Everyone knows smoking causes cancer and that the tobacco industry lied about it for decades. When it finally got caught and was held accountable, some of the people and organizations the industry funded to protect its profits from regulations turned to the fossil fuel industry and continued plying their trade. Some twenty-odd years later, ExxonMobil and other oil companies are […]
Fossil fuel interests love to steal social justice language and use it to trick people into supporting the oil and gas industry. This fossil fuel “woke–washing” often comes in the form of false class struggle arguments that wrongly present climate action as a scam used by elite actors to disempower the working class, when it’s […]
Earlier this week, we talked about how $795,000 homeowner Anthony Watts is working with the Heartland Institute to sell $2,000 thermometers to compete with the global temperature records. But what’s up with Watts’ namesake blog, WattsUpWithThat? These days? Not much. By Climate Denier Roundup Last week, for example, Watts’ replacement blogger Eric Worrall was triggered by a Scientific American […]
Last week, we got a fundraising email from the Heartland Institute, begging for funds for its newest project. They’re not entirely reliant on grifting the public for donations just yet, though, since they seem to have a mysterious deep-pocketed donor offering to match donations. By Climate Denier Roundup Over a decade ago, conspiracy/denial blog runner and former weatherman Anthony Watts was […]
It’s not often that we get good news, so today’s roundup is going to be short, sweet, and celebratory. To start, the Supreme Court denied Big Oil’s request to block the litany of local accountability lawsuits from moving to the federal level. Exxon and other defendants have routinely tried to have the cases moved to federal court […]
The fossil fuel industry is mobilizing every possible delay tactic in the disinformation playbook to obstruct offshore wind. First, industry allies pretended to care about endangered species and began spreading disinformation about right whale deaths. Now, they’re relying on fishing disinfluencers and national security arguments in their attempt to block renewable energy projects. By Climate Denier Roundup Even smaller, state-level organizations […]
In early 2021, surge protector magnate and climate denial funder Barre Seid essentially donated his company to Leonard Leo, a conservative activist whose Marble Freedom Trust nonprofit then sold the company for $1.6 billion. Two months later, Consumers’ Research, which counts Leo among key benefactors, started a campaign against a supposedly “woke” Wall Street. By Climate Denier Roundup In the years since, […]
If you prefer your discussion of deniers and disinfo to be in podcast form, then Amy Westervelt’s Drilled podcast is probably right up your alley! But for the visual learners among us, the Drilled website also offers written content, such as this debunking of the myths behind the supposedly “moral” case for fossil fuels. By Climate Denier Roundup For […]
Remember last summer when the Supreme Court “fucked the planet” with the so-called “major questions doctrine” that basically gives the Court the authority to revoke any regulation it considers too big for its congressional britches? Unsurprisingly, defenders of dangerous industries certainly remember, as they’ve been using it for exactly its intended purpose: providing an excuse to […]
The National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) held its National Conference in Atlanta last month, and because climate deniers jump at every opportunity to embarrass themselves, they invaded the conference and, like unruly and immature students, got thrown out within minutes. By Climate Denier Roundup On the first day of the conference, the CO2 Coalition, a climate change denial group, […]
Do you know how to write and submit an op-ed to a major national media organization? Do you have both the time to send letters with studies to obscure federal regulators and the connections to turn the response into a (supposedly) exclusive news story? Probably not! This is why public relations (PR) professionals exist, but they usually […]
International human rights nonprofit Global Witness released the results of a survey of climate scientists this week in a report called Global Hating, which found that Twitter and Facebook are utterly failing to protect these scientists from harassment. By Climate Denier Roundup The report found that 39% of the polled scientists have been targets of online […]
It’s a tough world out there, and not everyone is privileged enough to have an easy or ethical source of income, given the inherently unethical nature of extractive, exploitative, colonialism-derived, late-stage capitalism in which we all struggle to come up with the money necessary to stay alive. Some people, though, have really easy jobs. Creating […]
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Matthews reported BellTroX, an IT firm based in New Delhi, India, targeted a group of climate activists and funders in 2016 with spear phishing messages just three days before they were scheduled to discuss ExxonMobil’s climate disinformation. By Climate Denier Roundup Months later, in April 2016, The Washington Free Beacon published a story with a private […]
There’s been some great reporting lately on the billionaire-backed campaign to use racism to activate the conservative base against “Woke Wall Street” (an oxymoron if ever there was one), as states calculate the billions of dollars in losses that Republicans’ bills would lead to if passed. Earlier this month, for example, market-oriented CNBC’S Brian Schwartz detailed “how Trump allies and wealthy […]