Last week, the satirical Onion tweeted a piece written back in 2019, after the last big climate report, joking that “in a desperate, perhaps final attempt” to stop climate change, the report “includes nothing more than the whereabouts of top oil executives and directions to secret weapons caches.”
“‘It may not seem like a lot on its own,’” a supposed excerpt reads, “‘but if everyone comes together and does their part, we can make a tremendous difference.’”
While it may be funny to turn Big Oil’s propaganda that climate change is a problem that can be solved by personal sacrifice and individual action on its head, by taking some personal action and making them sacrifice, in all seriousness the Onion should be ashamed.
Because it’s not just oil executives who may need to do some sacrificing, but also coal executives, lobbyists, billionaires who have funded anti-regulatory think tanks, and of course those who staff said think tanks and peddle deadly disinformation for a living, who are responsible for the climate crisis we’re in.
Okay, okay, really seriously, while the idea of bad things happening to bad people may be appealing and cathartic, it’s not healthy to dwell on violent fantasies, and violence is of course not the answer to climate change.
And to be clear, neither are threats of violence. For example, Marc Morano recently posted a message he’d gotten on Climate Depot, where someone said they hoped he and his family would die, and then wrote “I WISH YOU DEAD.” 53 times. (Not to be glib but wishing someone dead x53 seems like... overkill?)
This isn’t the first time someone’s been mean to Marc, and we get it. For over a decade, Morano’s whole job has been to sabotage climate action on behalf of his billionaire benefactors, even though he won’t put his own money where his mouth is. And sending him hatemail might be considered fitting, since one of his tactics has long been publishing scientist’s email addresses to subject them to a torrent of hate and abuse from his followers.
But not only is violence, and threats or celebrations (even coming from Morano) wrong morally and of questionable legality, they’re also just fodder for Marc’s persecution complex, as evidenced by how he always posts the emails under his “hatemail” tag.
So we condemn in the strongest possible terms the sending of hate mail to Marc’s email address, morano@climatedepot.com, available publicly at his Heartland page.
That said, we are still fans of greentrolling, so we’ll just point out that there are plenty of alternatives to violence that can be much more effective at sabotaging online disinformation. For example, reddit users recently took it upon themselves to render the subreddit for people looking to eat horse deworming paste instead of getting a COVID-19 vaccine totally inoperable by flooding it with horse-themed pornography. Most drawn, some real, all of it extremely graphic, and enough of it to basically make the subreddit unusable for those who wanted to read up on how to take deworming medicine for horses instead of a COVID-19 vaccine for humans.
And after the Supreme Court let Texas essentially overturn Roe v Wade (which is not at all funny) and set up a website to put bounties on people seeking abortions, TikTokers flooded the website with fake submissions, Rickrolling, excerpts from “Twilight,” and, for some reason, Shrek porn. Gen Z activist-troll Olivia Juliana told NBC that she “found out about this website and thought, ‘We have to do whatever we can if they’re going to use the internet against us -- the very people who were raised on the internet.”
Surely, though, dear readers, you are all much too mature to flood Morano’s email with the most disgusting content the internet has to offer. (And probably much less likely than redditors to have a catalog of disturbing pornography at your disposal to unleash upon his unsuspecting inbox.) (And if you actually go look up those images, then the joke’s kinda on you, too.)
But it just goes to show that there are much more entertaining ways to blow off steam than with threatening violence or sending intimidating messages, like sending Marc Morano graphic and disturbing content that will make it difficult and painful for him to sort through his email every day because he doesn’t know if he’s about to open an email with an offer for more dirty money, or with a dirty picture he’ll never be able to unsee.
Not that we’d ever encourage such juvenile and uncouth tactics. That’d be (debatably) below us, and (certainly) below your dignity as well.
And given how scared Marc is of wearing a mask for COVID-19, maybe that’s all you need to send?