For well over twenty years, climate deniers have tried to stymie discussion of extreme weather events and climate change. Why? Because extreme weather kills people, destroys property, trashes things and costs billions of dollars. And that’s when people start searching for accountability blame. Hurricane Harvey’s damage is breaking records. Who will pay, remains an unanswered question. What we do know is that a concerted campaign of climate denial, over the past three decades, has measurably slowed down society’s reaction to the climate crisis and has wasted valuable time and money.
For example, in October 1998, the Cooler Heads Coalition put together a “Media and Congressional Briefing” titled “Extreme Weather and Climate Change”, held in the Cannon House of Representatives office building. The sponsoring organizations are a who’s who of ‘free market’ anti-government groups. Many of the organizations are connected to Koch money and most of them were being funded by ExxonMobil in 1998 and subsequent years. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell was the chair of Cooler Heads then and now. CEI received $85,000 from Exxon in 1998. The full roster of Cooler Heads members got over $472,000 in grants from Exxon that year.
The guest speaker was the famous hurricane scientist Wizard of Oz, Dr. William Gray (who passed away in 2016).
In the wake of hurricane Harvey, its important to recall the corporate fake news campaign of 2006 to suppress the discussion of hurricanes and climate change. The campaign was spearheaded by DCI Group, then employed by ExxonMobil, and connected to TechCentralStation, a news site DCI Group set up to insert corporate friendly messages and third party messengers onto the internet before blogs were really a thing. Video cassettes with a prepared news segment were distributed to Gulf state local TV stations.
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