Fighting back against Big Lies on climate change and the environment

Fighting back against Big Lies on climate change and the environment — and winning

Despite the firehose of disinformation, activists are winning by insisting on facts, evidence and science, Salon, AMANDA MARCOTTE, 04.09.2018

In the age of Donald Trump, one could be forgiven for believing that truth has lost all value. As of March 1, Trump had reportedly told 2,436 public lies, an average of six a day during his 13 months in office. That number doesn’t even encompass the firehose of misinformation coming out of his administration, much less the right-wing media network that’s geared towards propagandizing on behalf of Dear Leader. It’s easy to despair, because it frequently seems there are no consequences for all this lying and that huge percentages of Americans have flatly decided they don’t care about facts any longer.

But when it comes to the issue of the environment, there’s reason to believe — at least for now — that there’s still some value to having the facts on your side. There are at least two reasons for this. Environmental laws, as written, still have high evidentiary standards that conservatives simply cannot ignore. Secondly, attorneys general in blue states are ready to put huge amounts of resources to make it difficult for corporate interests and their friends in the Trump administration to hide, deny or distort the facts to support their pro-pollution agenda.

At the end of March, environmentalists quietly scored another victory against efforts to conceal the truth about climate change, when a federal judge ruled against ExxonMobil in a transparency case. In 2016, in response to reporting that found ExxonMobil executives had hidden the truth about climate change from investors and customers for decades, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey opened investigations into the oil giant to find out whether the pattern of deceit was legally actionable. Exxon sued in retaliation, claiming the investigation was politically biased, and lost.

“Exxon has run a scorched earth campaign to avoid answering our basic questions about the company’s awareness of climate change,” Healey told Salon in an emailed statement. “Massachusetts customers and investors deserve answers from Exxonabout what it has known about the impact of burning fossil fuels on its business and the planet, and whether it hid this information from the public.”

Attorneys general have been using a similar strategy against Scott Pruitt, Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who has been notoriously secretive about his behavior, even installing a soundproof phone booth so he can talk to persons unknown without being overheard. But what he can’t do, said David Hayes, the executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law, is run away from scientific facts when he’s confronted with them in court……..

Litigation against tobacco companies in the ’90s successfully drew public attention not just to the science, but to the industry’s efforts to hide it. The result was a rapid drop-off in rates of young people beginning to smoke. That rate started to fall in the ’90s and has since hit an all-time low.

Right now, it seems there’s a similar situation brewing on the topic of climate change. It’s not just that environmentalists have the facts on their side, but they are also going to be able to show, as the lawsuits and investigations go down, that the Pruitt EPA and companies like ExxonMobil have actively been trying to hide the truth. Trying to cover something up often tends to backfire, making the public more interested in learning what facts were so alarming that someone felt the need to hide it in the first place.

Pruitt’s efforts at a cover-up stink of desperation. He’s trying to push scientists off the EPA’s advisory boards, which of course has resulted in a lawsuit, backed by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Working with Republican allies in Congress, he’s trying to limit the amount of scientific research the EPA is allowed to consider when crafting clean air regulations. Researchers are now afraid to use the phrase “climate change” when seeking government grants, for fear of triggering the censorious impulses of Pruitt and other Trump administration officials who are eager to keep the scientific truths from being known.

Trump officials and ExxonMobil executives wouldn’t be so afraid of the evidence on climate change unless they believed that truth still has the power to move the needle in both law and in public opinion. In the age of misinformation, it’s even more important to keep pushing to get the facts into the light. https://www.salon.com/2018/04/09/fighting-back-against-big-lies-on-climate-change-and-the-environment-and-winning/

1.This Month

“Lessons from Fukushima” booklet, available in 14 languages.

of the week

Gender and Radiation Impact Project

Tri-Valley CAREs – Communities Against a Radioactive Environment

3 Reasons Why Nuclear Energy Is Terrible! 2/3

Pros and cons of public opinion polls – Jason Robert Jaffe

What About the Ozone Hole | Global Weirding

For First Time, Majority in U.S. Oppose Nuclear Energy, Gallup, BY REBECCA RIFFKIN , March 18, 2016,

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

54% of Americans oppose nuclear energy, 44% in favor
First time in Gallup’s trend that majority oppose nuclear energy
Both major parties less likely to favor nuclear energy than in 2015

WASHINGTON, D.C. — For the first time since Gallup first asked the question in 1994, a majority of Americans say they oppose nuclear energy. The 54% opposing it is up significantly from 43% a year ago, while the 44% who favor using nuclear energy is down from 51%.

Gallup asks Americans as part of its annual Environment poll if they favor or oppose the use of nuclear energy as one way to provide electricity. Each year from 2004 to 2015, a majority of Americans said they favored the use of nuclear energy, including a high of 62% in 2010.

In 2011, Gallup conducted its annual Environment poll a few days before the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan, and at that time, 57% of Americans were in favor of nuclear energy. The next time the question was asked in 2012, a similar majority still favored the use of nuclear energy.

And although there have not been any major nuclear incidents since Fukushima in 2011, a majority of U.S. adults now oppose nuclear energy. This suggests that energy prices and the perceived abundance of energy sources are the most relevant factors in attitudes toward nuclear power, rather than safety concerns prompted by nuclear incidents.

Lower gasoline prices over the past year are likely driving greater opposition toward the use of nuclear power. As Americans have paid less at the pump, their level of worry about the nation’s energy situation has dropped to 15-year-low levels. This appears to have resulted in more Americans prioritizing environmental protection and fewer backing nuclear power as an alternative energy source.

Democrats and Republicans Less Likely to Favor Nuclear Energy

Republicans continue to be more likely than Democrats and independents to be in favor of nuclear energy. Still, support for the use of nuclear energy among Republicans and Democrats has declined in comparison to 2015. A slight majority of Republicans, 53%, are in favor of nuclear energy, down significantly from 68% last year. One in three Democrats, 34%, favor it, down from 42% in 2015. Independents’ support is essentially unchanged from last year, but is down from the high Gallup found in 2010……..

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted March 2-6, 2016, with a random sample of 1,019 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.

Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 60% cellphone respondents and 40% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. https://news.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppose-nuclear-energy.aspx

EVENTS

November-December 2018 International Uranium Film Festival – U.S. Southwest tour

November 29th and 30th and December 1st, Navajo Nation Museum, Hwy 264 & Post Office Loop, Window Rock, Navajo Nation, AZ

December 2nd, Flagstaff, AZ

December 6th, Guild Cinema, 3405 Central Ave, Albuquerque, NM

December 7th, Grants, NM

December 9th, Jean Cocteau Cinema, 418 Montezuma Ave, Santa Fe, NM

PETITIONS

Tell Congress: Stop Trump from ordering a nuclear first strike without a Congressional declaration of war.

PREVENT UNNECESSARY RADIOACTIVE RISKS ACROSS THE USA NATION

Protect Idaho’s water. Stop nuclear waste.

nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope