Watch an economist call out CNN for hosting a Koch-backed Trump surrogate to lie about the Paris accord

From Media Matters

JEFFREY SACHS: It's just unbelievable. Every word has been a lie for the last two days. So much ignorance. And you have Stephen Moore and he is from the Heritage Foundation, paid for by the Koch brothers have engineered the whole story here. So it's just endless. Big money of the Koch brothers is behind this. And Mr. Moore and his Heritage Foundation is a Koch brothers-financed operation and this is corruption. And it's so clear and it's disgusting after a while because they are all lying.

ANA CABRERA (HOST): Jeffrey, this study was the National Economic Research Associates study that Stephen was just citing that we've heard from the Trump administration. Why do you not believe that's a credible source?

SACHS: There are about 20,000 coal miners in this country out of 150 million people. This is so bogus, it's unbelievable. Everything that Trump has said is bogus. And the idea that he has given to the American people that somehow this is an agreement that is against America, that's biased against America. This is a completely symmetrical agreement in which all 193 countries have agreed to the same thing. They have agreed to submit national plans of action under a common framework. And so it's all a lie. And the important thing for your viewers to understand is this is the future of their children and their grandchildren. And this man is wrecking the planet and it's because of the oil, gas, and coal interests that have funded the Heritage Foundation, that have funded Stephen Moore, and that have funded the 22 senators that wrote to the president last week saying to do this. This is a game and it's a game against my children and my grandchildren. And it's disgusting.

CABRERA: Stephen, I'll give you a chance to respond.

STEPHEN MOORE: Well, Jeff just needs to get his facts straight. We get less than three percent of our budget from the Kochs. So, Jeff I don't know where you're getting your facts from, but what you just said is a lie.

SACHS: I know where I'm getting my facts from. You're on the take.

[...]

SACHS: I'm shocked that you are a [contributor] for this network.

Trump's exit from Paris agreement underscores the media’s catastrophic climate change failure during the campaign

KEVIN KALHOEFER/Media Matters

News outlets are reporting that President Donald Trump has decided to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. Trump’s reported decision, as well as months of media speculation about whether or not he would remain in the deal, put into stark relief the failure of major TV networks to discuss the climate implications of a Trump presidency during the election campaign.

According to Axios and The New York Times, Trump has decided to exit the Paris agreement, in which all but two of the world’s countries submitted pledges to curb their greenhouse gas emissions in order to combat climate change. Following the news reports, Trump tweeted that he would issue his announcement on the matter “over the next few days.”

Regardless of when Trump makes his announcement, this alarming development serves as a reminder that major news networks failed to discuss how a Trump presidency would affect climate change and the Paris agreement prior to the election.

Media Matters’ latest annual study examining the broadcast networks’ coverage of climate change found that in 2016, evening newscasts and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC as well as Fox News Sunday did not air a single segment informing viewers of what to expect on climate change and climate-related policies or issues -- including the Paris agreement -- under a Trump or Hillary Clinton administration. This failure was made all the more inexplicable by the fact that Trump had pledged to cancel or renegotiate the agreement during his campaign and that polls conducted prior to the election showed that large majorities of Americans supported the Paris accord.

PBS NewsHour was an exception to this trend, airing two segments before the election that provided much-needed discussion about what a Clinton or Trump presidency would mean for the Paris agreement and climate policy broadly. A September 7, 2016, segment featured a discussion with The New York Times’ Coral Davenport and The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney about Trump’s pledge to cancel the Paris accord. And a September 22 segment explored “what the early days of a Trump presidency might look like” and featured Judy Woodruff interviewing Evan Osnos of The New Yorker about whether Trump would renounce the Paris climate agreement.

The major networks did eventually devote a significant amount of coverage to the climate impacts of a Trump presidency in 2016, airing 25 segments on the topic after the election. And TV networks have been covering the Paris agreement this week, just as they covered Trump’s rollback of former President Barack Obama’s main climate policies in March; in both cases, it’s too little much too late.

International leaders respond to Paris decision with anger, criticism

E.A. Crunden/Think Progress

World leaders harshly rebuked President Donald Trump’s decision to exit the Paris agreement Thursday, saying a renegotiation would not be possible.

Signed in 2015, the accord brought together nearly every country in the world in an effort to prevent more than 2°C of global warming. Trump’s decision to withdraw was almost immediately derided as bad for both foreign relations and the country’s leadership position.

