009, is held by Marc Morano, the communications director for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, D.C.-based think-tank with a history of receiving funding from ExxonMobil and the conservative dark money organization Donors Trust. Morano serves as the executive director of CFACT’s climatedepot.com website, which as DeSmog’s database profile puts it, “regularly publishes articles questioning man-made global warming.”

Screenshot of Twitter thread posted by @ClimateDepot on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.

Morano has for many years played a prominent role in the climate denial movement. The Heartland Institute currently maintains a biography of Morano under its “Who We Are” section, noting his prior role as a “climate researcher for U.S. Senator James Inhofe,” who has regularly made speeches rejecting mainstream climate science. Rolling Stone once called Morano “the Matt Drudge of climate denial.” He more recently authored a book titled, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change. CFACT’s most recent tax filings show Morano was its highest-compensated employee, bringing in over $209,000 in pay and benefits in 2018.

On January 6, after the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) — whose board of directors includes senior officials with ExxonMobil and numerous other fossil fuel companies — posted a statement condemning the violence at the Capitol Building, @ClimateDepot retweeted a reply to that statement reading: “NAM has always been a bootlicking organization groveling at the booted feet of their governmental masters.”

Many fossil fuel industry groups immediately condemned the insurgency in statements or social media posts, and some long-time climate deniers did as well. But Moranowas not the only prominent science denier to express support online for the mob attack in D.C.

William M. Briggs, described by the Heartland Institute as one of its policy advisors, published a post on January 7 headlined, “we fought the good fight and we lost — this battle.” In the piece, Briggs claims that “Congress had an unarmed Air Force veteran shot and killed” and misleadingly claims that “the crowd, by doing very little, by remaining inside the tourist ropes inside the building, even, forced the startled regime into hiding.”

Can we go back in time and shoot one of them? https://t.co/7TQfPPuqLo

— William M Briggs (@FamedCelebrity) January 7, 2021

Briggs’ post goes on to describe Republican politicians’ later condemnation of Wednesday’s attack as “the most disgusting display of cowardice and abject surrender we’re likely to see in our lifetimes.”

“Some of us will be in deep kimchi because of this, but there are no regrets,” Briggs’s post continued. “One thing is certain. They will be coming for us.”

DeSmog reviewed numerous accounts during and in the wake of the Capitol attack. Social media posts show that several other climate science deniers, like the UK-based columnist James Delingpole and Steve Milloy, publisher of the JunkScience.com website, joined many on the far-right in circulating false information suggesting that it was not the visible pro-Trump participants who had been planning online for weeks to “occupy the Capitol,” but instead members of their opposition — the loose, left-wing movement known as antifa — that actually invaded the building. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that there was “no substantive evidence” that any antifa supporters had participated in the pro-Trump insurrection, adding that many claims of antifa involvement had cited a soure that had, in fact, reported neo-Nazi participation.

Screenshot of retweet by @JunkScience on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.

Others in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database, like the conservative media organization Prager U, used their social media presence to share messaging that sought to shift focus to last summer’s Black Lives Matter uprisings.

Detailed information about precisely what happened inside the Capitol Building on Wednesday — and what led to those events — is still continuing to emerge. But what is clear is that neo-Nazis and long-time far-right Trump supporters were documented, and in many cases documented themselves, participating in the mob violence inside the Capitol Building.

“The goal isn’t necessarily to convince anyone of anything,” Melissa Ryan, author of the Ctrl Alt-Right Delete weekly newsletter covering the alt-right and CEO of CARD Strategies, told DeSmog. “The goal is to sow so much confusion that it’s actually hard for people to tell the truth from fiction.”

That misinformation benefits the far-right, she said.

“They did the same after Charlottesville,” said Ryan, who has previously written about interactions between climate deniers and QAnon conspiracy theorists. “They do the same after any of their protests that cause violence. The goal is to cause confusion amongst viewers, those amongst their audience that might have a little trepidation about being associated with violent extremist groups, so ‘both sides’ is sort of how they neutralize that.”

Several accounts associated with climate science deniers focused in particular on pictures of Jake Angeli, who wore face paint and a horned helmet on January 6, with these accounts suggesting that Angeli was a member of antifa. Angeli, however, is better known as “the QAnon shaman.”

“He’s absolutely a QAnon right-wing follower,” said Ryan.

Attempts to shift blame away from those visibly participating in the invasion and to antifa were later also spread in Congress by Republican Matt Gaetz of Florida who was met with audible boos on the House floor when he suggested that the Capitol attack was by people “masquerading” as Trump supporters — a word choice made all the more ironic by the fact that many participating in the apparent coup attempt were not wearing masks despite the raging COVID-19 pandemic.

And of course, President Trump himself may perhaps be the world’s best-known climate science denier. Earlier in the day on January 6, he had addressed members of the soon-to-be mob in person, calling on them to “walk down to the Capitol” and adding that “you will never take back our country with weakness.” Later that day, in a recorded video, he told them, “We love you. You’re very special. Go home.”

On Thursday night, in a tweeted video message lasting less than three minutes, President Trump said that the “demonstrators” — the same individuals whom he had personally addressed before the attack — had “defiled” the Capitol and called for their prosecution. Today, he resumed using his Twitter account to praise and encourage his base.

Today, Trump faces renewed calls for his impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. But the disinformation-fueled movement backing him is extremely unlikely to simply fade away — and may in fact be further emboldened by the images of Trump and Confederate flags that were waved inside the Capitol Building.

“I feel like it’s a very clear end of the Trump administration,” said Ryan, “but what’s terrifying is what it is the birth of.”

Far-right organizers have already reportedly posted calls to gather again on January 20, inauguration day. On Thursday, USA Today quoted from a “white-supremacist Telegram channel” that called for “Pro-Trump and other nationalist crowds” to gather in D.C. that day

SEE CLIMATEGATE amplify escalator eg NRO

http://www.esquire.com/features/marc-morano-0410

This Man Wants to Convince You Global Warming Is a Hoax

Marc Morano broke the Swift Boat story and effectively stalled John Kerry's presidential run. Now he is working against an even bigger enemy: belief in climate change. Somehow, he seems to be winning.

By John H. Richardson

Marc Morano

Mackenzie Stroh

Early on the morning of November 17, Gavin Schmidt sat down at his computer and entered his password. It didn't work. Strange, he thought. He tried a few other accounts and none of them worked, either. Now he was alarmed. As a leading climatologist with NASA’s Goddard Institute in Manhattan, he’d been hacked before. He was used to e-mails from people who disapproved of his work, threatening e-mails that detailed the romantic life he was going to have in prison. So he knew what to do: He logged in via the Unix shell command.

A second later, the computer logged him off — and locked him out. Someone was in there, fighting him in real time. Schmidt sent an emergency message to his Web server:

"WE ARE BEING HACKED RIGHT NOW."

When they started the system up again, hours later, Schmidt found a forged Web page and a link to a file holding thousands of what looked like private e-mails written by some leading climatologists who study global warming. In addition to being a massive theft, it was a dark joke. Because the Goddard Institute is the professional home of James Hansen, the scientist famous for first sounding the alarm on rising temperatures back in 1988, and these particular e-mails had been compiled as part of a bitter Freedom of Information fight launched by contrarians who insist that global warming is a hoax, the hacker was posting the e-mails as a malicious tweak. He came in via a misconfigured proxy server in Turkey that was on a list of the proxy servers people use if they want to hide their tracks.[C8 CARSON WIKI?]

But the hacker had moved on. He'd been working on this for weeks, maybe longer, risking prison on charges of industrial espionage. A few hours later, he posted this note on a blog called The Air Vent:

"We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

"This is a limited time offer, download now."

Two days later, Marc Morano is riding up the Pacific Coast Highway in the back of a rental car, a big cheerful guy with five o'clock shadow that makes him look like Barney Rubble. He was eleven when his older brother got him a job on the Reagan campaign placing [BUYING TIME FOR ADS?] sound bites with radio stations, which eventually led to a job with Rush Limbaugh and three years as communications director for Senator James Inhofe, where he made the words Global warming is a hoax world famous. Now he's forty-one and he's enjoying the downtime between political speeches, catching glimpses of the California ocean — on these lecture tours, he just runs and runs and runs until all he wants is a quiet place to drink a beer and smoke a cigar.

But a call comes in from Anthony Watts, a retired TV weatherman who runs one of the leading contrarian blogs, and he has astonishing news about some e-mails from theClimate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. There's explosive stuff there — in one, a scientist actually rejoices over a contrarian's death. How's that for scientific detachment? Another says he's using a trick to "hide the decline" in temperature. A trick!

It's exactly what the contrarians have been saying for years. The leading global-warming scientists are scamming the world. Billions of dollars in green energy and CO2 restrictions and it all comes down to their reputations and their grant money.

So Watts is posting a note on his Web site: "The details on this are still sketchy, we'll probably never know what went on. But it appears that University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown..."

"Many many" files is right. There are thousands of them, nearly a million words total. Fortunately, the hacker took the time to draw up an annotated list. Watts is posting some of the juiciest.

The timing is perfect. The United Nations climate conference starts in Copenhagen in three weeks. The activists are pushing for a 40 percent cut in CO2 emissions within ten years, a revolutionary number. The eyes of the world are open wide and suddenly here's this tremendous gift: Climate-gate, they'll call it. With any luck, it will be just like the story that put Morano on the map, the one he wrote in a hurry late on a Friday afternoon in the spring of 2004 that was supposed to be the beginning of a vacation. He was working at the time for the right-wing CNS News service, and his boss wanted a pound of flesh before he left, as bosses do, so he made some calls and a contact suggested he call a guy named John O'Neill down in Texas. A few minutes later O'Neill was on the phone, sounding surprised. Yeah, he was leading a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, hundreds of them, all ready to declare that John Kerry was unfit to be commander in chief. Yeah, nineteen of them had actually served with Kerry. They even had his commanding officer, who said he'd had thorn pricks that were worse than some of Kerry's wounds.

Morano knew it was big. He stayed late, digging through clips and calling Kerry's office for comment. "You asked for a pound of flesh," he told his editor. "I may have given you several."

The story ran on Monday under the headline "KERRY UNFIT TO BE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF," SAY FORMER MILITARY COLLEAGUES, when Morano was down in North Carolina, at Nag's Head with his two baby girls. It blew up into international news, turning the Swift Boaters' press conference into a mob scene, the beginning of the end for Kerry, who simply didn't understand what he was up against. It didn't matter that the claims of the Swift Boaters would later be documented to be lavishly financed lies; the actual truth was a lumbering dinosaur in the face of a blitzkrieg. Morano followed it with stories like KERRY'S MEETING WITH COMMUNISTS VIOLATED U. S. LAW and FBI FILES SHOW KERRY MET WITH COMMUNISTS MORE THAN ONCE.

But that was when he still had some institutional support behind him. Now he's all alone in a hotel room with a laptop, a phone, and a BlackBerry, and his only weapon is a Web site called ClimateDepot.com.

Listen and learn, pilgrim. This is how the information wars are fought in the age of the Internet, when an isolated outside voice can swing the debate and change the world. The story starts with Hansen's congressional testimony back in '88: "The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now." Within a few years, the fossil-fuel industry was fighting back with films like The Greening of Planet Earth, which said that more CO2 would actually be good for farmers. Big Oil and Big Coal funded sympathetic think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute and also outright front groups with names like Friends of Science and the Global Climate Coalition, all of which came up with an endless stream of arguments for why global warming wasn't happening and even if it was, nothing should be done about it. Some of their criticisms were valid, like questioning the more extreme predictions for ocean-level rise or the dubious link to hurricanes, and they were certainly right to bring up the cost-benefit analysis of cap-and-trade. But as the science piled up, each bit of evidence more convincing than the last, more and more people were starting to believe that global warming was real.

