Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumNo One Under 30 Has Ever Experienced A World Free Of Paid Climate Liars, Shills And Denialist Hacks
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The article describes a conference last month at Brown University that featured a 90-minute panel built around a recent study in Nature Climate Change showing how decades of concerted misinformation played a key role in the current climate of climate denial. The event was convened by Browns Climate Development Lab. Brown students at the lab recently compiled and published a report giving the backstory on a dozen climate denial coalitions.
Some are long gone, like the Global Climate Coalition, others are still very much alive, like the Cooler Heads Coalition, which counts Trump advisors Myron Ebell and Steve Milloy among its members. But even some of the ones that are no longer operational, like the Information Council on the Environment, which was funded by the Western Fuels Association and the Edison Electric Institute, still impact the current discourse.
For example, ICEs Pat Michaels and Sherwood Idso have both gone on to a long and lucrative fossil-fuel-funded denial career. ICEs initial PR campaign goal to reposition global warming as theory (not fact) is at the core of President Trumps ongoing attempts to attack climate science with a red team of deniers drawn from these sorts of coalitions.
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As pundits and deniers increasingly chide children for daring to speak out about the state of our planet, remember that these kids are speaking out against a misinformation machine thats older than they are. For the students who put together this report, the fact that theres a well-funded, widespread propaganda effort to protect polluters at the public expense isnt some new revelationits simply a fact of life. Just like how no one born since February 1985 has ever experienced a month in which the global temperature has dipped below the 20th century average, this report shows that no one under 30 has lived in a world free from the fossil fuel industrys misinformation campaign.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/03/07/college-students-calling-out-climate-denial-machine-older-they-are