While the bulk of last week’s climate denial focused on pushing “American Energy” propaganda, on Friday the professional disinformation set pushed a particularly misleading attack on President Biden’s international climate envoy John Kerry.
They seem to be learning from the illegally-misleading Amtrak loudmouth James O’Keefe, propaganda-saboteur who’s infamous for doctoring together “sting” videos purporting to catch people admitting something, but in reality just showing how easy it is to mislead the willingly misled with carefully edited video (or even not that carefully).
But it’s a good thing (for them) that O’Keefe is going to be popping out of a cake at Heartland’s next birthday party, because they still don’t quuuuite have his schtick nailed down quite yet. Instead, Steve Milloy opted for simply posting a 30-second snippet of something John Kerry said, and letting the lack of context do the work of making it seem ridiculous instead of cutting multiple different things together in a really obvious fashion like O’Keefe does.
During President Biden’s Climate Summit, Kerry talked about how even once we get to net zero emissions there will still be work to do, because we’ll “need to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.”
What Kerry’s referring to is formally called Carbon Dioxide Removal, which describes a few different types of processes for capturing the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere, and then locking it away long-term underground or underwater, or through reforestation efforts, getting stored in concrete, etc. And it’s different from Carbon Capture and Sequestration, which is the industry’s fantasy that if the public gives it enough money, it will develop technology to scrub the carbon from the fossil fuels it wants to keep selling.
So he’s right, only when CO2 is back to pre-industrial levels will the climate stop warming and destabilizing our infrastructure, and upending age-old agricultural practices and worsening extreme weather events. But that sort of extended explanation is not in Milloy's version of the video.
Instead, career defender of tobacco and fossil fuels Steve Milloy appears to have stood in front of his TV screen and filmed the clip by hand on his phone, catching and posting a grainy, muffled, slightly swaying video along with the caption claiming that it was “a statement of climate futility and insanity.”
That video was then reposted by The Daily Caller, again with zero context, simply the caption “JOHN KERRY: ‘We need to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.’” And if you’re wondering what the deal is and thinking surely no one could possibly be stupid enough to believe that Kerry was suggesting a total removal of every single molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere, and not just restoring the climate to normal conditions, think again!
Or rather, don’t think at all, and you’ll be in the right headspace for the reply to the Caller’s tweet. With nearly 3,000 likes of it own, one “Melissa Koch,” who said that “as a Biology teacher, that statement horrifies me. Complete lack of understanding of basic earth processes and cellular respiration/photosynthesis cycle. And people will now take it as gospel.”
Now, the idea that a comment John Kerry made offhand in a virtual climate summit would become “gospel” to anyone may be an amusing fantasy, but is a biology teacher really that dense? No, actually! Sorry for the rhetorical mislead there about the (we assume) coincidentally-named Koch being dumb enough to fall for this, because two tweets later she admits “you could take his meaning that ALL CO2 needs to go or we need to reduce it from pre-Industrial levels” before launching into the denier-standard “we NEED CO2 to survive” stuff.
Turns out even a random climate science’s denier account with 287 followers has higher editorial standards than rightwing media and deniers. On top of the Daily Caller’s use of Milloy’s video in a tweet, GatewayPundit made a whole “story” out of it, which ClimateDepot thought worthy of posting as well!
How effective of an insult can it really be though, when even its own biology-teaching champions immediately confess it’s a deliberate misreading of Kerry’s statement? Even those parroting this attack know it’s nonsense.