climatewire good E & E
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greenwire disambig
1000 Wilson Blvd, 8th Floor Arlington, VA 22209
202-628-6500
tim cama et al sexual favors?
https://www.eenews.net/articles/inhofes-legacy-a-vast-alumni-network-on-climate-energy/
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Carbon removal looks more promising by the day. Is methane next?
BY Chelsea Harvey | 10/19/2023
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CLIMATEWIRE | In a win for local governments suing oil and gas majors over climate change, a federal appeals court Wednesday became the seventh to reject the industry’s bid to move a lawsuit to federal court.
In a unanimous ruling, three judges with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state of Connecticut, upholding a lower court decision that said the state’s lawsuit against Exxon Mobil should be heard in state court.
In a twist, the decision was written by Judge Richard Sullivan, who wrote a 2021 decision for the appeals court that found that New York City’s claims in a climate lawsuit were preempted by federal law.
The industry has relied on the 2021 ruling to argue that it represents a split among the courts. An industry attorney cited it as recently as Tuesday in an effort to get a similar case in Delaware dismissed.
But Sullivan, who called the Connecticut and New York lawsuits “very different” in oral arguments last September, noted in Wednesday’s opinion that the court was joining its sister circuits in rejecting the company’s request to move the cases.
Connecticut’s lawsuit is one of more than two dozen filed by municipalities that accuse the industry of lying to the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. The industry has sought to move the cases to federal court where producers believe they have a better chance to toss the cases under the Clean Air Act.
But Sullivan wrote that the Connecticut case presents a “total mismatch” between the business practices that Exxon Mobil argued were subject to federal control and the behavior that Connecticut is challenging.
Connecticut’s claims, Sullivan wrote, “ultimately concern neither extracting oil and gas nor burning them, but talking about what happens to the environment when they are burned.”
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D), who filed the case in 2020, welcomed the decision and said his office is ready to “aggressively prosecute” the lawsuit in state court.
“Our case is simple and strong — Exxon Mobil amassed billions of dollars in profits off a decadeslong campaign of lies, and they must be held accountable,” Tong said.
He called the case a “straightforward consumer deception case” and said it was built on the state’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, which was argued in cases involving the tobacco and opioid industries.
The industry said the decision “misses” the real issue.
“The nature of climate change, this whole litigation and the remedies that Connecticut and other jurisdictions seek are all beyond the scope of any state law,” said Phil Goldberg, special counsel to the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, an initiative of the National Association of Manufacturers.
He argued that determining how best to address climate change is a “major national and international priority that cannot be decided piecemeal by state judges based on which companies each state or locality decides to sue.”
Sullivan, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote that the Supreme Court has cautioned that judges should “be reluctant” to find the authority that “converts an ordinary state common law complaint into one stating a federal claim.”
And he added that the judges were “wholly unpersuaded by Exxon Mobil’s efforts to push the boundaries of the exceptions” it claimed.
He said the judges agreed with the lower court decision that found Connecticut accuses Exxon Mobil of lying to the state’s consumers and the “fact that the alleged lies were about the impacts of fossil fuels on the Earth’s climate is immaterial.”
He noted that the sides “vigorously dispute” whether federal pollution law is at play in the case. But he added the allegation that Exxon Mobil’s statements ran afoul of Connecticut’s “truth in advertising” laws, “have absolutely nothing to do with the federal common law of transboundary pollution.”
The company had argued the case should be heard in federal court because it leases oil drilling sites from the federal government and is subject to “myriad” federal regulations.
But the court was not convinced, with Sullivan writing that “Exxon Mobil has made this very argument to five of our sister circuits, all of which have squarely rejected it. We find their reasoning persuasive, and we now join them.”
Sullivan wrote that Exxon Mobil had argued the federal government had “significant control” over the means of oil and gas production during World War II.
“But World War II ended in 1945,” he wrote, adding that the conduct Connecticut cites dates to no earlier than the 1950s. “We are aware of no authority for the proposition that once a private company has acted under the close supervision of the federal government for some discrete period in its history, it may claim ‘acting-under’ status for the rest of time.”
He was joined in the case by Judge William Nardini, another Trump appointee, and Judge Myrna Pérez, an appointee of President Joe Biden.
