Round-up Myron ready for radio
This is a welcome to any 209 radio listeners in Cambridge. Myron hasn't been very observable through the internet recently, but we have to remember that the acts he has perpetrated over the last ten years or more are having permanent consequences, long after he's cashed his final Exxon-funded paycheck. He claims to have attended Peterhouse College for a term. Someone should go check if this is true, because he wears the tie.
If you want to warm up on the quality of these people's rhetoric, try this after-dinner speech by Myron's boss Fred Smith, the great founder of the CEI. And here's a private letter from him in the year 2000 begging for some more money from the Tobacco Industry. It's true. It was this lobby which funded the disinformation infrastructure in the 1990s that then took on the Global Warming issue.
The Union of Concerned Scientists have a detailed memo of a workshop meeting at the American Petroleum Institute in 1998, attended by Myron Ebell, where the disinformation plan was fleshed out and a budget drawn up. It involved training a team of fake scientists to get into the media and lead the public into the false belief that there was uncertainty in the science of Global Warming. They had conducted polling search to establish that this tactic would achieve their victory of blocking public policy moving forward on this issue.
Every possible malicious lie has been perpetrated by these think-tanks, who's names would never have been visible in the news media if access was based on the merit rather than political connections, and the facts mattered. Here's an article in Forbes magazine, which refers to "kooky blogs in England". Now there's only one. This one. There should be more. Admittedly, this is a magazine for stupid rich people who have direct influence on politics and banking policy. You won't find reports detailing the foundations of the predictable current financial crisis, which is going to result in the collapse of hundreds of US banks this year, because, like Climate Change, they don't actually believe the consequences will touch them. They are selfish and ignorant at the same time. And the crises are going to be reported by them in future years as if nobody saw them coming.
The other prong of the PR campaign is to target the government -- where the decisions are made, partly with the consent of public opinion. The proportion of campaign effort that goes to misleading the public over misleading congress is guideline of how much they believe public opinion matters in the decision making process. It doesn't matter so much in the UK, which is why the lobbyists here put all their effort into buying New Labour, and didn't waste it on the public. The system means our votes don't count, and we seem content with that.
Obviously, the documentation of this work doesn't often see the light of day (which doesn't mean it's not absolutely rampant). What did emerge once was an email which showed Myron Ebell conspiring with the petroleum lobbyist Philip Cooney working in the White House to litigate against a branch of the government that had published a Climate Change report which he had not had the chance to edit down into a piece of meaningless ink on paper.
I can report one of the all too few moments of public humiliation Myron experienced from a member of the audience, but it's extremely rare. Maybe his light is fading from view. But, to be honest, the threat to the species he has rendered upon us is not going to go away.
You have to remember, Global Warming was absolutely concrete science twenty years ago -- as real as the hole in the ozone layer. An international treaty was negotiated and signed by 1997 -- which is very fast for such deals, demonstrating the urgency of the situation. And now in 2008 we're not even close to where we were in, say, 1988. Here's a speech by Margaret Thatcher in that very year that's still ahead of what any politician these days is comfortable with saying.
This moment has been one of the most extra-ordinary turning points in all of human history. It exceeds the fall of the Roman empire. Our amazing global communications network was essentially bought out by corporate interests and used against us to defeat our intelligence and basic survival instinct. It was allowed to happen consciously and with full understanding of the consequences by our political leaders.
Mother Nature has conducted its first experiment with intelligent life on this planet. This experiment is careering towards a real failure, as first experiments often do.
If you want to warm up on the quality of these people's rhetoric, try this after-dinner speech by Myron's boss Fred Smith, the great founder of the CEI. And here's a private letter from him in the year 2000 begging for some more money from the Tobacco Industry. It's true. It was this lobby which funded the disinformation infrastructure in the 1990s that then took on the Global Warming issue.
The Union of Concerned Scientists have a detailed memo of a workshop meeting at the American Petroleum Institute in 1998, attended by Myron Ebell, where the disinformation plan was fleshed out and a budget drawn up. It involved training a team of fake scientists to get into the media and lead the public into the false belief that there was uncertainty in the science of Global Warming. They had conducted polling search to establish that this tactic would achieve their victory of blocking public policy moving forward on this issue.
Every possible malicious lie has been perpetrated by these think-tanks, who's names would never have been visible in the news media if access was based on the merit rather than political connections, and the facts mattered. Here's an article in Forbes magazine, which refers to "kooky blogs in England". Now there's only one. This one. There should be more. Admittedly, this is a magazine for stupid rich people who have direct influence on politics and banking policy. You won't find reports detailing the foundations of the predictable current financial crisis, which is going to result in the collapse of hundreds of US banks this year, because, like Climate Change, they don't actually believe the consequences will touch them. They are selfish and ignorant at the same time. And the crises are going to be reported by them in future years as if nobody saw them coming.
The other prong of the PR campaign is to target the government -- where the decisions are made, partly with the consent of public opinion. The proportion of campaign effort that goes to misleading the public over misleading congress is guideline of how much they believe public opinion matters in the decision making process. It doesn't matter so much in the UK, which is why the lobbyists here put all their effort into buying New Labour, and didn't waste it on the public. The system means our votes don't count, and we seem content with that.
Obviously, the documentation of this work doesn't often see the light of day (which doesn't mean it's not absolutely rampant). What did emerge once was an email which showed Myron Ebell conspiring with the petroleum lobbyist Philip Cooney working in the White House to litigate against a branch of the government that had published a Climate Change report which he had not had the chance to edit down into a piece of meaningless ink on paper.
I can report one of the all too few moments of public humiliation Myron experienced from a member of the audience, but it's extremely rare. Maybe his light is fading from view. But, to be honest, the threat to the species he has rendered upon us is not going to go away.
You have to remember, Global Warming was absolutely concrete science twenty years ago -- as real as the hole in the ozone layer. An international treaty was negotiated and signed by 1997 -- which is very fast for such deals, demonstrating the urgency of the situation. And now in 2008 we're not even close to where we were in, say, 1988. Here's a speech by Margaret Thatcher in that very year that's still ahead of what any politician these days is comfortable with saying.
This moment has been one of the most extra-ordinary turning points in all of human history. It exceeds the fall of the Roman empire. Our amazing global communications network was essentially bought out by corporate interests and used against us to defeat our intelligence and basic survival instinct. It was allowed to happen consciously and with full understanding of the consequences by our political leaders.
Mother Nature has conducted its first experiment with intelligent life on this planet. This experiment is careering towards a real failure, as first experiments often do.
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