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Author Topic: Fossil Fuel Propaganda Modus Operandi  (Read 39449 times)

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AGelbert

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September 20, 2021



🐍 Bjorn Lomborg Lies About Warming Saving Lives, Gets Factchecked, Gets Invited by 😈 Fox and The 😈 Wall Street Journal to Repeat His Lies Anyway

On Friday, we talked about how Facebook is doing everything it can to look like it’s taking disinformation seriously, short of actually doing much of anything about it, and especially not the relatively easy action of removing bad actors all together. 

But it’s not just Facebook that seems to delight in ignoring factchecks, which is why — though incredibly valuable — they can’t be relied on as the sum total of a disinformation strategy, particularly not for a company with billions of dollars to spend. 

For example, earlier this month, in response to the IPCC report, the New York Post published an op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg in which he claimed that climate change is saving 166,000 lives a year because fewer people are dying of cold than of heat. 

Well, ClimateFeedback talked to real scientists , including some who Lomborg has cited, and unsurprisingly, finds his claim incorrect and “based on a misinterpretation of a study and interpretation of data that doesn’t support” his conclusions. 

“The issue with Lomborg’s argument,” said Aaron Bernstein of Harvard, “is that he is using cherry-picked data.” A shocker, we know...

And indeed, Lomborg, who has a history of making this argument, cites studies that specifically don’t do the comparison, and ignores the ones that do. Why? Well, probably because, as one such study author, Antonio Gasparrini of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine explained, “in many countries, especially in highly populated tropical areas, the increase in heat-related deaths is much higher than the reduction in cold-related deaths, with an increase in net mortality, especially under more extreme scenarios of global warming. A separate analysis led by other research groups has confirmed these results in both the US and Europe.” 

The ClimateFeedback post also addresses something Lomborg claimed on social media, that the reason why heat deaths have appeared to go up by 54% is that there’s simply more old people, and that population change is behind the results. 

But that too is false, because it turns out that the researchers doing these studies aren’t the idiots that Lomborg takes them for, and do in fact account for those demographic changes. Or, in the words of the University of Gloucestershire’s Philip Staddon, “this is clearly incorrect as all serious academic research already takes account of population growth, demographics and ageing… It sounds like a simplistic analysis was taken… According to the WHO, climate change is causing over 150,000 additional deaths annually, so it would appear [Lomborg] has misread facts and stated more or less the exact opposite of reality.”

But stating the opposite of reality is basically exactly what the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page is for, and sure enough, the morning after ClimateFeedback debunked Lomborg’s claims, there 😈 they were in the Journal’s pages.

Lomborg repeatedly makes the exact false claims that were debunked as “unsupported” and “incorrect,” because the Wall Street Journal is happy to print such unsupported and incorrect claims, and is fine running basically the same content as its fellow Murdoch-owned outlet the New York Post (and even the same content it ran back in 2016, when Lomborg made these same claims and they were again ruled as misleading!).

And to complete the Murdoch Media trifecta, on Friday, Lomborg appeared on Fox News to once more repeat the same exact debunked claims about lives lost to climate change. 

So, as much as we love to factcheck, and appreciate all the time other experts spend on it, when the subjects are allowed to keep repeating the same lies, in the same Murdoch media outlets, year after year, what else needs to happen to make factchecking mean something? 

Besides, you know, kicking liars off social media platforms and for respectable newspapers’  fact-checking teams to work on opinion content as rigorously as they do reported content...
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AGelbert

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September 29, 2021



WSJ Column Ignores WSJ Reporting To Blame Renewables For Fossil Fuels’ Failures

Have you ever heard of the Covid-19 pandemic? Or the UK’s decision to leave the European Union? Of course you have. And of course 😈 deniers have too, but you wouldn’t know it judging by a spate of recent pieces seeking to blame renewables for the fact that it’s fossil fuels that are expensive and unreliable.

At the Washington Times, an op-ed by “🦖 energy attorney” and utility consultant 🦕 Terry Jarrett blamed renewables for the Texas blackout, and the resulting $46 billion it spent on electricity that week, despite the fact that it was the state’s deregulated and gas-heavy grid that drove up prices.
 
Over at the Koch-funded 🦖 RealClearEnergy, the (ashamed) Koch crony 🐍 Daniel Turner also blamed “energy-rich” Texas’s blackout on renewable energy, because it “is incapable of producing the same amount of energy and cannot withstand the elements.” Not mentioned is the recent federal report that determined the two main causes of the blackout. The first was power plants not being weatherized, and it was mainly the gas plants that froze. The second was that gas transmission systems couldn’t withstand the elements either, so the gas plants that weren’t frozen couldn’t get deliveries. Overall, 60% of the power that cut off was from gas failures. 

You wouldn’t know that by reading the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, though. They rejected the factual findings of gas’s failures in an editorial last Friday, and on Monday editorial board writer 🦖🎩 Allysia Finley brought a new bogus argument to their pages.

