“These people are not scientists, they are public-relations people who happen to have degrees in science. These are people who make their living producing results that their clients want. And that’s not science.”
Sounds like a standard description of the fringe minority of “scientists” who reject the consensus on human-made climate change, right? Except, it’s not. It's what tobacco expert Stan Glantz said of the people the Philip Morris company hired in its vain attempt to convince the courts and the public that their product isn't dangerous and addictive.
The Center for Public Integrity carried Glantz’s quote at the end of their interesting look at how Philip Morris attempted to continue deceiving the public about the safety of its products. It’s practically a game of mad-libs where you could replace "tobacco industry" with "fossil fuel lobby," who used the same tactic of hiring fake scientists (like Marc "I'm not a scientist but I play one on TV" Morano) to produce reports that don’t undergo real peer review (such as GWPF does) in an attempt to stave off the regulation of their product for as long as possible.
[Continued after the jump...]
Speaking of ExxonMobil, there was a rare instance of deniersphere media carrying something that resembled actual news yesterday. The Washington Times got an unredacted copy of the subpoena that Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker issued to ExxonMobil back in March. The subpoena shows just how expansive the suspected collusion is and requests that Exxon turn over its communications with pretty much every denial think-tank and many of the scientists/public-relations people that we’ve covered here over the past years. Many of them are proven recipients of ExxonMobil funding. The list is three single-spaced pages of organizations uploaded as images here if you don’t want to download the PDF. It includes the Fred Singer’s Science & Environmental Policy Project, Heartland Institute, ALEC, and, of course, Marc Morano’s employer CFACT.
Now, if ExxonMobil has always been, as they insist, on the up-and-up on climate science and totally honest, it should have no issue with turning over these communications to prove its funding hasn’t been for fraudulent purposes, and that it is therefore protected under the First Amendment.
After all, the company's complaint about the #ExxonKnew investigations has been that the reporting is based on a limited and cherry-picked representation of the facts. So this should be a great opportunity for ExxonMobil to correct that supposedly biased reporting by entering all its communications into the public record. This is its chance for Exxoneration!
More likely, though, Exxon will keep up the “monkey see, monkey do” act by mimicking what Philip Morris and the tobacco industry in general did for decades. It’ll claim free speech protection and to try to project an image of speaking no evil so that the courts see no evil communications from their past and the public hears no evil about Exxon's deception.
What a bunch of monkey business.
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