lying liars
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How progressive can legislation be if it’s never allowed to make progress?
Dan Walters writes in the Sacramento Bee:
The messy departure of the chairman and executive director of the Air Resources Board, if nothing else, reflects the extremely intense, largely clandestine struggle in the Capitol over how Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's much-ballyhooed anti-global warming crusade is to be implemented.
Schwarzenegger says he fired ARB Chairman Robert Sawyer last week because the veteran energy researcher was moving too slowly on cleaning up the San Joaquin Valley's dirty air. But Sawyer and ARB Executive Director Catherine Witherspoon, who resigned Monday, have a far different version, one that rings truer. They contend that Schwarzenegger's chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, and other aides wanted them to slow down on implementing anti-global warming legislation passed last year. -
When journalists go too far
I could have been sitting across from a writer of US Weekly or OK Magazine, but I wasn't. I was sharing an hour of my morning with a journalist from Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), one of the oldest and most respected newspapers in Switzerland. Granted, my interview was for their "softer" weekend edition, NZZ am Sonntag, but even that paper carries the weight of its weekday counterpart's esteemed name. That's why I was shocked to read a spuriously devised, albeit glamorous, story of my life when the article appeared.
Let's get one thing straight: The "journalist" did not slander my name. It was quite the opposite: He had me sharing a photo shoot with Mayor Bloomberg; saving sharks in Miami; buttering up old-school Sierra Club veterans; and convincing motorheads to shut off their cars in exchange for bikini-clad pictures. Ooh, how naughty of me!
He even quoted me in conversations -- on topics ranging from recycling batteries to rainforest preservation -- that never took place, built off of scenarios that never happened. Even the water I was drinking during the interview wasn't "glamorous" enough for him. He had me sucking back a Starbucks coffee after a whirlwind tour around the country. Note to future interviewers: I've never drunk coffee in my life.
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We had to destroy the village to make it a global village
The job of the PR industry: comforting the comfortable, afflicting the afflicted. Now on to protecting the feelings of the poor maligned air travel industry:
As part of the makeover, there's a short in-flight video, titled "Flying's a Wonderful Thing," that has been produced to ease consumer guilt over plane travel, and brochures have been printed. "Air transport made the global village a reality," one pamphlet says.
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Conservative blog doesn’t read studies it writes about
As discussed last week, Planet Gore's Sterling Burnett was upset with the media for supposedly ignoring "the recent reports by MIT and the CBO [PDFs] detailing the substantial costs and regressive nature of the costs that are estimated to arise if any of the current domestic proposals restricting carbon emissions to combat global warming are enacted."
Given that the MIT report in fact concluded the exact opposite of what Sterling claimed -- and given the fact that the National Review typically doesn't complain about the regressive nature of, say, tax cuts for the wealthy -- I'm guessing you won't be surprised to learn that the CBO report also comes to a different conclusion than Sterling claims.
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Funding deniers, still, in 2007?
A little while back Exxon was trying to backpedal on its global warming shenanigans, claiming it had been misunderstood and that it wasn’t funding those nasty denialist groups any more. In what is sure to come as a huge shock to … nobody, that turned out to be bullsh*t. According to a new report from […]
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A video you simply must see
Yikes. Everyone must watch this video, which comes to us from DeSmogBlog: And on a related note, this seems like a good time to link to The Denialists’ Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts. You will see that these perpetual, maddening arguments about global warming are not […]
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Vote!
A little while back, CNN recruited a right-wing talk radio host named Glenn Beck to host one of its prime-time shows. As MediaMatters rather exhaustively reveals, Beck is an unreconstructed racist, sexist, classist, misogynist, authoritarian, xenophobic troglodyte of the old school. He doesn’t work particularly hard to conceal his trogloditicism. In fact, one suspects CNN […]
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Shot down
Alex Cockburn, who has long been a low-key denier of the human contribution to climate chaos, has decided to take his contrarianism on this issue loud and proud. Because Alex is a bit too prominent to simply ignore, George Monbiot takes a few minutes from his busy schedule to tear the piece into little tiny shreds.
It takes Monbiot only a few sentences to point out that all the arguments Cockburn makes are well known and widely discredited, and that Alex uses zero references. Cockburn's sole source seems to be a guy he met on a Nation cruise. Alex is not only taking a highly destructive position, he is doing so without bothering to do his homework. Monbiot goes on to quote Cockburn himself on the nature of crank arguments. I recommend reading Monbiot's refutation, even if you are familiar enough with the debate to spot all Cockburn's scientific mistakes unaided. Because Monbiot illustrates here how, if circumstances force you, to deal with an opponent who makes an argument totally unworthy of any respect.
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