The ruling comes as the Supreme Court earlier this year boosted a raft of similar cases by rejecting the oil industry’s latest efforts to derail them. Those rulings could pave the way for a flood of lawsuits against the industry to be heard in state courts from Maryland to Hawaii.
California earlier this month became the eighth and largest state to file a climate deception lawsuit.
The state of Delaware defended its lawsuit against the industry Tuesday in a three-hour hearing before Superior Court Judge Mary Miller Johnston.
Ted Boutrous, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who represents Chevron in a number of the climate liability cases, raised Sullivan’s 2021 opinion in the New York case, telling Johnston it “provides a road map” for her court and that federal law should govern the case.
He noted Delaware argues that the cases are different, but he insisted the cases contained “the very same allegations.”
Victor Sher of the law firm Sher Edling, who represented the state, said the New York lawsuit was based on a different liability standard.
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/big-tobacco-had-to-pay-206b-is-big-oil-next/
In 2006, a federal judge issued a scathing ruling that would reverberate across the country.
"Over the course of more than 50 years, Defendants lied, misrepresented and deceived the American public," Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in a nearly 1,700-page opinion.
"Defendants have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted," she wrote.
kessler was referring to the largest U.S. tobacco companies and their trade associations, which she found had misled American consumers about the harmful health effects of smoking cigarettes and the addictive nature of nicotine.
But she might as well have been describing the world’s biggest oil and gas companies.
That’s according to states and municipalities that are now suing fossil fuel companies over their contribution to — and alleged deception about — the dangers of climate change.
"The tobacco companies were deliberately lying about the harmful effects of cigarettes, and they had to pay for those false statements," said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), who filed a climate liability lawsuit last year against Exxon Mobil Corp., the American Petroleum Institute and three Koch entities.
"With Exxon Mobil, Koch and API, we will show that they, too, were deliberately misleading and lying to the public about how their products caused climate change so they could keep making billions of dollars," Ellison said in a phone interview with E&E News.
Since 2017, five states and more than a dozen municipalities have filedlawsuits seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry financially responsible for floods, wildfires and other disasters fueled by rising global temperatures.
All five of those states — Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Rhode Island — specifically mentioned the tobacco industry in their complaints.
"ExxonMobil engaged in a decades-long, intentional, tobacco-industry style effort to deceive investors and consumers," Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (D) wrote in her amended lawsuit against the oil giant last year.
The fossil fuel industry and its allies, however, strongly object to the Big Tobacco comparison. They argue that unlike cigarette manufacturers, energy companies have provided a valuable benefit to all Americans — a service for which they say they shouldn’t be punished in court.
"Energy is a staple of modern life. I mean, this is something that we need to heat our homes, to fuel our cars, to turn on our lights, to power our factories," said Phil Goldberg, special counsel for the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, an initiative of the National Association of Manufacturers that opposes the climate liability litigation.
In addition to serving as special counsel for the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, Goldberg is a partner at Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP, a law firm that represented tobacco clients in the litigation brought by state attorneys general in the 1990s. Goldberg, who joined the firm’s public policy practice in 2003, declined to comment on the tobacco litigation for that reason.
‘They knew and believed otherwise’
In the 1950s and ’60s, researchers at tobacco companies began to identify dozens of cancer-causing chemicals in cigarette smoke, including arsenic and benzene.
"Carcinogens are found in practically every class of compounds in smoke," Helmut Wakeham, research director at the tobacco manufacturer Philip Morris Inc., wrote in an internal industry memo in 1961.
But over the following decades, tobacco company executives vigorously denied this scientific connection in public-facing remarks and advertisements.
It was a similar story at oil supermajor Exxon Mobil Corp., where in-house scientist James Black told management in 1977: "There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels."
Despite this warning, Exxon and its peers would spend decades and billions of dollars casting doubt on this scientific consensus, including in advertorials in major newspapers such as TheNew York Times.
All 50 states filed lawsuits against the biggest tobacco manufacturers in the 1990s,alleging the companies had deceived the public about the harms of smoking and should cover the Medicaid costs of treating people with smoking-related illnesses. The state suits culminated in a $206 billion master settlement agreement in 1998.
The following year, the Department of Justice launched a criminal complaint against the tobacco firms under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The federal complaint, which alleged the companies had fraudulently covered up the health risks of smoking for 50 years, resulted in the historic ruling from Judge Kessler.
