DeSmog

It is probably worth noting the financial relationship George Mason University has with the Koch brothers. https://www.desmogblog.com/koch-and-george-mason-university

https://www.desmogblog.com/blog/john-mashey John follows the money and the science!

An article by Tyler Cowen of the Mercatus Center - "the most important think tank you've never heard of." [1] If you're interested in the background of this interesting organization, there's some funding information at [2]. It's maybe not that surprising that a board member of an economics outreach effort heavily funded by Koch Industries would argue for the freedom of the very rich to "to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations," especially considering that the Kochs were exposed doing just this by a previous round of ICIJ published leaks. [3] But maybe it's worth asking why such a reasonable practice, totally within the law, would be so secret in the first place that it takes leaks like these to make it known. 1: http://web.archive.org/web/20070824203256/http://gazette.gmu.edu/artic… 2: http://www.desmogblog.com/mercatus-center 3: https://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks/new-leak-reveals-luxembo…

Alex Epstein is the director of the Center for Industrial Progress, an organization he founded in 2011. Its mission is to "inspire Americans to embrace industrial progress as a cultural ideal." He is also a blogger at Master Resource, a "Free Market Energy Blog," and a past fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute, an organization that has received funding from the Koch Foundations including at least $50,000 between 2005 and 2010. http://www.desmogblog.com/alex-epstein Some of my favorite blog post titles of his: * Coal is Clean: http://industrialprogress.com/2012/03/12/coal-is-clean/ * Keep Our "Addiction" to Oil, End Our Allergy to Self-Assertion: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr005=zvtlch4c22.app14b… * Why We Should Love the Oil Companies: http://www.masterresource.org/2012/06/love-oil-companies-educate/ (I think this might be my favorite for its shades of Dr. Strangelove's subtitle)

That only works for relatively small amounts of fossil fuels for a relatively short distance. Once you start to consume a lot of oil, you really need to start piping it around and only depending on trucks for last mile work. America[0] and Europe[1] are covered in pipelines to move both oil and natural gas. Trucks are only used to cover the distance between where the pipe stops and the gas station is. 0 - https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/ngpipelines… 1 - https://theodora.com/pipelines/europe_oil_and_gas_pipelines_map.jpg

Both-sidesism at its finest. For every environmental announcement, got to find somebody who disagrees with it, and the people paid to say the earth is flat are right there to provide you with the quote you need. https://www.desmogblog.com/david-kreutzer : "According to a report Kreutzer co-wrote at The Heritage Foundation: “No consensus exists that man-made emissions are the primary driver of global warming or, more importantly, that global warming is accelerating and dangerous.” "

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S135223101930218… https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/26/electric-cars-lower-carbon-emiss…

I’d look on the climate changer denier debunking websites. That’s the sort of trope that gets rolled out by the fossil fuel “think tanks” and denier troll farms. Example: https://www.desmogblog.com/institute-energy-research-admits-it-was-beh…

Tony Heller is a well credentialed denier[1], been in the game since at least 2008, and is at least good friends with the deniers that get oil money to keep going [2]. I estimate his honesty as comparable to that of Giuliani post 2017. [1] https://www.desmogblog.com/steven-goddard [2] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12032015/leaked-email-reveals-whos-…

Opinion piece author, an anthropology PhD holder, has been pushing climate change denialism and attacking individual scientists via his NAS organization since 2009. He did the same thing to another scientist in 2011[1]. The publications he lists on the Federalist Society make his other agendas very clear. And yes, this is plain as day advertising and deception. [1]:https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/bottling.no…

While I agree with the general premise that we shouldn't rush to assign blame for individual events to climate change, the rest of the article seems to be trying to say the current fires can't be attributed to climate change as effects aren't expected until 2040. But that seems to be based upon a single study/analysis. I can also cherry pick: "Australia. Observational data suggest that fire weather extremes are already becoming more frequent and intense (Dowdy, 2018; Head et al. , 2014)" [https://sciencebrief.org/briefs/wildfires] Noting that the _very same paragraph_ also references the Abatzoglou study. In any case, the author seems to be frequently banging this same drum: https://www.desmogblog.com/roger-pielke-jr https://skepticalscience.com/Roger_Pielke_Jr_blog.htm

This guy gets funding from Exxon https://www.desmogblog.com/robert-p-murphy

Susan Crockford's research is a crock, read up on why here: https://www.desmogblog.com/susan-crockford

> The official position of organizations like Heritage Foundation is not to deny that climate change is happening. This is a flat-out false representation. The Heritage Foundation has sown the seeds of denialism many times. https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/how-the-scientific-consens… https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/congress-should-stop-regul… (section titled "climate change realities") https://www.desmogblog.com/heritage-foundation Some of the problematic articles are from years ago, you say. Well, where is the retraction? The damage of denialism (and their credibility) has already been done... Redemption would not be trivial.

Willie is a fossill fuel-ie https://www.desmogblog.com/willie-soon

I bet that they didn't add the important fact that producing shale oil/gas is still not profitable. The cost is way too high still, they are constantly losing money. https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/06/23/former-shale-gas-ceo-says-shale-…

The draft document here: https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Garden%20Cr… appears to be incomplete. Specifically, pages 3-7 appear to be missing. From the article: > Suess [the state’s Spill Investigation Program Manager] defended his agency’s methods. “What I believe the North Dakota public wants to know is not how big is it, but is this spill a risk to me,” he said. “Personally, I have actually been told by others that we are one of the most transparent agencies out there. My boss is the North Dakota taxpayer, and my door is always open, any citizen can walk in at any time and talk to me.” That statement sets off all kinds of alarm bells. Forget the facts. You can count on us to tell you what you need to know.

