Climate Denial Crock of the Week

If a nest of orcs like ALEC is distancing itself from climate denial, you know there’s a shift going on.

Washington Post:

Facing a loss of high-profile corporate sponsors, a conservative state-level policy group — the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — threatened action in recent weeks against activist groups that accuse it of denying climate change.

Attorneys for ALEC sent letters to Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters asking them to immediately “cease making false statements” and “remove all false or misleading material” suggesting that ALEC does not believe in global warming.

ALEC officials insist that their nonprofit state-level policy organization does not deny climate change and that they have been overhauling their organization to be more transparent and more welcoming to divergent views. ALEC’s attorneys cite the organization’s model legislation, distributed to state lawmakers, acknowledging that “human activity has and will continue to alter the atmosphere of the planet,” which “may lead to demonstrable changes in climate.”

ALEC is panicking because so many corporations that have formerly supported their promotion of anti-environment, anti-climate, anti-science legislation and ideas have been fleeing recently, as polls show majorities of Americans now get it that climate change is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, and that groups like ALEC are, in the words of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, “literally lying”, about the science of climate change.

Salon:

In August, Microsoft announced that it’d be severing ties with ALEC, citing its opposition to renewable energy projects; in September, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said his company would be leaving as well, in part because ALEC is “just literally lying” about climate change (the group tried, and totally failed, to reform its stance). But despite the tech exodus that followed — Facebook, Yahoo and Yelp are no longer ALEC-affiliated — the group is sure to be buoyed by the favorable results of the midterm elections, Nick Surgey, of the Center for Media and Democracy, told reporters during a press call Wednesday.

And according to Aliya Haq, the climate change special projects director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, it ”will actually be escalating its attacks on environmental safeguards.”

The “most extreme” proposal getting attention at this week’s conference, according to the NRDC, is a plan to have Congress disband the EPA, slash funding for environmental protections by 75 percent and replace the federal agency with a group of 300 state agency employees — even though the entire point of having the EPA is because pollution extends beyond state boundaries.

A quick look at ALEC’s website shows handy templates available for state legislators eager to stop a tax on carbon, withdraw from the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas initiative, or oppose the President’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gas and other pollution from coal fired power plants.