Last week, Google announced that they would no longer allow climate denial ads, and that YouTube would demonetize climate denial content. This is a small but serious win, particularly for the advertisers who don’t want their ads running next to toxic climate denial content.
Deniers, of course, freaked out about it. For example, Matt Vespa at TownHall wrote climate denial is not “something that truly goes against acts and reality, like Holocaust denialism.”
Which is funny, because literal Holocaust denier Peter “Sweden” Imanuelsen, who is increasingly dabbling in climate denial, tweeted that this “climate change censorship” is the “first step,” after which comes “climate change lockdowns” and “finally climate change passports.”
Yes, because not being able to make money lying to people is just one small slippery slope away from “climate change passports,” which … aren’t a thing.
Meanwhile, Anthony Watts posted on Friday that he’s holding an essay contest with $1,000 prizes for winners. The catch? Well, because “over the past two years Google has slowly squeezed out most of our ad revenue,” first he has “to raise the funds so we can offer meaningful cash prizes. That means folks like you need to help. Please go to our donation page and contribute as much as you can.”
What a great deal! First, give as much of your money to Watts as you can. Then, write a 1,500 word essay with “the best arguments against the theory of man-made catastrophic global warming that would convince your neighbors that there is no climate crisis,” and get a shot at winning your money back!
Watts may want to have a chat with his fellow deniers though, because over at JunkScience dot com, the website that bears the name of Steve Milloy’s early pro-tobacco lobbying, Milloy actually wrote it off as no big deal, and he may be somewhat right. He says that “if what we were saying was wrong, we would have been laughed off the Internet long ago,” which is sort of true, as one conservative pundit attempted to “gotcha” outlets like PBS, CBS and the Boston Globe for interviewing deniers nine, 11, and 11 years ago. Why nothing more recent? Probably because deniers have been laughed out of mainstream media, for obvious reasons.
More seriously, Milloy wrote that “Google’s move will have no effect on climate realist web sites for the simple reason that the ad revenue is pretty trivial. We don’t know of any climate realist who blogs for the Google ad revenue.” Again, probably pretty true, because deniers like Milloy are paid by the industry directly, not ad revenue, and while Watts long (claimed) he wasn’t funded by Big Oil, he’s employed by the Heartland Institute these days, so while his site might be hurting for ad revenue, we probably don’t need to pass the collection plate around for him quite yet!
Milloy then decided to conclude his post with the claim that deniers like himself are “winning… with or without a few shekels from Google,” because either Milloy thinks ad revenue is payed in the currency of Isreal and he was using the term literally, or he deployed a classic anti-Semitic dog whistle because he’s exactly the sort of person the world would be better off never hearing from again.
So Vespa may be right, in that climate denial isn’t quite as ghoulish as Holocaust denial. But the Venn diagram of Holocaust deniers and climate deniers may be close enough to a circle to make any distinction meaningless.
