Common Sense Institute says 🦕 fracking is 😇 safe and will make you 💰🎩 rich. Make Nexus Hot News part of your morning: click here to subscribe.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.