Climate Denial Crock of the Week

I’ve spent a lot of time since the January 6 insurrection thinking about how 30 years of high budget, psychological warfare on climate science has degraded our national conversation, and people’s ability to tell truth from falsehood.

Working on a Yale Video on that topic now.

Amy Westervelt is a climate journalist, produces the Drilled podcast, and has done some deep dives on fossil fuel’s psychological warfare programs. We had a wide ranging conversation, so look for more clips soon.

My take is that the fossil fuel funded war on science and fact is not something that can be kept within the boundaries of a climate debate, or a tobacco, or corona virus debate – the anti-science complex is like a virus itself, that has escaped from the lab.

What got me thinking about it – following last night’s shooting in Boulder, the conspiracy mill is already theorizing that the whole thing was a “false flag”, and the dead people are crisis actors.

Newsweek:

Almost immediately after the mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, was reported, some of the most popular and influential QAnon figures began pushing false claims that the attack was a “false flag” and no one had actually died.
–

Rather than express empathy for the victims of the attack, supporters of QAnon, who have no issue believing there exists a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles, instead declared that the media reports and statements from the police were all false and that there is no way yet another mass shooting could have occurred in the U.S.

“No question Boulder, Co incident today was a false flag. The only question is by which side?,” one QAnon profile, who has more than 260,000 subscribers on Telegram, wrote. “False flag means it’s fake. Nobody actually died.