Climate Change Denials Are Just Fossil Fuel Corporation Propaganda

When facts don't fit their ideology, their preference for delusion over reality, the right responds by simply lying.  It is a tragedy that the right is not more adept, more intent on fact checking and on insisting on operating from a foundation of fact, not their paid-for-by-big-oil and religious fictions.

We have long contended that the right wing position on fossil fuel was propaganda, not good science, and generally a load of crap.  It is sad that the right wing has been bought and paid for, and that the low information voters who subscribe to their ideology have been conned when they should know better.

Now that hoax has been further exposed by Media Matters with internal documents leaked to them from the Heartland Institute, a right wing conspiracy-theory generating front for corporate greed.  Among those notably associated with Heartland are the Koch Brothers,  others known for generous right wing PAC support and campaign donations to keep themselves rich by disproprortionately influencing public policy and legislation. And now apparently they are hoping to influence our schools, by teaching them crap science that is factually inaccurate and pathetically poor scientific theory. 

Ecological pollution is not bad enough; now they're working their way down the alphabet to Education pollution, all for greed.  When lies don' work, they go to thuggery, as was the case when the documentary film maker of the movie Gasland was arrested for trying to record a public hearing in Congress, at the insistence of Republican Representatives.  To hell with freedom and the First Amendment, when big oil feels threatened; and the Tea Partiers and extreme right can't be quick enough to appease their buyers.

It is not chance that our nation has slipped badly in comparison to other nations in reading, math and science.  The extremist ideology driven right wants to control, and to some extent destroy, any form of control over education so they can substitute religion for fact, and intrude ideology in history.  Just recently the Tennessee Tea party was trying to remove references in history books to quite a number of the founding fathers having been slave owners.  They in fact wanted to remove references to slavery, and to any negative or unpleasant treatment of native americans as well, because it might give students a negative opinion of their country if they knew the truth.  They prefer a filiopietistic (look it up) approach to history, instead of admitting flaws in our great historic figures.

Texas has long tried to alter text book content to be less than factual.  Slavery is not being revised out of the American Revolutionary era; right wing politicians and others have tried to remove any mention of slavery as well from the Civil War.  They don't like the facts, so instead of presenting the reality, they choose to lie. Subjects like economics, and science, notably as it relates to topics like the religion masquerading as false pseudo-science, in the guise of creationism and intelligent design are just a few other examples.

And then we have climate change, global warming, man-made causation, about which there really IS NO controversy except where big oil money has faked a controversy.   I have long contended that we will not bridge the divide in American partisan politics until we begin from a basis of facts; only from that basis can we hope to achieve a consensus, a meeting of the minds.

Except that the right has lost their collective minds, or more precisely sold their minds and consciences.

Here is the first story in a series from Media Matters; it should be noted for those who discount anything no matter how factual if they don't personally LIKE the reality, that the facts in the Media Matters series on Heartland have been independently verified by the AP:
INTERNAL DOCUMENTS: The Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax

By Brad Johnson on Feb 14, 2012 at 3:10 pm

The first in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. Heartland has issued a press release claiming that some of these documents were sent to an outsider under false pretenses and that one document in the set is a fake.

Heartland Institute's secret plans for a K-12 climate-denier curriculum.

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.” This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” Heartland’s confidential 2012 fundraising document bemoans. The group believes that Wojick’s project has “potential for great success,” because he has “contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting scientific curricula.” The document explains that Wojick will produce “modules” that promote the conspiratorial claim that climate change is “controversial”:

Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy“), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather“), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

Wojick will receive $5,000 per module, with twenty modules produced a year. Wojick, who manages the Climate Change Debate listserv, is not a climate scientist. His doctorate is in epistomology.

The Heartland Institute also runs the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a conspiracy-theorist parody of the Nobel-prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Heartland’s NIPCC project “pays a team of scientists approximately $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered.” Their climate-denial work is funded anonymously.

James M. Taylor, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, told ThinkProgress Green in an e-mail why the group is developing its denier curriculum:

We are concerned that schools are teaching climate change issues in a manner that is not consistent with sound science and that is designed to lead students to the erroneous belief that humans are causing a global warming crisis. We hope that our efforts will restore sound science to climate change education and discourage the political propaganda that too often passes as “education”.

Right-wing ideologues, fueled by the fossil fuel industry, have been increasing their efforts to pollute science education in elementary schools. These attempts to hijack children’s education piggyback on the religious right’s war on biology education and the science of evolution. The National Center for Science Education, which has long led the defense of evolution education in elementary schools, has begun a new program to fight global warming denial in textbooks and classrooms.

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Any doubt that the right is in the pay and the pocket of big oil?
 
I have written about the Keystone XL pipeline debacle, which directly benefits not only the Koch Brothers, but also a number of right wing politicians both directly and indirectly.  If you remember the disaster, including loss of lives, from the BP Oil incident in the Gulf of Mexico not that long ago, the lack of transparency, the lack of honesty should sound famliar.  If you have doubts, I encourage you to fact check all the happy happy propaganda ads that BP is running, trying to cover their oily backsides for that incident, so they can keep drilling, more and deeper, despite a complete lack of preparedness that is any better than they had in that last disaster.
 
Also from ThinkProgress Green:
 
House Passes Section Of Transportation Bill Consisting Only Of Earmarks To Big Oil

By Public Lands Team on Feb 17, 2012 at 1:27 pm
By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last night the House of Representatives passed part of the behemoth transportation bill it is considering over the next month on a 237-187 vote. This section consisted solely of earmarks to Big Oil including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opening Florida coasts to offshore drilling, a plan to develop oil shale (which isn’t even commercially viable), and building the Keystone XL pipeline. A Congressional Budget Office analysis shows that the drilling proposals together generate only approximately $2 billion, far less than the $50 billion funding gap needed for transportation projects over the coming years.

Even if the drilling could pay for the costs, linking oil and gas development to long-term highway funding is just bad public policy, as Ryan Alexander of the nonpartisan group Taxpayers for Common Sense has explained:

Paying for a couple of years of transportation funding with expected revenues from an increase in oil and gas drilling that will likely take many years to get rolling is not a responsible budget approach… It’s like buying the Ferrari tomorrow because you are sure a raise is coming sometime in the future.”

Originally the transportation bill (H.R. 7, American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act of 2012) was one large bill that included transportation funding, drilling, and changes to federal pensions. However, Republicans realized that they would not have the votes for the bill, and so split it into three bills to be voted on separately that will then be spliced back together and sent to the Senate. This was an unusual procedural move designed to shield Republicans from having to take tough votes that won’t be popular with their constituents but also force the bill through.

What is most galling is that none of these bills alone or combined would be able to pay for the costs of transportation generated by this bill. Traditionally, improvements to roads, bridges, and public transportation are funded by the federal gasoline tax, but GOP leaders in the House are taking the unprecedented step to tie funding to an unnecessary and ineffective increase in fossil fuel production. Since it doesn’t even begin to fund our highways, the bill can be considered nothing more than a series of earmarks for Big Oil.

The proposal to fund oil shale from Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CO) is a particularly nasty earmark. The Congressional Budget Office found the bill would generate no revenue over 10 years and in the short term would cost money to implement the leasing program. The Checks and Balance Project detailed this “boondoogle” in an online ad.

Last night’s vote saw some crossing of party lines, particularly 11 Florida Republicans angered by proposals to drill off of the state’s coasts who voted no on the bill’s passage.