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Catching Up On Two Weeks Of Climate Disinfo [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-02  

Hello and welcome back, dear readers! What'd we miss? Anything juicy?

Here's some of what stood out to us!

ProPublica dropped another damning Clarence Thomas piece , detailing how the Koch network has been schmoozing the Supreme Court justice. And, much to our surprise, it turns out the case Koch influence operation changed his opinion on is Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo — the fishing industry case that our fisherman-turned-lobbyist friend Jerry Leeman knows all about.

And speaking of industry-backed legal lobbying, disinformation outlet RealClearEnergy published the latest on how polluter-protecting propagandists are using the " Major Questions " doctrine to undercut climate policy. Elsewhere in disinfoworld, The Washington Times ran an op-ed by Richard W. Rahn promoting Judith Curry 's latest book, and in true denier fashion, Rahn manages to misrepresent the basics of Curry's career.

"In 2016," Rahn writes, "Ms. Curry resigned her university position, in part to get away from the academic BS (my words, not hers) and joined the private sector as president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network to work on real, applied science, without having to be politically correct." Technically Curry resigned on January 1st, 2017 , so Rahn's details are already suspect.

The bigger problem? Curry "joined the private sector as president" of CFAN back in 2006 , when she co-founded it! Coincidentally, that's when her heel-turn to denial began, though who's to say if her slow descent into disinfoworld is because she started signing, per her blog , "contracts with private sector and other non-governmental organizations include [sic] energy and power companies, reinsurance companies, financial companies, other weather service providers, NGOs, development banks and government agencies."

But 'person who started getting checks from Big Oil started saying there's no need to reduce fossil fuel use' doesn't quite have the same narrative zing to it as 'capitalism frees scientists from politically correct restraints of the ivory tower,' so there ya go.

Elsewhere in narrative-over-facts land, The Washington Free Beacon continues turning lobby groups’ white papers into news-like content, attacking the Biden administration’s green buildings policies, for example , on behalf of the National Association of Home Builders. Then there's the outlet’s obviously bad-faith 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' coverage of the administration's efforts to work with China to reduce emissions.

Same goes for The Daily Caller, where Nick Pope is emerging as the latest in a rich history of polluter errand boys pretending to be reporters with, you guessed it, an anti-China-themed story about the John Locke Foundation’s report comparing individual state climate policies to the country of China's emissions. Pope also carries the GOP's (oily) water too, though, as per Daily Caller tradition , dutifully turning Republican attacks on the Biden administration into faux news content.

And the same can be said for his predecessor at the Caller, Thomas Catenacci, who's now doing the same exact thing over at Fox News: turning GOP shenanigans targeting climate action into something with the tone and cadence of a news story revealing wrongdoing, but without any actual evidence that anyone's done anything illegal, immoral, or in any way unethical.

But hey, maybe now that Fox News is getting a new boss , things will change!

(Clearly, our sarcastic sense of humor has not.)

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/2/2196826/-Catching-Up-On-Two-Weeks-Of-Climate-Disinfo

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