A major challenge exists: it is far easier to dispense truthiness (and outright deceit)than it is to have to run after and rebut it. When it comes to anti-science syndrome suffering climate deniers and delayers, the whack-a-mole campaign of dealing with deceit, deception, and diversion is a never-ending and utterly exhausting process. And, that exhaustion is one of the powerful items in the quiver for serial deceivers — eventually the exhausted truthtellers run out of energy (and other resources) to respond. And, the deceit lives on without serious challenge.
Of course, there is the not insignificant issue that serious interests are aligned with downplaying (even dismissive) climate change risks. Thus, it is easy for anyone with even a shred of credentials to get a powerful megaphone in, for example, the Murdoch disinformation empire.
Today’s Wall Street Journal provides (yet) another example of this sad reality.
With the publication of “No Need to Panic About Global Warming”, the editor made sure to reinforce the argument by pointing to the “authority” of “16 scientists listed at the end of the article” who signed it. (As Yes, 16 … although not all are scientists, still a heady number of some (reasonably) well known names, such as aviation pioneer Burt Rutan. These 16, however, are less well known for their passionate rejection of the scientific community’s understanding of climate risks and outright denial of many fundamental concepts.
After the fold is an initial look at (yet) another recklessly misleading Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
A correspondent just provided the text of material that Greenpeace has sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) making a case that TransCanada is potentially in violation of security laws due to its use of inflated job figures as part of a strategic influence campaign to drive the Obama Administration into supporting this misguided and risky venture.
From that correspondent:
Accountability time for TransCanada’s bogus job creation claims to investors. The company has repeatedly used a number that would have it magically creating jobs at a rate 67 times greater in the U.S. than it told Canadian regulators it would in that country. Your basic lobbyists’ lie.
“It’s wrong for politicians and pundits to use these false numbers, but it’s illegal for TransCanada to lie to investors. The SEC needs to take immediate action to hold TransCanada accountable for misleading investors to boost its valuation,” said Phil Radford, Executive Director of Greenpeace. “TransCanada needs to knock off the propaganda and level with people that they’d create a few temporary jobs just to move dirty oil through our country so it can be shipped to Europe for maximum Big Oil profits.”
From complaint:
“In the process, it has misled investors, U.S. and Canadian officials, the media, and the public at large in order to bolster its balance sheets and share price. We think these statements violate U.S. securities disclosure laws, notably SEC Rule 10b(5) – Employment of Manipulative and Deceptive Practices. It is incumbent on TRP to immediately and publicly correct this information – or be forced to do so by the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
I was told that the SEC has confirmed that it is now actively considering the Greenpeace complaint.
On January 16, the Los Angeles Times revealed that anti-science bills have been popping up over the past several years in statehouses across the U.S., mandating the teaching of climate change denial or “skepticism” as a credible “theoretical alternative” to human caused climate change came.
“Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.”
What the excellent Times coverage missed is that key language in these anti-science bills all eminated from a single source: the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.
ALEC Exposed: No, Not Alec Baldwin*
In summer 2011, “ALEC Exposed,” a project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD)**, taught those alarmed about the power that corporations wield in the American political sphere an important lesson: when bills with a similar DNA pop up in various statehouses nationwide, it’s no coincidence.
Explaining the nature and origins of the project, CMD wrote, “[CMD] unveiled a trove of over 800 ‘model’ bills and resolutions secretly voted on by corporations and politicians through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These bills reveal the corporate collaboration reshaping our democracy, state by state.”
CMD continued, “Before our publication of this trove of bills, it has been difficult to trace the numerous controversial and extreme provisions popping up in legislatures across the country directly to ALEC and its corporate underwriters.”
CMD explained that ALEC conducts its operations in the most shadowy of manners (emphases mine):
“Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve ‘model’ bills…Corporations fund almost all of ALEC’s operations.Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills.”
So, what is the name of the “model bill” this time around?
The Trojan Horse: The “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act”
Within it, “A Blueprint to Make the Most of America’s Energy Resources” (full section after the fold) from which we learn that “nuclear power, efficient natural gas, and clean coal” are “renewable energy” sources.
Now, if we wish to speak in terms of 10s of millions of years, it seems true that coal, natural gas, and oil are renewable. Today’s biomass will, over that sort of geologic time, create (renew, one might say) new fossil fuel supplies. However, in any rational discussion, these are not “renewable” fuels within any context of human civilization.
From the White House document:
renewable energy sources like wind, solar, biomass, hydropower, nuclear power, efficient natural gas, and clean coal.
This is, almost certainly an issue of poor writing. (It could have read “nuclear power, efficient natural gas, clean coal, and renewable energy sources like wind, solar, biomass, and hydropower.” That rewrite, however, would have put renewables at the back of the line and hurt the President among those (e.g., the majority of Americans) strongly supportive of greater investment in renewable energy deployment and research.)
This section, however, has far more serious problems. Most importantly, the President’s whole-sale throwing in the hat with the ‘natural gas is good for the environment and economy’ propaganda that is a Potemkin Village when it comes to addressing the nation’s real challenges. On that Potemkin Village, for example, see
With all due respect, Mr. President, you misstated “the defining issue of our time …”
I do hope that the United States returns to the idyllic notion of a past defined by your grandparents in
a story of success that every American had a chance to share – the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.
This, however, is not “the defining issue …”
No, Mr. President, as important as that American dream is, “the defining issue of our time” is existential on a far more fundamental level:
Will we or will we not turn aside from our reckless path toward catastrophic climate chaos which represents an existential threat to American security as (probably more) serious as that created by the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal?
Honestly, the State of the Union (SOTU) has never been a time which I’ve seen as ‘getting drunk’ time. However, there has grown over the years a State of the Union drinking games tradition. And, well, 2012 builds on that tradition.
Let’s take a look, for a moment, at the President’s forshadowing of tonight’s SOTU address.
Now, when I conceive this tradition against what is projected for the State of the Union address, my game is simpler: will the President speech give rise for celebration as to a serious battle to address the most critical issues our nation faces to provide for prosperity and security in the decades to come?
Yes, I agree, the 1% dominance imperils our nation. Yes, I agree, the economic hardships on 10s of millions of Americans while Wall Street spews out $177 billion in bonuses is horrendous. Yes, I agree …
However, the most critical issue is to figure out how to navigate the Perfect Storm of economic havoc, energy supply challenges, and environmental limitations. These must be addressed as an integrated package because addressing them in isolation from each other will lead to (is leading to) catastrophe.
Yes, at the end of the day, it does come down to Global Warming and Peak Oil.
My prediction, amid discussion of ‘homegrown energy’, boosting U.S. oil production, and developing ‘alternatives’ (sigh, likely to again include “clean coal” and “natural gas”), neither term will come up.
And, well, those are my two ‘drinking game’ terms … and, thus, I expect to remain sober this evening.
PS: A bottle will be close at hand … Now, there is at least some reason to hope that I am wrong. As per EENEWS,
Energy and environmental insiders on and off Capitol Hill said yesterday that they were unsure whether Obama would again spend a significant amount of time calling on Congress to promote a clean energy standard that would require 80 percent of U.S. power to come from low-carbon sources by 2035.
E.g., it is possible that President Obama will forcefully lay a case for ending subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, will call for carbon and other pollutants to be made ‘internal’ to pricing, and … And, if so, then the bottle will not remain full.
The problem debating this sort of thing is the side of dishonesty and intellectual laziness is at an advantage. It will likely take more effort for me to compose this post, then it took for Ron Paul to stand before the Confederate Flag and offer his thin gruel of history. Those attempting to practice history need not only gather facts, but seek out facts that might contradict the facts they like, and then gather more facts of context to see what it all means.
