lying liars
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The latest sorties in the war over nuclear power
There have been several good entries in the never-ending nuclear debate lately. I’m pulling several together into one post, so all the vicious arguing can center in one comment thread. Fun! In a long, detailed, and devastating cover story in The Nation, Christian Parenti asks, “What Nuclear Renaissance?” Peeling away the hype and PR, he […]
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Nice way of life. Shame if something happened to it.
According to ACCCE, if we don’t use coal, we’ll have to wave goodbye to the American way of life:
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Gingrich mounts campaign to support domestic oil drilling
"Green conservative" and We campaign spokesman Newt Gingrich is mounting a new campaign: "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less." His promise is that (blocking Lieberman-Warner and) opening up drilling off the coasts, in the Gulf of Mexico, in northern Alaska, and in the Rockies (for oil shale) would lower gas prices. Now, for one thing […]
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Stop the presses!
A report put together by the National Coal Council finds that coal is essential and it’s not going anywhere and reducing coal use would mean the widespread death of puppies and cute children but the full-scale use of all available coal will lead to a country infused by pony spirits!
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Big Oil’s crooked talk on profits
Has the oil industry borrowed the (laughable) tagline of presidential candidate John McCain? As Fox Business reported last Friday:
The American Petroleum Institute took out a full-page ad in USA Today, and other major media were tapped this week to provide "straight talk on earnings." The earnings that need "straight talk": ExxonMobil's $11 billion quarterly profit, and Chevron's $5.2 billion quarterly profit.
(Note to Big Oil: When Fox doesn't give your spin favorable coverage, you've definitely become the Britney Spears of industries.)
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Henry Waxman weighs in on Bush admin. efforts to suppress climate science
The House Oversight committee has released its official report (PDF) on White House efforts to interfere with climate change science, and its conclusions are ... well, totally predictable. To wit:
The Committee's 16-month investigation reveals a systematic White House effort to censor climate scientists by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress. The White House was particularly active in stifling discussions of the link between increased hurricane intensity and global warming. The White House also sought to minimize the significance and certainty of climate change by extensively editing government climate change reports. Other actions taken by the White House involved editing EPA legal opinions and op-eds on climate change.
The sheer volume and magnitude of chicanery, when laid out in nearly 30 pages of detail, betrays a remarkably fastidious program of misinformation.
I suppose it's in the nature of things that many of the sub rosa efforts to tamper with the findings of real scientists would leak to the press and the Congress. After all, it's only Bush appointees who take an oath -- explicit or otherwise -- to uphold the president. The scientists who work in those appointees' agencies, on the other hand, were apparently pretty upset about all of this.
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Bush lies misleads on global warming, again
The Prez has a long history of misleading the nation on climate change. Not unlike his father, who promised on the stump to be the "environmental president," Bush promised on the campaign trail in 2000 to reduce CO2 emissions, then promptly reversed this position once he took office.
But that's in the history books. Last week, according to the Washington Post, he told an audience at a fundraiser in Washington state:
Do you realize that the United States is the only major industrialized nation that cut greenhouse gases last year?
One problem: that's, er, misleading at best. A spokesperson for the Council on Environmental Quality admitted so after the speech, saying that although the U.S. did slightly reduce energy consumption and thus emissions last year, it couldn't rule out the possibility that other nations did as well.
"We are making sure the President is aware of that," the spokesperson said.