So far, the litigation against Big Oil has been ensnared in procedural battles over whether it belongs in state or federal court, meaning it hasn’t yet progressed to trial or settlement. The Supreme Court will soon issue a decision in a case stemming from Baltimore’s climate liability lawsuit that could help determine the venue — and by extension, potentially, the fate — of the state and local challenges against fossil fuel firms (:{Climatewire:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Feb. 23).
Sharon Eubanks, who served as lead counsel at DOJ in the federal tobacco racketeering case, United States v. Philip Morris USA, said she sees striking parallels with the oil and gas industry litigation.
"Both the tobacco industry and the petroleum industry denied that there were harms associated with their products, while at the same time … their internal documents showed that they knew and believed otherwise," said Eubanks, now chief counsel at the National Whistleblower Center.
"So they wanted to downplay the dangers of smoking, or downplay the dangers of climate change, to what end?" she continued. "In the case of cigarettes, to keep people purchasing their product. In the case of the oil industry, to slow down anything that would make people move a little faster to address what was a very real environmental problem."
Trade groups
Another similarity between the oil and tobacco litigation is the involvement of trade associations in the legal battles, said Robert Proctor, a science historian at Stanford University and the author of the book "Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition."
Proctor noted that tobacco companies hired the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to establish the Tobacco Industry Research Committee in response to growing evidence that smoking caused lung cancer.
As one of its first acts, the committee published the now-infamous "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers," which asserted: "We believe the products we make are not injurious to health."
Similarly, the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for the oil and gas industry, led efforts to portray the link between burning fossil fuels and global warming as uncertain.
A 1998 internal strategy document written by a team convened by API stated that "victory will be achieved" when "a majority of the American public, including industry leadership, recognizes that significant uncertainties exist in climate science."
The Tobacco Industry Research Committee — later rebranded as the Council for Tobacco Research — was ultimately dissolved by the 1998 master settlement agreement with state attorneys general.
Under the terms of the agreement, the four largest tobacco manufacturers also agreed to amend their advertising practices and shell out $206 billion over 25 years to 46 states, five territories and the District of Columbia.
Recent climate lawsuits brought by Delaware; Minnesota; and Hoboken, N.J., all name API as a defendant in addition to oil and gas companies.
"One, [API] knew the effects of their products, and two, they deliberately coordinated and assisted in perpetuating falsehoods about the dangers of their products," said Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general. "So yeah, API has a lot of answering to do."
Trade associations like API are "really just engines of deception," said Proctor, who has served as an expert witness in tobacco litigation and advised climate activists on strategies for suing Big Oil at a 2012 conference in La Jolla, Calif.
"I think that’s going to have some of the strongest grip in the litigation because those are very parallel to the Tobacco Institute," Proctor added.
‘Completely fallacious’
Some conservative interests bristle at the comparison between the legal challenges to Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, scoffed at the notion of equating cigarettes and fossil fuels in court.
"This whole idea that our civilization is addicted to fossil fuels and we must break this dangerous addiction is itself so completely fallacious," Lewis said.
"Fossil fuels, probably more than any other material force on the planet, have benefited the greatest number of people over the longest period of time," he added.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, CEI does not disclose its donors. But records compiled by DeSmogBlog show the group has received significant funding from the fossil fuel industry, including at least $2.1 million from Exxon through 2006.
Gale Norton, who served as Interior Department secretary during the George W. Bush administration and helped sue tobacco companies as Colorado attorney general in the 1990s, echoed Lewis’ sentiments.
"Tobacco has satisfied the urges of its users, but it has never had a real benefit to society," she said. "Fossil fuels underlie tremendous advances in the economy and the standard of living."
Norton added that it’s unfair to pin the blame for climate change on a small number of corporate actors.
"When you looked at the tobacco litigation, the question of who was responsible was fairly easy to comprehend. It was either the tobacco manufacturers or the smokers," she said.
"In the energy context, it’s all of us," she continued. "It’s utilities. It’s coal companies. It’s oil and gas producers. It’s people who drive. It’s people who heat their homes. It’s people who use electricity.It’s all of usbecause it is so pervasive within our society to use fossil fuels."
‘A sad and disquieting chapter’
Regardless of whether the two types of litigation raise the same issues, they feature some of the same lawyers and law firms.
