Today at 10am, the House Natural Resources subcommittee on Water, Oceans and Wildlife will hold a hearing on the recent report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warning that human activities, like land use and climate change, threaten a million species with extinction.
Given that Senate Republicans have started getting positive press for slowly abandoning climate denial rhetoric, one might expect their House counterparts to similarly eschew the hardline denial position. But one would be wrong.
While the main witnesses for the panel will be a few of the actual scientists who wrote the report, Republicans invited two of the biggest deniers on the planet to respond: Patrick Moore and Marc Morano.
We recently talked about Trump’s tweet about Patrick Moore, the industry lobbyist and Roundup safety hypocrite who claims to be a co-founder of Greenpeace, something that’s not exactly true but is now pretty much beside the point. Regardless of his past connection to the organization, for decades Moore has been a staunch advocate for the industries that pay him, including nuclear power, mining, logging, plastics, and now, fossil fuels. Moore was recently named Chairman of the Board of Directors for the CO2 Coalition, a group funded by the Kochs, Mercers, and other conservative foundations.
Moore and Morano have been tag-teaming on behalf of industry for decades now, and they’re not shy about it. In seeking to cast doubt on this IPBES study, as is their job, they hearkened back to 2000, when “reporter” Morano interviewed Moore for a “documentary” about deforestation in the Amazon.
Moore’s argument, which you’re likely to see a permutation of, is that extinction warnings like the IPBES study rely on computer modeling of species, and not actually counting animals. We expect him to point to the fact that the IPBES report relies on the IUCN red list, which only says some 28,000 species are at risk of extinction, rather than the million species IPBES found. This discrepancy is because the IUCN’s remit is solely already documented species, and not those that we haven’t yet discovered, catalogued and studied. But IUCN explicitly praised the IPBES report, so if Moore relies on IUCN to debunk the report, he’ll be directly contradicting the organization’s own statement.
Based on past attacks, Moore’s also apt to indulge in one of the most blatantly illogical denial approaches by pointing out that extinction events have occurred in the past, either with or without human help, and therefore this isn’t a problem. But that’s just as bogus as similar claims that warming can’t worsen wildfires because fires have happened before humans existed--the (il)logical equivalent of a detective saying that murder’s impossible because people die naturally.
Meanwhile, Morano’s whole schtick is conspiracy theories: we can expect him to trot out the usual denial line about scientists’ secret desire for world domination. When talking about the report on Fox News recently, Morano claimed that the independent academics at IPBES are actually “a self-interested lobbying organization.”
This is, of course, the epitome of irony, considering that Morano’s employer CFACT has gotten grants from Exxon (including $180,000 specifically for climate change work) the utility industry lobby group EEI, Chevron, Ford and DiamlerChrysler. In 2015 and 2016 it also received Koch money. According to Peabody Coal’s bankruptcy filings, the coal giant funded CFACT in 2016 as well.
Folks keen to see a shift in how the GOP is handling environmental issues should be wary of reading too much into green overtures in the Senate, as clearly Republicans in the House aren’t ready to end its embrace of industry-funded denial.
And those who are suckered in by the obvious propaganda might soon find themselves filled with buyer’s reMoorese.
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