DeSmog
NAACP Report: Fossil Fuel Industry Uses Deception to Conceal Damage to BIPOC Communities
From co-opting community groups to shifting blame to those most impacted by pollution, a new report documents fossil fuel industry practices that obscure harm to people of color
Apr 2, 2021 @ 15:18
Pastor Harry Joseph near oil storage tanks in St. James, Louisiana, close to the Mount Triumph Baptist Church. Credit: Julie Dermansky
The fossil fuel industry continues to use a long list of deceptive tactics to conceal environmental destruction that harms Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and low-income communities.
That’s the top finding of a newly released NAACP report titled “Fossil Fuel Foolery.” The report identifies 10 tactics that polluters, industry lobbyists, and politicians often deploy to deflect accountability for the impacts of fossil fuel production and pollution on the environment and human health.
DeSmog
Jul 21, 2020 @ 06:00
The Three Percenters, a loosely organized group of far-right militants, appear to have established a significant presence in North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield, one of the most productive oilfields in the nation. “There is a lot of membership in the oil and gas industry up there,” says Matt Marshall, a Three Percenter running for state legislature in Washington. “The fact that you have a lot of Three Percenters working in the oilfields of North Dakota is not surprising.”
The Three Percenters are so named for the dubious historical claim that only three percent of American colonists took up arms in the Revolutionary War. Their adherents have frequently been involved with incidents of armed protests, hate speech, and threatening behavior across the U.S., and the group’s members have shown up prominently at recent protests related to both pandemic response measures and police brutality.
DeSmog
Climate Change Facts
The Scientific Consensus
Most of us are not climate scientists, so we should refer to the experts. Expertise might be gained from a strong track record of publishing in reputable peer-reviewed journals or from working at a non-partisan institute or university. There are also multiple disciplines that have expertise in different areas, such as climate modeling, attribution, impacts, atmospheric physics, climatology, paleoclimatology, and oceanography. Finding the most appropriate expert is a crucial task for journalists.
At least six independent and peer-reviewed studies from 2004 and 2016 have found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by humans. A summary of these studies and their methods was published in 2016 in the academic journal Environmental Research Letters.
Commentary: Lisa B Nelson - Beware of a federal bailout of states myjournalcourier.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from myjournalcourier.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
One of the useful functions of the latter book, in particular, is that it brings force and clarity to one’s prior knowledge of the dangers of right-wing libertarianism, or more generally anti-government and pro-“free market” thinking. In fact, this sort of thinking is an utter catastrophe that threatens to destroy everything beautiful in the world. I know that sounds like an absurd exaggeration, but it’s not. What with society and nature teetering on the brink, it’s the literal truth. I suppose the reason leftists don’t always take right-wing libertarianism as seriously as it deserves despite their deep awareness of the evils of capitalism is simply that it’s embarrassingly easy to refute. It’s a childish, simplistic, vulgar hyper-capitalist ideology that, once you examine it a little, quickly reveals itself as its opposite: authoritarianism. Or even totalitarianism, albeit privatized totalitarianism. Noam Chomsky, as usual, makes the point eloquently: