It’s no mystery that the deniersphere is a self-contained echo chamber where complimentary voices amplify one another’s work and reality struggles to pierce the firewall of denial. Generally the deniers' sharing can be said to operate “organically,” with like-minded folks sharing things they find interesting, just like everyone else. Other times it seems like a more coordinated effort is operating just below the surface.
For example, Marita Noon has a piece in Brietbart that's basically just a hard-spun combination of two Politico stories on Steyer’s spending and voters' climate concerns. The Breitbart column is one she ran in Canada Free Press and RedState the day before.
In an impressive display of rapid amplification, just fifteen minutes after Brietbart published the piece, Tom Nelson did his duty as the keystone of the deniersphere’s Twitter presence and tweeted out the link. Seven minutes after that, Junk Science echoed the post (too quickly to catch the typo in the title). The machine kicked into gear so fast, the Junk Science post was already up before Noon tweeted out a link to her own piece. Not long after, the piece went up on Heartland.
So who is Marita Noon? She's a former Christian motivational speaker and author under the name Marita Littauer. Apparently, in 2006, her now ex-husband said, “you need to decide if you’re going to have a marriage or a business.” She chose her marriage and walked away from her career as a relationship-focused speaker and writer for Christian women. However, she appears to have started a new career soon after, replacing her best friend’s husband, Mark Mathis, as the executive director of Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE).
This information came to light last week, when the Heartland Institute featured Noon in a podcast discussing the different Presidential candidates' positions on energy related topics. By her own admission, Noon has no background in energy or science. Why she was tapped to replace Mark as Executive Director of an energy education group was not explained in the podcast, or elsewhere.
Since it seems Noon may be a rising star, it’s worth taking a look to see if her group is a legitimate grassroots campaign or just another fossil fuel front. A quick look at CARE's "about" page reveals that Board Director Paul Gessing is president of the Rio Grande Foundation, which is a State Policy Network (ALEC) group. Gavin Longmuir, another board director, is a petroleum consultant. Then there's the fact that CARE was founded by Mark Mathis, a TV personality, talk radio host, and petroleum consultant. One of Mathis’s old op-eds disclosed that CARE is funded “by more than 250 members including New Mexico oil and gas producers."
It will come as no surprise that Breitbart, et al failed to disclose CARE’s fossil fuel funding in its bio of Noon.
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