Christopher Horner, Steven Milloy’s comrade in developing the “secret science” censorship policy finalized recently, before then also working for the fossil fuel industry as a professional denier, has stepped out of the shady gutters of death-peddling with a string of pieces. They aren’t exactly hitting the target, however. In fact, it’s not clear that there actually IS a target, aside from, of course, distraction and obstruction.
Chris Horner has spent the years since his days as a tobacco lawyer doing other shady stuff for the fossil fuel industry, and is now working on the last-minute, Hail Mary, get Trump to submit the Paris agreement to the Senate as though it were a treaty, even though it’s explicitly not a treaty campaign. The gist of this effort is that if Trump were to submit the Paris climate agreement (and Iran nuclear deal, while he’s at it) to the Senate for confirmation, as though they were treaties, the GOP-held body would reject them.
Then, the thinking goes, the incoming Biden administration wouldn’t be able to easily re-sign those treaties, because the Senate rejected them. But they aren’t treaties, in no small part likely because when they were designed, Republicans controlled the Senate, so there’s nothing to formally submit. The Paris Agreement, for example, is actually already part of a congressionally-approved treaty, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. So sending it to be ratified now would be missing the deadline for opposition by nearly 30 years.
And even if they were submitted, and the Senate did decide to take up a vote on the Paris issue in these waning days of the Trump lame duck, and voted it down, that still wouldn’t do anything to stop the Biden administration from simply rejoining the Paris Agreement, because again, we’re already party to the Treaty that established it.
While mainstream media attention necessary to make these attacks successful hasn’t happened yet, Horner’s been doing the rounds in the same conservative/fossil-fueled media circuit Milloy and others have been working.
The Washington Examiner’s dedicated conservative propaganda conduit Kevin Mooney recently cited Horner’s work trying to get documents released about how Obama negotiated the Paris Agreement, and Horner talks about it even when plugging allies’ reports, while the Washington Times published Horner’s (alternative) history of Obama’s Paris negotiations on December 29th, and then ran another piece by Horner on January 3rd. This one’s slightly different though, and alleges that the Biden administration will abuse the Department of Justice by making it go after fossil fuel companies.
With no policy of their own to push and only denial, distraction and delay at their disposal, deniers aren’t even waiting until Trump is done with his wannabe Tony Soprano/Erdoğan antics before projecting exactly those sins on their enemies.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
