Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Leo Hickman of the Guardian Tweeted on this the other day.

Of course, Climate Deniers, . are nothing if not consistent. This is largely because, much like the tobacco, Ozone layer, Acid rain, and Asbestos denial campaigns that they built on, and which some of the very same people enthusiastically participated, (Singer, Happer, Seitz, Heartland, the usual suspects), they are all products of the same group of silk stocking PR firms and “think” tanks whose job it has been to push back against pesky scientists with inconvenient findings.

Hickman noted in another tweet, that the letter came from Fred Palmer, a senior official at Peabody Coal that Hickman has since interviewed.

But Palmer was known to environmentalists long before he joined Peabody in 2001. During the 1990s, Palmer was a central figure in the coal industry’s funding of climate sceptic scientists through a now-defunct organisation called the Greening Earth Society. As the-then president of a coal advocacy group called Western Fuel Association, which funded the Greening Earth Society, he claimed in a 1997 documentary that whenever you “burn fossil fuels, and you put CO2 in the air, you are doing God’s work”.

On whether Peabody is planning on diversifying its investment portfolio to include other energy sources, such as renewables:

We’re 100% coal. More coal. Everywhere. All the time.