The first turning point was 1997, when the nations of the world agreed to limit their CO2 emissions at the Kyoto Protocol. A year later, the American Petroleum Institute hired a conservative PR expert named Steve Milloy to develop a "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan." They had to tell a better story and tell it fast. They had to change the narrative. Milloy ran a Web site called Junk Science, joined in time by Climate Audit and Ice Cap and a thousand others, all hammering the same message — ignore global warming. There was even an evangelical-Christian faction, led by something called the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Then,in 2006, Al Gore killed them with An Inconvenient Truth. On one side you had a Nobel-prize-winning vice-president, the world's leading scientists, a Hollywood cheering section, and a growing public consensus. On the other, a handful of legitimate scientists and a small but noisy group of amateurs, ideologues, and cranks. At the peak of the consensus, 84 percent of Americans thought global warming was a threat. The only thing they agreed on more was the existence of God.

Then Morano got hired as the communications director for Jim Inhofe, the dyspeptic senator from Oklahoma. Setting to work, he began compiling so many inflammatory stories and documents on Inhofe's Web site, Newsweek said he was "more like a wire service than a spokesman." He began to use the Web in pugnacious new ways, like printing the e-mail addresses of reporters and scientists and inviting readers to pester them. All this made Inhofe's office the global center of the resistance, but it also infuriated people. "Morano is unquotable and uncitable," said one influential climate blog. "Besides his penchant for smear, he just makes stuff up." Another investigated his e-mail list. A scientist threatened him with a libel suit. Eventually other Republicans started telling Inhofe to fire him — he was unprofessional, they said. He appealed to Inhofe's worst instincts.

Morano took those as compliments.

[Pix Morano Limbaugh]

Now he sits at the anonymous desk in his California hotel room and taps away on his Web site, which is funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-wing billionaire who also financed the investigation into Bill Clinton's sex life. Morano starts searching and surfing, setting up Google alerts to aggregate stories to his in-box, grabbing scraps of information wherever he can find them, adding headlines and lining them up on his front page.

Click on the headline Real Files or Fake and it takes you to a Web site called the Blackboard, where a blogger named Lucia mentions e-mails "between various bloggers and climate science illuminati" but isn't sure whether they're some sort of scam. May sully the reputations of a number of working scientists leads to a story on Examiner.com New York by a writer named Thomas Fuller, who refuses to go into detail because the e-mails are private and would almost certainly "prove embarrassing to those concerned, especially if ... published in snippets and without context." If legit, this apparently devastating series of revelations will be very hard for the media to ignore leads to a giddy post at the National Review Online: "The blue-dress moment may have arrived!"

Morano has fun with it too, using goofy illustrations like a cartoon hand hammering a nail into a coffin and a Scooby Doo villain getting his mask pulled off. People tell him this is too childish for a publication that affects global policy, but it's part of his vision for his Web site — climate entertainment, he calls it.

As the words leave his fingers and become electric ones and zeros in the information cloud, other people start responding. One of the first is James Delingpole of London's Daily Telegraph: "If you own any shares in alternative-energy companies I should start dumping them NOW." Morano's Google alerts pick up the new tidbit and he slaps on another headline and adds it to his Web page. Then other people pick up his stuff and he writes about that and someone else writes about that until it's all swirling around like a digital dust devil in a Michael Crichton novel. Soon Morano's caution begins to fade: [note iterative amplify feedback amplify]

If they are real and not fake, he writes, this is absolute dynamite, and will destroy the credibility of the alarmist cause.

Physicist on alleged behavior of CRU scientists: "These people should be put in jail as soon as possible."

A scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science.....

Marc Morano—who has been the Republican-called expert witness at several Congressional hearings and forums on climate change, and whose climate denial documentary was recently promoted by President Donald Trump—called for similarly violent actions at state Capitols across the country.

“Striking fear in politicians is not a bad thing,” Morano wrote, adding that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

he goes on to say we need (armed) protested aganist covid lockdowns at state captils?

Here’s his full Twitter thread: from heated podcast/drilled

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-breaks-out-all-tools-denier-playbook-downplay-climate-changes-role-western-wildfires

fox breaks out all the tools in the denier playbook to downplay climate change's role in western wildfires

09/17/20 12:15 PM EDT

Climate denial, conspiracy theories, and misleading information -- Fox recycles old arguments year after year in wildfire coverage

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY TED MACDONALD

PUBLISHED 09/17/20 12:15 PM EDT

Ignoring the clear scientific links between the climate crisis and this year’s apocalyptic wildfires on the West Coast, coverage on Fox News and Fox Business has downplayed and denied the role of climate change in these devastating fires, deflecting from climate science while pushing President Donald Trump’s perennial claim that forest mismanagement is to blame. At least two Fox programs have even falsely suggested that an organized campaign of arson is responsible for igniting the fires in the Pacific Northwest -- a harmful conspiracy theory that has also quickly spread across social media platforms.

Fox shows are following a playbook that they have used with other major fire disasters linked to climate change, including last year’s catastrophic bushfires in Australia and previous catastrophic fires in California.

The goal of Fox’s coverage is always the same: deflect from the scientific reality of climate change and paint Democratic policies as the true culprits in worsening the wildfires.

Deny and downplay the climate crisis

Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson is leading the network on denying the indisputable connection between climate change and the catastrophic fires burning on the West Coast. On three recent episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host and his guests spread dangerous disinformation about the fires.

On September 10, Carlson claimed that “there’s no evidence” climate change contributed to the western wildfires, instead arguing that state regulations and energy grid mismanagement were the real problems responsible for the blazes. Carlson took this a step further on September 11, when he called climate change “systemic racism in the sky” and stated with a straight face that “there is not a single scientist on Earth who knows whether or by how much these fires may have been, quote, ‘exacerbated’ by warmer temperatures caused by climate change.”

To top it off, Carlson invited Marc Morano -- perhaps the most notorious climate denier in the U.S. -- on the September 15 edition of his show to falsely claim that these fires are “not unprecedented” and that it’s really just “climate ambulance-chasing at its core” and “weaponizing weather events” to link them to climate change.

The exact same line of “weaponizing weather” was used on an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight last year to dismiss climate connections during the Amazon fires. During a segment discussing those fires in August 2019, climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi claimed that “if humans are causing climate change, it's very, very slight,” and said that any attempts to pin the Amazon fires on climate change was “weaponization of the weather.”

Carlson’s climate-denying rants fly in the face of well-established scientific evidence that climate change is both prolonging the fire season and intensifying the size and scale of the fires. Climate scientists have also called these wildfires “unprecedented” and linked a climate-fueled drought to conditions worsening the fires.

Additionally, Carlson’s claim that “not a single scientist” can link the fires to climate change is also demonstrably false -- and taken laughably out of context. Climate scientist Daniel Swain addressed this point on Twitter, noting that his featured quote from Carlson’s show was “fundamentally misrepresenting climate scientists' public statements on wildfires and climate change”:

Carlson is no stranger to peddling dangerous climate misinformation. Just last year, he invited Morano to hype a silly, debunked document that claims clouds are responsible for global warming. In March 2019, he stated without evidence that if climate change is affecting natural disasters, “it might be making them in some ways better too.” (Earlier that same month, the Fox host also baselessly accused undocumented immigrants of killing more people in the U.S. than climate change.)

In addition to outright denial, the network has regularly downplayed the connection between climate and the catastrophic fires. A Media Matters study from 2018 found that Fox ran only two segments on California’s wildfires in November of that year that mentioned climate; both of those segments downplayed the role of climate change.

In recent days, Fox shows have attempted to downplay climate’s role by politicizing the climate argument and purposely shifting blame for the fires to other issues. Neil Cavuto did just this on the September 10 edition of Fox Business’ Cavuto: Coast to Coast:

On the September 14 edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, correspondent John Roberts provided cover for Trump’s outright denial of climate change by calling it a “glaring difference of opinion” with California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Later on in the show, Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt attempted to pass off Trump’s clear climate denial as a problem for both sides of the political aisle, calling his response an example of “why people hate our system, because when bad things happen, the two parties want to pick and choose what’s to blame. … Instead, what they hear is politicians picking and choosing the things they like from the menu.”

This strategy of partisan obfuscation also has precedent on Fox: During California’s 2019 fire season, Fox & Friends responded to Newsom criticizing Trump’s assault on climate action by bringing a talk show host with no background in science, Mike Slater, to explain why “liberal policies are really to blame” for that year’s massive wildfires in California.

Jumping to blame “forest management” practices for the fires, while generally ignoring the role of climate change

On the September 14 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Cal Fire Assistant Deputy Director Daniel Berlant dropped a rare example of climate truth on Fox:

DANIEL BERLANT (CAL FIRE): In California, there really is no debate that our fire seasons are getting longer. We are seeing larger fires and more explosive fires. In fact, on average right now, our fire season is on average 75 days longer than they were just four decades ago. And so, you know, we can debate all we want, but I can tell you here on the ground, we are seeing fires that are incredibly destructive and incredibly fast moving.

But right after this segment, guest host Sandra Smith interviewed Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) to downplay climate’s role in the fires and instead promote “sound scientific management” of forests and his Trillion Trees Act, which climate scientists say is absolutely not a way of solving climate change, as the best solutions to worsening wildfires.

Poor forest management has played a role in California wildfires along with climate change and the expansion of people moving into the wildlife-urban interface, which “has increased the likelihood that wildfires will threaten structures and people.” But from watching coverage of the fires in numerous Fox segments, one would probably come away with the idea that it’s been only California’s forest management policies driving the worsening fires.

The jump by Fox to assign blame to the state for 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. At the time, Trump’s response was parroted by Fox News host Sean Hannity, who stated that he was “right” to blame California wildfires on poor forest management, and Fox’s Laura Ingraham, who on her radio show cherry-picked a BBC article to claim that “Trump was right” about wildfires and forest management.

Neither of these segments mentioned climate change. Even worse, Ingraham glossed over the major mentions of climate in the BBC article, which specifically stated that “many experts point out that climate change has made things worse” in relation to those fires.

This framing of the fires by zeroing-in entirely on forest management doesn’t hold up to what climate science is saying -- especially this year. Fire scientists have said that “climate change, not forest management, is a driving factor behind the state’s fires becoming worse and more deadly.” Wildfire expert Stefan Doerr has also stated, “The bottom line remains that the extreme meteorological conditions are the main drivers for these extreme fires,” and he specifically noted hotter, drier, and windier conditions with climate change “has now created a tinderbox of vegetation.” Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe also pointed out on Twitter that it’s a myth to suggest that “the only reason wildfires are burning more area is because of poor forest management.”

Fox’s attempts to cast blame solely on the state’s leadership for poor forest management also fall flat when you consider that the federal government owns the majority of land out west -- in California, 57% is owned by the federal government, while the state government only owns 3%.

The network’s discussion of forest management hit a high point during midday of September 14, when Trump visited California and once again blamed forest management for the wildfires, ignoring climate change. In one example on the September 14 edition of Outnumbered Overtime, Fox contributor Jason Chaffetz called Trump “absolutely right” and blamed the wildfires primarily on a lack of clearing brush, saying “Democrats have been the biggest impediment to doing so.” Later on The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld stated that forest management is “the problem in California. It's not climate change. It’s forest management.”

Other examples abound. On two separate occasions in the past week, Fox Business’ Varney & Co. hosted conservative talk radio host Larry Elder to talk up poor forest management. On the September 8 edition, he agreed with Trump’s comments and said, “You can’t do a whole lot about the weather but you can do something about the fuel that these fires feed upon that makes these fires so intense and so serious.” Again on the September 14 edition, he repeated that forest management is the biggest issue in fighting the fires and said that “Donald Trump does not believe in climate change alarmism.”

On Fox News, Environmental Progress president and climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on the September 10 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight to talk up the role of poor forest management at the expense of climate change, claiming that the media’s climate coverage of the fires “has been really irresponsible.” He largely dismissed climate change again on the September 14 edition of Fox News @ Night, when he falsely stated that saturated wood fuel “is driving the intensity of these fires. It's not climate change.”

Later that night on Hannity, host Sean Hannity again made forest management the focal point of blame for the fires, calling it “an important piece of the puzzle.”

Advancing the dangerous arson conspiracy theory

While the conspiracy theory that arson is behind the wildfires has not yet been as pervasive on Fox News as it was in January, when the network’s prime-time hosts pushed the debunked idea that arson was driving the Australian wildfires, it has already been pushed by at least two of Fox News’ shows covering the West Coast fires.

As Media Matters reported on September 14:

During the month of September, record wildfires made worse by climate change have raged across California, Oregon, and Washington. As the fires have spread and officials have tried to contain them, a conspiracy theory claiming that “antifa” has been behind the wildfires has spread across major social media platforms. In reality, as NBC News noted, incidents like “lightning, faulty or knocked-down power lines and accidents” have been reported as the cause of many of the fires. Authorities, including the FBI, have been forced to rebut the false “antifa“ claim as people have refused to evacuate and militia groups are getting active.

The use of focus on arson as a counter-narrative to climate change follows the exact same playbook used during Australia's deadly wildfires from late 2019 into early 2020, when Murdoch-owned media and other right wing outlets peddled false claims that arsonists were to blame for the historic blazes, and not climate change. However, this talking point was debunked; as one study found, only a handful of blazes out of 11,000 were deliberately set. Notably, the arson conspiracy theory now not only distracts from the climate crisis, but is also an attempt to vilify activists protesting police brutality. For right-wing media, this false narrative is the proverbial killing of two birds with one stone.

On the September 13 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Jedediah Bila briefly discussed a story accusing a supposed left-wing activist of deliberately setting fires:

JEDEDIAH BILA (CO-HOST): Another man is accused of setting a fire near a Washington highway. A report says he is a regular attendee of defund police rallies in Seattle. That last detail unfolding [is] pretty amazing. It is really incredible to see.

…

WILL CAIN (CO-HOST): These arsonists, as of yet we do not know exactly their ties to any extremist organizations or what their motivations might be, but I think one thing is clear: We now know many of these fires in the West were set intentionally. What does that reveal, Pete? What it reveals is the brazen political monopolization of a tragedy by people like Gov. Gavin Newsom who quickly jumped out and blamed these fires on climate change. There’s no tragedy, there’s no moment too soon to jump and advance your political agenda and pin awful events on your political opponents.

While discussing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s recent climate speech on the September 14 edition of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham brought up arson unprompted, asking, “Did Biden anywhere in that speech lay out his solution to prevent any wildfires in the future or the people who are actually intentionally setting them in California, including antifa?”

Her guest, Victor David Hanson, glossed over this comment and directed his ire at Biden for even considering to blame climate change for the fires.

The mentions by Fox hosts are particularly irresponsible and egregious given that several days earlier both The Intercept and The New York Times reported that these claims were unfounded and that local law enforcement were “pleading with the public to stop calling 911 to pass on unfounded rumors that antifascist political activists have intentionally set the blazes.” On social media, the arson rumors have been pushed by a number of far-right accounts and groups including QAnon, which the FBI identifies as a domestic terrorism threat. It is alarming that Fox is undermining law enforcement and continuing to align itself with dangerous factions in spreading such conspiracy theories.

Fox has, and continues to be, the main purveyor of climate denial in the United States. It’s no surprise that their minimization of climate change’s role in this year’s western wildfires is lazy, cheap, and similar to Murdoch-owned Australian media’s role in downplaying climate change from earlier this year; we can expect to see more of it in the future.

orwellian transparency, no press allowed?

secret sci bs:

: On April 24, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt released a proposed rule that would restrict which scientific studies EPA could use in creating new regulations. The move — already controversial when it was first revealed over a month ago — would prevent EPA from considering studies in which the data is not available to the public, including the private health information of individuals in medical studies, and which is based on one-time events, such as the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Prominent climate science deniers were in attendance at the EPA announcement, including Marc Morano, Steve Milloy, and Will Happer.

...

twit: "era of secret science @EPA is coming to an end. The ability to test, authenticate, & reproduce scientific findings is vital for integrity of rulemaking process. Americans deserve to assess legitimacy of the science underpinning Agency decisions"

March 16, E&E reported that EPA Admin Scott Pruitt is brewing more plans to further hobble how the EPA uses (or in this case, doesn’t use) science to protect the public. According to E&E, the effort will be similar to the Orwellian-esque HONEST Act that Lamar Smith sponsored a year ago but is stalled in the Senate. Pruitt’s idea is to apply a blanket set of new criteria to studies the EPA can cite. The “sound science” recommendations are designed to sound reasonable, but in practice would render lots of high quality, relevant research off-limits.

aha wow omg:

cfg big lobbyist on climate vs CoC? enforcer drives polarization, RINO hunters

Climate science skeptics grasp for power in changing GOP

Nick Sobczyk, E&E News reporter

Published: Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Skeptics of mainstream climate science and hard-line conservatives think they still have a hold on the GOP, despite a recent rhetorical evolution among congressional Republicans.

Climate science skeptics grasp for power in changing GOP

MARCH 10, 2020

As originally published in E&E News.

By: Nick Sobczyk

March 10, 2020

Skeptics of mainstream climate science and hard-line conservatives think they still have a hold on the GOP, despite a recent rhetorical evolution among congressional Republicans.

It’s part of a battle for the soul of the party between hard-right organizations, such as the Club for Growth, and the newfangled and well-funded ecosystem of conservative clean energy groups, led most prominently by ClearPath and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions.

There are abundant signs on Capitol Hill that people who question climate science are losing clout with Republicans. But they are insistent that not much has changed, particularly with President Trump still in the White House.

“I don’t think we’re losing much ground,” said Myron Ebell, a prominent energy advocate with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a longtime opponent of the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are warming the planet. Ebell helped lead Trump’s EPA transition team.

“I do think that there’s been more hand waving,” he added, “but I don’t think Republican voters have been influenced very much by the hand waving and the shouting.”

Party leadership on Capitol Hill would beg to differ. And even some Trump-loyal Republicans are happy to distance themselves from the climate science denial movement, even if they’re not willing to offer the kind of policies many experts say will be necessary to reduce the use of fossil fuels — the primary driver of climate change.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and his top energy deputies rolled out a package of small-ball climate change bills last month, pointing to polls that show younger voters increasingly worried about the issue.

None would reduce fossil fuel use, but they would aim to reduce emissions through carbon capture and sequestration (Greenwire, Feb. 12).

Meanwhile, Republicans on powerful committees such as Energy and Commerce have largely dropped outright climate denial for the kind of “energy innovation” talking points favored by CRES and ClearPath.

“Both sides now recognize climate is changing, temperature is increasing we need to do something about it,” said Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Greg Walden (R-Ore.). “We’re just speaking out and making our own views known better, and there is more evidence.”

Policywise, what they’re doing is phenomenal and unbelievable and beyond anything we could have hoped. It truly is.

Marc Morano, director of communications at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow]

The fact remains, however, that the Republican president frequently denies climate change and for a time employed a man — William Happer — tasked with performing a critical review of federal climate science.

For skeptics and libertarian ideologues alike who want to see the federal regulatory regime torn down, that’s an important audience.

“Policywise, what Andrew Wheeler is doing is phenomenal. Policywise, what Donald Trump is doing is phenomenal,” said Marc Morano, director of communications at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, who has questioned climate science for years.

“Policywise, what they’re doing is phenomenal and unbelievable and beyond anything we could have hoped,” he said. “It truly is.”

Fighting over the details

There’s no meaningful debate among climate scientists about whether temperatures are rising because of man’s industrial activity.

A host of peer-reviewed studies warn of potentially catastrophic economic and environmental effects, many of which are readily apparent today, without dramatic changes to global greenhouse gas emissions. Most objections to the science have virtually zero credibility in the world’s scientific community.

Still, politically, Ebell doesn’t think it’s useful for conservatives to cede the debate because he said McCarthy’s efforts won’t convince voters who want the federal government to address climate change to vote Republican.

“If local environmental groups or local media in their districts start looking into these bills and start giving them publicity in the local media, they’re going to have a hard time explaining themselves because we’ve conceded that global warming’s a problem, and we’ve got a plan which will do nothing to address it,” Ebell said.

“So I think it’s not a well-thought-out way to proceed on this issue, and I doubt that they’re going to get very much positive spin out of it with voters,” he said.

Prominent conservative organizations, meanwhile, are making similar arguments with more subtle references to the science of climate change.

After McCarthy, Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves and other Republicans came out with their package of bills last month, the Club for Growth promptly blasted it, threatening to withhold endorsements from supporters.

“When you give an inch on principle, you concede a negotiating posture that has also led to devastating bipartisan agreements on bailouts, spending and regulation,” Scott Parkinson, vice president of government affairs for the Club for Growth, wrote in a subsequent letter to the editor in The Washington Post last month.

“Club for Growth will continue to work with principled conservatives who reject climate alarmism and fight for energy and environmental policies based on sound economic principles,” he wrote.

Despite those disagreements, the Republican efforts on climate aren’t actually all that new, and they’re generally more focused on repackaging GOP-backed policies through a climate change lens.

One of the bills they rolled out last month, for instance, would make permanent the 45Q tax break for carbon capture and sequestration, which a Republican-led Congress expanded in 2018.

Graves, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis’ ranking member, is also leading a letter to National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, to be sent in the coming weeks, urging the White House to promote fossil fuel exports as a way to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

Top Republicans, including Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, are expected to sign.

The Trump administration, of course, is already gung-ho about exporting fossil fuels, but Republicans argue that it can help the fight against climate change because U.S. exports have lower life-cycle emissions than sources in the developing world.

The current backdrop, however, is that U.S. emissions are increasing, undermining Republicans who point to emissions reductions during the last 15 years. EPA’s most recent numbers found that greenhouse gas emissions rose 3.1% in 2018 — during Trump’s second year in office — despite the continued decline of coal (Climatewire, Feb. 13).

Meanwhile, the party as a whole still roundly rejects carbon pricing and regulations, tools that most climate experts say will be necessary to deploy clean energy technology to the market and reduce emissions fast enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

“Looking back over the last several years there have been policies that are entirely consistent with Republican ideology that we can continue doing that achieve multiple goals,” Graves said. “My whole thing is let’s not sit here and fight over the details of the science.”

Constituent services?

Ebell and other skeptics dismiss conservative clean energy groups as empty vessels with money but no loyal supporters, but they’re having an impact.

CRES alone spent nearly $500,000 lobbying on various energy issues in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to disclosure forms, including with several outside lobbying firms.

Much of the lobbying effort went toward getting clean energy priorities into the tax extenders package at the end of last year, according to CRES Executive Director Heather Reams, but CRES and ClearPath were enthusiastic about Republicans adopting their rhetoric in early 2020.

