Yesterday was a big day for fossil fuel counter-programming to COP23. Heartland held its America First Energy Conference, while Europe’s version of Heartland, EIKE, held a denial conference with CFACT in Dusseldorf (a short distance from Bonn.)
At the America First conference, participants dutifully toed the pro-fossil fuel party line. Kevin Dayaratna of US-based, fossil-fuel-funded Heritage Foundation was applauded by the crowd for calling for a subsidy for CO2 emissions (apparently, the social cost of carbon is negative). This reality-challenged perspective was repeated by CFACT’s Paul Driessen, whose presentation at the conference (and not his own organization's European event) touted the dangers of high electricity prices and the benefits of carbon dioxide.
Since we can expect to see this pro-pollution argument echoed at the Trump administration’s Monday event in Bonn, we’d like to highlight Emily Atkin’s latest piece at the New Republic for a concise debunking of this (im)moral case for fossil fuels. From Bjorn Lomborg to Alex Epstein to Rick Perry, Atkin traces the short history of this long con, and points out the two key reasons why it’s wrong.
First and foremost, Atkin explains, fossil fuel pollution hurts public health. Secondly, since renewables are increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels and being more rapidly deployed in the developing countries these pseudo-moralizers pretend to care about, the argument that fossil fuels provide cheaper electricity increasingly fails to reflect reality.
Just as reality-deficient as the arguments at fossil-fuel-funded conferences are some the urban legends and manufactured quotes about Paris and international climate policy that deniers often bandy about. In a new post over at DeSmogBlog, Graham Readfearn breaks down some of the most egregious quote mining that deniers have engaged in over the years, tracing the myths of some of deniers’ favorite false flags.
If you see a climate-denying relative post on Facebook, for instance, that UN negotiators have admitted climate policy is just a wealth redistribution scheme, or that the press never criticizes the Paris agreement because it literally cheered its signing, know these are both incredible distortions of what really happened. Worse, if a denier breathlessly relays that environmental godfather Maurice Strong once admitted that the real goal of climate policy is to bring about the collapse of industrial civilization, know the quote comes from an interview where he was describing the fictional plot of a fictional dystopian novel he was considering writing.
Say what you will about deniers, but it’s clear they do have some admirable qualities. For these supposedly “free market” groups to propose subsidies for carbon pollution shows a certain ideological flexibility and nuance when it comes to picking winners and losers. And to think to portray a description of a fictional plotline as a factual admission is the sort of boldly creative, out-of-the-box thinking inherent in innovators and criminal defense lawyers doing their best on behalf of a guilty client.
And if nothing else--no honesty or morality or compassion or basic human decency--deniers sure are loyal to fossil fuels.
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