[Pants-of-dog]

He doesn't know what neoliberalism is,

I lived in Chile under Pinochet. If you think you have learnt better lessons about neoliberalism, please share them.

he doesn't even know which side he's on, he's just mindlessly stringing words together in an idiotic flail to protect his incoherent worldview from the facts. He tries to mimic what the debunkers do but because he doesn't really understand the principles of critical thought his attempts at debunking are all just comical misfires. Like he'll claim a quote is out of context when it's an unambiguous statement that leaves no room for interpretation.

Great argument there.

Anyway, the Cato Institute is a well known free market/neoliberal think tank:

https://www.cato.org/research/global-warming

The articles there give an indication of how neoliberals oppose any real action on climate change.

Incidentally, they also claim that government efforts to mitigate climate change are a front for authoritarian government policies, just like Sivad.

[Sivad]

My favorite is when he tries to debunk a claim based on the medium of communication it comes through. Somehow he go it in his head that anything posted to youtube is suspect, that's like rejecting everything in the library of congress because librairies are known to carry inaccurate information. That's gotta be the most retarded fallacy of irrelevance ever, it's the all time prize blue ribbon idiocy for sure.

[Pants-of-dog]

No, @Sivad, you once again misunderstood.

I do not watch thise videos because they are not an argument. At best, they are aources of information that contain evidence that you can use in an argument, but you do not do that.

You just post the video and expect others to watch it for you, analyse it for you, find out what the argument is for you, write it out for you, and then criticise it.

Since other people are not here to do your work for you, you can do all that work for you.

On topic, the link to the Cato Institute shows that neoliberals actively oppose legislation and other action to mitigate climate change. Is there any disagreement about that?

[MrWonderful]

SCORES OF MILLIONS of Eco-Hypocrites around the world burned MILLIONS of gallons of *nasty* fossil fuels to drive to protests and hold up signs, and trash the cities and whine and scream hysterically. What did they accomplish? Ask any of them. They believe their Eco-Hypocrisy is justified and effective.

How many of them:
1. Take vacations every year, where they burn hundreds of gallons of *nasty* fossil fuel,
2. Drive to entertainment venues just for fun or for dinner or to meet friends and family members,
killing (wink, nudge) polar bears and raising sea level (wink, nudge) in the process,
3. Are driven to school and then back home by mommy or daddy, every day,
4. Are driven to school athletic events, practices, meets, plays, dances, and all manner of social activities that burn *nasty* fossil fuels some Democrats now want to be permanently banned worldwide?

There could not possibly be so much dissent, from scholars and scientists and insiders around the world if there were not sound scientific basis for dissent, which can easily be accessed with any online search. There are numerous books, scientific papers, videos even on YouTube.com.

A few of them are referenced at

Code: Select allhttp://TheGlobalWarmingFraud.wordpress.com


These are extremely diverse sources, credible sources, such as staff members and insiders from NASA. Such a powerful set of facts and science cannot be dismissed with a condescending, snarky sentence, which always seems to be the reaction from those claiming the scientific and intellectual high ground.... which they do not occupy.

[Truth To Power]

A few of them are referenced at

Code: Select allhttp://TheGlobalWarmingFraud.wordpress.com


Thanks for linking this.

… those claiming the scientific and intellectual high ground.... which they do not occupy.

Perhaps more importantly, they claim the moral high ground, which they also do not occupy, in order to obtain the political high ground, which they unfortunately now do occupy. I find it shocking how thoroughly young people have been and are being indoctrinated in anti-fossil-fuel hysteria in public schools.

[Truth To Power]

The neoliberal position on climate change is that it does not exist, and even if it did, governments should not do anything to mitigate it.

Which "neoliberal" has said climate does not change?

@Sivad’s position on climate change is that it does not exist,

Please provide a quote where Sivad says climate does not change.

Thought not.

[Pants-of-dog]

That was a strawman.

[Truth To Power]

That was a strawman.

Yes, your statement certainly was, which was of course precisely my point. Was that your apology for it??

