Earlier this week we looked at three examples of obviously bad pseudo-journalism from the Federalist, so today we’re balancing the cosmic scales and showcasing three examples of solid journalism from legitimate sources.
First up? The latest climate fact check from Politifact, which finds that a Watts Up With That blog post claiming that “Facebook is spamming all climate articles by misleading readers about” climate models is “false.”
While it’s usually not false that Facebook never Meta lie it didn’t like, the exception is in its climate science information center. Turns out when you reference credible experts and not crackpot YouTubers, it’s not all that hard to get things right!
Politifact does a great job explaining how the gish-galloping WUWT post is wrong, for example in its reliance on the infamously wrong John Christy graph used to cast doubt on climate science. But one thing left unaddressed is Larry Hamlin's claim that he has “been commenting on many of these articles with the same comment as shown below,” and then shows the lengthy comment he leaves that begins by claiming “Facebook is spamming all climate articles by misleading readers” by using absolute temperature instead of anomalies.
But Facebook attaching a banner image and link to real science isn’t spam, it’s a relatively unobtrusive link. Spam would be someone posting the same comment on different posts. Which… is exactly what Hamlin admits he's doing. Not only are Hamlin’s attempted factual points clearly false, even his bluster is obvious projection!
Unfortunately, not all climate disinformation comes from bumbling sources, and as Sharon Kelly revealed Monday at DeSmog, some of it is actually quite slick.
Somehow Kelly got a hold of a 2015 presentation, in which consultancy FTI described its covert public relations work on behalf of the fossil fuel industry to the Tennessee Oil and Gas Association. Key to their presentation “mentioned on more than 20 of its 45 slides,” Kelly writes, “is Energy in Depth,” the oil industry’s anti-environmentalist attack dog. The presentation brags about it’s thousand-plus “rebuttals” and other forms of industry disinformation and propaganda attacking methane research or the science linking fracking and earthquakes.
And lest you think for even a split second that maybe things have changed in 2015, consider this investigative piece from the Energy and Policy Institute’s Joe Smyth that pulls back the curtain on industry support for a disinfo-spreading pro-gas front group fighting back against grassroots electrification pressure.
Turns out that there’s a new pop-up coalition, “Coloradans for Energy Access,” who really care about keeping energy cheap, according to their debut op-ed in the Colorado Sun. They claim that’s by using methane gas, but then their op-ed required a correction because they deceptively played up the cost of electric heat pumps in making their progressive-co-opting argument that low-cost gas is a better “equity” option.
Turns out heat pumps are a lot more efficient than old electric baseboard style heating, so a new one would actually save money compared to paying for erratically and often high-priced methane gas, totally undermining the four-author op-ed’s claim that “this coalition is working for the Coloradans who depend on affordable energy.”
Who’s it really working for? As Smyth details, the local electric utilities and methane gas industry companies, including Xcel Energy, whose customers are paying higher prices this winter because of higher methane prices, which it’s seeking to raise further with an additional gas rate hike over the next three years.
Turns out if they really did want affordable energy, they’d be advocating for renewables, not more fossil fuels!
Whoopsies!
Ah well, nevertheless.
(Wouldn’t be a fossil fuel front group op-ed without a little disinfo in there, right?)