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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (47018)	1/29/2014 1:59:55 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86363

"the part of this whole scam that really annoys me is the scaring of ignorant people." Yeah, there's been a lot spent doing that. I'm for another tobacco settlement resolution, but with bigger fines and jail time. Climate change denial is a set of organized attempts to downplay, deny or dismiss the scientific consensus on the extent of global warming, its significance, and its connection to human behavior, especially for commercial or ideological reasons. [1] [2] Typically, these attempts take the rhetorical form of legitimate scientific debate, while not adhering to the actual principles of that debate. [3] [4] Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, industry advocates and free market think tanks, often in the United States. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] Some commentators describe climate change denial as a particular form of denialism.[10][11][12][13][14][15] In Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (2010), Clive Hamilton describes a campaign to attack the science relating to climate change, originating with the astroturfing campaigns initiated by the tobacco industry in the 1990s. He documents the establishment of the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) as a 'fake front group' set up 'to link concerns about passive smoking with a range of other popular anxieties, including global warming'. The public relations strategy was to cast doubt on the science, characterizing it as junk science, and therefore to turn public opinion against any calls for government intervention based on the science. [22] As one tobacco company memo noted: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the "body of fact" that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." [38] As the 1990s progressed ... TASSC began receiving donations from Exxon (among other oil companies) and its "junk science" website began to carry material attacking climate change science. — Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, [16] describes how a small group of retired cold-war nuclear physicists, who through their weapons work had become well-connected, well-known and influential people, promoted the idea of 'doubt' in several areas of US public debate. According to Oreskes, they did this, "not for money, but in defense of an ideology of laissez-faire governance and opposition to government regulation". In 1984, Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz and William Nierenberg were instrumental in founding the George C. Marshall Institute, initially to defend Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) against other scientists' boycott of it. Oreskes said that this first campaign of the Institute's, from 1984 to 1989, involved demanding equal air-time in the media when mainstream physicists and engineers were critical of the SDI, and producing militarily alarmist material such as the article America has five years left, published in 1987 by Jastrow in the National Review. At the same time, Seitz was employed as a consultant to R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. His principal strategy on their behalf, said Oreskes, was to defend their products by doubt-mongering, by insisting that the science was unsettled and therefore that it was always premature for the US government to act to control tobacco use. [39] en.wikipedia.org

To: Bilow who wrote (47018)	1/31/2014 4:45:56 PM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Recommended By Bilow Jorj X Mckie Respond to of 86363

That's what religions, superstitions and political power brokers always do. Lie to them, frighten them, demand cash, tribute and girls for them to be saved, <It's one thing to scare the politicians so they dump more money into the grants you need but the part of this whole scam that really annoys me is the scaring of ignorant people.> There is always unquestioned authority, dogma, litany, liturgy, catechism, heresy and burning at the stake or stoning to death for apostasy. Keeping the rubes scared is rule number one of power. "You better be scared. If you behave, I will save you. I will need lots of lovely lolly to do so." Mqurice