On a call following the announcement, White House officials said that U.S. contributions to climate action would be renegotiated. “There is no question that other countries, particularly our allies and partners, and other major emitters are going to want to sit down with us,” said one senior official. “There is no question that there will be interest in doing so.”

But Germany, France, and Italy released a joint statement shortly after the announcement asserting that the Paris accord could not be renegotiated, immediately contradicting the administration’s claims.

“We deem the momentum generated in Paris in December 2015 irreversible, and we firmly believe that the Paris agreement cannot be renegotiated, since it is a vital instrument for our planet, societies and economies,” the statement from Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Emmanuel Macron read.

Other world leaders were also quick to slam the decision to leave the agreement. European Union Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete tweeted that the occasion marked a “sad day” for the world, but that Europe would rise to the challenge.

A sad day for the global community, but the #ParisAgreement will endure. The world can count on Europe. EU statement https://t.co/MeI9jov4Zf

— Miguel Arias Cañete (@MAC_europa) June 1, 2017

In a series of tweets, Cañete added that, “The #ParisAgreement will endure. The world can continue to count on Europe for global leadership in the fight against climate change. The EU will strengthen existing partnerships and seek new alliances from the world’s largest economies to the most vulnerable island states. Today’s announcement has galvanised us rather than weakened us, and this vacuum will be filled by new broad committed leadership.”

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called the decision a “major disappointment,” and Barbara Hendricks, Germany’s environment minister, warned that the decision would harm the United States more than anyone else.

“The damage this causes to multilateral cooperation is even more severe than the damage done to international climate action,” Hendricks said. “By leaving, the [U.S.] administration is throwing away a precious opportunity for forward-looking development in the United States. This decision harms the United States itself most of all.” Her comments were echoed by Manfred Weber, a member of Merkel’s party, who tweeted that the United States was no longer a “reliable partner” in the fight against climate change.

German MEP from Merkel's party, echoing broad EU consensus: the US no longer reliable and, in time, no longer relevant. Accelerated decline. https://t.co/nHtkbjzWEB

— Jasmin Mujanović (@JasminMuj) June 1, 2017

London Mayor Sadiq Khan called upon the leaders of other major cities to fight the threat of climate change. “As Mayor of London, I remain committed to the Paris Agreement and working with other world cities on solutions to tackling emissions, harmful pollutants and safeguarding the environment,” read a statement from Khan. “We cannot overlook the fact that climate change remains one [of] the biggest environmental risks to humanity.”

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel condemned the move as a “brutal act,” and former Mexican President Vicente Fox tweeted that Trump’s action “condemns this generation and those to come,” adding that, “United States has stopped being the leader of the free world.” Asserting Canada’s commitment to tackling climate change, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also tweeted his disappointment and concern.

We are deeply disappointed that the United States federal government has decided to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) June 1, 2017

Canada is unwavering in our commitment to fight climate change and support clean economic growth.

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) June 1, 2017

Numerous figures cautioned Trump against exiting the deal prior to the announcement. In a joint letter, Nordic leaders pleaded with Trump to show “global leadership,” and stick with the accord. In remarks yesterday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that Trump did not understand the agreement — or that leaving would take several years, notably concluding the day after the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

“We tried to explain that to Mr. Trump,” Juncker said. “It seems that our attempt failed, but the law is the law, and it must be obeyed. Not everything which is law and not everything in international agreements is fake news, and we have to comply with it.”

Seeking to offset the damage from Trump’s announcement, China and the European Union are expected to declare a joint commitment to combatting climate change and upholding the Paris agreement Friday.

“The EU and China consider climate action and the clean energy transition an imperative more important than ever,” a statement from European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker, along with European Council President Donald Tusk, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang read.

Exiting the deal makes the United States one of only three countries that will not be party to the accord. Nicaragua has abstained, saying the agreement did not go far enough, while Syria is in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war. But a U.S. exit is notable for other reasons — as the world’s second biggest carbon emitter after China (which, unlike the United States, is also the world’s largest producer of renewable energy), U.S. leadership on climate change has been considered crucial. Now, it is likely that European countries will partner with China as they work to meet the Paris agreement’s demands — leaving the United States behind.

During Thursday’s announcement, made from from the Rose Garden, Trump repeatedly said the deal was “bad” for the United States and good for other countries, adding, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

Cable News Virtually Ignores Obama’s Major Climate Speech

By Annie-Rose Strasser/Think Progress

On Tuesday, President Obama rolled out a plan to cap carbon emissions at existing power plants, improve efficiency standards on automobiles, double the amount of electricity produced with renewables, and lead a global movement to address climate change. But the media virtually ignored it.

