In September of 2021, we talked about the differences between organized disinformation, the strategic public relations employed by the fossil fuel industry to deceive the public, and what we called disorganized denial, the growing genre of content attacking the climate issue because it drives clicks on social media from audiences cultivated by the organized denial set. At the time, we talked about how the Daily Caller's loss of Koch-funding and Michael Bastasch marked its exit from the organized denial sphere, and on the disorganized side, we used some Trumpian attacks on Biden over at the Gateway Pundit as the example.
A year later, Bastasch is back at the Caller and so is steady climate disinformation. But the Gateway Pundit is still just throwing whatever it can find at the wall and hoping something sticks; clearly without the guidance on messaging that the organized denial world is getting.
Because this week, the Wall Street Journal's opinion page, the major leagues of organized climate disinformation, ran a couple pieces typical of the fossil fuel industry's messaging. On Wednesday, the editorial board took note of a Tesla battery that caught fire in California, warning that "there is no free lunch in producing energy" and that "all sources have costs and carry risks" so "climate lobbyists and the media" shouldn't "fret about oil spills, gas leaks and nuclear meltdowns" because they "ignore the very real costs and risks of renewables."
But obviously the fossil fuels that Tesla batteries and renewable energy sources are displacing aren't exactly known for being inert. In fact, if there's a defining feature of fossil fuels, it's that they are flammable!
And while the WSJ could have at least tried to compare actual safety numbers for renewables vs fossil fuels, instead they just present a couple of anecdotes and call it a day. But two can play at that game, and in fact, the disorganized deniers at the Gateway Pundit happened to do exactly that!
On Thursday, they published a piece wondering "What's going on?" because an explosion at a BP refinery in Ohio killed two people, and is the fourth such explosion since June. The tone and tenor of the article suggest, as is the editorial preference of the outlet, that there's some grand conspiracy at work, concluding that "At a time of high inflation, two major fossil fuel production facility shutdowns, previous explosions and disruptions, it begs the question: Why we are experiencing so many major disruptions in our natural fossil fuel supply production/distribution facilities?"
Well, it could either be that fossil fuels are inherently explosive and companies have an inherent incentive to skimp on safety protocols because profit motives trump safety concerns … or that secret agents of sabotage are striking fossil fuel production facilities. Hard to say! Even harder to say, though, is that on another pair of stories, the WSJ and Gateway Pundit are actually sort of right!
On Tuesday, the WSJ's Allysia Finley wrote a column about the fraud trial for the CEO of EV startup Nikola, which is alleged to have vastly misrepresented the viability of their electric trucks. Finely wrote that the case "in some ways mirrors that of Elizabeth Holmes, who founded the Silicon Valley blood-testing startup Theranos. When her technology failed to live up to her hype, she concealed its shortcomings." Back at the Gateway Pundit, Jim "dumbest man on the internet" Hoft picked up a local news story out of St. Louis, about Pink Energy, a company that appears to have misled customers about the amount of power the solar panels they sold would produce.
Both make it clear the American economic system (which both outlets otherwise defend) allows companies to exploit customers, which means it isn't going to save us from climate change. While it's great that the Inflation Reduction Act allocates billions of dollars for clean energy companies, that money is flooding into a system that's designed to generate private profits, not public goods like carbon-free power.
If companies rip off consumers in the process of greedily sucking up subsidies, and they're doing it in the name of solar power, that's just going to make it harder to transition to clean energy. So too will money in the hands of unscrupulous techno-optimists with oNe CrAzY tRiCk to solve the climate crisis.
Empowering people with public ownership of clean power would be quicker, easier, safer and more equitable than outsourcing the stability of the climate to a country full of hucksters looking to get-rich-quick, be it with shoddy solar panels or government subsidies for fake e-Trucks.