For example, Kansas City, Mo.-based Shook, Hardy & Bacon represented five of the six largest cigarette manufacturers in the tobacco litigation. Today, Goldberg, managing partner at the firm, serves as special counsel for the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, one of the most vocal opponents of the climate litigation against oil companies.
Meanwhile, Ted Wells, a partner and co-chair of the litigation department at the New York City-based law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, defended Philip Morris in the government’s fraud lawsuit against the tobacco giant.
Wells later represented Exxon in a 2015 lawsuit brought by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) that alleged the oil company misled investors about the true costs of climate change.
The New York Supreme Court in 2019 ruled in favor of Exxon in the case, which differs from the other climate lawsuits against Big Oil because it focuses on investors rather than consumers (:{Greenwire:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Dec. 10, 2019).
On the challengers’ side, Steve Berman of the international law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP helped advise several state attorneys general in the tobacco litigation. Berman has also represented several municipalities — including New York City; San Francisco; Oakland, Calif.; and King County, Wash. — in their climate lawsuits against oil companies.
In her landmark 2006 decision, Judge Kessler had particularly harsh words for the lawyers who helped the tobacco industry mislead American consumers for decades.
"Finally, a word must be said about the role of lawyers in this fifty-year history of deceiving smokers, potential smokers, and the American public about the hazards of smoking and second hand smoke, and the addictiveness of nicotine," wrote the judge, who was appointed during the Clinton administration.
"At every stage, lawyers played an absolutely central role in the creation and perpetuation of the Enterprise and the implementation of its fraudulent schemes," she wrote, adding, "What a sad and disquieting chapter in the history of an honorable and often courageous profession."
Lessons learned
The tobacco litigation ultimately offers important lessons for the states and municipalities fighting to hold Big Oil accountable today, lawyers said.
One lesson is to be persistent, said Martin Olszynski, an associate professor of law at the University of Calgary in Canada and the lead author of the 2017 paper "From Smokes to Smokestacks: Lessons From Tobacco for the Future of Climate Change Liability."
Olszynski noted that the early lawsuits against tobacco companies from the 1950s to the ’80s largely failed. It wasn’t until the ’90s that challengers began to notch some victories, in part because internal documents leaked showing the industry knew of the addictive nature of nicotine.
"I think it’s a matter of time. It’s a matter of when, not if," the challengers in the lawsuits against Big Oil are successful, Olszynski said.
Another related lesson is the importance of uncovering internal documents that show what the fossil fuel industry knew and when, lawyers said.
The master settlement agreement in the tobacco litigation resulted in the disclosure of millions of internal industry documents, which are now publicly available in an online archive maintained by the University of California, San Francisco.
So far, the lawsuits against Big Oil over climate change have been tied up in procedural wrangling over whether they belong in state or federal court. But once these jurisdictional battles are resolved, the challengers could enter the discovery phase and uncover more information about oil companies’ early knowledge of climate change, building on the work of investigative journalists.
"One of the things that’s going to matter a lot is getting access to documents," said Proctor of Stanford.
"Now, there’s a fundamental asymmetry in that we’re several years later," he added, "and Big Carbon knows what’s coming."
https://www.eenews.net/articles/climate-misinformation-spreads-on-musks-twitter/
scott waldman e and e 12 22 no lnx
scientists say they’re experiencing more climate denial on Twitter since Elon Musk became owner of the social media platform.]
At Tesla, Elon Musk helped kick-start an electric vehicle revolution that will meaningfully cut greenhouse gas emissions. Now, as Twitter’s CEO, he’s overseeing one of the world’s most popular social media platforms that’s rife with climate change misinformation.
And it appears to be getting worse.
Since Musk’s purchase of Twitter two months ago, some prominent climate deniers have returned to the platform after being banned for pushing misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. There also are signs that scientists have left Twitter after their posts depicting global warming research were swarmed by critics.
Among the changes potentially driven by Musk’s effort to tear down barriers that once prohibited figures like former President Donald Trump from spreading election lies are a rise in the popularity of tweets that claim climate change is a scam. Some recent posts have earned 40,000 likes.
Marc Morano, who runs a blog that routinely attacks climate science, said that since Musk bought Twitter the appearance of his name in climate search results “appear to be juiced by the new algorithms.”
“My Twitter account and many others opposing the ‘consensus’ climate view have all increased visibility dramatically since Musk took over Twitter,” he said in an interview. “Whatever Musk is altering, I hope he keeps it up.”
Indeed, the number of tweets rejecting climate science have never been higher than in 2022, according to research by the University of London conducted on behalf of The Times newspaper. There have been more than 850,000 climate denial tweets or retweets so far this year. There were 650,000 such messages in 2021 and 220,000 in 2020, the analysis found.
Musk has said he will sell the blue check marks that Twitter uses to verify account holders to anyone who pays $8 a month. Users who pay the fee will see their posts “rocket to the top of replies, mentions and search,” according to Twitter. That could also mean that scientists who refuse to pay the monthly fee could see their posts lose visibility.
Climate misinformation has long been present on Twitter. But the proposed blue check mark policy could make the social media platform a larger clearinghouse for climate denialism, experts say.
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Tweets that misinform the public about climate change can increase interactions on Twitter by generating controversy, said Michelle Amazeen, director of the Communication Research Center at Boston University and an expert on climate disinformation and social media.
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“Twitter wasn’t designed to provide accurate info. Twitter is designed to maximize people’s attention and engagement. And how do you do that? You surface sensational, emotionally evocative content rather than surface deliberative rational information,” she said. “That’s not sexy, it’s all about the architecture.”
Earlier this week, a search for “climate” on Twitter resulted in “#ClimateScam” as the top term on the platform. Tweets using that hashtag were a miasma of climate disinformation, cherry-picked statistics and conspiracy theories. On another day, the top result was “climate lockdown,” a reference to the Great Reset conspiracy theory that claims a group of global elites is planning to shut down economic activity around the world to cut carbon emissions (Climatewire, Dec. 6).
Twitter appears to now boost the accounts of serial climate misinformers, including Steve Milloy, a former Trump EPA transition official; Patrick Moore, former head of the CO2 Coalition; and Morano, who runs a climate denial blog. In recent Twitter searches, their accounts appeared in top results with climate scientists, media outlets and NOAA.
Milloy and Moore did not respond to requests for comment.
Some prominent Twitter users who convey climate misinformation and were banned from the platform for other reasons have returned under Musk’s ownership. Tony Heller, who was removed for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, has recently tweeted inaccuracies about global warming. More prominently, the Canadian author Jordan Peterson, who was removed for tweeting transphobic messages, was allowed back on Twitter under Musk and now frequently pushes climate disinformation to his 3.5 million followers. He recently retweeted Heller using the term #climatescam.
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“Delusional green policies kill. Literally. Now,” Peterson wrote recently.
‘Radically different’
Prominent climate scientists say they are experiencing an increase of “climate denier bots”— which they identify as having a Twitter handle followed by a name and a bunch of numbers — that respond to their posts. It seems to be an effort to disrupt online climate discourse, said climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Twitter was a primary medium for dissemination of the facts surrounding the climate crisis,” Mann said in an email. “By infecting the online discourse w/ massive troll and bot armies, it becomes very difficult to communicate these facts, which is precisely what polluters and petro-state bad actors like Russia and Saudi Arabia want.”
Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, also experienced a swarm of bots in recent weeks. She has been testing tweets and running experiments to check engagement and found a dramatic increase in troll and bot activity on climate tweets, she said. A few days ago, she received 3,000 replies from critics — or trolls — in one 24-hour period.
“I’m not totally sure what is happening, but there is something radically different going on the last month that has increased troll and bot activity on climate tweets by 15-30x according to my data,” Hayhoe tweeted recently.
She also created a master list of hundreds of climate scientists on Twitter. Its membership has shrunk by about 4 percent since the Musk takeover, she noted.
Even though Musk runs a company that has created the exact type of clean energy jobs that Biden wants to increase under the Inflation Reduction Act, he has elevated voices that routinely attack renewable energy and climate science. Some also attack the electric vehicle tax credits and grants that have been a key to Tesla’s growth.
In recent weeks, Musk’s team has provided internal company communications, or “Twitter Files,” to a select group of opinion writers. The communications show that Twitter officials discussed how to handle tweets related to Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election. One of the writers who received the documents was Michael Shellenberger, who has promoted increased fossil fuel consumption and attacked clean energy and climate science in congressional hearings as a Republican-invited witness.
