While the Wall Street Journal currently has the honor of being the biggest paper with the most denial-stricken opinion page, the Washington Examiner is gunning for the title. The openly conservative outlet tilts its coverage in favor of fossil fuels on a regular basis. A recent pair of op-eds provide an easy example of the ease with which bad faith actors exploit the conservative ideology to serve their industrial masters.
First up was a piece from last week by Patrick Michaels and Caleb Rossiter, which claims climate models have failed. The very last line of the piece, at the end of the brief bio explaining who the authors are, is where readers will find the most important piece of information. The authors “are currently with the CO2 Coalition,” a fossil-fuel funded front group. So it should come as no surprise that Patrick Michaels, who’s so squarely in Big Oil’s pocket that his Sourcewatch entry needed a whole separate page for all his fossil fuel funding streams, and Caleb Rossiter, the CO2 Coalition’s Executive Director, wrote a piece filled with errors.
According to ClimateFeedback, the op-ed “is highly misleading, including a number of false factual assertions, cherry-picking datasets that support their point, failing to account for uncertainties in those datasets, and failing to assess the performance of climate models in an objective and rigorous manner.”
In other words, par for the course for people whose job it is to defend fossil fuels.
Speaking of, apparently the Examiner wasn’t content to mislead its readers once, and invited Steve Milloy to provide a second act. For some strange reason, the Examiner didn’t describe Milloy as a former coal executive who runs “burnmorecoal.com” and has spent his career defending the tobacco industry as well as fossil fuels, which might perhaps explain his opposition to the Green New Deal.
While ClimateFeedback hasn’t debunked Milloy’s silly screed, odds are it wouldn’t fare much better than the piece by Michaels and Rossiter. Milloy laments how the GND would kill oil and gas jobs, yet also criticizes candidates for including plans to create jobs to replace them- as though replacing the fossil fuel industry’s output wouldn’t require employing people to make that transition!
Now, it’s certainly fair game for the Examiner to run content critical of a liberal policy package like the Green New Deal. But the fact that the Examiner solicited the opinion of someone like Steve Milloy, who has built a career out of protecting polluters at the public’s expense, is worth calling out.
It’s not like the GND doesn’t have detractors who aren’t in Big Oil’s pocket; ones who can offer a fair and honest critique of the admittedly wide-ranging and aspirational policy. And it’s not like the Examiner’s readership wouldn’t be better served by an honest critique, from people who aren’t paid to protect the fossil fuel industry with whatever crazy claims they can get published.
And if the Examiner can’t find any credible voices whose financial well-being isn’t reliant on fossil fuels to provide an anti-climate-action opinion, well, then, maybe it should reexamine its position.
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