In my previous blog post, I showed how one anonymous op-ed writer tried to casually drop the “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” phrase into his piece to insinuate skeptic climate scientists received illicit industry money in exchange for the promise to lie to the public. Now, watch how Greenpeace used the phrase to say the Koch brothers are guilty of corrupting those skeptics. The phrase is heard and seen just 34 seconds into this video, right after a cute but rather defamatory setup of Charles and David Koch…..
Screencapture here for posterity, in case someone decides to delete the video. It is not just some randomly-made video, it is the main feature at this Greenpeace web page.* [*11/16/16 Author’s note: within the last month, Greenpeace’s url address to that page changed to this one.]
Narrator: In order to protect profits, these industries devised a plan, to reposition global warming as a theory and not fact and designed what a recent Greenpeace report dubbed the climate change denial machine. Greenpeace’s Kert Davies: It’s a network of corporations and think tanks, front groups who try to lie about the climate science, stop policies that will solve global warming. Of all the dirty energy money that’s coming into Washington, trying to influence policies, Koch is the worst…
A sledgehammer message if there ever was one: Nasty, greedy billionaire industrialists who hatched a plan to pay skeptic scientists associated with think tanks to lie to the public, and the hard evidence is that sinister-sounding “reposition global warming” phrase.
What is the key thing to remember about Greenpeace’s Kert Davies? He is no less than one of the alumni trio of the old Ozone Action environmental group who came into Greenpeace when Ozone Action’s founder John Passacantando merged his group into Greenpeace USA in 2000. Passacantando took over as Greenpeace USA’s executive director, Ozone Action’s Field Director Phil Radford joined him not long after and later ascended to the Greenpeace USA executive director position when Passacantando moved on in 2008, and Kert Davies was brought in to head Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets.org web site.
What is the key thing to remember about Ozone Action? “According to documents obtained by Ozone Action and by Ross Gelbspan, several ICE strategies were laid out including: the repositioning of global warming as theory, not fact.”
And what is the critical thing to know about the “reposition global warming” phrase? In 1991, it was nothing more than a suggestion to invite science-based rebuttal back into an issue Al Gore and his friends hijacked with assertions that catastrophic man-caused global warming was settled science; a suggestion which came out of a leaked non-profit coal association’s public relations test market campaign which was so obscure that practically no one ever saw or heard about it. Since that PR campaign does not resemble any sort of sinister plot to manufacture doubt out of thin air, it is little wonder why neither Gore nor any other accuser who quotes from its leaked memos has ever had the courage to directly show those to the public as ‘smoking gun’ proof of skeptic climate scientists’ guilt.
The odds of Charles and David Koch having ever heard of an industry-wide directive to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact is practically nil. The real question to ask here is whether the people of “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” made this insinuation with malice, knowing the portrayal of the “reposition global warming” phrase as an industry-approved directive was false from the start.