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In a recent hearing, Shellenberger said an expansion of electric vehicles “risks undermining American industries and helping China.”
‘Climate is a scam’
A few weeks after Musk bought Twitter on Oct. 27 for $44 billion, the company eliminated a policy that cracked down on Covid-19 misinformation. Some scientists, including Mann, said the policy also limited inaccurate climate narratives.
“That was a clear message that it’s open season on twitter for the promotion of anti-science, and clearly we’ve seen an escalation in climate denial rhetoric,” Mann said of the policy’s withdrawal.
Scientists concluded decades ago that humans are warming the planet at an unprecedented pace through the burning of fossil fuels. A movement to dilute those findings has been funded in part by energy companies and linked to conservative politics in the U.S. and other countries. Twitter is a key platform for spreading that type of false information.
In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its sixth assessment report and found that effective communication of climate science has been significantly damaged by the spread of false claims on social media.
“Accurate transference of the climate science has been undermined significantly by climate change countermovements, in both legacy and new/social media environments through misinformation,” the report stated.
That same month, Twitter banned paid ads that promote climate denial.
“We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” company officials wrote in a blog post.
It’s unclear if that policy is still in place. Musk has fired more than half of the company’s employees, including its communications department. The two authors of the blog no longer work for the company.
Musk could not be reached for comment.
Since July, months before Musk bought Twitter, there was an uptick in content referring to “#ClimateScam,” “climate scam,” or “climate is a scam,” totaling more than 500,000 mentions, according to a report released last month by Climate Action Against Disinformation, an international coalition of environmental groups. The messages originated from about 150,000 accounts and spiked around the time that global climate talks began in Egypt last month, the report found.
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Researchers found one account, @climate_fact, that was responsible for more than 50,000 tweets. Every few minutes, it retweeted posts that use “#climatescam,” “#greatreset” and other phrases. It’s unclear who runs the account or where they are located.
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wait, what?
https://www.eenews.net/articles/gop-criticizes-its-own-on-climate
ref climatewire 5/19
https://www.eenews.net/articles/gop-criticizes-its-own-on-climate/?ref=drilled
rep. Matt Gaetz (center), a Florida Republican who accepts that man-made climate change is occurring, is being criticized by conservatives for offering legislation to address global warming. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom
As some Republicans inch toward climate policy for the first time in years, those in the party who reject climate science are getting nervous that a more permanent shift is coming.
And they’re going on the attack against their former allies.
A group called Energy & Environment Action Team recently sent a 16-page pamphlet to every member of Congress encouraging lawmakers to reject all climate policy and connecting concern about global warming to political losses. In bold letters across the top, the pamphlet stated, "The Plan is … No Plan! Why the GOP shouldn’t do anything on climate."
"There is absolutely no reason for any Republican to offer a plan to ‘combat climate change,’" the pamphlet continued. "Such a plan, if enacted would accomplish nothing good for America or the climate."
A growing number of Republican lawmakers, including some who have disputed climate science for years, are not only now acknowledging global warming but also putting forward climate policies. But some worry that their colleagues are simply shifting to climate action because they have been spooked by the popularity of the Green New Deal.
"If you are planning on running against the Green New Deal, it seems sort of odd to play footsie with key elements of the Green New Deal," said Republican energy lobbyist Mike McKenna, who was on President Trump’s Energy Department transition team.
In March, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) proposed a "Green Real Deal" resolution that acknowledges the reality of climate change and the threat it poses to national security, and seeks to use innovation to combat global warming.Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) called for a bipartisan "New Manhattan Project for Clean Energy"that would increase the share of renewables on the energy grid, boost nuclear power and encourage electric car production.
"Congressman Gaetz and others are going to do what they think is best, but the idea that Republicans are going to outcompete with Democrats with respect to who can have the best government-based solution to anything is ridiculous and profoundly unserious," McKenna said.
While modest in comparison with the ideas put forward by Democrats — none of the Republican proposals would restrict fossil fuel use, for example — such plans have angered groups allied with the GOP for years.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute and other groups opposed to regulations want to increase political pressure on Republicans who are proposing climate action to "educate them and thereby bring them back into line," said Myron Ebell,director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment and head of the Trump EPA transition team.
