Climate Denial and the Coup
January 23, 2021
If you have not yet read the New York Times piece about the attempted coup within the US Justice Department, follow the link below.
Turns out, the Attorney who hatched an election fraud plot within the Justice Department (that was thwarted only when a number of senior officials threatened to resign en masse) – was also an attorney representing BP in the Gulf Oil Spill case, and a consistent, prominent voice for climate denial.
Climate denial a reliable proxy for treason.
The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.
The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.
The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?
–As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.
The answer was unanimous. They would resign.
Jeffrey Bossert Clark, a lawyer who has repeatedly challenged the scientific foundations of U.S. climate policy and was part of a legal team that represented BP in lawsuits stemming from the nation’s worst oil spill, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, was nominatedby President Donald Trump on Tuesday to serve as the Justice Department’s top environmental lawyer.
Clark, a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Kirkland & Ellis, has represented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in lawsuits challenging the federal government’s authority to regulate carbon emissions. In court he has repeatedly argued that it is inappropriate to base government policymaking on the scientific consensus presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“When did America risk coming to be ruled by foreign scientists and apparatchiks at the United Nations?” Clark demanded in a 2010 blog posting on the EPA’s endangerment finding.
Clark was prominently involved in industry challenges to the EPA’s “endangerment finding” that set the scientific basis for all subsequent attempts to regulate greenhouse gases, including from autos and industrial sources. It was a demonstration of opposition to the underpinnings of the whole Obama administration regulatory approach to carbon dioxide, which were consistently upheld by the Supreme Court.
One of the legal briefs he signed is such a comprehensive compendium of thoroughly debunked denial of the scientific consensus that it stands as a classic of the genre, replete with condemnations not just of the EPA but of the IPCC, whose work the petitioners tried to persuade the court to rule out of bounds. A series of podcasts and papers he has written on The Federalist Society website continue his arguments against the endangerment finding and climate science more broadly.
January 23, 2021 at 5:17 pm
Dear Peter Sinclair,
I was informed by my friend Keith that “There are about 700 science peer-reviewed climste change websites. Yet, there are over 30,000 websites fundsd by the fossil fuel industry to control the information on climate change. They also fund education materials that are biased toward down playing the risk. The truth gets outgunned.”
There is indeed the very serious and intractable problem confronting us insofar as astroturfing operations and front organizations are very rife.
Questioning whether the world has finally gone mad, my other friend Stephen wrote:
As for me, I have declared in my most recent post that human beings are proving to be as fallible in their responses to global epidemics and global warming as they are vulnerable to their own mental traps, thinking styles, behavioural patterns, psychological tendencies and cognitive biases. This post is entitled “Misquotation Pandemic and Disinformation Polemic: Mind Pollution by Viral Falsity”, which has received a good-looking improvement and extension. Given your intellectual perspectives, I would be delighted if you could kindly submit your comment to my said article, as I am very keen and curious to know what you think or make of it.
I would like to wish you a very happy New Year. May you find 2021 very much to your liking and highly conducive to your writing, reading, thinking and blogging!
January 24, 2021 at 7:02 am
What is a “peer-reviewed” website?
January 24, 2021 at 7:40 am
Dear Gingerbaker,
Peer-reviewed websites are those that contain or include evaluations of scientific, academic or professional works by others working in the same field.