Aviation accounts for just 2% of global carbon emissions: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/1/11/18177118/airlines… The plastics industry will burn through 14% of remaining carbon budget: https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/05/15/plastics-industry-climate-change…

Who demands these e-mails from IARC was not researched in the article. It's: "Energy & Environment Legal Institute" http://www.desmogblog.com/energy-environment-legal-institute With "connections with “the Koch brothers, Art Pope and other conservative donors seeking to expand their political influence." "The Guardian has described E&E Legal/the American Tradition Institute as having “a core mission of discrediting climate science and dismantling environmental regulations"

For more information about Christopher Monckton, the author of this article, please see http://www.desmogblog.com/christopher-monckton and http://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton_Myths_blog.htm He's a well-known climate change denier whose views and writings have been widely debunked.

It looks like the joint UK/US investigation has run out of leads and is going after the bloggers' computers in the hopes that the hacker had some communication with them. Or the police might have evidence that we won't hear about until trial. It will look the same to us either way; we weren't at the warrant request hearing. In the meantime, a few bloggers are without their computers for the foreseeable future. There was apparently another hacking last month. This might have influenced the police to act aggressively. http://www.desmogblog.com/climategate-hackers-slither-again-night

From the original report [1]: "It was not our purpose to examine, nor did we seek evidence on, the science produced by CRU. It will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel to look in detail into all the evidence to determine whether or not the consensus view remains valid." [1] http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/phil%20jones…

I wonder what parallels we can draw with oil. The US resumed being a major oil producer in the last decade thanks to the fracking boom. I feel like we got a lot of propaganda about energy independence and not supporting brutal Middle East dictators (that our CIA set up). We got into a price war with the Saudis and Russia [1] and lost. With Covid killing demand this year, the US shale oil industry is on the verge of imploding. I can't see the US competing long-term with cheaper rivals in any natural resource production. We're hamstrung because the main tools for sustaining such industries (state ownership, tariffs, massive subsidies) are politically unpalatable/anticapitalist. "Energy independence" was just a cover for private industry to make a quick buck. Shale firms have not produced a profit [2], workers are being laid off left and right, but owners and investors benefitted massively from the grift [3]. 1. https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714 2. https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-and-fall-of-sha… 3. https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom-fraud-alt…

Your source for that article is a man named Alex Epstein, who is paid by coal industry figures to advocate for a "new industrial revolution". > In a September 11, 2018 piece at the CIP website, Epstein disclosed “proudly” that one of his industry clients was Tyler White, president of the Kentucky Coal Association. [22] Also interesting: > Alexander Epstein planned to release his “Energy Liberation Plan” for consideration by 2016 political candidates. According to an article by Epstein in Forbes, the Energy Liberation Plan seeks to combat “backwards energy and environmental policies that are anti-development, not anti-pollution.” He contends that we are “squandering the opportunity of a generation, through blind opposition to our three most potent sources of power: hydrocarbon energy (coal, oil, and gas), nuclear energy, and hydroelectric energy.” [15] I am reading, and I am neither weeping nor laughing, because this is exactly what I expected to see. If this is someone you expect to accurately represent climate science, I think you are mistaken in holding them in that regard. As a counterpoint, here's another take on the "97%" figure, a review of the several meta-studies that have been done on climate science: http://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm Their conclusion is that between 90 and 100% of climate science papers agree that 1) climate change is occurring and 2) it is caused by human industrial sources. Of course, the man paid by the…

> Paris has a pollution problem. Instead of the smoke from Gauloise cigarettes and the aroma of freshly baked bread, the air is packed with smog, an issue that got so bad one day last month, the city forcibly halved traffic by allowing only cars with odd-number plates to drive. Of course this could have nothing do to with Germany phasing out its nuclear power plants and having to reopen coal power plants instead. They massively increased the share of solar and wind in their energy production, but still need more traditional methods of power generation to cover when those 2 are not providing energy, hence more coal [1]. And coal is incredibly polluting. See [2] for example for CO2 emissions : > In July 2014, a group of NGOs published a study on the EU’s 30 worst CO2-emitting thermal power plants. German power stations featured six times among the 10 dirtiest. CO2 is not the problem for city pollution of course, it's the rest of the small particulate matter that is. [1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/germanys-energy-transitio… [2] http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/01/24/coal-casts-cloud-over-germany-s-e…

First, let's set aside that this is a secretive climate change denial lobbying group that's been under multiple investigations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation) and is headquartered at the same office as an industrial mining lobbying group and look at the actual claim. They quote fired climate skeptic Peter Ridd (https://www.desmogblog.com/peter-ridd) who has been funded by numerous industrial groups and coincidentally made claims that their products are harmless. This time he misreads AIMS data for which AIMS has openly criticized him before on (that's why he had to create his own chart and not use one of AIMS). AIMS of course, firmly and clearly states the opposite of his findings: https://www.aims.gov.au/docs/research/climate-change/declining-coral-g… . Coincidentally the GPWF is fairly well known for intentionally deceptive graphics https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_Warming_Policy_Foun… Anyway, then the article says the author of the claim they are criticizing, Terry Hughes of James Cook University "refused to make public the raw data". This is linguistic acrobatics. His research team had already made public the data so he personally couldn't make it public a second time because that's not how language works. Here's the data: https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.ncjsxksrq So in summary they lied about the data not being public and cited someone who intentionally misrepresented data and…