Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Senator Whitehouse has unveiled his “web of denial”, a vast conspiracy theory about why his side is losing the climate debate.
US senators detail a climate science ‘web of denial’ but the impacts go well beyond their borders
By the middle of this week, about 20 Democratic senators in the US will have stood up before their Congress to talk about the fossil fuelled machinery of climate science denial.
The senators are naming the fossil fuel funders, describing the machinery and calling out the characters that make up a “web of denial”.
“The web is so big, because it has so much to protect,” said the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who bookended the first evening of speeches.
The Senate heard how fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy and the billionaire oil brothers Charles and David Koch had funnelled millions into groups that had spread doubt about the causes of climate change.
The following is a video of Senator Whitehouse’s presentation on July 7th;
Whitehouse’s conspiracy theory reminds me of some of the worst excesses of the anti-communist era, in which fantasies about shadowy conspiracies were used to ruin the lives of political opponents and innocent bystanders. But Whitehouse appears to mean every word of it. The Attorneys for Clean Energy effort appears to have faltered, for now, but who knows what the future holds? We can only imagine what will happen if people like Whitehouse win control of the US government, and are put in charge of a new era of “Unamerican Activities” style witch hunts.
What Senator Whitehouse argues against is simply the 1st Amendment right of free speech. We know that, I’m almost certain even he knows that. He argues for prior restraint; we are not shouting fire in the theater, we should be by the lights of Senator Whitehouse. All good Americans should be. It’s a peculiar approach.
It seems to me the Senator would like to make free speech, intelligent debate and science itself, crimes against the State. I’d say he’s made that pretty clear.
I’d counsel just ignoring him, but keeping his philosophies close to your heart. He represents a very serious illness in the American body politic and he can’t be ignored, at the same time an overzealous response only serves to legitimize him.
He’s a loon, but not a loon that can be safely ignored. A close watch needs to be kept on him.
Check any college campus. Left wingers only believe in free speech, when what you are speaking has been pre-approved by them.
On Drudge this morning, there’s a story about a Perdue student who is facing expulsion because he criticized the “Black Lives Matters” movement on a Facebook post.
http://heatst.com/culture-wars/university-student-who-criticized-black-lives-matter-faces-expulsion-death-threats/
One more thing:
Everyone makes jokes about “not getting paid by Exxon”, and some go so far as to ask “how can I get on the list”.
So here’s the procedure. You wait for a good opportunity in the market when XOM is selling at some absurdly low price due to some absurd international situation. That happened last February. XOM was selling at around $74/share, a 15 year low as I recall. Now it’s at $94/share. Big payback.
When that happens, you take every last dime you have in the cookie jar and by every share of XOM you can afford. Rinse and repeat.
At $74, Exxon pays a pretty darned good dividend. Forever. Or until Oil runs out.
So that’s how you get paid by Exxon. Remember it. I won’t say it again.
Disclosure: I have no position in Exxon (XOM) and have no intention of taking one in the next 72 hours.
He he – the real method of “cash transfers” to skeptics – bet on alarmist stupidity.
I always use that same logic when some millennial or socialist complains that this company or that is ‘making too much money… it’s not fair”. Easy fix, it’s a publicly traded company, buy shares. Now it’s you making too much money. That seems more fare doesn’t it?
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
The very fact Democrat senators and climate zealots alike, repeatedly trot out the “denier” meme speaks volumes about the perilous state of Climate Crisis Incorporated and the subsequent methods used to combat the barrage of real-world observations that increasingly and thoroughly refute the man-made catastrophic global warming theory.
The Leftist fix – when your argument is weak, default to ‘othering’ and smear.
Those who rely on ‘othering’ and groupthink clickbait as their go-to, should be aware that “belief” and “denial” are the words of zealots, not scientists.
Excellent WUWT post on ‘Othering’ here: https://climatism.wordpress.com/2015/05/24/why-its-so-hard-to-convince-warmists/
Senator Whitehouse et al. know exactly what they are doing and they are betting the farm they can get away with it.
They should be careful where they step, some of the stuff produced on farms can be very… “fragrant” if you step in it, and the smell lingers.
They may end up ‘buying the farm’ if they aren’t careful.