In their never-ending quest to falsely disparage renewables, Finley wrote that “increased global demand has caused the price of coal to triple and the price of natural gas to increase fivefold over the past year.” Hmm, now, what were coal and gas prices like last year, during the global pandemic that shut down travel and business across the planet? Finley doesn’t say, instead continuing with “Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme has pushed prices even higher.”

Ah yes, it’s not that prices are recovering after falling so far during the pandemic that prices went negative, or what Wall Street Journal reporters described as expert opinion that the “short-lived” “surge in coal demand is unique to the pandemic” as well as the fact that when it comes to prices, “the rise is off a low base after an exceptional fall in demand last year.”

And the UK’s issues with importing energy from the EU is all because of Boris Johnson’s totally sincere climate pronouncements, not that whole “Brexit” business that promised to make importing things from the EU more of a hassle.

At least according to the WSJ’s opinion page. Ask it’s fact-checked reporters, and you might find a different story.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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October 5, 2021



Green Washing Ads Can't Remove 🦕 Oil Stain from 😈 Fossil Fuel Investors

A new analysis covered at DeSmog looked at over 3,000 social media ads and posts from six major European fossil fuel companies between December of 2019 through April of 2021, and found 63% painted the climate-destroying company as climate-friendly.

“Half of the companies analysed,” wrote Rachel Sherrington, “dedicated over 80 percent of their posts to highlighting their involvement in green and climate-friendly work such as building up more renewable energy capacity. Green investments, however, make up just 12 percent of these companies’ portfolios on average based on publicly available figures."

The biggest discrepancy was found at Preem, where 81% of their promos are green, while 98% of their business is dirty fuels. Shell was next, with 90% of its investments going into fossil fuels, while 81% of its promotional materials focusing on its “green” energy generally and 13% on renewables specifically, which comprise just 1% of its energy investments

One of the 😈 newest strategies, borne out in the ads, is to paint itself as what disinfo expert Geoffrey Supran has termed a “fossil fuel savior” framing, that “helps defend the status quo” with “silver-bullet techno-fixes that aren’t yet commercially viable.” 

Overall, 20% of the ads were about the companies' climate plans, and another 10% about sustainable transportation. Only 13% of ads were about conventional gas and oil products, and only 3% touted the benefits of fossil fuels. The rest were a mix of ads about renewable energy generally, solar, or gas as a green fuel (4% each), a circular economy, bioenergy, hydrogen, efficiency (3% each), climate policy, wind, and carbon capture (2%), and hydro and nature-based climate solutions (1% each).

Having moved from questioning the reality of climate change to championing itself as the solution, the industry is “positioning itself, astoundingly, as a climate leader,” Loyola University professor Karen Sokol told DeSmog. Sokol believes the phrase “'greenwashing’ tends to minimize the wrongful nature of the industry’s messaging. It is a systematic deceptive marketing campaign designed to interfere with the solution that is necessary to respond to the climate emergency: stopping fossil fuel production.”

By promoting things like hydrogen or carbon capture from power plants, they’re not just promoting false solutions that wouldn’t address the problem, Sokol said, but instead “would accelerate the climate crisis, perpetuate existing and create new harms that disproportionately impact communities who have long been on the frontlines of fossil fuel infrastructure.”   

Sokol also told DeSmog that “the industry’s ‘climate and society friendly’ messaging is nothing new” it is instead “just the latest instantiation of its disinformation campaign designed to allow it to continue profiting from deadly and planet-destroying fossil fuel products.”

There’s that discrepancy, and then there’s the fact that only 16% of the ads focused on fossil fuels at all, a small figure given that the companies are still investing 70-98% their resources into 🦕 fossil fuels.

Most of the posts weren’t even ads though, technically they were just organic content. Only 18 percent were designated as ads in Facebook, so while the YouTube and Twitter disclosures might increase that percentage, the reality is that there is little to no difference between a company’s advertisements and their social media posts.

In other words, while deniers love to cast themselves as free speech martyrs, the reality is that there’s already a well-known term for climate denial, disinformation, and greenwashing, whether in content they pay for or post regularly to the platforms: false advertising.


The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. Since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks 🦀, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE!  Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on! 
« Last Edit: October 05, 2021, 09:02:22 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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October  14, 2021



Will Big Oil’s Slippery Six CEOs Honor Their Intentions To Testify to Congress About Climate Disinfo



Remember in 2018, when the Washington Post hired 🦕 Mark Lasswell from the 🎩👿 Wall Street Journal to edit the opinion page? And we were concerned that maybe he’d bring climate denial along with him? Well yesterday the Washington Post published a third 🐘 conservative columnists’ praise for Steven Koonin. Contributor Mich Daniels, president of Purdue University and barely not the worst recent Indiana governor, wrote that even if Koonin’s “contrarian views might be completely wrong,” the critical response to his (completely wrong) book is proof that it’s actually important.