Still, Reams said she doesn’t see her group’s efforts as in direct conflict with those who question climate science. Rather, she believes she offers Republicans who want to talk about climate change a supportive landing pad.

“They’re responding to voters,” Reams said. “So I think it’s a very unfair position that some groups are putting Republican members in. These are complex problems and deserve complex solutions, and keeping your head in the sand is not a solution.”

And in a sign that the climate skeptic wing’s influence could be petering out, the Heartland Institute — a conservative think tank that has long dispersed debunked theories about climate change — laid off some of its staff last week amid reported financial woes (Greenwire, March 9).

Efforts to promote carbon taxes as a conservative solution to climate change have been less successful so far, however, showing the limits of the Republican transformation. Currently, the policy has only a small constituency.

Read the rest of the article here....e&e

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Marc Morano on What UN Climate Conference Attendees Are Saying About Trump

MRCTV

https://cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/report-un-climate-conference-attendees-claim-us-still-paris-accord-call-trump. MRCTV Reader,. The liberal ...

Harrison Ford and Beef Burger-Loving Attendees at UN Climate Conference - CNSNews.com (blog)

Full Coverage

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Tea Party Says Cuomo Hurting New York

Jamestown Post Journal

Marc Morano of CFACT and author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” stated: “Climategate pulls back the curtain on a scene of ...

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COP25: Climate Science Deniers Attend on Behalf of Trump-Affiliated Lobby Group

DeSmog (blog)

In 2016, Marc Morano, Communications Director at CFACT and Executive Director of the Climate Depot website, attended the COP22 Marrakech ...

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Bill Nye the Suing Guy Takes on Disney

PJ Media

Marc Morano Exposes Bill Nye's Astonishing Ignorance Of Climate Science In Debate On CNN. "It started as soon as Nye opened his mouth at the ...

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Delingpole: From Hitler and Stalin to Greta Thunberg — Time Loves to Celebrate Totalitarian Icons

Breitbart

You'll find a range of them in this talking points report prepared by Marc Morano for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. And we know — as ...

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format problem, see bak

https://www.davisenterprise.com/local-news/ucd/anti-gmo-group-sues-ucd-over-public-records-requests/

2016

a national nonprofit group is suing UC Davis to comply with requests for public records related to the university’s work on genetically modified organisms, pesticides and its relationship with the agrichemical industry.

Gary Ruskin, co-founder and co-director of U.S. Right to Know said, “We are conducting this investigation of the food and agrichemical industries in an effort to improve the food we eat and the health of all Americans.”

Since Jan. 28, 2015, U.S. Right to Know has filed 17 public-records requests with UCD, the group said in a statement, “but the university has provided a total of merely 751 pages in response to all of these requests, while similar requests at other universities have yielded thousands of pages each.”

The lawsuit was filed on Wednesday in the Yolo County Superior Court against the Regents of the University of California.

A specific issue that Ruskin is concerned with involves Jon Entine, listed on UCD’s World Food Center as a “senior fellow.”

In March of 2015, U.S. Right to Know filed a request with UC Office of the President asking for all correspondences to or from Entine to any staff of 19 organizations, including Monsanto, Bayer, DuPont and Dow.

In March of this year, Ruskin wrote a letter to UCD Chancellor Linda Katehi asking that she and the university reveal the sources of funding for Entine’s work with the Genetic Literacy Project, the UC Davis Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy, and its parent unit, the UC Davis World Food Center.”

On April 7, Josette Lewis, associate director of the World Food Center, responded to Ruskin on behalf of Katehi saying, “The World Food Center has not accepted any industry funding to support IFAL, Mr. Entine, or the Genetic Literacy Project.”

She further stated that Entine serves in a non-compensated role as a senior fellow.

UCD has not provided an estimate of when it will fill the remainder of the PRA requests, according to U.S. Right to Know’s statement. “It originally estimated production of documents in April 2015. It has completed only one response — regarding the soda industry — but none of the 16 requests related to the agrichemical industry.”

UCD spokeswoman Dana Topousis said on Friday, “As is our normal practice, we have been working diligently on U.S. Right to Know PRA requests, in addition to responding to a higher volume of other PRA requests over the last year.”

A copy of the complaint is available at http://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/UCDaviscomplaint.pdf

— Reach Tanya Perez at tperez@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8082. Follow her on Twitter at @EnterpriseTanya

ref

Industries Turn Freedom of Information Requests on Their Critics

Image

By Elizabeth Williamson

Nov. 5, 2018

WASHINGTON — Dennis J. Ventry Jr., a law professor at the University of California, Davis, drew the ire of tax preparation companies like Intuit and H&R Block this summer by criticizing a deal they have to provide a free tax filing service through the Internal Revenue Service.

The companies promptly hit back with a tactic that corporations, lobbyists and interest groups are increasingly using against academic researchers: Their trade coalition filed a public records request with the university in July seeking everything Mr. Ventry had written or said about the companies this year, including emails, text messages, voice mail messages and hand-jotted notes.

The university estimated that it spent 80 to 100 hours complying with the request, filed under the California Public Records Act, which requires employees of any state agency or institution to produce, upon request from any member of the public, any record that relates to “the conduct of the public’s business” that is “prepared, owned, used or retained” by the university.

The request generated 1,189 pages of documents, university officials said. And it was just one example of how both state-level public records laws and the federal Freedom of Information Act, written to ensure transparency and accountability in government, have morphed into potent weapons in legal and business disputes, raising questions about the chilling effects — and costs — they impose on targets who are doing research in controversial or sensitive fields.

A 2017 analysis of requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act found that “public-oriented inquiries by concerned citizens and their advocates” account for “only a small fraction of the 700,000-plus FOIA requests submitted each year,” wrote David Pozen, a law professor at Columbia University, whose paper reviewed studies on the issue. “The bulk of requests come from businesses seeking to further their own commercial interests by learning about competitors, litigation opponents or the regulatory environment.”

Public records requests have long been an important tool for a wide variety of groups, like journalists, political opposition researchers, climate-science skeptics, animal rights advocates and anti-abortion activists keen to dig into research and the work of people in the government.

But the sheer scale of the requests in recent years, and their growing use by advocacy groups and business interests to challenge academic work at public universities, has alarmed some experts, who say the commitment to openness embodied by freedom of information laws could be tested.

The weaponization of such requests poses “a real danger that we’ll hit a tipping point, where the cost and burden of open records laws will overcome the benefits and we’ll have a retrenchment of transparency rights,” said Margaret Kwoka, a University of Denver professor with expertise in government transparency litigation. “This kind of abuse fuels the political will to do that.”

The University of California system, with nearly 45,000 faculty and academic appointees on its campuses and in its laboratories and medical centers, sits at the center of this trend.

In 2009, the system received a total of 3,266 public records requests. In 2017, it received 16,921, an increase of 418 percent.

A significant portion of the requests are from activists and industry groups “using public records requests as one part of a strategy to undermine the work of researchers in controversial fields,” Maria Shanle, managing counsel for education affairs and governance at the University of California, said in an interview.

These have included a 2011 request for every document a visiting scholar produced related to “chemical substances, including flame retardants”; a 2012 demand by an anti-abortion group for the names of researchers working on an abortion safety study; and a 2015 request for every email to and from a journalism professor that contained words like “biotech” and “Monsanto.”

Image

“What we need is a dividing line between financial and ministerial accountability, and the university’s function as an intellectual and teaching institution,” Claudia Polsky, an assistant law professor who directs the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of California in Berkeley, said in an interview.

In a paper titled “Open Records, Shuttered Labs: Ending Political Harassment of Public University Researchers,” Ms. Polsky argued for legislative protections, already offered in some states, for unpublished emails and other personal records that can be used to stymie research.

“Digging into professors’ email inboxes has nothing to do with democratic accountability or fiscal transparency,” she said, “and everything to do with creating ideologically based mischief.”

In Mr. Ventry’s case, he said he did not have anything to hide — he has been a critic of the tax preparation program, Free File, and an outspoken advocate for no-cost, simplified, government-provided tax preparation for years. But he said that the request had made collaborators in his research wary of communicating with him and amounted to intimidation by the industry.

“They are trying to bully me,” Mr. Ventry said of the industry group. “More importantly, they are trying to chill my research and scholarship, whether it has to do with tax law reform or not.”

The industry group, the Free File Alliance, whose legal name is Free File Inc., defended the request as a proper use of public records law.

Mr. Ventry, the group said, had a conflict of interest because he also serves as the chairman of an outside advisory group to the I.R.S. and was intent on promoting an alternative plan under which the government would offer its own tax preparation service through the I.R.S. The alliance defends its program as benefiting low- and middle-income Americans who would otherwise have to pay for tax preparation services.

Freedom of information requests “are a legitimate, legal method to determine what public officials are doing and saying in their official capacity,” the alliance said in an emailed statement. “Professor Ventry holds a strong preconceived bias against the I.R.S. Free File program.”

Mr. Ventry is not employed by the I.R.S. He is the chairman of the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council, a public forum on tax administration issues that advises the I.R.S. commissioner and is composed of outside experts who volunteer their time. He was a published critic of Free File for years before joining the council.

Mr. Ventry; Joseph Bankman, a tax law professor at Stanford University; and others have worked over the years to create a model for free tax-filing programs administered by a half-dozen states, while advocating a free, streamlined federal e-filing system.

In July, Mr. Ventry, Mr. Bankman and other colleagues wrote op-eds taking aim at Free File, which the I.R.S. offers to many taxpayers through an agreement with the Free File Alliance, which includes Intuit, makers of TurboTax and other software; H&R Block; and 10 additional commercial tax preparation companies.

After the House passed a bill that included a provision making the Free File agreement permanent, the academics raised alarms. Citing research, I.R.S. statistics and investigations by ProPublica, The Wall Street Journal and others, Mr. Ventry wrote that Free File is a “failed program” that “inflicts substantial harm on taxpayers” by confusing them, pushing them toward paid products and failing to fully protect their personal data.

The companies in the Free File program are not compensated by the I.R.S. for providing their services. But ending the program and replacing it with a government-run electronic filing service for all taxpayers would threaten the industry.

Image

In a July opinion piece in The Hill titled “Free File Providers Scam Taxpayers; Congress Shouldn’t Be Fooled,” Mr. Ventry originally included his affiliation as chairman of the tax agency’s advisory council as well as his academic post. (After a complaint from the industry group, he removed the affiliation to the council.)

In a subsequent commentary, the academics criticized the I.R.S. for poor oversight of the industry agreement, saying that Free File “puts tax preparation companies first and taxpayers last.” Some of the criticism echoed the I.R.S.’s independent taxpayer advocate, Nina E. Olson, who said in an interview that Free File was a “poorly designed” program that only 3 percent of eligible taxpayers used after 15 years in existence.

Days later, the University of California received the request for all of Mr. Ventry’s communications about the op-eds, including his contacts with the I.R.S. taxpayer advocate’s office.

In addition to its public records requests, the alliance wrote directly to the I.R.S. about Mr. Ventry in July, saying he “improperly used his I.R.S. affiliation to lend credibility to this attack.” The alliance questioned whether Mr. Ventry should be able to speak out publicly on the issue given his role on the I.R.S. advisory council.

Mr. Ventry said that role was strictly advisory and that he received no compensation aside from his university salary. After the industry alliance leveled the complaint, he says he voluntarily recused himself from the council’s analysis of the Free File program, due out in November.

