While we have Oxycontin Rush "Limpballs" Limbaugh telling his missing link listeners that the focus on unprecedented climate events such as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma should be on the media's encouraging panic buying (!), there's been a more sophisticated assault on the science of global climate change. A long, but must- read article in today's Washington Post details this decades- long effort by a coalition of ultra- right, tax- exempt "charities" to propagandize against the threat of global climate change:
For nearly two decades, [Martin] Ebell has led the Cooler Heads Coalition, an umbrella group of tax-exempt public charities and other nonprofit organizations in the vanguard of efforts to cast doubt on the gravity of climate change and thwart government efforts to address it.
Coalition members have called climate science a hoax and denounced environmentalists as “global-warming alarmists.” They have written letters, blasted out emails, pressured lawmakers, sponsored seminars, appeared on television and made a documentary movie.
It was all part of a wave that crested with Trump’s rejection on June 1 of the Paris agreement, a landmark accord by nearly 200 countries in 2015 to limit greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. [snip]
The Cooler Heads have received more than $11 million in donations over the years from coal and oil companies. They’ve taken in tens of millions more from nonprofit foundations, such as those controlled by the wealthy Koch brothers, and the Scaife and Mercer families, according to interviews and Internal Revenue Service filings.The article goes into fascinating detail about how this astroturf collection of sociopathic plutocrats has succeeded in hiding behind its tax- exempt status while pushing its ultra- right political agenda. And if the name Ebell rings a, um, bell with you, it's because he was the Trump regime's transition director for the Environment Protection Agency.
Please read and share.
(Image: Most- powerful- ever Atlantic Hurricane Irma, definitely a sales gimmick, not a sign of climate change)
