So this is what the climate change “debate” has come to.
Forget debating the economic underpinnings of cap and trade or the best way to implement new vehicle emissions standards. Instead the fine folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) are spending their days playing the public victim over an infammatory email they received and subsequently posted on their site.
Michael Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), sent and email to Competitive Enterprise Institute “Senior Fellow” Marlo Lewis saying that he would “destroy” Lewis’s “career” as a “liar” if he “produce[d] one more editorial against climate change.”
Eckhart promptly apologizes here.
Most likely it is such petty shenanigans that are one of the reasons behind ExxonMobil ending their longtime funding arrangement with the CEI for their climate change misinformation campaign.
It almost goes without saying that Eckhart has learned a valuable lesson about sending inflammatory emails to an organization bent on (and paid handsomely for) discrediting anyone pushing to address the threat of climate change. What it has done is create yet another strawman for the likes of the CEI and right-wing pundits like NewsBusters to beat the living daylights out of.
Of course, you didn’t see NewsBusters exactly jumping off their seat to report a leaked email exchange between “Great Global Warming Swindle” director Martin Durkin and two eminent climate scientists in which Durkin called them “daft cocks” and recommended one of them go “f**k himself.”
Nope, instead you only saw glory and praise for the film.
No doubt, Mr. Eckhart is frustrated by the endless amount of misinformation being put out by the CEI. I myself have used much worse words when it comes to the likes of Lewis and the CEI cadre – just haven’t sent an email.
In fact a letter sent in the Fall of last year to ExxonMobil by the very conservative and usually soft-spoken Royal Society regarding the CEI‘s misinformation campaign was another expression of the frustration harbored by many in the scientific and environmental communities. As the scientific evidence continues to mount about the realities and seriousness of human-caused global warming, the CEI and the rest of the global warming denial industry continue to pump out misleading information about that reality.
It’s frustrating.
The best thing we can all do is: a) ignore the CEI, or (b) my favored option, continue to point out that the CEI receives large amounts of money from the very industries whose bottom lines are most threatened if we move to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
And leave the rest unspoken… at least in an email.