[Atlantis]

'They Have Lied for Decades': European Parliament To Scrutinise Exxon's Climate Science Denial

With millions of students taking to the streets and oil majors increasingly facing litigation, the fossil fuel industry is finally being held to account for its contribution to the climate crisis.

This week, the EU is taking this accountability up a notch, with ExxonMobil’s decades-long denial of climate science facing the scrutiny of MEPs and the public at a hearing at the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday.

During the two-hour session, scientists, campaigners and a historian will examine the history of climate denial and in particular the misinformation spread by Exxon, with MEPs able to ask questions about the role and behaviour of the oil major.

The hearing is being held jointly by the petitions committee and the environment, public health and food safety committee. It was arranged following a petition by Food & Water Europe, a Brussels-based non-governmental organisation, which gained 732 signatures.

“To my knowledge, this is the first major body of lawmakers, certainly at the national or international level, to hear on record expert testimony about the history of climate denial today,” says Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who has examined Exxon’s history of obfuscation on climate change, and who will testify at Thursday’s hearing. “There’s a general momentum here, that investigative bodies are starting to formalise this enquiry.”

Representatives from the oil company itself won’t attend the hearing, due to “ongoing climate change related litigation in the US”, according to leaked notes from the coordinators of the hearing. Exxon did not respond to requests for comment at the time of publication.

Political Access

One issue MEPs will be asked to consider is the easy access to policymakers that Exxon enjoys, which contrasts sharply with that afforded to members of civil society.

In a five-minute speech that Frida Kieninger, campaigns officer at Food & Water Europe, will make at the hearing on Thursday, she plans to highlight the lengths to which young people have recently gone to gain the attention of lawmakers, compared to the access that Exxon has to the corridors of power.

“We have the young people marching on the streets, while at the same time Exxon is sitting within the European institutions; it's basically on the table helping to draft climate and energy laws, and has a big influence and a lot of money to do so. It's not proportionate to what civil society organisations have,” says Kieninger .

“At the same time they have lied for decades to us about the importance of climate change that they are actually causing with their activities.”

Exxon came under fire in 2015 when investigations by various publications, including DeSmog, InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, revealed that the oil company had known about the causes and impacts of climate change since the 1970s. But instead of acting to reduce emissions, financed efforts to sow seeds of doubt about the science, and lobbied to block federal and international efforts to tackle the problem.

“The overwhelming consensus of experts studying the history of fossil fuel interests is essentially that the fossil fuel industry has known about the basic dangers of global warming caused by their products for 60 years, yet instead of taking action and warning the public, it orchestrated and funded decades of denial,” says Supran.

“A key actor in that history is ExxonMobil. But I also plan to give the committees a broader perspective, to point out that I’m only showing them the tip of the iceberg. We have now thousands of pages of documented evidence and it all points one way, and that’s that Big Oil is the new Big Tobacco. [I’m helping] them understand that I’m just talking about one cog in this web of denial machine.”

EU Lobbying

As well as examining Exxon’s history of climate science denial, Thursday’s hearing will also focus on the extent of Exxon’s lobbying within the EU itself, and on its efforts to delay climate action.

“In the US, I think the political climate is far friendlier towards climate denialism, and in the EU I think it has not been possible,” says Pascoe Sabido, a researcher at Corporate Europe Observatory.

“Publicly in Europe, it's been a lot harder for Exxon and others to really downplay the reality of climate change, so instead they're spending millions and millions on lobbying to delay climate action and distract us with false solutions. This hearing is a chance to explore Exxon's climate denialism, which is well documented, but we're also hoping to hold them to account for scuppering much needed climate action.”

DeSmog UK has previously revealed how Exxon funneled millions of Euros to corporations, lobby groups, and academic institutions in the EU.

According to a new report by Corporate Europe Observatory, citing the EU Transparency Register, ExxonMobil spent up to €3.5 million on lobbying in 2018. The company declares 12 lobbyists, six of whom have badges that give them direct access to the European Parliament.

Campaigners hope that MEPs will punish Exxon for spreading climate disinformation by revoking its lobbyist access badges to the European Parliament, similar to its decision to revoke access to lobbyists from Monsanto, the US seed company, in 2017, following its refusal to participate in a hearing in Parliament on the ‘Monsanto Papers’.

