In my travels and interviews with midwestern farmers over the last 6 years, I have been continually struck by the similarities of the stories I am hearing of harassment, intimidation, onerous FOIA requests, reputational slurs in local media, and even physical threats they and local governing boards have received when they sought to site clean energy on their land, and in their communities.
The similarities to accounts of scientists like Michael Mann, (above) Malcom Hughes, Ben Santer, James Hansen, and others are not a coincidence. As Mann wrote in his book The New Climate War , as the fossil fuel industry gradually lost the fight to obscure the science of climate change, they moved from climate denial to solutions denial.
A decade ago, one of the primary bad actors in the attacks on scientists, the “American Traditions Institute”, which had been leading attacks on scientists, began to focus on mobilizing right wing extremists against what the coal industry then recognized was an existential threat, the suddenly-economically-competitive wind industry, and the prospect that solar would soon follow.
ATI has been rebranded as “E&E Legal” in recent years, and continued from the same playbook.
A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama’s energy agenda.
A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.
Now a confidential strategy memo seen by the Guardian advises using “subversion” to build a national movement of wind farm protesters.
The strategy proposal was prepared by a fellow of the American Tradition Institute (ATI) – although the thinktank has formally disavowed the project.
The proposal was discussed at a meeting of self-styled ‘wind warriors’ from across the country in Washington DC last February.
“These documents show for the first time that local Nimby anti-wind groups are co-ordinating and working with national fossil-fuel funded advocacy groups to wreck the wind industry,” said Gabe Elsner, a co-director of the Checks and Balances, the accountability group which unearthed the proposal and other documents.
Among its main recommendations, the proposal calls for a national PR campaign aimed at causing “subversion in message of industry so that it effectively because so bad that no one wants to admit in public they are for it.”
As the video above demonstrates, there is now significant crossover between the anti-clean energy movement, and the anti-democracy J-6 movement, leading to ever more credible threats of violence and stochastic terror against those advocating clean energy.
I’ve been subject to those threats myself, and got this recent text from a clean energy advocate who attended a contentious public meeting.
The text about threats is disturbing,
Is there any actual instance of a fossil fuel company attacking Michael Man? He gets attacked by bloggers and writers at think tanks. Bloggers and think tank writers attack scientists whose work they think is bad and overhyped. That’s what they are supposed to do. Mann made his name on an incredibly crappy paper that resulted in a overhyped promotional graph that became the logo of the IPCC third assessment report.
Please justify your statement that the paper was “incredibly crappy” by pointing to specific details or any paper (not blog) that came to the same conclusion. Or any temperature reconstruction that differs so much to justify “incredibly crappy”.
How about a book? There’s The hockey stick illusion reviewed by Matt Ridley:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/environment-news/53869/the-case-against-the-hockey-stick
BTW, why papers over blogs? A Nic Lewis guest post at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. actually got a paper withdrawn.
https://judithcurry.com/2019/09/25/resplandy-et-al-part-5-final-outcome/
First paragraph of Ridly’s review:
“Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph.”
I’d also recommend this surreal comment exchange (Judith Curry with Gavin Schmidt’s inline responses) at Real Climate:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/comment-page-4/#comment-181895
I picture Julianne Moore from the movie, Hannibal, and Joe Pantoliano from just about any role he has ever played.
You have to understand that I’m not a climate scientist. I will not trust blogs or commenters, even commenters I agree with. Therefore I prefer peer-reviewed papers (not perfect, nothing is, but extremely better than “incredibly crappy” blogs).
I will not be able to understand everything that was said in that link with Judith Curry and Gavin’s responses. It reminds me of the pissing contests that occurred when I invited competing scientists to meetings.
Therefore, I look at Mann’s reconstruction from that paper and tried to find any more current papers that showed global temperature reconstructions that differed substantially from the hockey stick graph. I could not. Other tree ring data sets, ice cores, and coral reconstructions were close. Do you have any? Thanks.
That Montford book is bullshit. A combination of massive cherry-picks and distortions.
A main point is that Mann, Bradley, Hughes were pioneering new techniques when they published their 1998 “Hockey Stick” paper, with respect to both the analyses and datasets. Within a year or two they had done more work. Famously they discovered that the tree ring dataset seemed to be disproportionately influential but also behaving in unexplained ways. More and better datasets and statistical techniques were brought to bear on the problem.
The original authors published better reconstructions not long after, as did other groups working independently. And the hockey stick is still here after a quarter century of improvements and new data.
The Montford book seems to be full of conspiracy theories and accusations. And as much as it throws shade on the inner workings of some analyses, does it make any attempt to explain in similar detail why subsequent reconstructions are right?