Message From the Editor

Since March, DeSmog has been tracking the overlapping cast of characters who have long attacked climate science and are now spreading COVID misinformation, touting false cures, ginning up conspiracy theories, and fomenting attacks on public health experts.

We’ve packaged up everything you need to know in our COVIDeniers report.

Check out the executive summary as well as Steve Horn’s reporting showing this overlap between climate deniers and the conserative groups behind the “liberate” state protests.

And this week, 50 years after the first Earth Day, we’ve continued our hard-hitting reporting on climate and energy as part of the Covering Climate Now collaboration. We look at what it will take to endure both the climate and COVID crises, the oil industry’s favorite climate “solutions,” and how to accelerate clean transportation by going electric.

Follow all our coverage here.
Have a story tip or feedback? Get in touch: editor@desmogblog.com.

Thanks,
Brendan DeMelle
Executive Director

P.S. Read an interview with me about our COVIDeniers report at Earther.

COVID-19 'Liberate' Groups Are the Same Ones Pushing Climate Denial

— By Steve Horn (13 min. read) —

The response among many American public officials and the public at large to the COVID-19 pandemic has, in many ways, paralleled the response to the climate crisis.

First came a denial that it was a problem at all, then a denial of its depth and gravity. Later came an acceptance of the problem but the stance that responding is too economically costly. And as with the climate crisis, this is no accident. The well-funded machinery that sowed doubt about climate is now sowing seeds of doubt over the economic and public health response to COVID-19.

Amid Historic Oil Collapse, an Opportunity to Accelerate Clean Transportation

— By Dana Drugmand (9 min. read) —

Petroleum products continue to fuel most of our vehicles while fouling our air, leaving some people more vulnerable to suffering severe impacts from respiratory illnesses like COVID-19. Transportation is also the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and studies show that powering our cars, trucks, and buses with electricity would reduce climate pollution.

With the oil industry suffering what is probably its worst year in history, and the window of time for tackling the climate crisis narrowing, could this be the best and last chance the world has to push the accelerator on electrifying transportation?

Trump Admin Looks to Use Federal COVID Relief Funds to Prop up Oil and Gas Industry

— By Dana Drugmand (5 min. read) —

The Trump administration is eyeing new strategies to support a struggling oil and gas sector, which may include freeing up funds or facilitating access to lending programs under coronavirus economic relief efforts, even as millions of Americans remain unemployed and with coronavirus testing and personal protective equipment in short supply.

On Tuesday morning, April 21, President Trump took to Twitter to announce that he is ordering what amounts to a bailout for the oil and gas industry.

A Look at the Oil Industry’s Favorite Climate Solutions

— By Justin Mikulka (12 min. read) —

Shell recently announced plans to “stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2050,” a move hailed by some as a major step towards addressing climate change. Around the same time, however, the oil and gas major confirmed it would go ahead with its investment in a joint $6.4 billion gas project in Australia.

This approach of saying one thing about addressing climate change while doing the opposite has been standard practice for the oil and gas industry for decades. Another popular strategy for the industry is to push certain climate “solutions” — often with slick advertising campaigns — that sound good in theory but are not viable in practice.

10 Years After BP Oil Spill, Pandemic Compounds Hardships Faced by Louisiana’s Commercial Fishers

— By Julie Dermansky (9 min. read) —

A decade after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 and spewing 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, south Louisiana resident Kindra Arnesen told me that the community was never made whole again, despite BP’s ads promising it would.

“No amount of money can replace the people we lost from the cancer explosion in our community,” Arnesen, an outspoken critic of BP and advocate for the commercial fishermen in her community, said. Many people she knew have died of cancer or other illnesses, which she believes are a result of toxic exposure to the oil spill’s aftermath.

How a Non-Proliferation Treaty Could Save Lamu’s World Heritage Site from the Destruction of Fossil Fuels

— By Sophie Mbugua (9 min. read) —

Around 2014, Somo Mohamed Somo, a 47-year old father of seven, accompanied a team of researchers conducting preliminary research ahead of a proposed coal power plant along the Indian Ocean in Lamu, a UNESCO World Heritage site on the northern Kenyan coast.

“I was deeply disturbed,” says the chairman of the Lamu County Beach Management Unit Network. “They were investigating the wind direction, the Indian Ocean water temperatures, the sand, the mangrove and coral species, to have a record of how they would be affected by pollution once the coal plant was in operation.”

Enduring the Climate and Coronavirus Crises: What Will It Take to Get Through Both?

— By Ashley Braun (9 min. read) —

While time feels distorted these days, it was only seven months and a lifetime ago that millions around the globe, led by school children, were marching in the streets, passionately demanding action and investment to match the scale of the climate crisis. Today, we’d instinctively recoil imagining those crowds, fearful of the potential to spread more than the idea that humans deserve a livable climate. But in both cases, pulling away from each other, at least in spirit, may be our collective undoing.

Simultaneously surviving climate disruption and this pandemic — because they cannot be separated — will require us to grapple with two major challenges.

Big Oil Foresaw Extreme Flooding Now Predicted to Hit US Coasts Almost Daily

— By Dana Drugmand (6 min. read) —

Oil companies have long been aware that their products cause global warming and the impacts, including from rising seas, could be catastrophic. From a scientist who warned executives in 1959 that New York could be submerged, to a confidential 1988 Shell report that raised the possibility of abandoning inundated low-lying areas, the industry has shown clear internal acknowledgment of the potential consequences of unabated fossil fuel burning.

Those consequences are starting to play out, and studies continue to project alarming climatic trends for the future. One such study published April 16 in the journal Scientific Reports projects an exponential increase in the frequency of coastal flooding from rising seas.

This Earth Day, Stop the Money Pipeline

— By Bill McKibben, The Nation (6 min. read) —

Nineteen-seventy was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.)

Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it.

The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation

— By Amy Westervelt, Drilled News (6 min. read) —

For a long time, the story went that the tobacco industry cooked up disinformation and then spread it to the fossil fuel guys, the chemical industry, pharma, you name it. But one thing that became incredibly clear when we began digging into PR firms and specific publicists was that this version of history was not quite right; if disinformation strategies were cooked up by any particular industry it was the public relations industry, which put these strategies to work on behalf of fossil fuels, tobacco, chemical manufacturers and more, often all at the same time.

From the Climate Disinformation Database: Stephen Moore

Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the “arch-conservative“ Heritage Foundation and served as an economic adviser for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Critics of Moore say his career is “marked by a pattern of errors, deception and falsehood.” Moore, who has referred to climate change as “a dingbat idea,” recently called coronavirus stay-at-home orders “one of the biggest bone-headed moves by government in 100 years.” After saying that an anonymous Wisconsin donor was prepared to pay legal fees for conservative protesters of these orders, he compared them to civil rights legend Rosa Parks.

Read the full profile and browse other individuals and organizations in our Climate Disinformation Database or our new Koch Network Database.