One of the great ironies of the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation machine is that despite how generously it’s funded, and how long it’s been operating, it’s not exactly a well-oiled machine. One of the (many) great tragedies? It doesn’t need to be.
The ad agencies and PR shops that individual companies pay to burnish their public image with slick ad campaigns are certainly earning their keep. But the various fronts and pro-fossil lobby groups who serve as the disinfo attack dogs, AKA the climate change counter-movement in now-IPCC-approved parlance, are often just objectively bad at their jobs.
This week’s IPCC release is a perfect example. Dealing with the outlook for mitigating climate change, it’s all about the social dynamics of politics, policy, and economics, complicated territory rife with nuance that could be fertile ground for disinformation.
But that would require actually engaging with the report, which is of course giant and complicated. It’d be much easier to just prattle off some nonsense and rest assured that any reporter gullible enough to publish it is probably only putting it in front of an audience that’s not exactly primed for critical thinking and being (actually) skeptical of people confirming priors.
Take Pat "40% fossil fuel funding" Michaels' response to the IPCC WG3 report, sent as a press release by the industry funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (that’s where he ended up after Cato.) Keep in mind that this isn’t an off-hand tweet, this was their official response, sent out to the press. They claim the report “deals in politically-convenient fictions rather than fact-based reality.”
What fictions does the report deal in? And what facts does it leave out? And how long will it take before Michaels says something false?
Let’s see!
To start, Michaels’s statement begins simply enough, that “today’s IPCC report detailing mitigation and adaptation to climate change…” But wait! The Working Group 3 report published Monday is just about mitigating climate change. It doesn’t deal with adaptation, and it’s an important distinction, because adaptation is the express subject of the Working Group 2 report, which came out a month ago!
Michaels very first sentence is flawed because he apparently doesn’t even know what report he’s responding to! The bulk of his statement deals with the physical science attributing warming to fossil fuels, which is the subject of the Working Group 1 report published last fall.
He complains that the IPCC report, a review of peer-reviewed papers, “makes no mention that the German government, for now, has put coal possibly back into its energy mix.”
Yes, a review of scientific literature, bound by the laws of time and causation to cover only those peer-reviewed studies that were published before the report is drafted, does not cover news from after the report was finished. It also fails to assess the climate ramifications about a country “possibly” burning more coal. The IPCC can’t time travel to cover studies based on a country considering doing something?!
What an incredibly cogent and intelligent point from one of the leaders of climate disinformation!
If Patrick Michaels had to be good at his job, he might have bothered to write a statement that was actually about the new IPCC report. But because he’s built a career on polluter welfare, he can dash off a statement attacking the IPCC’s 3rd report by conflating it with the 2nd, and then claiming it doesn’t address the content covered by the first.
And his funders keep cutting checks so he doesn’t have to get a real job, because disinformation doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to convince anyone, it certainly doesn’t have to be trenchant or cutting or even strategic.
It just has to exist in the public conscious to work as a filibuster for those defending polluter profits.