By that logic, Daniels should be platforming people who tout horse deworming paste as a smarter choice than vaccines, or holocaust deniers, flat earthers, and any number of other people who need to be told loudly and frequently that they are wrong. But he’s not, because it’s not really about intellectual honesty and integrity in science. It’s about propaganda 😈 designed to undercut the need for climate policy.

But much like how the WSJ’s opinion page is several orders of stupid worse than its reporters, over at the news side of the Washington Post, new hire Maxine Joselow is proving her worth with a great interview with California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna confirming that at least most of the six fossil fuel executives invited to testify on climate disinformation intend to show up for the October 28th hearing!

Last month Rep. Khanna and the Oversight Committee chair Rep Carolyn Maloney sent letters to 👉 ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, API and Chamber of Commerce leadership, but given how we know executives prefer to send “whipping boys” to testify in their place, expectations were low that they would show up unless compelled by subpoena.

Apparently just the threat was enough, as representatives of each group offered assurances to Joselow that they intend to show without being legally required by subpoena. While this is certainly encouraging, we couldn’t help but notice that none of them actually said they would be there, but instead offered carefully crafted replies that they intend to go.

Joselow described BP’s statement as that its President “plans to testify,” similar to the direct quote from the Chamber of Commerce’s spokesperson that its CEO Suzanne Clark “plans to participate in the hearing.” 

API’s spokesperson reiterated that the organization “welcomes the opportunity to testify,” while Chevron said it “is committed to participating” and Joselow wrote that “Shell and Exxon confirmed via email they were cooperating with the investigation.”

Politico’s Ben LeFebvre got similarly evasive sort-of answers from Chevron and Exxon, who didn’t commit to sending anyone but instead said they are “working with committee staff on details” (Chevron) and “continue to communicate with committee staff” (Exxon). The Oversight committee told him, though, that they “expect each of the executives we invited to appear before our Committee and testify under oath.”

Maybe it’s just because we’re jaded by things like [b]Chevron’s[/b] empty “aspirations” to be carbon neutral, but it sure seems like each one is saying just enough to avoid getting subpoenaed right now, only to slow walk the proces and/or suddenly have a conflict when the big day comes. That way they won’t have to answer for their disinformation, and will have at least temporarily ducked a legally binding subpoena.

After all, the whole reason they’re being called to testify in the first place is their company’s history of deception and denial. For a nice refresher, the Climate Accountability Institute has a great website putting everything about the “Slippery Six” in one place, so you can easily see what each of these players has done to spread climate disinformation.

If even that seems like too much, there’s also a “Smoking Gun” page with all the decades-old documents laying out how they knew about their products climate impacts, and then lied about them.

They may well be telling the truth now though, and really are going to show up to explain to Congress, and the public, about how and why they lied to us for years. 

But if we were Reps. Khanna and Maloney, we might start getting those subpoenas ready, just in case.

The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. Since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks 🦀, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE!  Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on! 
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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Common Sense Institute says 🦕 fracking is 😇 safe and will make you 💰🎩 rich.


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October 22, 2021

Colorado 😈 Climate Disinformation 🦖 Complex Provides Microcosm of Fossil Fuel Industry’s Global Deceptions

If something is common sense, then it’s accurate and can’t be argued with, right? Describing one’s position in an argument as the “common sense” approach is a longstanding rhetorical device used to frame your position, clearly actually up for debate, as being so obvious that any other consideration is ridiculous. 

For example, when people in Colorado hear that the Common Sense Institute says fracking is safe and will make you rich, they might not immediately assume that such a “common sense” message is coming from a respected University group that’s been co-opted by funding from the 🦖 oil and gas industry, who retains all sorts of control over the 🙊🙉🙈 “Institute.”

That’s one of the many, many specific examples in a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists detailing how the fossil fuel industry wages disinformation campaigns to block climate action just in one state, Colorado.   

As report author Ortal Ullman explains in an accompanying post 👉Colorado’s Fossil Fuel Industry Wants to Buy Your Friendship. Don’t Be Fooled, the industry-backed Common Sense Institute bought its way into the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder and then pushed out industry-friendly reports, getting pro-fracking findings out without having to put the literally toxic industry’s figuratively toxic name on them. 

UCS refers to this practice of buying credibility as “the screen,” one of the four main tactics they describe in cataloging the 🦖 industry’s disinformation. By running this reputational ruse, they can then push out “the fake,” the sorts of reports that make claims that sound good until you take even the briefest glance at them, but nevertheless serve as talking points for the astroturf groups. 

That’s another main tactic, “the diversion,” of using industry-funded groups like “Protect Colorado” to push the industry-funded reports by other, industry-funded-but-discretely partnerships with otherwise legitimate academic organizations. 

All of this, of course, builds up to the most important tactic: “the fix.” Because in addition to funding a whole ecosystem of astroturf groups, the body that really matters is the one making the laws, so for example, Protect Colorado raised almost $17 million to defeat a proposal mandating some distance between fracking sites and homes and schools.