Responding to the academics’ criticism in a letter to the editor published in the policy journal Tax Notes, Tim Hugo, a Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates who serves as the alliance’s executive director, wrote that the partnership between the I.R.S. and Free File had saved taxpayers “an estimated $1.6 billion in tax preparation and filing fees” since its inception in 2003.

The program was under attack, he wrote, “by a handful of ideologues” who “want a centralized system of direct government tax preparation.”

Representatives for Intuit and H&R Block said the companies did not participate in the records requests by the industry group, but the alliance confirmed that the member companies received the documents produced by the university.

Stanford is a private institution not subject to public records requests under the California law, but the alliance’s lawyers used the University of California request to obtain Mr. Ventry’s communications with Mr. Bankman, too.

“There’s nothing really that interesting in my emails,” Mr. Bankman said in an interview. But worries about such requests, he said, stifle the peer review process, a freewheeling exchange of views, often by email, in which academics around the world evaluate one another’s work.

Companies often request such emails “to intimidate people like us, because it really raises the ante and makes it very scary just to email stuff,” he added. For the industry, “it’s a freebie,” he said. “But imagine you’re some young professor somewhere — you don’t know what hit you.”

Mr. Ventry said he was more worried that Mr. Bankman and other colleagues would shy away from collaborating with him.

“We went from emailing multiple times a day over the course of a couple months to not emailing at all,” he said. The request “stifled not just academic freedom but the deliberative and beneficial process of thinking through problems with others.”

If that constitutes winning for the tax industry, he said, “they won.”

milo shut down

mark bray antifa bk see milo 2

https://www.salon.com/2018/01/31/antifa-vs-milo-yiannopoulos-who-won/

From kitchen tables worldwide, you can hear a chorus of parents chastising their children with the same refrain: “Stop playing with your food.”

Children aside, this rebuke needs to be loudly directed at the food fabricators of industrial agriculture. Corporate interests keep toying with the very nature of food — not to benefit consumers, family farmers, workers or the environment, but to fatten the profits of Silicon Valley tech giants, food monopolists and Wall Street financiers.

Meet Recombinetics, a high-tech gene manipulation corporation with bioengineers in its labs remaking farm animals — pigs, for example. Recombinetics wants to mess with the very DNA of Mother Nature’s oinkers to make them produce bigger litters to supply the pork factories of brand-name marketers. It is also genetically altering milk cows to withstand hotter weather so that climate change won’t reduce the output of huge dairy corporations.

This re-engineering of nature to build industrial Frankenanimals is being supported by such land-grant colleges as the University of California, Davis — your tax dollars at work! Of course, this corporate-government collusion faces a high hurdle in the marketplace, for consumers have demonstrated again and again that they don’t want the food they put on their tables tampered with by profiteering geneticists. The tamperers, though, have a solution to that problem: secrecy. The industry is lobbying lawmakers and regulators to outlaw any requirement that milk and meat produced by genetically altered animals be labeled as such. Better to keep consumers in the dark because… well, if given a free choice, people might reject Recombinetics in favor of natural food.

Rather than remake animals and remake the marketplace to benefit corporations that play with our food, let’s remake the corporate system that is trying to industrialize dinner. Corporate manipulators are not out to make food better or more affordable for us, but strictly to make it more profitable for them.

How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen … Angus?

Not Angus the breed of cattle, and not the time-honored given name of many farm boys, but Angus the 1,000-pound “farmer of the future.” He’s actually not a he, but an it: a robot, toiling away on a hydroponic “farm” that is indoors, soilless and, yes, soulless. Angus is owned and programmed by a multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley startup named Iron Ox, and its homestead is hardly bucolic. It’s in an 8,000-square-foot concrete warehouse in a suburb south of San Francisco.

This farm bot is more of a heavy lifter than a heavy thinker. Basically, Angus wheels around the warehouse to lift, move and hand off large pallets of basil, bok choy and other produce to another robot that, so far, hasn’t earned a name. The human overseers of this robotic animal farm don’t wear John Deere “gimme caps,” but clean-room hairnets, apparently to prevent anything organic from contaminating the edibles or the robot.

Started by a Google engineer, Iron Ox hopes to install duplicates of its faux farm in metropolitan areas across the country. The obvious question is, Why? Well, for the greater good, claims the Googlite owner. “If we can feed people using robots, what could be more impactful than that?” Well, reconnecting our food system to nature, a democratic economy and human beings. The roboticists brag that local warehouses can provide fresher lettuce than what megafarms ship from thousands of miles away. But wait! Local farmers markets do that, do it even fresher and keep the consumer dollars in the community rather than siphoned off to Iron Ox and the Wall Street financiers of Angus robots.

In fact, the robotic indoor farm hucksters quietly concede that their real business plan depends on “sidestepping” the cost of human labor and local farm owners. Instead of spreading wealth to people and communities, their scheme concentrates food profits in a handful of absentee syndicators, rich investors and technology giants.

Deep in his digital brain, even Angus must know this is stupid.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

usrtk:

In 2014 and 2015, Genetic Literacy Project partnered with a Monsanto-backed group, Academics Review, to sponsor the Biotechnology Literacy Project “Boot Camps,” a series of conferences designed to teach scientists how to “best engage the GMO debate with a skeptical public.” Reporters were told the funding for the 2015 BLP Boot Camp at UC Davis came from UC Davis, USDA, state money, and the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) — in fact, the industry group appears to have provided all the funding, as Paul Thacker reported in 2017. (See section on Entine’s funding for more.)

dn 4/29/16

pike cop got more $ than those sprayed; no longer there

http://www.extremetech.com/internet/226677-uc-davis-spent-175000-to-boost-public-image-after-pepper-spraying-incident

Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Salinas, and Assemblyman Jim Cooper, D-Elk Grove, asked Thursday for Katehi to resign or be removed. Their statements followed earlier calls for her resignation by Assemblymen Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, and Evan Low, D-Campbell.

Alejo is the chairman of the California Latino Legislative Caucus and a UC Davis School of Law graduate. Cooper sits on the Assembly Budget Committee.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article66689912.html#storylink=cpy

In response to these events, the UC Davis Student Workers Union is leading a Fire Katehi protest at the Memorial Union on Friday.

Written by: Alyssa Vandenberg – campus@theaggie.org

DAVIS (AP/CBS) — A group of students at the University of California, Davis who are demanding the chancellor resign say they have been threatened with disciplinary action.

The Sacramento Bee reports (http://bit.ly/1pklMPI) about 20 students are occupying the lobby outside Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi’s office Monday to protest her involvement with private corporate boards and to demand her resignation.

Graduate student Emily Breuninger tells the newspaper administrators told them they could face dismissal from the school.

Read Also: UC Chancellor Resigns From For-Profit College Board After FTC Lawsuit

The students say they plan to stay until Katehi agrees to meet with them.

Students began their sit-in Friday after being told the chancellor was not available to meet with them.

UC Davis spokeswoman Dana Topousis says the students were told they could make an appointment to see Katehi.

Katehi was criticized for joining the boards of a textbook publisher and a for-profit education company.

By Diana Lambert and Sam Stanton

dlambert@sacbee.com

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/08/13/climate-deniers-receive-more-media-attention-climate-scientists-research

New media organisations feature climate science deniers more than climate scientists, while the mainstream media promotes “false balance”, according to a new study published today in Nature Communications.

The authors examined some 100,000 English-language media articles relating to climate change for how often they mentioned a hand-picked group of 386 scientists and 386 contrarians.

The mainstream media is regularly accused of ‘false balance’ — where a climate science denier is invited to ‘balance’ the debate, despite the fact that rising temperatures driven by human-caused emissions is not scientifically disputed. But the study finds that across a sample of mainstream and new media, non-experts are actually given more visibility than experts.

Across all media sources, climate change contrarians were mentioned around 26,000 times – 49 percent more than climate change scientists.

The comparative attention afforded to scientists increased when the authors reduced their search to 30 mainstream media outlets, including the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Across these mainstream publications, sceptics and scientists were mentioned roughly the same number or times. Indeed, the most elite 224 scientists were mentioned 38 percent more times than the 224 contrarians that had at least one scientific paper to their name.

Visibility

Does that mean the mainstream media is doing a good job? Not really. Alexander Petersen, the paper’s lead author and assistant professor at the University of California Merced, questions why contrarians are still visible in the media at all.

“This is a challenge to modern information systems, which can readily scale up any voice to a very large magnitude. We’ve demonstrated objectively the degree to which new media can really amplify small positions,” he told DeSmog.

“Journalists should have moved beyond this supposed debate that really doesn’t exist, and should move onto other aspects of climate change communication – for example discussing how policy should proceed to really take action. Yes, there’s a small pool of these sceptics but it’s not clear to me why they’re even in the conversation.”

High Profile Voices

The paper highlights the media sources that publish most prolifically on climate change, alongside those that most frequently mention climate scientists. Among the blogs and publications that are frequently publishing on climate change, and which have a known preference for publishing sceptics, are Climate Depot and Heartland.

The three most visible climate scientists are Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth and Andrew Weaver (the latter is also the leader of the Green Party in British Columbia). The contrarians on which the paper focuses are kept anonymous. The database was assembled partly through data gathered by DeSmog, which did not have any role in the research.

The paper suggests that the parity between sceptics and scientists in the mainstream media could be down to an ingrained tendency among journalists to seek “balance” – until 1987, contrarians in the US were guaranteed airtime by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Fairness Doctrine.

By now, false balance should be a thing of the past, as the evidence for climate change becomes undeniable, says Petersen. “There should be a better effort on both sides, both by the journalist seeking sources and the scientists promoting their work, to have more of an interactive dialogue that brings the scientists into these media articles as authorities,” he suggests.

“We need to give the microphone back to the scientists so they can make various findings and recommendations crystal clear.”

Greta Thunberg, at age 16, has quickly become one of the most visible climate activists in the world. Her detractors increasingly rely on ad hominem attacks to blunt her influence.

Thunberg gained prominence after she began skipping some days of school to protest climate inaction outside Swedish parliament. She spearheaded the school walkouts that saw more than a million children across the globe leaving their classrooms to demand action on global warming.

She has addressed world and U.N. leaders and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Later this month, she'll sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a 60-foot yacht powered by solar panels and underwater turbines on her way to participate in the U.N. climate talks in New York (see related story).

But the success of Thunberg — who describes herself on Twitter as a "16 year old climate activist with Asperger" — remains a sore point for those who reject mainstream climate science and some who have helped shape or encourage the Trump administration's rollback of climate policy.

They frequently point to Thunberg's autism, claim she is used by her parents and compare her call to young people on climate change to "Hitler Youth." They have pointed to her "monotone voice" and framed her as a "millenarian weirdo" with the "look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes."

A recent opinion piece in The New York Times prompted an outcry among climate hawks and Thunberg's allies, who said the newspaper was validating these types of personal attacks on the teenage activist.

Experts say relying on ad hominem attacks has significant collateral damage in that they dissuade people with intellectual and developmental disabilities from speaking publicly. While the language of describing someone as a "puppet" or abused by adults may appear coded, it's clearly a dog whistle that signals her words should be discounted because her mind works differently, said Steve Silberman, author of "NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity."

"It's classic autism bashing," he said. "They feel at liberty to do it because autism has been framed as a pathology for decades, so they feel like they don't have to hold back, than just 'other' her, turn her into a freak when she's actually making more sense than 95% of the adults who have addressed this issue for the last 30 years."

Patrick Moore, chairman of the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition, which promotes the benefits of carbon dioxide, wrote on Twitter that "Greta=Evil." In an interview with E&E News, Moore denied that his numerous mentions of Thunberg's autism in media appearances and on social media were attacks on her disability but that he instead was "comparing her masters to Hitler."