Ebell said he is particularly concerned that there seems to be a push among House leadership to craft climate policy. He accused House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) of misleading others in the party and said some lawmakers, including Reps. Garret Graves (R-La.) and Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), have been misinformed by advocates on the value of clean energy.
"It’s when conservatives have decided to offer alternatives, they have gotten beat, because in the public’s mind it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between the left’s plan and the right’s plan and then pretty soon they’re compromising it, they’re coming to some sort of middle ground and pretty soon we’ve lost the whole issue," he said.
Ebell added: "It’s pretty clear to anybody who looks at it, there is no middle ground."
A spokesman for Gaetz said the congressman has discussed "the reality of climate change" with Republican lawmakers as well as with Trump. Gaetz, who once proposed eliminating EPA, is optimistic that more Republicans will eventually form their own plans to address climate change, spokesman Luke Ball said. Gaetz doesn’t view those in the party who reject science as a lost cause because the scientific evidence is now so overwhelming that it will push others to act, his spokesman said.
"Gaetz is concerned at the lack of support he has received from members of his own party who continue to deny the science of climate change," Ball said. "He believes history will judge harshly those who refuse to acknowledge this issue or take actionable steps to address it."
Other GOP lawmakers criticized from the right for climate policy were more reluctant to call out their colleagues.
Graves is one of the most visible congressional Republicans when it comes to the issue of global warming. Not only does he serve as the top GOP lawmaker on a new House climate change committee, but Graves has a history of acknowledging the risks of a warmer planet (:{Climatewire:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, March 11).
In a brief Capitol Hill interview, he said he hasn’t encountered noticeable pushback from climate deniers or climate contrarians. But he said he’s still cognizant of the way he must broach the issue with other Republicans.
"What you have to do is to meet people where they are and sort of use verbiage or words that translate to people the right way," Graves said.
"You may not be able to go into some Republican circles and say that, ‘Hey, I’ve got this plan on how we’re going to reduce greenhouse gases in the United States and we’re going to convert everything to renewable energy,’" he said.
But Graves added that the audience could be more receptive "if you come in and start talking about strategies on how we can reduce energy costs by improving efficiency and conservation [or] by bringing new technologies to the table."
Nonetheless, conservatives who oppose climate policy plan to escalate their attacks if members of the party don’t back down.
The recent 16-page brochure attacked a few lawmakers for being concerned about climate change, labeling Gaetz as "one Republican to fall for the climate-baiting guilt-trip." The pamphlet, which misrepresents and distorts climate science, portrays Republicans as politically victorious when they reject climate policy. It blamed the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s loss in the 2008 presidential election on his climate policy.
Steve Milloy, editor of JunkScience.com and the author of the pamphlet, said it’s a signal to Republicans not to get out of line on climate policy. Democrats have united on the other side, he said, and the GOP should also do the same. He blamed Republican actions on climate change on young staffers who don’t yet understand the party’s position. Milloy said he plans to make sure other lawmakers don’t "drift" and warned he would extend his advocacy beyond pamphlets.
"People say all kinds of shit, and if they stop saying it, then OK, but if they persist, well, tougher action will be required," he said. "Then it’s going to be ugly."
The differences between Gaetz’s plan and the Green New Deal backed by progressive Democrats are mere "window-dressing," wrote James Taylor, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, which aims to muddy climate science.
Taylor has said that Republicans risk alienating their base if they craft climate policy. He said that "weak-minded congressional Republicans" who try to respond to the Green New Deal take away the chance to run against it in the 2020 elections.
He has written critically of Gaetz in particular and even referred to him as "Matt Gore" in reference to Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president and environmental activist.
"Gaetz, Alexander, and theirsmall cadre of Republican climate alarmists are seeking to undermine the conservative Republican voter base and Trump on one of his most important policy principles," he wrote."Their betrayal of Trump and the conservative Republican base will almost certainly and justly come back to haunt them."
The fight on the right over climate change isn’t a new one for Alex Flint, who leads the Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative group that supports carbon taxes.
Earlier this year, Flint criticized climate contrarians for their views and argued that denialism is anathema to conservatism because it ignores the risks of global warming. And "being irresponsible disqualifies anyone from being a true conservative," he wrote at the time (:{Climatewire:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, April 15).
In an interview Thursday, Flint made the case that the rejection of climate science is losing ground with Republicans.
"But we won’t know until after the 2020 elections how rapidly it’s occurring," he said.