The decision to revoke Exxon’s lobby badges would not be taken by the hearing, but rather by the leaders of the parliamentary groupings. Even so, given that the oil company has various means by which to access decisionmakers, any action taken to ban the group from parliament itself would be partially symbolic, says Kieninger.

“It's really affecting only the European Parliament. We know it's a very strong symbolic move, but we are aware of the fact that Exxon have other institutions that they can access, and we also want to make aware of the fact that they have many other channels to influence decision makers, even within the European Parliament, even without the lobby badges,” says Kieninger.

“It's a strong way of parliamentarians to show publicly what they think about Exxon lobbyists, and we can much more easily put pressure on those who are still engaging with Exxon or still showing up to events that Exxon are organising and so on.”

The European Commission has already proved reluctant to censure Exxon for its climate science denial, or to limit its lobbying power. Following the submission of the petition, asking for action against Exxon, the Commission refused to hold a hearing.

“Misinformation about climate change, while deplorable, is not in itself a breach of EU law,” the Commission responded in May 2017. “The best response to climate scepticism is to pursue the current actions and ensure the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions.”

In a subsequent 2018 hearing, the Commission refused to hold a hearing on the grounds that everyone, including climate science deniers, have the right to freedom of speech.

While the potency of the hearing may be weakened by the absence of Exxon itself, the company’s refusal to cooperate could be what ends up making an impression on the MEPs in attendance, says Kieninger.

“I think it's losing some of its strength by Exxon not being there. On the other hand, it gives a chance for MEPs to really consider if they want to keep cooperating with Exxon who's obviously not cooperating with them once they invite them,” she says.

Sabido agrees that Exxon should have its lobbying privileges stripped for its refusal to show up before the committees, suggesting that their absence means the company doesn’t believe the Parliament will hold them to account.

“Exxon not showing up shows the disregard they have for democracy, and for European institutions. What's happening in Brussels is not a court case – it's a political hearing,” says Sabido, adding that their excuse of the ongoing litigation in the US doesn’t hold much water as a result.

“If Exxon is not going to show up to be held to account, then they shouldn't be able to show up to lobby the Parliament.”

@Sivad I can understand why BigOil sponsors climate change denial. There are big bugs at stake. What I can't understand is why the useful idiots do it.

While the plutocracy attempts to subvert democratic institutions, our only hope are the kids.

[Sivad]

[Pants-of-dog]

Does that video have an argument?

[Sivad]

@Sivad I can understand why BigOil sponsors climate change denial. There are big bugs at stake. What I can't understand is why the useful idiots do it.

While the plutocracy attempts to subvert democratic institutions, our only hope are the kids.

Meet Maurice Strong: Globalist, Oiligarch, “Environmentalist”



A very odd thing happened last weekend. The death was announced of the man who, in the past 40 years, has arguably been more influential on global politics than any other single individual. Yet the world scarcely noticed.

Had it not been for this man, we would not last week have seen 150 heads of government joining 40,000 delegates in Paris for that mammoth climate conference: the 21st such get-together since, in 1992, he masterminded the Rio “Earth Summit”, the largest political gathering in history. Yet few people even know his name.

In the Sixties, having become very rich himself from Canada’s oil industry, Strong came to see that the key to his vision was “environmentalism”, the one cause the UN could harness to make itself a truly powerful world government.

A superb political operator, in 1972 he set up a UN “Environment Conference” in Stockholm, to declare that the Earth’s resources were the common inheritance of all mankind. They should no longer be exploited for the benefit of only a few countries, at the expense of poorer countries across the globe.

To pursue this, he became founding director of a new agency, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and in the Eighties he took up the cause of a tiny group of international meteorologists who had come to believe that the world faced catastrophic warming. In 1988, UNEP sponsored this little group into setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In 1992, now allied with the IPCC, Strong pulled off his greatest coup when he set up another new body, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to stage that colossal “Earth Summit” over which he presided in Rio, arranging for it to be attended not only by 108 world leaders and 100,000 others but also by 20,000 UN-funded “green activists”.