He said that Thunberg's public speeches were written for her, that she was a "puppet" and that she was unable to answer questions in interviews because her ideas were not her own.

"They aren't her ideas," he said. "There's a reason why 16-year-olds don't vote, don't drink, don't drive, don't whatever. At that age, she is not an adult, and therefore she has no right to influence people in a political process."

Moore's group has been increasingly active on Capitol Hill and in the Trump administration. CO2 Coalition co-founder Will Happer is now serving on the National Security Council at the White House and spearheaded a shelved plan to conduct an "adversarial" review of climate science. Moore was recently invited by congressional Republicans to downplay an alarming U.N. extinction report.

Earlier this year, Trump enthusiastically tweeted a quote from a Moore performance on Fox News in which Moore said climate science was "fake news" and that more carbon dioxide would be good for humanity.

Moore said he was seeking to show Thunberg "is a full-blown tool of adults."

"She is being abused by her parents, by Al Gore, by society at large that is on side with this ideology as if there is a climate emergency," he said. "What a nonsensical, stupid concept, there is no climate emergency, I think you know, otherwise people would be fleeing from it."

While her critics claim to attack Thunberg for ideas, critiques that mention her personal traits are harmful and reliant on "prejudiced ideas about autistic people," said Zoe Gross, a spokeswoman for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. People are quick to label autistic traits, including tone of voice and facial expressions, as "creepy." She said criticism of Thunberg that highlights the way she speaks, answers questions and displays emotions is clearly an attempt to belittle her.

"Some people may be making assumptions out of ignorance ... but others are explicitly saying that autistic people are not worth listening to," Gross wrote in an email response to questions. "It's upsetting to see any person being belittled because of their disability, especially a child. People with all kinds of disabilities can form and express opinions, speak up for ourselves and others, and become advocates and leaders."

Thunberg's critics include those who have been close to the Trump EPA.

Steve Milloy, who served on the Trump administration's EPA transition team and has pushed to restrict the use of science at the agency, has referred to Thunberg as an "adult-exploited empty-headed child."

"She's ignorant, maniacal and is being mercilessly manipulated by adult climate bedwetters funded by Putin," he wrote recently on Twitter.

At his congressional hearing, Moore testified alongside Marc Morano, who works for the conservative Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and has a blog that misrepresents and attacks climate science. Morano has been invited by the Trump administration to EPA events weakening the role of science at the agency; he was photographed giving his book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change" to former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Morano's blog describes Thunberg as an "autistic prophet." In his Twitter feed, Morano retweets criticisms of her that center on her autism.

"She hasn't been called a mascot. Which; is really what she is. She'll get a Nobel Prize and a wanna-be Ph.d. from Harvard. For being autistic and not going to school," wrote one follower retweeted by Morano.

Conservative media have also begun using Thunberg's character traits in an attempt to minimize her words. A columnist at The Federalist, for instance, recently wrote that Thunberg's struggles with autism while growing up "bred in her an absolutist attitude that is far from attractive." An editor of the right-wing British magazine Spiked, which receives funding from the Koch brothers network,called Thunberg a "weirdo" and wrote that "there is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg."

Andrew Bolt, a Sky News host, recently wrote a column that called Thunberg "deeply disturbed."

"I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru," he wrote. "But Thunberg has something very rare as well: a sense of absolute certainty. She shows not the slightest doubt and forgives not the slightest compromise. This allows followers who are tormented with doubt and burden of freedom to relax into her totalitarian certainty. And in Thunberg's case, that certainty comes from what normally would be seen as a disability."

In the New York Times opinion piece, The Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell called Thunberg a "complicated adolescent."

"Intellectually, she is precocious and subtle," Caldwell wrote. "She reasons like a well-read but dogmatic student radical in her 20s. Physically, she is diminutive and fresh-faced, comes off as younger than her years, and frequently refers to herself as a 'child' — about the last thing the average 16-year-old would ever do."

Thunberg's autism actually informs her activism and motivates her to speak out against the falsehoods spouted by climate deniers, said Silberman, the author of "NeuroTribes." He said she doesn't pay any attention to the false notion of a "debate" in climate science.

Thunberg speaks like "one of the few people who has woken up out of this fever dream of bullshit that's spread by these right-wing politicians and oil company misinformation," Silberman said.

"Unlike most neurotypical people, she can't just shrug off the fact that of course oil company executives are going to lie and politicians who are beholden to them are going to lie," he said. "She can't abide that, it bothers her almost viscerally."

For her part, Thunberg has said that autism is "not a 'gift'" but that it "CAN be a superpower."

"I've had my fair share of depressions, alienation, anxiety and disorders," she wrote in a Facebook post in April. "But without my diagnosis, I would never have started school striking. Because then I would have been like everyone else."

the gift that keeps giving

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/05/23/climate-science-deniers-marc-morano-patrick-moore-biodiversity-report

many lnx graf

First, Climate Change, Now the Global Extinction Crisis: Industry-Paid Hacks Deny Science to Congress

Read time: 5 mins

By Justin Mikulka • Thursday, May 23, 2019 - 16:18

Patrick Moore, Marc Morano, Robert Watson]

In this week’s Congressional hearing on the recent (and dire) UN Global Assessment of Biodiversity, conservation scientist Dr. Jacob Malcom did not mince words as he explained the report's startling findings that one million species are at risk of extinction.

“We are, as you have heard, losing species faster than ever in human history, tens to hundreds of times faster than the background rate of extinction,” the Defenders of Wildlife scientist told the Congressional House Water, Oceans, and Wildlife Subcommittee. “We are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction, where the last time this happened it was because an asteroid hit the planet. Today we are that asteroid.”

Such a massive loss of plants, animals, and other species would also, quite naturally, affect human life on earth. But just as they have with hearings on the climate crisis, Congressional Republicans and their witnesses used this opportunity to attack the well-documented scientific evidence of a far-reaching global threat to life. And they even used some of the same climate science deniers and tired arguments to do it.

The comprehensive report they attacked gathers even more evidence that human activities are having a significant effect on global biodiversity, just as the scientific consensus shows humans are driving rapid changes in the climate.

“The evidence is crystal clear: Nature is in trouble. Therefore we are in trouble,” Sandra Díaz, one of the co-chairs of the UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, told National Geographic.

Business as Usual With Republican Science Denial

Marc Morano isn’t a scientist but does make his money attacking scientists. From 2006 to 2009, Morano was the communications director for Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who will be remembered for his stunt of throwing a snowball in Congress as he tried to discredit climate science.

Morano moved on from politics to working for organizations funded by oil companies, and he currently runs the website ClimateDepot.com, a project funded by the climate science-denying Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a conservative think tank which has received funding from ExxonMobil, Chevron, and the Koch brothers.

This week, Morano wasted no time in attacking some of the actual scientists on the hearing's panel, specifically Sir Robert T. Watson, who heads the UN agency that produced the biodiversity report. These attacks on fellow witnesses resulted in hearing Chairman Jared Huffman (D-CA) twice reprimanding Morano.

Rep. Huffman had to ask that Morano “show respect for your fellow panelists.”

[vid]

However, oil industry-funded attacks on climate science, and even Robert Watson, are nothing new. In 2001 a memo to the Bush administration from Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol specifically requests that Watson be removed as head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a position he held at the time.

And Morano, a notorious climate science denier, is continuing this long tradition of groups funded by Exxon attacking Watson. Exxon has donated heavily to CFACT and was also involved in the infamous “Victory Will Be Achieved” memo. This memo, assembled by Randol and the American Petroleum Institute, declared in 1998 that “Victory will be achieved when average citizens 'understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.”

The other climate science denier on the witness panel this week was Dr. Patrick Moore, current head of the CO2 Coalition, an organization that grew out of a now-defunct group heavily funded by Exxon.

What did the leader of an organization called “the CO2 Coalition” have to say about carbon dioxide?

“There is no hard evidence that CO2 has anything to do with the change in temperature of the earth’s climate,” Moore told the committee.

In fact, Exxon’s own research accurately predicted the rise in CO2 and temperature which the world has been experiencing.

However, Moore not only made the claim that CO2 doesn’t contribute to atmospheric warming — a concept first demonstrated by Eunice Foote in 1856 — but also said that because humans have been increasing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, they were actually the “salvation of life on earth.” And while plants do use carbon dioxide, more CO2 is not necessarily good for plants.

Not everyone in the hearing seemed interested in the blatantly false statements coming from these industry-backed science deniers. Chairman Huffman noted that the efforts came from the “shadowy corners of these junior varsity think tanks.”

Solutions Amid the Attacks and Noise

Due to the format of Congressional hearings and the general GOP policy of climate science denial, these hearings typically offer very little in the way of solutions or actual debate. However, two of the panelists did speak about the threats to biodiversity and comment on solutions.

Malcom, the scientist from Defenders of Wildlife, called out the success of the U.S. Endangered Species Act. “We have forty some odd years showing that the Endangered Species Act has worked incredibly well and as we all know the American economy has continued to grow throughout that entire time,” he said.

Notably, the Trump administration currently is attempting to weaken the scope and effectiveness of the Endangered Species Act.

Perhaps the most concrete recommendation of the day came from Watson, who recommended that governments stop subsidizing industries that are causing harm to the climate and global species.

“One should get rid of many of these environmentally harmful subsidies in agriculture, energy, and transportation,” Watson told the committee.

With suggestions like these, Watson was an obvious target for industry-funded science deniers like Morano and Moore.

https://naturalresources.house.gov/subcommittees/water-oceans-and-wildlife

DEMOCRATS 519

May 22 House committee hearing on the extinction crisis devolved into a spectacle resembling a Fox News segment, thanks to two frequent Fox guests who were invited by Republicans to testify.

The House Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife held a hearing on the recent summary report from the United Nations that warned human activity is leading to the possible extinction of up to 1 million plant and animal species. The Democratic majority invited expert scientists as witnesses, including Robert Watson, who led the U.N. team that wrote the biodiversity report, and two of the other scientists who worked on it. The Republican minority invited two of Fox News’ favorite climate deniers, Marc Morano and Patrick Moore, who only downplayed the report's findings and cast doubt on climate science.

Morano and Moore have appeared on Fox multiple times in 2019

Morano, a notorious, polluter-backed climate denier, is a Fox News favorite, regularly invited on-air to discuss environmental topics despite the fact that he has no scientific credentials. So far in 2019, Morano has appeared on Fox News shows at least 10 times. His most recent appearances were on May 6 when he commented on the U.N. biodiversity report on two of Fox's “news”-side shows, Shepard Smith Reporting and Special Report with Bret Baier. Both shows aired footage of Morano trying to undermine the report:

MARC MORANO: This is politics, not science. The U.N. is trying to expand its base to include climate and species. They are looking for more treaties, more regulation. They have identified a problem, they've juiced it up, and they put themselves in charge of solving the problem. That's called a self-interested lobbying organization.

Morano has also appeared three times this year on President Donald Trump's favorite show, Fox & Friends: on April 30, when he claimed that carbon dioxide is not pollution; on February 12, when he called efforts to reduce climate change "medieval witchcraft"; and on February 8, when he lied about what's in the Green New Deal and called it "a big bowl of crazy."

Morano has also repeatedly appeared on Infowars, the far-right outlet run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. And he recently attacked a young climate activist online, which led to trolls threatening her.

