So here’s a few quotes Marc Morano likely won’t be including on posters to promote his climate science denying “documentary” Climate Hustle.
“It’s not in the same class as Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.”
“This is a very amateurish film.”
“Not very watchable.”
“Not good film making.”
All these quotes come from Los Angeles-based filmmaker, author and communications consultant Randy Olson — one of the few people to have seen the film who doesn’t think climate change science is a global scam.
“It has a few good parts – but it got me angry because it’s just cherry picking,” Olson told DeSmog. “You aren’t missing anything.”
Morano, of the organisation Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, is one of the most active pushers of climate science denialism in the United States. His film will be screened for one night in about 400 theatres across the US next week.
In the eyes of Morano, and those of his supporters and peers, fossil fuel emissions are only a benefit to the world and they won’t cause dangerous climate change.
What’s more, Morano, whose CFACT group has accepted fossil fuel industry money, pushes a conspiracy that climate science is part of a plot to control the public’s access to energy.
Unfortunately for Morano, about 97 per cent of climate scientists say that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming — a position backed by all the world’s leading scientific academies.
Olson was invited to the 14 April Capitol Hill screening of Climate Hustle that came after a panel discussion featuring former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin.
Palin was drafted in to help promote the film that will be shown for one night only on 2 May in about 400 cinemas. Palin has been using her social media channels to tell followers to see the movie.
Olson said he met Morano in 2008 when he interviewed him for his climate change “mockumentary” Sizzle. “I liked his spirit – he’s a warrior in the war on boredom,” says Olson, who is also a critic of the environment movement, which he says has done a poor job in communicating the climate change issue.
Olson said that in fact, Palin was not in the room for the screening of the movie. DeSmog has asked the former Alaskan Governor if she has in fact seen the film.
Olson said: “Climate Hustle doesn’t have a clear narrative. It’s just a shopping list of different points. It is amateurish film-making.”
He added that at the end of the film, Morano tells the audience that he is working on a follow-up, which Olson said had a title “Climate Monarchy” — a phrase that was used by CFACT policy advisor Paul Driessen last year.
Morano’s latest talking point is that Climate Hustle is the film that “climate activists” don’t want you to see.
Yet Morano and CFACT have gone out of their way to make sure that people who disagree with their conspiratorial narrative on climate change don’t get to watch the film or review it in advance.
DeSmog has asked on multiple occasions to see the film, including at CFACT’s “red carpet premiere” in Paris in December 2015.
When DeSmog again asked for a media preview of the film last week, we were told by a press representative for Morano that there were “trailers available via YouTube” and that CFACT’s Facebook page “does have a few short segments”.
Morano has been bouncing clips, media releases and commentary on Climate Hustle around the conservative media echo chamber since the back end of 2015.
Places like Fox News, One American News, Breitbart, National Review and The New American have fallen over themselves to publish approving stories, commentaries and reviews around Climate Hustle.
The New American was in Paris during the UN climate talks and interviewed Morano, describing his film as “exposing global-warming alarmism”.
The New American is a project of the John Birch Society— a radicalist free market organisation co-founded by Fred Koch, the father of oil industry billionaires Charles and David Koch.
One American News has aired a number of segments that have helped promote the Morano film. OAN was launched in 2013 specifically to give “libertarian and conservative voices” more airtime, Charles Herring, president of Herring Broadcasting and OAN owner, told The Daily Beast.
So Morano has carefully controlled the list of people who have been able to see the film, which means that instead of having review quotes like “a very amateurish film”, he instead is able to list supportive quotes that come from “reviews” by his own network of supporters.
“It’s just not a good film,” added Olson. “It won’t get much traction because it’s not very watchable. But [Morano] will get better with time.”
Blog image credit: DeSmogBlog