So next time you see some supposedly common sense suggestions from a blandly-named local-looking group that happens to sound like it could be coming straight from the industry’s ad team, you can probably just assume that, one way or another, it is.

The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. Since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE!  Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on! 
« Last Edit: October 22, 2021, 05:48:02 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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October 27, 2021

😈 Paper Comparing Electric Cars To Gas Relies on Anecdotes and ‘Less Than Honorable Methodology’

Last week, the Detroit Free Press covered a report from 🐍 Anderson Economic Group that claims that gassing up a traditional car is cheaper than recharging an electric one, based on its CEO Patrick Anderson’s experience with the electric Porsche Taycan he bought.
If it seems odd for an economic report to rely on the anecdotal experience of one (1) CEO to provide what it claims to be “real world” costs, never fear, the report also relies on such reputable sources as online forums like Reddit, where people who have trouble will complain and those having a fine time are nowhere to be seen (and therefore are excluded from the study). 

Safe to say then, there are some red flags with the report. In fact, there were so many that the Detroit Free Press did a follow-up piece responding to readers' questions, acknowledging that the report “is an outlier” and that “many studies show the opposite to be true,” like Consumer Reports’ comparison showing EVs saved owners $6,000-$10,000 over a vehicle’s lifetime. 
And to be fair, the original Free Press story did note that the 🦖 Anderson report “differs from some reports that show it’s cheaper to drive an EV than a conventional car,” like “a 2018 study from the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute [which] found the average cost to operate an EV in the U.S. was $485 per year compared with a gasoline-powered vehicle at $1,117.” 

It was Sebastian Blanco 👍  at Car and Driver, however, who really dissected the Anderson report and found it was little more than “an exercise in finding convenient ways to minimize the benefits and highlight the negatives” of electric vehicles. 

“While the study authors did point out a fair number of legitimate factors that make charging EVs more time-consuming than getting gas for your car,” the introduction explains, “what they did not do was publish an honest and realistic look at how easy it is to charge up for some people.” 

Because yes, charging a car does take longer than filling it up with gasoline. But the deceptions are deep and numerous. For example, the refueling comparison looks at entry-level, mid-priced, and luxury gas cars, and mid-priced, luxury, and luxury EVs. Yes, the report includes figures for two different luxury EVs, and a mid-priced one, but no entry-level EV to compare to the entry-level gas car. “In other words,” Blanco writes, “any cost benefit from buying an entry-level EV is missing” all together. Turns out luxury goods cost more! What helpful analysis!

And it doesn’t get any better from there. For some reason, the report from the Anderson Group “assumes people with home chargers,” Blanco explains, “actually conduct 40 percent of their charges at a public, commercial station. This, then, allows the study to claim that they spend 4.5 hours a month charging their car,” instead of the 75 minutes a month someone who actually mostly charges at home would spend waiting at public chargers when out and about. 

That issue of home vs public charging provides “another example of the study's less than honorable methodology,” Blanco writes, because it first assumes that the person charging has a $70,000 salary- well over the national average of $55,000. It then uses that figure as the basis to “calculate the dollar cost of the extra time it takes an EV driver” to fuel up, and adds that to the cost tally. 

Though yes, you should value your time just like a CEO like 🐷 Anderson apparently does, but assuming people’s time spent getting snacks and going to the bathroom while their vehicle charges is as valuable as the time they spent doing their job ostensibly producing some good or providing some service was a cheap way to add costs to the EV ownership column. 

And it gets worse! The report acknowledges that free public chargers exist, but because someone has to pay for that energy, they simply count that charger use as being the same price as commercial rates. But if you’re including costs the public pays, why not include the benefits the public reaps from the reduced pollution? “It feels disingenuous not to at least address the topic,” Blanco writes, because “it’s not like no one has tried to calculate the different emissions,” for example pointing to “Polestar's recent life-cycle analysis.” 

That’s not even all of the biases and assumptions built into the analysis that Patrick Anderson told the Detroit Free Press was “apples to apples,” but it’s clear that comparing other EV reports to this one is a matter of comparing real experts’ apples to 🐍 Anderson’s lemon of a report.
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November 1, 2021

COP26 Begins: What To Expect When You’re Expecting Disinformation

Last week we previewed some of the lines of attack we expect to see from deniers as COP26 kicks off, and today we’re updating and adding a few more to watch out for (beyond any Republicans that come bearing supposed good-faith while talking about the Taliban’s lithium.)

Electric vehicles are of course a consummate 🔴 target for deniers, as they offer a chance to use their “hypocritical elites” framing, and the issue we flagged with COP26 charging luxury EVs with (bio)diesel generators has already been fact-checked, as was Bjorn Lomborg’s recent (false) claim about electric vehicles being a “net negative,” which (surprise!) they’re not. Lomborg’s regular columns in the WSJ (which the editorial board summarized, sans fact checks) argued that climate impacts aren’t so costly ( they are!) and instead we can just adapt our way out of danger (we can’t!) so long as economic growth isn’t hampered (even though climate change will hamper economic growth)! 