But Comfortable History is asymmetrical warfare it needs only a smattering of facts, and need not guard against a lack of context, presentism, or other facts that might undermine its arguments. Instead it breezily proceeds through hypotheticals and abstract thought experiments which somehow satisfy our desire to be in possession of a dissident intellect. Comfortable History is like the computer virus that poses as the shield—it positions the espouser as a brave truth-teller, even as it infects us with lies. [...]
Reading this struck a nerve … a direct nerve … that goes beyond the challenges in “Thinking in Time” but to a dominant element in 21st century American political, media, and general culture:
The truthiness-laden soundbyte and tweet are heard round the world … and the truthtellers are relegating to chasing after truthiness …
It is far, far, more ‘energy-efficient’ in terms of time (and intellectual horsepower and other resources) to run from glib half-truth to well-phrase misrepresentation to outright fabricated lies than to remain faithful to truthful engagement. And, it is far easier to promulgate such untruthful thinking than to chase after the falsehoods, in a perpetual whack-a-mole game, as a white knight debunker.
Across the spectrum, in American politics, the half-truths and falsehoods seem too often to have rein. From “Obama is a Socialist” to “taxes are evil” to “Global Warming is a scam run by a world-wide conspiracy of scientists who are after funding”, too much of the American public (and too much of our political debate) is impregnated with such truthiness and falsehoods and it undermines our ability to have a healthily functioning civil society.
Let us be clear, there are interests — serious interests — behind much of this truthiness.
Coates is looking at “Comfortable History” and how distortions of mid-19th century American society leads to a ‘comfortable’ counter-factual concept of American history that fits right into Nixonian ’southern strategy’.
History is ’social science’.
Considering Coates’ work suggests that ‘Comfortable History’ is a soft-science element of “sound science”.
“Sound Science” sounds so good … after all, who wouldn’t want science to be sound?
The challenge is that the answer is that those promoting “Sound Science” are those seeking to undermine the scientific method and most people’s understanding of what science is / should be … [Read more →]
This guest post by a scientist who finds himself a FishOutOfWater highlights just how concerned we should be … global warming is not an issue for your grandchildren …
Flowers are blooming in England in January more than a month early. The Vail, Colorado ski resort has no natural snow for the first time in 30 years of operation while Homer Alaska had over 15 feet of snow by the tenth of January smashing all time records. Temperatures were strangely warm in the Dakotas with highs reaching the low seventies on Jan 5 & 6 in several towns in South Dakota, smashing records by as much as 15°F. Crocuses in England credit:Ben Birchall
Record Start to 2012
The first 10 days of 2012 have been warmer than anytime in recorded history across portions of the Northern Plains. This was mainly due to the lack of snow cover leading to unseasonably warm high temperatures. The average high temperature for the first 10 days in January (January 1-January 10) was warmer than previously recorded, in some instances by 6 degrees!
Image, NOAA: The jet stream, far north of normal, brought record warmth to the northern plains.
Record Warmth: January 5, 2012A warm front pushed northeastward across Minnesota and brought with it very warm temperatures, making it feel more like late March or early April than the first week of January.
Temperatures soared across Minnesota where there was abundant sunshine and no snow on the ground. The highest temperature found so far from a National Weather Service Cooperative Station is 62 degrees at Marshall. Both Milan and Madison in southwestern Minnesota both saw 61 degrees. An automated station near Canby in Yellow Medicine County reached 63 degrees. Looking back to 1891 this is the first time a maximum temperature reached 60 degrees in the state for the first week of January. St. Cloud saw a record high of 53 degrees, breaking the old record of 43 degrees set in 1984. Clouds held the temperature down in the Twin Cities and “only” had a high of 45 degrees.
There has never been a 60 degree temperature recorded during the first week of January in Minnesota’s modern climate record. The warmest temperature ever recorded in Minnesota during the first week of January is 59 degrees, occurring on January 7, 2003 in Amboy, MN. The warmest temperature ever recorded in Minnesota on January 5 is 57 degrees, recorded at Crookston in 1902.