‘Anything my side says or does is OK, but anything the other lot says or does is material to put them in jail……’
Look at the mess the EU has made of our continent with their redgreen anti-oil and -coal policies.
Don’t let it happen to the US.
You can still stop the madness.
Unfortunately, we can’t.
As I said previously, this is not really about conspiracies this is about bandwagons.
Back in the 90s the CO2 bandwagon came along, and they were playing a tune that resonated with many people’s world-view. And so they all jumped on, and the bandwagon gained momentum and influence, and became self-sustaining.
But after playing the same old tune for 25 years, people have noticed that the old bandwagon is out of tune with the modern world. They promised many things, and none of them have come true. Dissolusionment is setting in, and people are looking for a new direction, a new influence on their lives that conforms to their newly revised world-view.
And suddenly, over the horizon comes the the new WUWT non-Co2 banwagon, playing a new melodious tune that explains why the old bandwagon is badly out of tune. So people are voluntarily jumping bandwagons and the old bandwagon is losing folowers, power and influence.
Conspiracies are about positive control over people. There is no control here, just a platform or wagon that you can chose to jump upon if that suits you. Bandwagons are voluntary, but no less influential because of that.
This is what I said about bandwagons previously:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/26/the-tangled-web-of-global-warming-activism/comment-page-1/#comment-2246309
Ralph
I am never going to be beaten by any man called Sheldon. I’d rather go down to an Aubrey or even a Percy.
That is like losing a drag race to a Pious, um, I mean Prius.
Or Algernon !
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“Attorneys for Clean Energy”? I got so tired of the lawyer jokes during my time as a lawyer I probably would have joined just to be a good guy for a while. Well, to some people, anyway.
Yes but you would have to keep a straight face when they held a minute’s silence for the passing of some species of rat.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/14/claim-global-warming-killed-a-species-of-rat/
Attorney Jokes? It is my understanding that they do not exist as they are all true stories!
When I worked for an electric utility, the lawyers ere salivating at big paydays to put us out of business because power lines cause cancer. It was a huge effort, national meetings and everything. Had to speak on the phone many times with concerned parents. When I ‘splained that all our linemen were daily in close contact to EMFs without any increased incidence of cancer, they usually relaxed a bit. There are so many non-productive people in our society, looking for some excuse to exist, that they are attracted to these scams ike bugs to a fire.
Well when you get to hell, you won’t need any clean energy; or any energy. You can just join the throng of other lawyers sitting closest to the fire.
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Not only the senators but also the Guardian have finally gone crackpot.
There’s no denier conspiracy and there’s no alarmist conspiracy. Nobody is getting together in back rooms planning to do anything. What we have is something like Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
Some of us have been looking for an alarmist conspiracy for a long time. It doesn’t exist per se. What we have mostly is individuals and organizations doing their own thing for their own reasons. There are pockets of conspiracy such as we saw with the Climategate emails but there’s no overarching organization.
I suppose we could talk about a Web of Alarmism. In fact, every point made by the good senator could be equally applied to the alarmists. Maybe some other senators will notice that fact and act accordingly.
Agreed, that is my sense of both sides. There is no umbrella organization behind all alarmists or all deniers. But then, it hardly matters whether there is or is not. What seems important is that some people *wish* for such a thing and would being it into existence were it possible (with each such person as the architect and maybe the leader of it).
Madness knows it’s own.
Look into the eyes of Senator Whitehouse they are identical to the Grand and evil Inquisitor Tomas De Torquemada both are full of vermin, hate, bigotry, and cruel fanaticism. The only difference is the time in between then and know!
@ur momisugly SAMURI,
“All the physics and empirical evidence show the earth will ENJOY about 0.5C~1C of beneficial CO2 warming recovery (most likely closer to 0.5C) by 2100 per CO2 doubling (aka ECS).”…
Again, there is NO proven link to CO2 causing/increasing temp/warming. Increase in CO2 follows increase in temp, does not cause it.
CO2 is insignificant in the warming issue.
400 ppm, 0.04%, that’s 4/10,000, 4 in 10,000.
The physics and empirical evidence does NOT show it.
Here we have a claim/admission that CO2 can cause 0.5C~1C in ~95yrs.
I know its a well meant comment but it subtly works against the truth, what we really know.