All of the three major news networks spent mere minutes on the speech — which ran in total 49 minutes.

While the lack of coverage is shocking enough, perhaps the most astounding media failure of the day was by FOX News, who broke from Obama’s climate speech to interview climate denier Chris Horner. Horner works for the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is largely funded by the oil money, including the Koch Brothers and Exxon-Mobil.

Of course, a media blackout on climate issues is nothing new. Even when outlets cover the devastating and very real affects of a changing climate, they are reluctant to mention “climate change” by name. Recently, the midwest experienced historic flooding, but only 3 percent of coverage used the term. When hurricane Sandy tore its way through New York, literally no newspapers mentioned a climate connection. Perhaps this comes from the shady, and undisclosed, connection between major news outlets and dirty energy interests.

INTERNAL DOCUMENTS: The Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax

By Brad Johnson/Think Progress 




Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.” This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” Heartland’s confidential 2012 fundraising document bemoans. The group believes that Wojick’s project has “potential for great success,” because he has “contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting scientific curricula.” The document explains that Wojick will produce “modules” that promote the conspiratorial claim that climate change is “controversial”:

Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy“), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is amajor controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather“), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

Wojick will receive $5,000 per module, with twenty modules produced a year. Wojick, who manages the Climate Change Debate listserv, is not a climate scientist. His doctorate is in epistomology.

The Heartland Institute also runs the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a conspiracy-theorist parody of the Nobel-prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Heartland’s NIPCC project “pays a team of scientists approximately $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered.” Their climate-denial work is funded anonymously.

James M. Taylor, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, told ThinkProgress Green in an e-mail why the group is developing its denier curriculum:

We are concerned that schools are teaching climate change issues in a manner that is not consistent with sound science and that is designed to lead students to the erroneous belief that humans are causing a global warming crisis. We hope that our efforts will restore sound science to climate change educationand discourage the political propaganda that too often passes as “education”.

Right-wing ideologues, fueled by the fossil fuel industry, have been increasing their efforts to pollute science education in elementary schools. These attempts to hijack children’s education piggyback on the religious right’s war on biology education and the science of evolution. The National Center for Science Education, which has long led the defense of evolution education in elementary schools, has begun a new program to fight global warming denial in textbooks and classrooms.

WSJ Publishes Op-Ed From 16 Climate Deniers, Refused Letter From 255 Top Scientists

By Brad Johnson/Think Progress


In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, sixteen prominent global warming deniers with scientific backgrounds — such as tobacco apologist Richard Lindzen of MIT and ExxonMobil executive Roger Cohen — concede that manmade carbon dioxide emissions have a warming effect on the planet, but argue that the effect is “small” and nothing to “panic” about. All the other scientists in the world who believe the science are part of a conspiracy to intimidate people like themselves, they write, just as Soviet biologists who believed in genes were “sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.”

As climate scientist Peter Gleick reports at his Forbes.com blog, those other scientists include 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences who wrote a letter about the scientific threat of climate change for the Wall Street Journal — but were turned down:

The most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal with respect to manmade climate change is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a scientifically accurate essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because 16 so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.

The NAS letter was eventually published by Science magazine.

Even though the first decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s, and 2005 and 2010 were the warmest years on record, the denier op-ed asserts “the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.”

This op-ed was promoted on Fox News, Real Clear Politics, Alex Jones’ Infowars, and other right-wing political and conspiracy sites.

Romney Flips To Denial: ‘We Don’t Know What’s Causing Climate Change’

By Brad Johnson/Think Progress

Speaking at the Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney reversed his earlier stance on climate change pollution and rejected man-made global warming. Because “we don’t know what’s causing climate change,” Romney said, the United States should not reduce carbon dioxide emissions:

My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.

Watch it:

“I think the EPA, acting in concert with the president, really doesn’t like oil, gas, coal, and nuclear,” Romney said in response to another question. “I really do believe that the EPA wants to get its hands on all of energy and be able to crush it to cause prices to go through the roof.” To applause, he concluded that “the EPA should not be regulating carbon dioxide.”