"Net Zero" is turning out to be another contentious issue, which makes sense because it can be used as greenwashing by 🦕 industry promising to pay for offsets for their continued emissions tomorrow while continuing to pollute today, but of course that’s what legitimately climate-concerned critics will say, while deniers are decidedly stupider. 

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s main climate denial organization, has rebranded as Net Zero Watch to oppose climate policies instead of just denying climate science. See DeSmog for more on the rebrand and ClimateFeedback for a fact check demonstrating GWPF’s lack of credibility. Then there’s also another UK pop-up PR front group attacking NetZero, CAR26 that Sean Buchan of Stop Funding Heat told Desmog was just another one of the “fringe groups [that] will inevitably try to derail the proceedings.”

Speaking of fringe groups, the disgraced and repeatedly debunked Heartland Institute is convening a 3-day sideshow in Glasgow, The Scotsman reported, and CFACT is sending fundraising emails about how it’s going to Glasgow as well.
Alex Epstein, who creates and spreads pro-fossil fuel talking points for the industry, has indicated he intends to “crash” the COP. In 2018, The Weather Channel did an extensive feature on how Epstein offered “a course in climate misinformation”, and no doubt he and the rest of the professional deniers will try to trick reporters into taking their antics seriously.


It’s not just the fringe though. As the GOP’s shameful display at the disinformation hearing showed, 🐘 they’ll stoop as low as it takes to defend their fossil fuel funders by claiming that fossil fuel failures are actually due to renewables. 
But fuel shortages and gas price hikes show how costly our current reliance on fossil fuels can be, and it’s oil companies, not environmentalists or politicians, who control the price of fuel, and blaming today’s high energy prices on the possibility of future climate action is a transparent attempt to defend fossil fuels by deflecting blame on to the technology that is poised to replace them.

So while we can’t know the exact attacks the fossil fuel industry’s goons will try to make stick to disrupt COP26, we can be pretty sure they’ll be grossly dishonest. Hopefully reporters will be too clever to fall for their trolling.
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November 11, 2021



Is CNN’s 🐍 Fareed Zakaria Part Of A New Fossil Fuel Front Group’s Efforts To Portray Methane Gas as a ‘Natural Ally’ For Clean Energy? Or Just A Natural Ally of Natural Gas?

Yale and Harvard graduate Fareed Zakaria is a trusted journalist on CNN, columnist at the Washington Post and editor at the Atlantic. If you wanted to sway the public, he’d be a great person to have in your corner. 

Unfortunately, he appears to be squarely in the gas industry’s corner, with multiple Washington Post columns about how “we will need gas to replace coal in developing countries,” and how we need gas here in the U.S. too, while last year he wrote that that Bernie Sanders was wrong to oppose, you guessed it, natural gas. And while this sort of “bridge fuel”rhetoric was widespread a decade ago, Zakaria’s🦕 embrace of it nowadays raises a bunch of big red flags.

And indeed, if it seems like Zakaria’s efforts to promote a fossil fuel as a way to solve the climate problem caused by fossil fuels is something coming straight out of the fossil fuel industry, sure enough an excerpt of his recent 🐍 Washington Post column calling for gas exports can be found on the website of Natural 🦕🦖 Allies for a Clean Energy Future.”

Who are these “natural 😈 allies” of renewables that are enamored with Zakaria? No, it’s not batteries, improved efficiency, or transmission lines, or anything that actually helps make a clean energy future happen. 

“Natural gas is accelerating America’s transition to a clean energy future” says the home page, “by partnering renewable resources with natural gas, we can reach our climate goals faster without sacrificing reliability and affordability.”

Wow! Sounds too good to be true! And, of course, it is. Natural gas is getting in the way of renewables, and as Texas showed this winter it’s hardly reliable, and as the current energy price spike shows, fossil fuels are hardly affordable

So who’s behind this obvious front group? That’s not quite so obvious. 

Like most shady groups who don’t want you to know the 🦕 industry they’re championing is paying them to do so, Natural Allies For A Clean Energy Future doesn’t actually list who those allies might be. No “staff” or “about us” page to speak of, but instead a few pages of “news,” “policies,” “resources,” and a “media library” with links to some (not actually publicly posted) YouTube videos that are basically indistinguishable from the oil industry’s greenwash and woke-wash, like this one featuring a Black woman in a white labcoat talking about how great the switch from coal to gas has been, or this one with a little white girl pushing a little Black girl on a skateboard and a voiceover about what great partners natural gas and renewables are. Aww! So sweet!   

Oddly, though, these allies aren’t too eager to let the public know who, exactly, they are. 

  But we’ve found some clues! It turns out the group’s executive director is 😈 Susan Waller, who prior to joining Natural Allies For A Clean Energy Future in 2020 was the VP of “Stakeholder Engagement & Enterprise Public Awareness Programs” at the gas pipeline company Enbridge, and before her three years there, she spent 9 years as a VP for natural gas company, Spectra Energy, and before that she had a bunch of different jobs at various natural gas-related companies. 

🦕 Waller is also the 2021 chair of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, so suffice to say that the group promising that natural gas is a climate solution is being led by someone who’s spent her career advocating for natural gas, not policies to address the climate crisis.

We also happened to notice that Energy in Depth, the PR-group-run 🦖 oil and gas front, recently posted a link to the Natural Allies For Clean Energy website about how it’s “protecting families from higher costs,” which would certainly suggest that the group’s deeply enmeshed in the organized denial and professional disinformation space. 

And sure enough, at least one of their funders is a natural gas company, as 🦕 Cheneire energy lists a $250,000 annual membership fee in a 2020 disclosure.

So while there’s no proof ;) that Zakaria’s getting any money for producing content perfectly matching the gas-backed-group’s messaging and placing it in the Washington Post, he probably should be. C'mon 🐍 Fareed, you don't need to work 'for exposure' anymore. Stand up for yourself! After all, the group’s clearly got the cash!
https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/20211111-china-us-agreement-bangladesh-vulnerable-countries-fulbright

« Last Edit: November 11, 2021, 04:24:00 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Fossil Fuel Propaganda Modus Operandi
« Reply #293 on: November 30, 2021, 06:24:29 pm »
November 30, 2021


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😈 PR Firms Played Outsized Role In Blocking Climate Action, Study Finds

Top PR firms have played a significant and overlooked role in denying and obfuscating the science of climate change while bolstering the reputations of major polluters, a peer-reviewed study in Climatic Change reveals.

Researchers analyzed more than 2,800 "unique engagements" between PR firms and entities within five groups: the coal, steel and rail sector; the oil and gas industry; the electric utility sector; the renewable energy industry; and the environmental movement.

Utilities and the oil and gas sector hired PR firms the most, and the environmental movement hired PR firms the least. While the fossil fuel industry's denial of climate science, efforts to shift responsibility for climate change to consumers, and obstruction of action to address climate change are well documented, "PR people become these kinds of glue or network builders among all of these different industries, and so their power is outsize[d] in that way," Melissa Aronczyk, a media studies professor at Rutgers University, told E&E. "How else would these different industries kind of speak to each other?" (E&E $, DeSmog)
« Last Edit: November 30, 2021, 08:26:40 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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🐍 Stossel et al.
« Reply #294 on: December 03, 2021, 03:24:18 pm »

December 2, 2021

It’s understandable, though, that 🐍 Stossel et al. would pour so much time and energy into attacking the fact checkers. Afterall, their careers are built on spreading disinformation to cover for 🦖 polluters and 😈 prevent meaningful climate action that reduces fossil fuel use.

Read more at the Denier Roundup segment of the Nexus Hot News Newsletter:

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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January 14, 2022

🦖 Heartland Institute Sending 100,000 Climate Disinfo Pamphlets To Teachers Because They Didn’t Learn Last Time That Everyone Knows They’re Stupid

Having failed to get any real traction for their “Climate at a Glance” website, the disgraced and debunked Heartland Institute recently emailed subscribers to let us know they’d be sending 100,000 printed versions of the website directly to professors and teachers around the U.S.

This is hardly the first time deniers have tried to simply mail their way into classrooms. Exposed plans going back to 2012, reprised in 2017, were loudly and prominently criticized for their plans to send 200,000 copies of their IPCC-disinfo books to teachers. 

Apparently they’re aiming lower this year with a target half the size, but in keeping with the most cutting-edge technology, they also included a QR code in the email that would send people to the .pdf of aggregated web posts. You know, just in case anyone wanted to take a picture of a QR code to get a link to a PDF to see all the exact same content that’s on their “ClimateAtAGlance.com” website all at once, without navigation. Apparently they felt that process would be easier for their readers to pass along to friends than just the link to the website. (Heartland definitely gets technology and is in no way a struggling 20th-century relic.) 

As for the content itself, it might actually be somewhat closer to reality than you might expect, but only in that even Heartland has to pretend to accept the findings of official reports, and the email notes that their content references “mainstream sources such as NOAA, WHO, EPA, and others like them.”

It is true that they reference those sources, in that they misrepresent, cherry pick, and cite out-of-date-reports. Of course, they also cite a bevy of notably less mainstream sources, like the “climate at a glance” co-author, Heartland fellow, and college drop-out Anthony Watts’ blog. WUWT gets at least a dozen citations, Watts himself made ten of the graphs, Heartland gives at least a dozen citations to itself and its own reports, and even Sandy Hook denier/Birther/conspiracy theorist Tony Heller gets a graph and reference despite the fact that Anthony Watts long banned Heller from WUWT for his “inability to openly admit to and correct mistakes”. 

Also cited is a Spencer and Braswell paper so egregiously bad that the Editor in Chief of the journal that published it resigned in disgrace after its publication. (Surely it was in the interest of open access that the reference goes directly to a .pdf of the study on Roy Spencer’s website, and not the actual URL for the study from the publishing journal, that just so happens to include a bright yellow header pointing readers to the resignation letter…) 

Unsurprisingly, then, the Heartland "Climate at a Glance" chapters are a grab bag of cherry-picking the most cautious or out-of-date statements from IPCC reports, and repetition of long-debunked denial. For example, reading the Urban Heat Island and Temperatures sections, one would never guess that 🦕 Watts was part of a research team that took this contention seriously, did the research, and found Watts and deniers were wrong. (🐍 Watts then recanted and refused to honor his pledge to accept the study findings.) 

For another example of how these work, the Heartland’s “glance” at wildfires is based entirely on data that is well known to be of poor quality, and has since been removed from the National Interagency Fire Center website all together because early wildfires were double or even triple-counted by overlapping federal agencies, among other issues with data quality. (And Heartland knows that this data is flawed, because factcheckers debunked it and Heartland didn’t care.) 

So if you’re a teacher who wants science-ish info from an organization that is still running pro-tobacco propaganda 😠, the most long-recognized and dangerous fields of industrial disinformation, then Heartland’s a good choice for your students.   

But be forewarned, they’re called “Climate at a Glance” because if you look at them any closer than at a glance, even elementary school students will be able to see through the thinly sourced material.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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COUNTERPUNCH

NOVEMBER 26, 2021 BY EVE OTTENBERG 👍

Big Oil’s Big Lie About Who Caused the Climate Collapse

SNIPPET:

🦖 BP’s championing of carbon footprints should be viewed not simply as a naïve and imperfect effort at corporate responsibility,” writes Grover, “but rather as a direct and calculated attempt to 😈 shape discussion of the problem in BP’s favor.” Oil companies, Grover notes “are actually all too happy to talk about the climate crisis. They just want you to know that it’s mostly your fault.” And they’ve succeeded remarkably with this subterfuge. Lots of people dither about eating a cup of yogurt when they could be joining Extinction Rebellion. Some benighted souls have even been hoodwinked into foreswearing children. 🤦‍♂️

It’s no news that 🦕😈🦖 oil companies curate their image. But in recent years, they’ve taken it to new extremes. As Brian Kahn noted November 17 in earther, they even recently had the chutzpah to publicly bemoan “cancel culture on hydrocarbons.” As Kahn comments, that takes some nerve, “as if this is somehow a real problem and not the fact that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction tied to said hydrocarbons.” But their obsessive focus on image has paid off.

Fossil fuel corporations deceived as many people as they could for as long as they could. Their own scientists told them decades ago that their product was cooking the earth. Did that lead them to change course? No, it did not. It led them to suppressing the science, lying about it and seeding that monstrosity called climate denial. So now half 🦖 the rulers of the U.S., one of the most powerful, violent, extensive and carbon polluting empires in human history, parrot idiotic talking points about burning oil, gas and coal supposedly NOT warming the earth. And until recently, the U.S. was the world’s worst polluter of greenhouse gases. Now it’s got the distinction of being the second worst.

Full article:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/26/big-oils-big-lie-about-who-caused-the-climate-collapse/

Agelbert NOTE:
What these 🦖 hydrocarbon hellspawn propagandists are trying to do through legerdemain is convince we-the-people that every human alive has the SAME AGENCY (i.e. biosphere damaging ability). That is TYPICAL broad brush fragmentation of agency (i.e. share of responsibility for the damage), formulated for the exclusive purpose of  absolving the major polluters of the massive pollution they are responsible for.

The biosphere math facts clearly state that less than 17% of the human population, MOSTLY concentrated in wealthy countries, is DOING over 80% of the damage by consuming over 80% of the resources.

Only about half (or less) of the MILITARY budgets alone of the wealthy countries could pay for bio-remediating the most impacted areas, stop the exploitation and care for and educate the high population growth poor there so they become good stewards instead of biosphere destroyers.
 
Since, according to the U.N., the richest 20% of the world's population uses 80% of the resources, the 'Fragmentation of Agency' pie chart for the damage done to the biosphere should look like this:

The hydrocarbon industry, and almost half of the world’s 100 largest companies, want that 'Fragmentation of Agency' pie chart to look like this:

The REAL bottom line is that less than 17% of the human population is an existential threat to ALL of the human population AND a large part of macroscopic species in the biosphere.

The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. Since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE!  Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on! 
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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February 2, 2022

Fossil Fuel Companies Are Greenwashing Europe With Advertisements, Greenpeace Wants You To Fight Back

Though this space is generally dedicated to the 🦖 US-based climate 🐍 disinformation shenanigans, there does in fact exist a 🦕😈 larger world out there, we are told.

For example, yesterday we came across a Greenpeace tweet that “activists have documented +100 examples of climate killing 🦖😈 fossil ads and sponsorships in 40 European cities.”

It links out to an impressive website from the group, which maps out the ads across the continent, organized by company (including 🦖 fossil fuel, automotive, and 😈 airlines) or by ☠️ product (coal, gas, etc.).

And lest you think Greenpeace is just amplifying the greenwashing ads, rest assured that they also have a toolkit so you can “hack” the billboards with some of their stickers, though maybe check out your local vandalism laws first!


The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. Since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE!  Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on! 

« Last Edit: February 02, 2022, 10:26:47 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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March 11, 2022

Factcheck Roundup! Koonin, 🐘 GOP, 🦖 Big Oil Still Wrong About Basically Everything

Yesterday got a little weird, so today we’re getting serious and bringing you some useful climate and energy fact-check content. Perhaps you saw that the EU’s special committee on foreign interference in democratic processes, like the IPCC, recently acknowledged the threat and harms of climate misinformation and called for coordinated responses from official institutions. 

Facebook actually took one such (extremely small) step and is giving group page admins the ability to auto-reject posts containing content that’s already been fact-checked. That’s still not as good as actually deplatforming repeat disinfo spreaders, but it’s a start!

So let’s take a look at some claims that are now too false for even Facebook, and one that’s not

Kate Aronoff is suffering through CERAWeek, and reported (among other things) that there was a long line of energy industry types waiting to get serially debunked Steven Koonin to sign their copy of his book. The latest in his long line of rebuttals comes from ClimateFeedback, which took a look at Koonin’s latest Wall Street Journal op-ed. Lauren Simkins called it intentionally misleading and flawed and Anders Anker Bjork suggested that “the WSJ title could just as well have been: ‘Last decade showed highest mass loss from Greenland ever measured.’” 

Koonin’s critics include the authors of the very study Koonin (mis)cites, and they responded in a letter to the WSJ, in which they write that Koonin’s argument is “an incorrect” and “invalid interpretation” that “is often referred to as ‘cherry picking,’” confirming that, as we pointed out, Koonin’s op-ed accusing climate scientists of cherry picking was itself cherry picking. Kind of a "you're rubber and I'm glue" situation.

The popular disinfo these days is to blame some combination of Greta, Greenpeace, and Joe Biden for Vladimir Putin’s fossil-fueled invasion of Ukraine is, you'll no doubt be shocked to learn, also something experts don’t consider accurate. For example, Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo mostly false-ly claimed that the U.S. is “reliant on Russian oil” and “have doubled our imports from Russia in the last year,” when we went from 1% of crude oil imports being from Russia in 2020 to just 3% overall in 2021. And though facts aren’t stopping those who attack Biden for not drilling enough, the fact is that oil production under Biden has been greater than during three of Trump’s four years in the Oval office (and adjacent TV-viewing rooms). 

And on the Keystone XL front, it’s only “half true” that KXL’s potential to ship 800,000 barrels of oil a day would “offset what we import from Russia” because yes, that would’ve been its capability. If Biden hadn’t canceled it, it was only 8% complete so it still would’ve faced years of construction and legal challenges, and the oil was never guaranteed to even make it to U.S. markets. As Tom Kertscher summarizes, “it couldn’t have solved today’s demand needs. Even in the future, there would be no certainty that the pipeline could produce a net increase of 800,000 barrels per day, rather than just transporting oil from Canada that is currently being transported some other way. Nor would producers be obligated to sell that entire amount to the U.S.”

What is true, though? At least, “mostly”, is Biden’s point that the 🦖 industry has over 9,000 permits to drill that it’s sitting on, and could increase production and boost supply to bring down prices for consumers. Why only “mostly true”? ??? Because “once the permit is approved, drilling doesn’t start overnight,” and, of course, “some companies choose not to drill for corporate reasons — because they can raise funds from investors by not drilling on leases with proven reserves.” It's an ironic twist that the thing that makes Biden's statement not completely true also further undermines the oil and gas industry's claims.

Well look at that! Turns out Wall Street’s been making money hand over fist  on Russian 🦖 fossil fuels , while the 18 🦖 CEOs from the Biggest of Big Oil firms have made over $8 billion since Biden took office. That’s the topline of a new report from Bailout Watch, which also found that the top five Big Oil execs alone have cashed out $99 million of their stocks.

https://bailoutwatch.org/latest :o
📢 US Financial Institution Holders Of Russia's 10 Largest O&G Companies
📢 US Banks And Asset Managers Fueled Russian Oil For Years. Now They’re Silent On Ukraine

BailoutWatch data analyst Christopher Kuveke said “The actions of these oil executives make it clear that no matter how much they groan about the Biden Administration's environmental policies and blame Putin for high prices, their focus remains entirely on lining their own pockets.” 

Oil companies are exploiting a moment of crisis to 😈 squeeze more 💰 money out of the public and into 🎩 their bank accounts? No need for a fact check on that one!
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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