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/
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.…
Cheers! AP laments: ‘Trump would be only head of state in world to contend climate change is a hoax’
http://www.news24.com/Green/News/trumps-climate-change-hoax-at-odds-with-world-leaders-20160712
Washington – If elected president, Donald Trump would be the only head of state in the world to contend that climate change is a hoax, according to a study.
The Sierra Club compiled public statements from the leaders of the 195 nations recognised by the State Department. An advance copy of the group’s report, to be released on Tuesday, was provided to The Associated Press.
In contrast to public statements by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee calling climate change a “con job” and a “myth”, the leader of every US ally urges action to reduce climate-warming carbon emissions, including Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan and Canada.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, head of the Earth’s most populous country and the No. 1 global emitter of carbon, has called for eventually phasing out dirty coal-fired power plants and is leading an ambitious national effort to build massive arrays of solar panels and wind turbines.
The regime of reclusive North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un signed on to the Paris accord last year and is implementing a 10-year push to plant new forests as part of a “national effort to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Even the leaders of nations economically dependent on oil production also accept the reality that the world’s climate is warming, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi King Salman.
“Being highly vulnerable to climate change and actions and plans to address it, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will be engaged in several actions to address climate change and make its development more sustainable,” the Saudi state said in a statement issued last year.
‘Failure to acknowledge basic climate science’
Trump, meanwhile, has pledged to “renegotiate” US commitments under the Paris accord and has suggested that the science of climate change is part of a plot to weaken the American economy.
“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” Trump tweeted in 2012.
He has also cited cold winter weather as evidence the world is not really warming.
“The entire country is FREEZING — we desperately need a heavy dose of global warming, and fast! Ice caps size reaches all time high,” Trump tweeted during a 2014 blizzard.
While Trump’s climate-change denial has become orthodoxy within the Republican Party, it is at odds with the overwhelming consensus of the world’s scientific community and rejects …