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Top Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A must-read book whether you agree or oppose views on climate change

March 3, 2016

Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

This is an important book (and also a movie, but I have not seen that), which meticulously and factually (half the book is the references) documents how not only did the tobacco industry consciously and knowingly bamboozle the public for years to keep making money, but the same methods and very often the very same individuals did the same thing for acid rain, DDT/chemical manufacturers, and now climate change.

"Read the Reviews", the award-winning book/movie exposes the business of deception

Look closer at a high-paid cast of characters, dark money and the denial industry ...

Global Warming / Climate Change Denier Database

https://www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database

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Misinformation, Disinformation, Mega-Money-in-Politics

Nov 2016

George Monbiot Paints a Picture, Not a Pretty Picture

I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the (US) government.

I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.

Among those I clashed with was Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI calls itself a thinktank, but looks to me like a corporate lobbying group. It is not transparent about its funding, but we now know it has received $2m from ExxonMobil, more than $4m from a group called the Donors Trust (which represents various corporations and billionaires), $800,000 from groups set up by the tycoons Charles and David Koch, and substantial sums from coal, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies.

For years, Ebell and the CEI have attacked efforts to limit climate change, through lobbying, lawsuits and campaigns. An advertisement released by the institute had the punchline “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution. We call it life...”

Trump staffers who have emerged from such groups: people such as Doug Domenech, from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, funded among others by the Koch brothers, Exxon and the Donors Trust; Barry Bennett, whose Alliance for America’s Future (now called One Nation) refused to disclose its donors when challenged; and Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, funded by Exxon and others. This is to say nothing of Trump’s own crashing conflicts of interest. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of the lobbyists and corporate stooges working in Washington. But it looks as if the only swamps he’ll drain will be real ones, as his team launches its war on the natural world.

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