It’s known that CO2 absorbs LWIR in the 15 micron range, which does cause a small amount of downwelling LWIR.
It’s my understanding that CO2’s logarithmic forcing effect per doubling is approximately: 5.35watts/M^2*ln(560ppm/280ppm)*(.31 Stefan-Boltzmann Constant)*(0.5 negative cloud feedback)= about 0.5C potential ECS.
Actual negative cloud feedback is not known for sure, but even if there wasn’t any (highly unlikely) the maximum ECS would be around 1.2C, which is 3~4 TIMES less than CAGW’s projections of 3C~5C ECS.
Regardless, there is already sufficient evidence to show CAGW is a disconfirmed hypothesis..
yes, scientists have truly mucked up climate science, so it is time for the politicians to have a go at it…
The scary thing here is that these ‘idiot’ Senators are in a position to make really bad laws!
Heck, that’s just about all they do.
So did the anti-communist. It was not a game to them.
They have lost the Climate War which is essentially a war on truth and now, all they can think to do is to hurl more and more outrageous lies, like monkeys at the zoo hurling their feces. The end of the CAGW memeplex is nigh. Here’s another of Whitehouse’s fellow feces-hurlers.
Poor Senator Whitehouse. He is seriously butthurt that when he and is ilk attempted to railroad people and deprive them of their rights, the people pushed back hard.
This idiot senator Whitehouse should be spending his time helping his state become more attractive for business instead of scaring companies away due to charlatans like him. Rhode Island came in last (50th) in the recent cnbc “top states for business”.
Here’s a link to the to the Top 5 industries in Rhode Island, Bob.
http://www.newsmax.com/FastFeatures/industries-in-rhode-island-economy/2015/04/10/id/637777/
Scroll down a little and you’ll find that they are very proud to have added 2.5 healthcare workers for every 1 new resident in the state. Which brings to mind the topic of sustainability…
I wonder how many nearly worthless carbon credits Sen. Whitehouse is sitting on.
You might want to investigate how much Sen. Whitehouse has invested in the Deepwind project off Rhode Island, or perhaps how much Deepwind has contributed to his campaign funds.
Well when they used to hold the NYYC rigged Americas Cup races at Newport, they always had problems getting the wind to blow enough to keep those yachts on a course, so I doubt that an offshore seabird clobberfarm will pay off.
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@John – the real crime is that Congress is exempt from insider trading laws,
Has anyone ever seen Dan Matheson (ex-CTV “news” anchor) and Sheldon Whitehouse in the same room?
http://oi65.tinypic.com/2n1ykax.jpg
Possibly they were in the same bathroom because people saw Matheson enter and saw Whitehouse leave a few minutes later.
Look no further than the lobbyists that fund re-elections to understand Washington. The best government money can buy.
After the fall of the USSR, Soviet archives revealed that most of the anti-communist “conspiracy theories” were actually correct.
All I got to say is that Joe McCarthy was right. The proof positive is in Whitehouse.
I was a psych major 40 years ago, in the decline of of the Freudians as a model. They did have very good insults, though. Whitehouse is clearly indulging in projection–attributing his own faults onto others.
@Tom Halla. Agreed. And I was also thinking in terms of cognitive dissonance (if it is still an accepted concept in psychology today). Manufacturing the delusion of a vast climate denial conspiracy network funded by the fossil fuel companies in order to deal with the failing CAGW theory to which he is so emotionally and spiritually devoted.
People like Whitehouse keep taking me back to Leon Festinger’s book “When Prophesy Fails” published back in the 1950s which introduces the concept of cognitive dissonance. I’ve read it twice already. I just substitue UFO cult group in the book for CAGW believers.
Tom Halla July 13, 2016 at 7:12 am
“Whitehouse is clearly indulging in projection–attributing his own faults onto others.”
It’s also a well-known Propaganda Tactic. I took Dr. Sanity’s free online Psych course, aka her blog, for 2+ years. True Projection is Paranoia’s “little brother”, especially when the “mark” starts to get irritated by the Projector’s words and acts, and begins to treat the Projector with some suspicion, disdain, or accusations of making false charges, etc., but which only proves to the Projector that “See, these are bad people and they’re out to get me!”, so it gets worse from there. I like to tell the Prog Projectors, “Methinks thy doth projecteth too mucheth.”