Poor little Big Oil.
Iain Murray at The Corner hawks the climate change counteroffensive (emphasis mine):
Today Al Gore is jetting across the country to be at the Washington premiere of his movie warning about ManBearPig [South Park reference], erm no sorry, global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. With rather less of a budget, CEI held a press conference to announce the debut of two TV ads it has produced that seek to challenge the demonization of energy use and to demonstrate that there are plenty of scientific studies out there that are rather inconvenient to the alarmist agenda. There's a supporting web site too.
Really, it hardly seems fair, does it? I mean, how on earth is a little independent conservative thinktank going to compete with the all that Hollywood liberal money and influence in making its views understood? ThinkProgress has a few of the details:
Exxon documents reveal the company gave $270,000 to CEI in 2004 alone. $180,000 of that was earmarked for “global climate change and global climate change outreach.” Exxon has contributed over $1.6 million to CEI since 1998.
Technically, I suppose, it's still a smaller budget than what Mirimax is spending on An Inconvenient Truth. But, as Think Progress points out, it's not exactly because the money isn't there. Really, the blatancy of conservative moustache-twirling on climate issues is funny enough, but when pundits like Murray have to go further and try to pass off Big Oil's periodic panic attacks as some sort of plucky grassroots speaking truth to power the whole thing just reaches an unbelieable level of surreality.
It's part of the canon though. I remember back in 2004 when the Swift Vets were on the scene and the conservative blogs and print media couldn't stop throwing the word "independent" around and, moreover, insisting how the Swifties were tragically underfunded, swimming against the pro-Kerry MSM tide to air their ads with only the donations of average workin' joes who cared in their dim patriotic way about the national interest, just a bunch of underrepresented citizens trying to get the word out and restore their honour as vets. Jerome Corsi's Freeper past? Those ties to Texas GOP organizations? Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.
It seemed impossible then, but it worked. It worked because the right has no shortage of Hugh Hewitts who learned when young to suppress whatever part of the brain generates irony and just shout and shout and shout convenient absurdities. And still today, high-end Hugh Hewitts like Iain Murray will always intellectually embarrass themselves for the cause, reflexively even. Bullshit is a small price to pay for the health of the conservative movement, and the health of the movement is strongly tied to Exxon's profits.
Update: Wampum has more on poor plucky little CEI.
Today Al Gore is jetting across the country to be at the Washington premiere of his movie warning about ManBearPig [South Park reference], erm no sorry, global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. With rather less of a budget, CEI held a press conference to announce the debut of two TV ads it has produced that seek to challenge the demonization of energy use and to demonstrate that there are plenty of scientific studies out there that are rather inconvenient to the alarmist agenda. There's a supporting web site too.
Really, it hardly seems fair, does it? I mean, how on earth is a little independent conservative thinktank going to compete with the all that Hollywood liberal money and influence in making its views understood? ThinkProgress has a few of the details:
Exxon documents reveal the company gave $270,000 to CEI in 2004 alone. $180,000 of that was earmarked for “global climate change and global climate change outreach.” Exxon has contributed over $1.6 million to CEI since 1998.
Technically, I suppose, it's still a smaller budget than what Mirimax is spending on An Inconvenient Truth. But, as Think Progress points out, it's not exactly because the money isn't there. Really, the blatancy of conservative moustache-twirling on climate issues is funny enough, but when pundits like Murray have to go further and try to pass off Big Oil's periodic panic attacks as some sort of plucky grassroots speaking truth to power the whole thing just reaches an unbelieable level of surreality.
It's part of the canon though. I remember back in 2004 when the Swift Vets were on the scene and the conservative blogs and print media couldn't stop throwing the word "independent" around and, moreover, insisting how the Swifties were tragically underfunded, swimming against the pro-Kerry MSM tide to air their ads with only the donations of average workin' joes who cared in their dim patriotic way about the national interest, just a bunch of underrepresented citizens trying to get the word out and restore their honour as vets. Jerome Corsi's Freeper past? Those ties to Texas GOP organizations? Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.
It seemed impossible then, but it worked. It worked because the right has no shortage of Hugh Hewitts who learned when young to suppress whatever part of the brain generates irony and just shout and shout and shout convenient absurdities. And still today, high-end Hugh Hewitts like Iain Murray will always intellectually embarrass themselves for the cause, reflexively even. Bullshit is a small price to pay for the health of the conservative movement, and the health of the movement is strongly tied to Exxon's profits.
Update: Wampum has more on poor plucky little CEI.
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