…. you end up mindlessly regurgitating propaganda talking points about long-dead false news items while claiming it is “original reporting + analysis on the climate crisis.”
And, I should add, astute observers could use that wipeout to illustrate what is entirely wrong with the notion of ‘industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns,’ where the ultimate result is that it appears to be the enviro-activists who’ve been spoon-feeding disinformation on the global warming issue to gullible ‘reporters’ and others who also never questioned it for them to regurgitate at a later date.
I can never emphasize this enough, there’s only two worthless sets of ‘leaked industry memos’ which enviros rely on to say global warming disinformation campaigns exist, the never-implemented “reposition global warming” set and the never-implemented “victory will be achieved” set. Barely a little over four weeks back, yet another case study of that enslavement problem popped up.
In a piece titled “Manchin says climate goals too ‘aggressive’” at the Substack “Heated World” site by ‘journalist’ Emily Atkin, what does she cite as ‘evidence’ that disinformation campaigns efforts led by the fossil fuel industry exist? Why, ye olde “reposition global warming” memo set, followed by a partly cropped-at-the-bottom “Chicken Little” newspaper ad that was supposed to be a blatant part of the ‘disinformation effort.’
Manchin made his comments at the annual conference of The Edison Electric Institute, a longstanding fixture in the world of climate deception. … EEI’s members were first warned of the climate risks of burning fossil fuels its 1968 Annual Convention … Then, in the late 80s, it started playing both sides of the climate coin—publicly touting the need for aggressive climate action, while quietly funding efforts to prevent it.
One of those efforts was the Information Council on the Environment, which aimed to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”
Who’s Emily “foremost climate journalists in the US” Atkin’s source for the “reposition global warming” memo set in her hyperlink for the phrase, and for the Chicken Little newspaper ad? The Energy and Policy Institute / Dave Anderson’s 2017 “Utilities Knew” report. That report, as I detailed in my April 11, 2020 blog post, was a major twist in the otherwise quite consistent 25 year-long effort to falsely attribute the “reposition global warming” memo set to the Western Fuels Association and its short-lived, largely unseen “Information Council for the Environment” (“ICE”) public relations campaign. For the record, I don’t have the first clue what the Edison Electric Institute’s position on the global warming issue ever was, or what they hoped to gain by submitting a proposal to the ICE PR campaign managers which was so obtuse that it was rejected outright, including its alternative name suggestion of “Informed Citizens for the Environment.” But that’s a whole other story.
While I covered the major problem with the Chicken Little in my blog post about Dave Anderson’s strange switch in accusatory attribution tactics, I bring it up again with regard to ‘journalist’ Emily Atkin’s prominent mention of the ad in her piece. Zoom in on the cropped lower right section of the ad:
Ms Atkin claims to be a reporter / analyst on the climate issue. If she was a true, traditional, objective one with an eye out for suspicious problems, she would have stopped her ‘reporting’ the moment she saw that ad from Dave Anderson’s report and minimally asked herself …
- why it was cropped at the bottom like that;
- why the name in the ad is shown as “Informed Citizens for the Environment” — which is never once mentioned as that specific name in either Dave Anderson’s Summary of his 2017 report or within the 66 pages of his report — instead of “Information Council on the Environment,” which appears twice in Anderson’s Summary, and three times in his 66 page report;
- and why the “toll-free” phone number in this “Informed Citizens for the Environment” ad is for a 701 area code that is and was never a toll-free number in the U.S. phone system.
Some might say “Emily Atkin-who?” Arguably, she’s perhaps as obscure to most people as some person on Twitter* who, only days ago, tweeted an even more cropped version of the Chicken Little ad sourced from an uncited source … and then subsequently hid it from the unapproved public. *(Oh; that Kyle Moler)
Then there are internationally recognized journalist names such as the UK Guardian‘s George Monbiot. Back in 2009, he accused the fossil fuel industry of treachery, citing the “reposition global warming” memo set as evidence of that while falsely saying that Naomi Oreskes exposed all the memos online.
Monbiot’s article came out more than a decade ago, but less than two weeks ago on 7/8/2021, he cited the only other ‘leaked industry memos evidence’ that enviro-activists have in their arsenal, when he offered the following assertion in his “How the BBC let climate deniers walk all over it” article regarding the way he thought the British Broadcasting System’s failure to be inquisitive enough about ‘suspect funding’ …
… gave the oil and tobacco companies just what they wanted: in the words of the American Petroleum Institute, “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.
Sift through enough migraine headache-inducing levels of information from skeptic climate scientists and related expert speakers / analysts on the topic, and it appears the so-called ‘climate crisis’ is heavily disputed on multiple angles. Sift through enough ‘reporting’ about political accusations within the issue along with how much opposition rebuttal on science details is seen, and it becomes ever more obvious that traditional, objective, unbiased reporting went out the window a few decades ago.
It’s only a matter of time before this failure of basic journalism collapses on itself, where people with greater influence and more investigative resources than me will expose its sheer extent and how the ‘crooked skeptic scientists’ one-trick pony accusation was so widely spread for so long. Doesn’t matter how many ‘journalists’ repeat the accusation; anything with that many holes cannot stay afloat forever; it will sink. It is a mathematical certainty.