Senate Dems Get Irrational During ‘Web of Denial’ Climate Change Event

The best answer to many of the claims by Senate Democrats during their three-day “Web of Denial” climate change campaign in Congress this week is also the simplest: “So what?”

“Climate change is real,” asserted Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Jean Shaheen (D-NH), and Martin Heinrich (D-NM). So what? Gravity and sunrise are also real. That doesn’t imply we cause them or that we would be better off without them. Climate has been changing since the origin of the atmosphere. The onlyconstant about climate is change.

Furthermore, the world has mostly cooled for the last 3000 years.

Merkley and Feinstein continued: “Manmade climate change is a fact.”

So what? It is obviously warmer in urban areas than in the countryside because of manmade impacts. But the only place where carbon dioxide (CO2) increase causes a temperature increase is in computer models programmed to show exactly that.

Every record from every time period shows that temperature increase precedes CO2 increase, not the other way around.

Here They Go Again: #ExxonKnew Activists to Re-Release Old Documents in Desperate Bid for Relevance

http://energyindepth.org/national/exxonknew-activists-to-re-release-old-documents-in-desperate-bid-for-relevance/

In its crusade to draw parallels between Big Tobacco and Big Oil, the #ExxonKnew campaign is making its most desperate pitch to date this week, following the publication of a devastating op-ed in the Washington Post authored by Dennis Vacco, a former New York attorney general who actually litigated and settled the Big Tobacco cases and pointed out that ExxonMobil is nothing like them.”

The latest desperate move comes from a group called the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), which – according to a news release obtained by Energy In Depth – is about to release documents that purport to show how the “denial” playbook “originated not with tobacco—as long assumed—but with the oil industry itself.”

Now, if you’re feeling as though you’ve heard this tale before, it’s because you have – and it was pretty weak the first ten times. But before we get into the documents themselves, reporters and the public should know who CIEL actually is: yet another Rockefeller-funded key player in the #ExxonKnew campaign.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

CIEL’s President and CEO Carroll Muffett sits the board of the Climate Accountability Institute, which co-hosted the now infamous La Jolla conference in 2012 where activists brainstormed how they could use racketeering laws to prosecute ExxonMobil.  He was also one of the participants in that closed-door meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund offices where activists strategized on how they could establish “in the public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution.” Prior to joining CIEL, Muffett worked for a number of activist organizations including Greenpeace and the International Conservation and Defenders of Wildlife.  He recently joined activists such as Naomi Oreskes, who wrote a book that attempts to tie ExxonMobil to Big Tobacco, at a recent forum on Capitol Hill held by members of Congress sympathetic to their campaign.  Matt Pawa, the activist who made himself famous for briefing the attorneys general ahead of their March 29th press conference with Al Gore, is on the CIEL board of trustees.…

The Hillary treatment for climate fraudsters?

The Hillary treatment for climate fraudsters?

http://www.cfact.org/2016/07/18/the-hillary-treatment-for-climate-fraudsters/

Maybe Eric Schneiderman and his fellow AGs are onto something — they are just investigating the wrong side. Instead of criminalizing differences of opinion or inconvenient facts, we might do well to root out actual fraud, let real science prevail, and protect our livelihoods and living standards from unscrupulous people and organizations that are using fraudulent climate chaos claims to control energy use, transform the U.S. and global economic systems, and redistribute the world’s wealth.

— gReader Pro…

Climate skeptics face Senate inquisition

alwhitehouseGalileo has lots of modern-day companions. Woe be unto those who dare to doubt that the sun orbits around Planet Gore as pontiffs of doom have decreed.

That’s exactly the 17th Century time warp scenario that played out last week on the Senate floor as Chief Inquisitor Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) and 18 fellow jurists intoned judgments against dozens of organizations for sins of “denial blocking action on climate.” Most of those sinful deniers are nonprofit conservative think tanks, including several that I am sinfully very proud to associate with.

And nope, like most of those other sinful deniers, I don’t get paid to think in any tank.

The purpose of this floor show was to vilify and intimidate a hit list for the Democratic drafting committee’s unanimously adopted platform calling for the Department of Justice to investigate those who disagree with their jihad against climate alarm-driven energy regulatory policies.

That position follows legal actions against ExxonMobil by attorneys general from California, Massachusetts, New York, and the Virgin Islands which demand that the company turn over decades of correspondence with a lengthy fishing trip listing of other suspected climate crisis skeptics.