Moore is another Fox News favorite who is frequently invited on the network to downplay environmental issues or to deny that climate change is happening, despite also having no background as a climate scientist and raking in money from polluting industries. So far in 2019, he has appeared on Fox News shows at least five times, all in mid-March. One notable appearance came on the March 12 episode of Fox & Friends, during which he claimed that "the whole climate crisis, as they call it, is not only fake news, it's fake science." This appearance caught the eye of another climate denier, Trump, who approvingly tweeted out a quote from Moore. Moore tries to appear credible by claiming that he was a co-founder of Greenpeace, but this is not true.

Morano and Moore made a mockery of the House hearing, and that’s exactly what Republicans wanted

The May 22 House hearing was supposed to be about the U.N.'s new extinction report, but Morano and Moore made a mockery of this occasion by accusing the scientists who wrote the report of having a political agenda and by downplaying the effects of climate change.

In his written testimony, Morano claimed that his political science background is “an ideal background for examining the latest round of UN environmental claims” and argued that the U.N. “twists and hypes and distorts science in order to push a political agenda.” During the hearing, he also wrongly attacked the 97% scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. Subcommittee Chair Jared Huffman (D-CA) called Morano out for "trolling" climate scientists, saying he came from the "shadowy corners of these junior varsity think tanks."

In Moore’s written testimony, he called the U.N. report's findings “highly exaggerated” and made reference to the “manufactured ‘climate crisis.’” He also falsely stated that without rising CO2 levels, plants would be much worse off. Moore often sings the praises of pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, despite the fact that it is definitely not good.

Morano and Moore also got more time at the hearing than the four scientists invited by the Democrats, according to Public Citizen.

Fox News has helped to put Morano and Moore in the public eye by giving them a platform to sow doubt about climate change and other serious environmental issues, and now the two men’s latest Fox-worthy rants are part of the congressional record. The vicious cycle continues.

https://www.therebel.media/marc-morano-climate-depot-rolling-stone-climate-report-united-nation-fox-news

last night's episode of The Ezra Levant Show with guest host David Menzies, Marc Morano of Climate Depot called in to talk about how Rolling Stone is after him for speaking truthfully about a United Nations climate report on Fox News.

fox & f

MORANO (CLIMATEDEPOT.COM): No. First of all, pollution, carbon dioxide, humans -- we inhale oxygen, we exhale carbon dioxide, so he's calling CO2 pollution, which it's not. No, this plan is as pie in the sky as the Green New Deal except it's a little bit more tepid. What's happened here is Beto O'Rourke is not satisfying the Democratic base. Within minutes of him releasing this plan, the Sunrise Movement, which was instrumental in the Green New Deal, is going after Beto O'Rourke for going back on his pledge from 2030 zero emissions to now 2050. They are saying that Beto's plan could result in 100 million climate refugees and tens of million dead. So that's the thanks that Beto O'Rourke gets for coming up with a lighter version of the Green New Deal and a massive federal boondoggle, just not as big a boondoggle as the Green New Deal's proposal.

random 3/18 gmail alert grab

Motivated or manipulated? Rise of youth climate activism fuels alarm over exploitation

Washington Times

Kids are fast becoming the face of the climate change movement as teenagers, 'tweens and even younger children file lawsuits, stage walkouts and ...

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Marc Morano: AOC Green New Deal puts a “global warming face on socialism”

The Rebel

On last night's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, guest-host David Menzies and Marc Morano of Climate Depot discussed everything wrong with ...

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New global-warming report reveals polar bears thriving

WND.com

... out Marc Morano at the Climate Depot website, which presents evidence countering the claim that mankind is causing catastrophic global warming.

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Trudeau loves to apologize — except for his own mistakes (Guest host: David Menzies)

The Rebel

(Ezra Levant is in the UK covering Tommy Robinson's fight against police harassment, so David Menzies is guest hosting tonight...) For Justin Trudeau ...

from gmail tag: note all in small unknown outlets

https://senecastandard.com/climate-guru-im-calling-bullst-on-ocasio-cortez-climate-fakery/30724/

EXPOSING CLIMATE HYPOCRISY, SCIENTIFIC MALFEASANCE, AND DOUBLESPEAK

JULY 17, 2018

By Jay Lehr

Marc Morano's Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change covers almost every climate change topic imaginable, exposing the lies and hypocrisy behind the scare along the way.

Review of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, by Mark Morano (Regnery Publishing), 2018, 413 pages, ISBN-10: 1621576760, ISBN-13: 978-1621576761; $17.59 on Amazon

Mark Morano has worked in the climate change trenches for more than three decades, and it is safe to say he has talked with almost every prominent person on both the science side and the advocacy side of the climate debate.

Morano began as a documentary filmmaker exposing environmental scams, then worked for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Morano now leads the award-winning website ClimateDepot.com for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. He has traveled the world, attending many of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summits. This book is Morano’s story of his “adventures in climate change,” presenting a Who’s Who of the climate warriors my regular readers love and those they (justifiably) don’t like, plus an evaluation of their scientific and policy positions.

Comprehensive Climate Coverage

Morano’s book covers almost every climate change topic imaginable.

Morano examines, for example, climate scares throughout the centuries, the historical waxing and waning of the polar ice caps and glaciers, IPCC shenanigans, the weaknesses of climate models, why there is no true consensus humans are causing climate change, the gravy train of funding for climate research, and more.

Morano interviewed as many IPCC members as possible, to show how the climate change sausage is made.

I am confident the vast majority of those who read this book recognize science is not to be done by consensus but by honest and thorough testing of hypotheses. Morano quotes eminent scientists and scholars such as Princeton physicist Will Happer, MIT’s Richard Lindzen, meteorologist Anthony Watts, and the standard bearer of climate skepticism, Lord Christopher Monckton, to make that point in spades.

Importantly, Morano documents the false use of statistics behind the fraudulent claim 97 percent of scientists agree humans are causing catastrophic climate change, citing numerous studies demonstrating there is no such consensus.

Anecdotes, Quotes Tell Story

Morano sprinkles anecdotes and quotes throughout the book, which by themselves tell nearly the whole scandalous story of the greatest scientific fraud, in my opinion, ever perpetrated on the world. Morano nails the scientists responsible for this travesty, hoisting them by their own petards. For example, Morano takes the reader step-by-step through Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann’s development of his notorious “hockey stick” presentation of the global temperature record, which critics have determined to be fraudulent. Morano also exposes unethical scientists’ attempts to fool the public into believing some of our recent years have been the warmest on record when they do not come close to many temperatures from the 1930s, also documenting the vilification of those who exposed the discrepancies.

Morano does an equally good job of recounting the dark “Climategate” scandal in which scientists dropped inconvenient data from their analyses, attempted to suppress the publication of research undermining their claims humans are causing climate change, and schemed to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests to provide their underlying data for confirmation and analysis.

Morano uses quotes from prominent scientists to expose the numerous weaknesses inherent in climate models. For instance, the late atmospheric scientist Augie Auer said “most of these climate predictions or models are about a half step ahead of Play Station 3,” and renowned Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson calls climate models ”rubbish.” Prof. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania states IPCCs procedures “clearly violate 72 of the 89 scientific principles of forecasting,” Morano notes.

Vying for Control

Morano’s chapter on icecaps and sea levels is a fun read, as he covers the many instances in which alarmists sailed into supposedly open waters to demonstrate the melting of the polar ice caps only to have their ships become trapped in ice. Morano also uses the centuries of existing data to expose pseudo-scientists’ attempts to scare the public about rising seas.

Morano convincingly argues the climate change war is all about activists’ and governments’ lust for central planning, global governance, and redistribution of wealth. “It’s just the most recent in a long chain of eco-scares—overpopulation, deforestation, the ozone hole, resource scarcity, and so forth—for which the solution is always the same: global regulation by central planners,” Morano writes.

As Morano notes, Richard Lindzen of MIT concurs, saying in Senate testimony in 2007 “controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.”

Big Money for Alarmists

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change makes clear the idea climate skeptics are Goliaths battling alarmist Davids has it backwards. Funding from governments and billionaire donors dwarfs the financial support for real science in the climate change debate. Australian researcher Joanne Nova documented climate realists are battling a multibillion-dollar industry, with $79 billion spent on alarmists’ behalf just through 2009.

Morano ends the book on a positive note, expressing hope for the future, which he sees as justified by the election of Donald Trump as president. Trump publicly rejects alarmists’ climate claims and the big-government actions promoted by those pushing them. Morano argues Trump’s presidency provides the opportunity to begin a sober, factually grounded, assessment of climate science and climate policy, which, he says, could bring the United States back from the brink of economic disaster.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (jlehr@heartland.org) is science director of The Heartland Institute.

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Overview Product Details About the Author Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword John Coleman xv

Chapter 1 The Education of a Climate Denier 1

Chapter 2 Climate Change Déjà Vu 13

Two Centuries of Climate Scares 14

The Inconvenient Global Cooling Scare of the 1970s 16

The Big Switch 21

Chapter 3 "Pulled from Thin Air": The 97 Percent "Consensus" 27

Fooling Even the Scientists 28

Whole Dozens of Scientists! 31

Dubious Evidence for a Ubiquitous Number 34

The Fake Science Is Not Fooling the Public 39

Chapter 4 The Tail Does Not Wag the Dog 41

The Origins of the Global Warming Scare 42

Human Beings Don't Breathe Out Poison 45

What Really Causes Climate Change 48

The Positive Benefits of CO2 51

If Anything, It's the Other Way Around 53

Chapter 5 The Ice Caps Are Melting! 61

The Antarctic 62

Greenland and the Arctic 67

Sea Level 72

The Polar Bears 78

Chapter 6 The Hottest Temperatures in a Thousand Years! Michael Mann's Hockey Schtick 83

Hiding the Medieval Warm Period 86

The Hockey Stick Breaks under Scrutiny 88

Replicating Error 91

Dissension in the Ranks 93

Chapter 7 A Long Cool Pause 97

Satellites over Surface 100

The Pause That Refreshes 104

The World Is Not Burning 107

Chapter 8 Models Do Not Equal Evidence 109

Predictions Are Suddenly "Evidence," Models are Now "Data" 110

Sub-Standard Software 112

In Violation of Basic Principles 115

Chapter 9 The Eroding "Consensus" 119

Goaded into Taking a Stand 120

Re-Evaluating the Evidence 120

More Skeptics on the Left 125

From True Believers to Heretics 128

Chapter 10 Climategate: The UN IPCC Exposed 143

Breaking Ranks 147

Circling the Wagons 152

Thoroughly Discredited 154

Insiders Speak Out 161

Chapter 11 What's in a Name? How "Global Warming" Became "Climate Change" 165

Unfalsifiable 166

Emergency! The Government Must Fix the Weather! 174

All the World's Ills 179

Chapter 12 Not So Extreme 189

Normal Variation 190

Tropical Cyclones and Hurricanes 192

Tornadoes 201

Drought 204

Floods and Heavy Rains 207

Wildfires 210

Ocean Acidification 213

Chapter 13 The Ever-Receding Tipping Point 215

Deadlines Come and Go 217

The Last Chance 220

"Serially Doomed" 222

Chapter 14 Controlling Climate … or You? 225

Spreading the Wealth, Governing the Globe 227

Dictator Envy 229

Voluntary Poverty 232

The Carbon Tax 235

Just Turn Down the Heat 237

Chapter 15 Climbing onto the Climate Change Gravy Train 241

Deep Pockets 242

Making Out like a Bandit 246

They Get More Money-Even from Gas Producers 249

Cut Them Off 255

Chapter 16 Hypocrisy on Parade 259

High Fliers 263

Noble Savages 267

More Hollywood Hypocrites 269

Chapter 17 Child Propaganda 273

Frightening the Children-and Using Them 275

Children versus the Climate 279

Chapter 18 Bypassing Democracy to Impose Green Energy Mandates 283

Chinafication 284

No Impact 289

Note Winning over the Public 292

Chapter 19 Green Colonialism 295

We've Got Ours 296

Fossil Fuels-A Power for Good 299

Keeping the Black Man Down 301

Irreplaceable 305

CO2, the Healthy Addiction 308

Chapter 20 The Way Forward 311

Dismantling a Disastrous Legacy 313

Sound Policy 315

The Fight Goes On 320

Acknowledgments 323

Notes 325

Index 399

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, Author: Robert Murphy

The Politically Incorrect…

by Robert Murphy

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting, Author: Frank Miniter

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by Frank Miniter

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Title: Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, Author: Kevin Gutzman

