Not-So-Smart ALEC: Is New CEO Lying Liar, or Merely Clueless Tool?

NELSON

10:35:35

What’s not reported in those stories is the fact that the Environmental Defense Fund was also in those conversations and participating in our conversations. So I go back to my original comments that what we really want to do is foster that dialogue between all sides with respect to climate change We, as an organization, specifically do not comment on climate change. What we have issue with is government mandates and subsidies that enable the government to kind of pick winners and losers as they look for energy solutions.

Climate change is a historical phenomenon

Climate change is natural and climate has always changed. Who knows why? I’m not a scientist.

and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions.

The real question is, are human beings responsible?  We read somewhere on the internet that Rush Limbaugh said it was warming on Mars.

So, like, who knows. We’re not scientists.

ALEC will continue to monitor the issue and support the use of sound science to guide policy,

We will continue to support the “he said, she said” false balance narrative that has been so effective in anti-science movements before, such as the prolonged fight by the tobacco industry to confuse the science of tobacco’s health effects.

but ALEC will also incorporate economic and political realism.

If our funders, the Koch Brothers, and the fossil fuel industry, tell us to jump, we salute and ask “how high.”

Unilateral efforts by the United States or regions within the United States will not significantly decrease carbon emissions globally, and international efforts to decrease emissions have proven politically infeasible and unenforceable.

China and India will never accept limits, and the US as the most powerful nation in the world and global leaders in technology can have no effect so, oh well, I guess your children are screwed, but we’ll be dead then. But who knows. We’re not scientists.
So have another drink.

Policymakers in most cases are not willing to inflict economic harm on their citizens with no real benefit.

Unless they can inflict harm on the poor and the powerless, preferably folks with dark skin who speak funny languages, so who cares,  or better yet, live in the future, when we’ll all be dead,  so double who cares, so have another drink.

ALEC discourages impractical visionary goals that ignore economic reality, and that will not be met without serious consequences for worldwide standard of living.

We encourage the practical goal of continuing to burn fossil fuels until the collapse of natural systems and civil society make it impossible to continue.  But again, we’re pretty sure we’ll be dead then, so does anyone really care? Certainly not us. We’re not crybabies, and  we’re certainly not scientists. So have another drink.

Since then, ALEC has issued statements maintaining that the group does not deny the science of human-caused climate change. However, model legislation put forth by the group has cast doubt on whether global warming is harmful, a direct refutation of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s statements that climate change increases the risk of “severe,” “pervasive,” and “dangerous” events. And in a presentation billed to be about climate science in July, ALEC members heard claims that there is “no need” to reduce carbon emissions; there is “no scientific consensus” on climate change; and that carbon dioxide increases have not caused sea level rise or polar ice melt.

ALEC also works to kill statewide programs that promote the use of renewable energy, and is pushing a bill that would require public schools to teach climate denial.

The fact that ALEC’s chief executive claims not to know the science of climate change while pushing these policies is drawing outrage from environmental groups who say Nelson should know better, given the breadth of scientific information available about climate change. Michael Brune, executive director of Sierra Club, said in a statement to ThinkProgress that Nelson’s statements were “disingenuous,” an excuse to continue pushing policies scientists know to be harmful.

“ALEC is claiming they don’t know the science on climate change while pushing legislation to teach climate denial in schools,” Brune said. “That’s like saying they don’t know whether smoking causes cancer while peddling cigarettes to kids.”

According to ALEC’s conference agenda, lobbyists instructed legislators how to “talk” and “think” about climate change on the first day of the meeting, clashing with ALEC’s recent insistence to the press that its operations are “completely legislator driven.”

Legislators also received a briefing from a scientifically irrelevant climate change denial group, the “Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC), published by a fossil fuel front group that infamously compared climate advocates with “murderers, tyrants and madmen.”

In keeping with ALEC’s longtime denial of both the science and solutions to climate change, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a Republican, spoke about proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limits on carbon pollution. That session was sponsored by the world’s largest publicly owned coal company, Peabody Energy, and the trade association for the coal industry, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), of which Peabody is a member.

Other agenda items include a presentation to legislators on the federal government regulating pollution from coal plants and a session on increasing the export of fracked gas from the U.S., likely a result of new ALEC member companies like Cheniere Energy, a liquid natural gas export company.

All of this was set to prepare lobbyists and legislators to sit down, during ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture task force, to vote together on a new proposed ALEC “model” bill in opposition to the EPA limiting carbon from coal plants. Members of this task force have declared “guerrilla warfare” on the EPA’s newly proposed rule.