The drafting committee ordained that all fossil fuel use must be banished by 2050. Its high priests include noted alarmist climate billmckactivist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben and Carol Browner, who directed President Barack Obama’s White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy.

Their summary report states: “Moving beyond the ‘all of the above’ energy approach in the 2012 platform, the 2016 platform draft re-frames the urgency of climate change as a central challenge of our time, already impacting American communities and calling for generating 50% clean electricity within the next 10 years.”

They are already making great strides. Just as the President Obama promised, in the interest of ending billions of years of climate change the coal industry, which has provided 18% of America’s primary fuel, is now bankrupt.

Conservatives fire back at warmist senators’ ‘coordinated attack’ on speech

http://watchdog.org/270413/conservatives-climate-change-speech/

By M.D. Kittle | First Amendment Reporter for Watchdog.org

Free-market groups are firing back at Senate Democrats’ coordinated attack on climate-change skeptics, the latest assault on the First Amendment in the left’s relentless effort to intimidate and silence conservative speech.

“We, the undersigned, have long since known that you have a list — an enemies list of intellectual foes you wish to isolate. But our policy differences are not why we write,” states a letter from the 22 free-market organizations to the senators who have spent the last two days calling out “climate-change deniers” on the Senate floor.

“We write today with grave concern over political leadership in a time of deep national division. We write at a time when free speech and association are more important than ever in our national experiment. How will we, together, solve problems if we cannot speak? How can you lead when you refuse to listen?” ask the conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, theAmerican Legislative Exchange Council and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity,Watchdog.org’s parent organization, is one of  the 22 organizations that signed the letter to lawmakers.

CEI has been targeted in a controversial prosecution by a coalition of left-wing state attorneys general, billing itself “AGs United for Clean Power.” CEI and other climate-change agenda skeptics have pushed back.…

Sheldon Whitehouse calls for news outlets to suppress ‘extreme’ op-eds by climate skeptics

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/14/sheldon-whitehouse-calls-news-outlets-suppress-ext/

– The Washington Times – Thursday, July 14, 2016

Sen. Sheldon Whitehousewants newspapers to stop publishing “extreme” and “phony” op-eds written by climate-change skeptics, blasting such articles as “industry propaganda.”

The Rhode Island Democratsaid he was stunned by the “extraordinary barrage of opinion pieces” that followed his May 2015 op-ed recommending that Attorney General Loretta Lynch investigate fossil-fuel companies and their supporters for possible civil violations of federal racketeering laws.

He blamed the flood of what he described as “error-plagued criticism” on “the climate denial apparatus” and urged newspapers to reject such opinion pieces in the future.

“The breadth of the op-ed assault suggests that a new level of critical scrutiny will be needed at honorable editorial boards to make responsible choices between legitimate and honest opinion and clever, made-to-order, industrial-scale dissemination of industry propaganda,”saidMr. Whitehousein a Tuesday op-ed in the Columbia Journalism Review.…

Union of Concerned Scientists makes shameless ploy for $2 million to protect #RICO 20

Union of Concerned Scientists makes shameless ploy for $2 million to protect #RICO 20

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/07/13/union-of-concerned-scientists-makes-shameless-ploy-for-2-million-to-protect-rico-20

From the “Kenji is not pleased” department. Can you imagine the wailing and caterwauling if say, Heartland or The Competitive Enterprise Institute tried something like this? In my opinion, the only thing related to “science” at UCS is their name, but clearly by their actions they are a political organization, and nothing else. After all, […]

— gReader Pro…

Dem Senator’s Floor Speech to Attack Nonprofit Critical of Her

http://freebeacon.com/issues/dem-senators-floor-speech-attack-nonprofit-critical/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=5f6edcde5c-WFB_Morning_Beacon_7_12_167_12_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-5f6edcde5c-22705981

BY:   

A Democratic Senator will take to the chamber floor on Tuesday to attack a group that exposed her secret collaboration with environmentalist pressure groups in crafting official press statements.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.) is scheduled to attack the Energy and Environment Legal Institute on the Senate floor on Tuesday as part of a coordinated PR offensive against conservative and libertarian nonprofit groups.

Nineteen Senate Democrats involved in the effort were tasked with using floor speeches to attack specific groups, which they are branding as parts of a “web of denial” seeking to impede Democratic energy and environmental policies.

Shaheen’s floor speech will go after E&E and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian nonprofit that has been targeted by state Democratic officials seeking racketeering charges against oil giant ExxonMobil and groups to which it has donated.…