It is the UNFCCC which in effect has dictated the global climate change agenda ever since. Almost yearly it has staged huge conferences, notably those at Kyoto (1997), Copenhagen (2009) and the present one in Paris. And all along it has been Strong’s ideology, enshrined at Rio in “Agenda 21”, which has continued to shape the entire process, centred on the principle that the richer developed countries must pay for a problem they created, to the financial benefit of all those “developing countries” that have been its main victims.

In 2005, Strong was caught having been illicitly paid $1 million from the UN’s Oil for Food programme, supposedly set up to allow Saddam Hussein to pay in oil to feed starving Iraqis. He retired to a flat in Beijing, where he had been close to China’s Communist leaders back to Mao. It was from there that he returned home to Canada to die,on November 27.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/ ... hange.html

"BigOil", "big bucks", "plutocrats", "subverted democracy", and "useful idiots" indeed.

[Sivad]

Which "neoliberal" has said climate does not change?

Or more to the point, what does being skeptical of alarmist hysterics have to do with neoliberalism? And how exactly is rejecting politicized junk science in any way exclusive to neoliberalism?

You know what is neoliberalism though? Carbon taxes. Carbon taxes are pure neoliberalism, regressive taxes are the neolib's policy instrument of choice.

[Pants-of-dog]

Climate deniers support the neoliberal agenda by being apologists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of or even may not agree with if they are aware of said goals, and are being used cynically by neoliberals.

[Truth To Power]

Climate deniers support the neoliberal agenda by being apologists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of or even may not agree with if they are aware of said goals, and are being used cynically by neoliberals.

I don't think you have thought very deeply about who is being cynically used, how, by whom, and why.

[Pants-of-dog]

@Sivad

Please tell me your beliefs about the following:

1. Chemtrails.
2. Is the Earth flat?
3. Did the USA land on the moon?
4. How did AIDS start?
5. Was 9/11 a false flag?
6. Is smoking linked to cancer?
7. Who killed JFK?
8. Is the US air force hiding evidence of extraterrestrials?

Other climate change denialists can answer these questions too!

[SolarCross]

^ there you have it POD has decreed global warming to be an orthodoxy, if you don't mindlessly repeat the orthodoxy as truth then you are a heretic.

[Pants-of-dog]

^ there you have it POD has decreed global warming to be an orthodoxy, if you don't mindlessly repeat the orthodoxy as truth then you are a heretic.

http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/l ... piracy.pdf

Abstract
Although nearly all domain experts agree that human CO2 emissions are altering the world’s climate, segments of the public remain unconvinced by the scientific evidence. Internet blogs have become a vocal platform for climate denial, and bloggers have taken a prominent and influential role in questioning climate science. We report a survey (N
> 1100) of climate blog users to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection of climate science. Paralleling previous work, we find that endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (r ≃ .80 between latent constructs). Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer.We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science. Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with the perception of a consensus among scientists.

[Hindsite]

Abstract
Although nearly all domain experts agree that human CO2 emissions are altering the world’s climate, segments of the public remain unconvinced by the scientific evidence. Internet blogs have become a vocal platform for climate denial, and bloggers have taken a prominent and influential role in questioning climate science.

Yeah, because they know it is fake news.

[Truth To Power]

Please tell me your beliefs about the following:

1. Chemtrails.

Jets flying higher than they used to.

2. Is the Earth flat?

Nope.

3. Did the USA land on the moon?

Yep.

4. How did AIDS start?

Chimp virus.

5. Was 9/11 a false flag?

Probably. Building 7's graceful descent into its own footprint when it had not been hit by a jet is the smoking gun.

6. Is smoking linked to cancer?

Yes.

7. Who killed JFK?

Not Oswald. The backward jerk of JFK's head seen in the Zapruder film shows the fatal bullet came from the front.

8. Is the US air force hiding evidence of extraterrestrials?

Unlikely.

Other climate change denialists can answer these questions too!

Who has denied that climate changes?