Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ed Markey (D-MA) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) have introduced an amendment to the energy bill that scolds merchants of doubt and the companies that fund them. The amendment wouldn’t actually do anything. It’s a “sense of the Senate,” which means the amendment just serves to express an opinion to get Congress on record as supporting or opposing an issue.
The amendment calls out the tobacco, lead and fossil fuel companies for knowing the peer-reviewed science of their products and employing “a sophisticated and deceitful campaign that included funding think tanks to deny, counter, and obstruct [the science]…to mislead the public and cast doubt in order to protect their financial interest.”
By agreeing to the amendment, the Senate would be saying it disproves of those deceitful tactics, and “urges fossil fuel companies to cooperate with active or future investigations into their climate-change related activities and what the companies knew and when they knew it.” In other words, the Senate would be calling on Exxon to cooperate with the ongoing New York and California investigations.
Deniers are, of course, not too thrilled about the amendment. And unsurprisingly, the likes of Climate Depot’s Marc Morano and JunkScience’s Steve Milloy are engaging in exactly the sort of misinformation the amendment condemns, describing it as an “amendment to muzzle [the] climate ‘denial apparatus’.” Again, as a “sense of the Senate,” it doesn’t DO anything at all; it just says that sowing doubt about peer-reviewed science to protect financial interests is wrong and calls on fossil fuel companies to cooperate with investigations.
One way to read this is as an admission by Morano and Milloy that “climate skeptics” are just puppets of industry. This is because they, in describing the amendment, refer specifically to the industry puppets when saying the amendment is “targeted at climate skeptics” and that there’s “no dissent allowed.” An innocent and honest denier would simply look at the amendment and say, “Well since I’m not paid to cast doubt, this doesn’t apply to me.” One that actually is in the pay of industry, though, would consider it a threat to his or her business.
Speaking of which, has anyone figured out who’s paying Milloy these days? He’s already peddled doubt on tobacco and fossil fuels, so perhaps he’ll take up the third issue addressed in this amendment, and go tell Flint that lead in their water isn’t a problem.
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