Outposts of a dead market

Myron makes his first post to the CEI's OpenMarket.org blog (the only thing that seems to move on that defunct think-tank's webpage) since last December with a rambling account of stumbling in to the room like a pissed old fart to witness Al Gore's short televised speech, A Generational Challenge to Repower America.

Having run the gauntlet of vegans, anti-meatarians, LaRouchies and "the large contingent of Americans for Prosperity and Bureaucrash and CEI interns" ("Great signs, lots of energy."), he tells us he got in at 11:46am

The Climate has perused the webpages of the aforementioned petroleum-funded brain-dead front groups for images of the great grand-daddy of lies in great detail. However, the bureaucrash website is very broken (way to go kids; that shite Microsoft technology is serving you well) with no trace of a report. There was something from 21 July where one of the kids complaining that she couldn't buy a hand-gun as easily as a pack of chewing gum after the certifiably insane supreme court overturned a 32 year old ban that been established democratically by a community who were sick and tired of getting shot at by children.

On the Americans for Despairity webpage there was a whole bunch of photographs of fat black executive cars for VIPs. Apparently this was hypocritical. Well that's news, isn't it? So was using microphones in the auditorium powered by coal-fired electricity. It must be great to believe in the Right where hypocrisy is a logical impossibility. Even when you're taking huge government subsidies and bail-outs, you're just being greedy -- and greed is good.

Americans for Poverty also produced a video (screen-grab above -- T-shirt says: "The Truth is Cool" and he's chanting "Al Gore: Gotta go! Energy Taxes: Gotta go!". Other great signs included: "Ready for $8 gas?", "Drill? Yes We Can", "Cap government C02") Then the cameraman goes off to harass people who are arriving in taxis. Meanwhile, the lie machine keeps on pumping it out. Who are these people? What are they trying to achieve?

Myron waffled on about the "overwhelmingly white" (like he cares for the lower classes) audience where he overheard two women worrying about what all the windmills will do to bird migration patterns. Person next to him asked, "I just realized I'm not sure what the purpose of this is. Do you know?" Myron: "I think Al Gore is going to give us a 10-year plan to save the planet."

Well, I guess it's a final denouement for Myron Ebell's completed ten year plan to destroy the planet.

Myron went off to lunch alone afterwards with no friends and mumbled into his fizzy drink coke about population growth and consumer demand. "Preposterous", he said.

And that's it, for his detailed critique. Does this guy get paid anymore to do this, or is it just for fun?

For what real work involves see this collaborative and positive fisking of the speech over at the New York Times, and then tell me that this dude hasn't completely run out of gas.

It's a hard life fighting to keep us on track for the predictable crash at the end of the world, isn't it Myron. Not everyone wants to keep on board with you, do they? Some of us want to live. In spite of the easy money available for being a bag-carrier for the human extinction industry.

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.

Update on Ebell

Since both main-party US Presidential candidates agree with the Military Advisory Board that climate change "poses a serious threat to America's national security" (ie that many Americans will die), Myron Ebell has rolled up his sleeves and got to work to make sure that this belief gets challenged -- in order that in the future many Americans will die.

As Myron's leverage is with the Republican Party, he's been attacking John McCain who has flip-flopped to the side of evil on so many other crucial issues, he seems a sure bet.

The fight is going to be down at the Republican Party convention, where Myron claims McCain is "really out of step with the strong majority of his party." How the press can continue to repeat the lie that his employer, the Competitive Exitprise Institute is "non-partisan" is beyond belief.

Anyway, at least there's some coverage of one of the standard lies about how, although all the ice caps are clearly melting at an accelerated rate (far quicker than the scientists predicted, because their calculations have erred too much on the conservative side), it's compensated by the ice getting thicker on the top.

Since Myron has never been to Greenland or Antarctica, nor is there any evidence he knows or cares to analyse any scientific measurements, it's clear to everyone outside our death-wish news media that he's simply making this up.

However, following this repeated claim, some scientists have looked into it:

Using satellite data that looked at both the West and East Antarctic ice sheets, the researchers concluded there has been no real increase in precipitation in the region in the past five decades.

Pah, says Ebell. You don't want to pay attention to any of those measurements things. He asks why are scientists are drawing broad conclusions from data covering such a short time span.

And the answer is, because they know what it means. And it's bad. Very bad.

"We now have 'the sky is falling down' on the basis of a few years of data," Myron said. You could say the same about a brain tumour, but you'd listen to a medical doctor's opinion about it, wouldn't you?

Signing off with a Thanks In Advance from the future generations for all the hard work you have put in ensuring that total environmental devastation becomes unavoidable for the sake of a few oily dollars in your pocket.