Lack of snow in the northern U.S. let temperatures break records. Image: NOAA
This guest post comes from a correspondent who, painfully, wishes to be identified solely as a “Former Post Subscriber”. This former post subscriber was outraged by the Washington Post’s editorial attacking President Obama for putting a hold on the Keystone XL pipeline. Seeing the word “addiction,” this “Former Post Subscriber” chose to see how it would read if we substituted another hazardous (and, in this case, illegal) addiction in the place of our fossil-foolish addiction. As I am sure you will agree, it makes compelling and painful reading …
Obama’s Heroin Supply Line rejection is hard to accept
By Editorial Board, Wednesday, January 18, 7:46 PM
ON TUESDAY, President Obama’s Jobs Council reminded the nation that it is still hooked on heroin, and will be for a long time. “Continuing to deliver inexpensive and reliable dope ,” the council reported, “is going to require the United States to optimize all of its natural resources and construct pathways (pipelines, transmission and distribution) to deliver White China and Mexican Brown .”
It added that regulatory “and permitting obstacles that could threaten the development of some heroin projects, negatively impact jobs and weaken our dope infrastructure need to be addressed.”
Mr. Obama’s Jobs Council could start by calling out .?.?. the Obama administration.
On Wednesday, the State Department announced that it recommended rejecting the application of TransCanada Corp. to build the Keystone XL heroin pipeline, and Mr. Obama concurred. The project would have transported heavy, tar-like smack from Alberta — and, potentially, from unconventional heroin deposits in states such as Montana — to U.S. refineries on the Gulf of Mexico coast.
Environmentalists have fought Keystone XL furiously. In November, the State Department tried to put off the politically dangerous issue until after this year’s election, saying that the project, which had undergone several years of vetting, required further study. But Republicans in Congress unwisely upped the political gamesmanship by mandating that State make a decision by Feb. 21. Following Wednesday’s rejection, TransCanada promised to reapply — so the administration has again punted the final decision until after the election.
We almost hope this was a political call because, on the substance, there should be no question. Without the pipeline, Canada would still export its heroin — with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground — but it would go to China. And, as a State Department report found, U.S. refineries would still import low-quality smack — just from the Middle East. Stopping the pipeline, then, wouldn’t do anything to reduce global warming, but it would almost certainly require more dope to be transported across oceans in tankers.
Environmentalists and Nebraska politicians say that the route TransCanada proposed might threaten the state’s ecologically sensitive Sand Hills region. But TransCanada has been willing to tweak the route, in consultation with Nebraska officials, even though a government analysis last year concluded that the original one would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.” Surely the Obama administration didn’t have to declare the whole project contrary to the national interest — that’s the standard State was supposed to apply — and force the company to start all over again.
Environmentalists go on to argue that some of the heroin U.S. refineries produce from Canada’s dope might be exported elsewhere. But even if that’s true, why force those refineries to obtain their heroin from farther away? Anti-Keystone activists insist that building the pipeline will raise dope prices in the Midwest. But shouldn’t environmentalists want that? Finally, pipeline skeptics dispute the estimates of the number of jobs that the project would create. But, clearly, constructing the pipeline would still result in job gains during a sluggish economic recovery.
There are far fairer, far more rational ways to discourage dope use in America, the first of which is establishing higher heroin taxes. Environmentalists should fight for policies that might actually do substantial good instead of tilting against Keystone XL, and President Obama should have the courage to say so.
NOTE: This restructured editorial is published in accordance with satire guidance as to proper use of copyrighted material.
Consider the risks from our fossil fuel usage and burning of ‘liquid gold’. And, consider how scandalous it would be to use the term “addiction” like this in a discussion of heroin.
have to run after and rebut it. When it comes to anti-science syndrome suffering climate deniers and delayers, the whack-a-mole campaign of dealing with deceit, deception, and diversion is a never-ending and utterly exhausting process. And, that exhaustion is one of the powerful items in the quiver for serial deceivers — eventually the exhausted truthtellers run out of energy (and other resources) to respond. And, the deceit lives on without serious challenge.
