Denialists recruit Sarah Palin as a campaigner

By Peter Jones

Michael Morano, a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, is a good tactician.  He admitted there is global warming, but claims it is really caused by “natural variability”.  He also states emphatically that governments should not be trying to control the temperature, as that is a waste of resources.

He knows that he cannot win the debate about the cause of global warming.  But his objective is not winning: he just wants to keep the debate going as long as he can.

The US tobacco industry adopted this approach to frustrate the efforts of legislatures to introduce legislation to reduce cigarette smoking.  It worked: many years passed before this industry was subject to effective regulation.

Morano uses the same tactic as the tobacco industry. He and similar-minded colleagues are “Merchants of Doubt”-  the name of a documentary film that explains how creating doubt works politically.

Now Morano has produced a film, “Climate Hustle” that disputes the case for global warming.  The Heartland Institute AKA as the Koch brothers has contributed to the financea of this film.  The film will be released for showing in movie theatres in the near future.

The theme of the film will be supported in a TV panel discussion.  One of the panellists is Sarah Palin, a former Republican Governor of Alaska and the running mate of John McCain in the US 2008 Presidential election. .

Palin dismissed climate change as just changes in the weather, and accused climate “alarmists” of trying to control the weather. She calls climate change “just a political agenda to stymie development [of our natural resources].”

She backs Donald Trump for president, and says the 2016 candidates need to talk more about climate change controversies.

“It’s something that our candidates should be talking about, and giving us their view on and hopefully acknowledging that it needs to become, in the science community, less political,” she said. “Otherwise, it leads us to believe that so many things coming from perhaps the scientists could be bogus.

Bogus!  An extraordinary word, one that has not been used by before, at least not by a well-know commentator.  A controversial choice of language.  But that is what climate sceptics want:  controversy.

1 thought on “Denialists recruit Sarah Palin as a campaigner”

Comments are closed.