In June, Romney told a New Hampshire audience that he believed in man-made global warming, and that reducing greenhouse pollution is “important“:

I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world’s getting warmer. I can’t prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that. I don’t know how much our contribution is to that, because I know that there have been periods of greater heat and warmth in the past but I believe we contribute to that. And so I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you’re seeing.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney presided over plans to regulate carbon dioxide as a “pollutant,” and was advised by Dr. John Holdren, now President Obama’s scientific adviser.

(HT: New Hampshire Primary 2012: Green)

Transcript:

Q: What is your position on man-made global warming and would you reject legislation, such as cap and trade, which is based on the idea of man-made global warming?

ROMNEY: Man-made global warming and cap and trade and so forth – I actually had in Massachusetts a consortium of states that came together with a cap and trade program. It was called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. And all the governors, Governor Pataki and so forth, signed it. I refused to sign.

I do not believe in a cap and trade program.

By the way, they do not call it America warming, they call it global warming. So the idea of America spending massive amounts, trillions of dollars to somehow stop global warming is not a great idea. It loses jobs for Americans and ultimately it won’t be successful, because industries that are energy intensive will just get up and go somewhere else. So it doesn’t make any sense at all.

My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.

My view with regards to energy policy is pretty straightforward. I want us to become energy secure and independent of the oil cartels. And that means let’s aggressively develop our oil, our gas, our coal, our nuclear power.

Look, Marcellus Shale is a huge godsend for the nation. Let’s develop it aggressively.

Oil has been discovered in North Dakota. I’m told that the discoveries in North Dakota suggest that we have oil there which will exceed what we found in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska.

So we have massive energy resources. Let’s grant the permits to let the drillers start drilling and provide those resources in America. We will create jobs here and make sure that we have the energy independence from the cartels that’s good for our foreign policy, for our national security, and for our economy

Koch And Exxon Pay To Write State Legislation Repealing Climate Change Laws

By Stephen Lacey/Think Progress

According to tax records and other materials acquired by Bloomberg News, Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, and numerous other corporations paid tens of thousands of dollars to write legislation for lawmakers that would repeal carbon pollution reduction programs in various states around the U.S.

These companies working to dismantle environmental programs are members of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which allows private-sector parties to “pay-to-play” – charging thousands of dollars to sit at the table with legislators and craft bills.

According to Bloomberg News, Exxon Mobil donated $39,000 to ALEC last year and the Koch Charitable Foundation donated $75,858 in 2009, the final year in which tax documents were available. Both companies, along with BP, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy helped draft legislation that has been introduced in Oregon, New Hampshire, Washington State and New Mexico designed to take those states out of regional cap and trade programs:

The eight-paragraph resolution, which was introduced in March, said “there has been no credible economic analysis of the costs associated with carbon reduction mandates” and “a tremendous amount of economic growth would be sacrificed for a reduction in carbon emissions that would have no appreciable impact on global concentrations of carbon dioxide.”

The model resolution was adopted by ALEC’s Natural Resources task force in April 2010, according to minutes from the meeting obtained by Bloomberg.

The group drafting and endorsing it included 13 legislators from states including Texas, Kansas and Indiana and 21 private sector members representing companies such as Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries and BP Plc (BP/), and trade groups including American Electric Power, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy.

In April, Think Progress Green reported on a bill in New Hampshire written partially by ALEC that would take the state out of the Northeastern cap and trade program called RGGI. The text was eventually removed due to pressure, and earlier this month New Hampshire GovernorJohn Lynch vetoed another piece of legislation that would have taken NH out of RGGI.

There are five climate change-related “model laws” on the ALEC website and a couple dozen on energy, water and forestry. The pieces of legislation can only be accessed by people who have paid to be a part of the organization. ALEC has also written a model bill that would pull state agencies from potential EPA greenhouse gas regulations.

ALEC has been crafting legislation since the 1990’s. The organization retains about 2,000 state politicians as members and 300 companies and political advocacy groups as members. ALEC claims to be a bi-partisan group; however, Bloomberg points out that 97 percent of corporate donations among ALEC members to lawmakers went to Republicans.

Corporations are “paying for an opportunity to connect directly with legislators,” said Jeremy Kalin, a former Democratic Minnesota state representative. “It’s an end-run around transparency and disclosure laws. Corporate interests that would otherwise be required to register as lobbyists are writing legislation behind closed doors.”

The fact that ALEC is influencing state-level legislation through a “pay-to-play” model isn’t exactly earth-shattering news. But this latest revelation does show the direct role that corporate interests opposed to climate-mitigation efforts are playing in the political process.