ALEC Tries To Prove It's Not Lying About Climate, Fails Miserably - Salon [View all]

[hatrack]

Monday, Google made waves — and kick-started an exodus — by cutting ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council. The reason, according to Google chairman Eric Schmidt? The free market lobbying group is “just literally lying” about climate change.

Unfortunately for ALEC, it’s no longer fashionable to be a climate denier, or to promote climate denial. And it’s proving to be a rather unprofitable position as well. This has put the group in the rather awkward position of having to defend its belief in climate change. Yeah, it’s not going so well.

EDIT

Thursday, ALEC upped its game, releasing a position statement on renewables and climate change. Again, it tries to make the case for “free market environmentalism” while insisting it’s not a “climate denier organization.” Again, it gets caught in its own lies. In the statement, ALEC tries to claim that it doesn’t advocate for the teaching of climate denial in schools. Its model Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, adopted in classrooms across the country, might not teach climate denial outright, but it does encourage teachers to give climate skeptics and deniers a voice, in order to provide students with a “balanced” view of the science. In practice, of course, that doesn’t turn out looking like how a balanced debated between the 97 percent majority and the climate-denying minority should.

ALEC also tries to get out of claims that it “opposes legislative or regulatory action that addresses climate change,” even though it’s been clearly, and firmly, opposed to the EPA’s clean power plan. Its twisted reasoning? Nowhere in the EPA plan, ALEC claims, does it say what the climatic benefits of limiting emissions from coal-fired power plants would be. Of course, the EPA plan is all about climate change. The legislation is entirely based on the agency’s finding, in 2009, that key greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations” – because of their contribution to global warming.

EDIT

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/26/alec_tries_to_proves_that_its_not_lying_about_climate_change_fails_miserably/