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by Kevin Gutzman

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire, Author: H. W. Crocker

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by H. W. Crocker

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire, Author: H. W. Crocker

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by H. W. Crocker

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Title: The Politically Incorrect GuideTM to the Founding Fathers, Author: Brion McClanahan

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by Brion McClanahan

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, Author: John Zmirak

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by John Zmirak

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism: The Killingest Idea Ever, Author: Paul Kengor

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by Paul Kengor

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, Author: Jonathan Wells

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by Jonathan Wells

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, Author: Marc Morano

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by Marc Morano

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, Author: Robert P. Murphy

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by Robert P. Murphy

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, Author: John Zmirak

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21 - 35 of 35 results for "Politically Incorrect Guides Series"

Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, Part 1: From Washington to Taft, Author: Larry Schweikart

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by Larry Schweikart

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the American Revolution, Author: Larry Schweikart

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by Larry Schweikart

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, Author: Elizabeth Kantor

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by Elizabeth Kantor

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), Author: Robert Spencer

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by Robert Spencer

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, Part 2: From Wilson to Obama, Author: Steven F. Hayward

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by Steven F. Hayward

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Christianity, Author: Michael P. Foley

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by Michael P. Foley

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Real American Heroes, Author: Brion McClanahan

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by Brion McClanahan

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties, Author: Jonathan Leaf

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by Jonathan Leaf

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama, Author: Steven F. Hayward

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by Steven F. Hayward

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible, Author: Robert J. Hutchinson

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by Robert J. Hutchinson

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Author: Thomas E. Woods

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by Thomas E. Woods

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South: And Why It Will Rise Again, Author: Clint Johnson

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by Clint Johnson

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East, Author: Martin Sieff

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by Martin Sieff

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, Author: Christopher C. Horner

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by Christopher C. Horner

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Title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science / Edition 1, Author: Tom Bethell

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change eBook by Marc ...

www.simonandschuster.com/.../The-Politically-Incorrect-Guide-to-Climate-Change/.../...

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change by Marc Morano - Less freedom. More regulation. Higher costs. Make no mistake: those are the surefire...

A must-read: The Politically Incorrect Guide® to Climate Change ...

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Feb 25, 2018 - Barnes and Noble has it. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-climate-change-marc-morano/1126845893

New Book: 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change' – by the ...

www.climatedepot.com/.../new-book-the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-climate-chang...

Mar 3, 2018 - New Book: 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change' – by the 'evil planet killer Marc Morano' – 'Like a bullet, it is now the #1 New ...

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Mar 4, 2018 - The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change gives a voice — backed by statistics, real-life stories, and incontrovertible evidence — to the ...

Q&A: Marc Morano's Politically Incorrect Book About Climate Change

https://www.dailysignal.com/.../qa-the-politically-incorrect-book-that-debunks-climate...

Jun 3, 2018 - It actually culminated in a documentary on the Amazon rainforest. >>> Buy the Book: “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change”.

http://www.wnd.com/2018/06/tv-weathercasters-now-push-global-warming/

a campaign “fraught with bad science” to deploy TV weathercasters as climate activists is spearheaded by federally funded groups that support shutting down debate on the issue by invoking RICO statutes, contends a leading skeptic of the theory of human-caused global warming.

Marc Morano, editor of the Climate Depot site, highlights a report by NBC News that claims meteorologists are being recruited by George Mason University and the non-profit Climate Central.

The objective of the effort, according to Morano, is “to promote climate change fears on your nightly weather forecast.”

He calls the climate information promoted by the activist meteorologists “pure propaganda,” noting they use 1970 as a starting date for their claim of a recent, dramatic rise in global temperatures.

The 1970s was one of the coldest decades in American history, and had they started with 1950, there would be almost no warming shown, Morano argues.

The Princeton, New Jersey-based group Climate Central sponsors classes and webinars for meteorologists and also shares real-time data and graphics with TV stations.

Since launching its “Climate Matters” education program in 2012, the group has reached more than 500 local TV weathercasters, about a quarter of those working in the U.S.

This week, according to NBC, it is expanding its effort to a wider group of journalists.

Morano points out that Climate Central is funded by federal tax dollars that “helps promote climate fears.”

“So taxpayers are having to pay Climate Central to produce what is often grossly inaccurate and misleading propaganda, which in turn supports the federal government’s agenda,” he writes.

NBC News cites George Mason professor Ed Maibach as a key figure in the effort to recruit weathercasters.

However, as Morano points out, Maibach is not a climate scientist. He has a BA in social psychology from the University of California and a PhD in communication research from Stanford University.

[whole bunch of code]

Maibach was a signatory of the controversial letter to President Obama urging the use of RICO statutes against climate skeptics.

Climate Central receives government funding from NASA, the National Science Foundation and private funding from groups such as Grantham Foundation and Rockefeller Family Fund.

Morano cites blogger Paul Homewood, who said it “could hardly be a more incestuous relationship.”

“NASA pumps funding into the Center in order to persuade the public of the terrors of global warming, which in turn will help to maintain their own funding, which can then be used to further ramp up the scare,” Homewood wrote. “It is no wonder Mr Maibach is so keen to sign the (RICO) letter, and silence skeptics.”

The NBC story features veteran weatherman Steve LaPointe of WRGB in Albany, New York, who was skeptical about the claims of global-warming scientists over most of his career.

But after doing “a lot of homework” and connecting with Climate Central, he “increasingly came to realize he was wrong,” NBC said, and eventually concluded it’s “irrefutable” that humans causing potentially catastrophic warming of the Earth

fox biz

Speed of Antarctic ice melt triples: Humans to blame?

Jun. 15, 2018 - 4:17 - ClmateDepot.com founder Marc Morano on a report claiming the speed at which Antarctic ice is melting has increased dramatically and the city of Berkeley declaring a climate emergency.

https://www.theblaze.com/video/this-author-is-debunking-climate-change-myths-by-dropping-a-few-historical-facts

Tired of hearing from the climate change lobby that your car is the problem, not the international roundtrip flights that celebrities take to accept “green” awards? Author Marc Morano joined “The Morning Blaze” today to talk about his new book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”

On today’s show, Morano shared some of the history behind climate change alarmism; explained why the facts don’t back up the rhetoric; and exposed a few examples of celebrity hypocrisy. Al Gore warned us that we were melting the polar ice caps, so why does his house use exponentially more power than the average American home?

Special: Exclusive: Our trusted expert reveals shock number 1 investment of 2018

Check out the rest of Morano’s interview (with more climate change debunking) with the full show here.

To see more from Doc, visit his channel on TheBlaze and listen live to “The Morning Blaze with Doc Thompson” weekdays 6 a.m. – 9 a.m. ET, only on TheBlaze Radio Network.

orwellian transparency, no press allowed?

secret sci bs:

Prominent climate science deniers were in attendance at the EPA announcement, including Marc Morano, Steve Milloy, and Will Happer.

...

Morano: Activists target Scott Pruitt because he's effective

The Rebel

On Friday's show, Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com joined me to discuss activists and the media attacking Environmental Protection Agency Administrator (EPA) Scott Pruitt. Marc and I agree that Pruitt has been Trump's most effective cabinet secretary, so naturally, he would be one of the left's main ...

1/18

Marc Morano: Climate Alarmists Make Absurd, Contradictory Claims on Cold and Snow

The Heartland Institute

Marc Morano, director of Climate Depot, discusses the most recent absurd claim made by Al Gore. Gore, citing work by Michael Mann, shows how the recent record setting cold spell and snowfall results from human induced climate change. Morano examines previous statements by climate scientists ...

https://www.heartland.org/multimedia/podcasts/marc-morano-climate-alarmists-make-absurd-contradictory-claims-on-cold-and-snow

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Gore snubbed by Hollywood as 'Inconvenient Sequel' misses out on Oscar nod

Washington Times

“Even Hollywood could not give Gore's climate turkey sequel a mention at the Oscars,” said Climate Depot's Marc Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” slated for release Feb. 26 by Regnery. “When a politically correct film like Gore's is dissed, it means it was below even ...

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/11/16/climate-depot-marc-morano-cop23-spins-climate-denial-turkish-tv

no link vid

Climate Depot's Marc Morano made his annual trek to the United Nations climate talks, where he and his colleagues like to tweak climate campaigners and delegates with their well-greased climate science-denying PR machine.

Most years, CFACT (The Commitee for a Constructive Tomorrow), which publishes Morano's Climate Depot website, will hold a press conference, but this year none is on the schedule. To fill his time this morning, Morano, who loves to play dress-up, donned a captain's outfit and mocked a Greenpeace campaign boat.

This afternoon, Morano sat down in front of a Turkish TV camera to debate Massachusetts state senator Michael Barrett about President Trump's pledge to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The DeSmog team became aware of the interview when overhearing Morano's booming voice announce before the interview, “I'm not here representing Trump, but I agree with him.”

Here is Morano bragging about how the United States is now the only country intending to pull out of the Paris Agreement:

And here he is responding to a question about the 97 percent consensus, and somehow equating Harvard-educated scientists and politicians to the judges in the Salem witch trials.

Next year, the climate talks will be held in Katowice, Poland, and we expect that Morano will be back singing the praises of fossil fuels (especially Polish coal), and dismissing the sc

ggl alert led to nonsensical art'ls robot aggregator?

http://xnewspress.com/2017/08/u-s-already-feeling-effects-of-climate-change-report-says/

quotes morno more co2 led to less ext weather

"x news press" xnewspress.com

Federal scientists contradict Trump on climate change

Fox5NY

So as CO2 has risen, our weather has gotten less extreme," the Climate Depot's Marc Morano said. "Hurricanes, floods, droughts… Floods -- there's ...

Climate skeptics slam New York Times as 'fake news' - Washington Examiner

Full Coverage

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Film flop: Maybe, just maybe, it's Gore's fault?

OneNewsNow

Climate Depot's Marc Morano, a skeptic of catastrophic man-made climate change (a.k.a., "global warming"), doesn't buy that Paramount is to blame.

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Debunking Al Gore's solar energy lies

The Rebel

On Friday's show, ClimateDepot.com's Marc Morano and I discussed Al Gore's latest lies about his personal energy consumption. Al Gore is notorious ...

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This was not supposed to happen': Gore's sequel comes in dismal 15th at box office

Canada Free Press

Gore fans reduced to blaming the distributor. 'A botched strategy by Paramount Pictures effectively sabotaged the nationwide release' of Gore's sequel ...

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Trudeau, Soros laughing as “refugees” pour into Quebec from US

The Rebel

It's nuts. Thousands of young men are just walking across the border from the United States to Quebec. And claiming to be refugees. There are a few ...