We ended Friday by looking back. Let’s start this week by looking forward: at more attacks on the planet and some technology that might clean up at least the online environment.
Interior Secretary Zinke told an industry conference last week that President Trump is in the process of reading an executive order to facilitate offshore drilling, according to Bloomberg’s Jennifer Dlouhy. Details are still scant, but word is that Trump will put millions of acres of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans up for lease, and may take a shot at undoing President Obama’s December decision to put 125 million acres of the Arctic ocean off limits. The 1953 law invoked in that decision has no provision for revocation, so this would be uncharted territory for Trump that would undoubtedly end up in court.
And so far, Trump has not been winning bigly in court. Most recently, the feds dropped a request that Twitter unmask the person running one of the many #WeAreAltGov accounts parodying federal institutions that sprang up in January. Twitter filed their objection to the government’s request in court, and then withdrew the case after the government withdrew its request (these court filings being the only reason the public knows the administration is tried to unmask the account). Staying feisty, the account responded to the news that the administration stepped down by tweeting a screenshot of the First Amendment.
On the flip side of these noble anonymous tweeters, there are the trolls that lob anonymous abuse at climate scientists and the bots and sockpuppets that seem to have endless amounts of time to pollute the public discourse with misinformation. In what is quickly and eerily approaching the “Troll Trace” story arch of last season’s South Park, scientists have begun using network and content analysis to identify sockpuppet accounts, and show us what everyone already kinda knows: Russia is likely behind the alt-right troll army.
Google’s recent decision to begin including a fact check in its searches seems like a more helpful tech fix for misinformation. Hopefully this marks something of a shift from just a couple weeks ago, when the company defended the decision to give James Delingpole’s barrier reef bleaching denial “Top Story” status, as Gizmodo’s William Turton reported. Google describes the nascent fact check effort in a blog post published last week. While we haven’t been able to make it show up in a search we’ve tried yet, the fact that the Daily Caller doesn’t like it for including Snopes and PolitiFact is a good sign of things to come!
So while we sit and wait for the next executive order to drop, we’ll be dreaming of the day when trolls are easily identified and ignored. Until then, we’ll just have to do the next best thing, and enjoy chuckling at the Alt-Gov accounts who troll them back.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: