With the Daily Caller supposedly pivoting to more respectable and non-partisan content, you might be wondering where the PR agents for pollution will go to publish their “I reject your reality and substitute my own” takes now.
It’s increasingly looking like the RealClear franchise is earning its Koch money. Its publication of only-barely-veiled fossil fuel propaganda hasn’t slowed down since we last pointed it out.
This week, for example, RealClear ran a piece by Benjamin Zycher about the Trump administration’s cost-benefit analysis changes, along with a piece by Steve Milloy about how PM2.5 pollution is no big deal and environmental racism is not a thing.
Zycher is frequently published at RealClear, and in what can only be described as an amazing coincidence, each and every one of his pieces makes an argument benefiting the bottom line of one of the fossil fuel and industrial funders that support his employer, the American Enterprise Institute.
Like Milloy, Zycher spent time working as a lawyer for the tobacco industry before moving to the fossil fuel racket, a fact that comes right up in Sourcewatch, but somehow never seems to find a place in any of Zycher’s pieces.
Which is important, because readers shouldn’t have to guess at what’s an independent expert opinion, and what’s coming from a person who got paid to find ways to convince the public that smoking isn’t dangerous.
So if you’d like to read what polluters want you to think about Trump’s cost-benefit analysis changes, RealClear is apparently happy to serve it up disguised as a good faith opinion piece.
Same goes for Milloy’s op-ed, which is a rehashing of his denial that soot is bad for your lungs sandwiched between some lovely denial of environmental racism.
Yes, apparently Milloy, and whatever editing process RealClearEnergy has, thought this would be a good time to claim the reason Black people are hit harder by COVID-19 is “has nothing to do with the environment so much as it does with poverty, education and the increased rate of co-morbidities that go along with those two problems.”
Apparently Milloy thinks it’s not that systemic racism plays a role in these obviously racist outcomes, but that Black people are just too poor and uneducated to stay alive.
Thanks, RealClear, for making it real clear how shitty you are.
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