It is disgusting to hear public radio broadcasting comments by people lauding them for "fair reporting". They slant towards their rich corporate and individual donors by omission. Eg., this weekend, in an interview yesterday with Bill McKibben, about why we have ignored the warnings about global warming, there was no mention of the way some fossil fuel owners have manipulated people to dismiss scientists warnings. The only thing that was allowed to be discussed was individual patterns of thinking. I don't know if they simply told him they didn't want to discuss this, or if they cut out his comments. There is no way McKibbon would not have mentioned this problem if he had been allowed to speak freely.
Also, they parrot the Republican charges that the IRS targeted "conservative groups" to investigate. No mention at all that that is not true, that progressive groups were also investigated for abuse of tax-exempt status.
I have no problem with people who express appreciation that NPR news is polite, but it is not unbiased.
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/06/310165852/despite-warnings-on-warming-public-response-remains-lukewarm
Despite Warnings On Warming, Public Response Remains Lukewarm
May 06, 2014
The National Climate Assessment was released today. NPR's Robert Siegel talks to Bill McKibben, author of Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, about the report.
SIEGEL: And I want you to try to reconcile these two phenomena. First, torrential rains, extreme weather conditions, even allergies are more common due to climate change. Second, the Pew Research Center tells us that dealing with global warming routinely ranks near the bottom of the public's priorities for the president and the Congress.
Why does stuff that cuts so close to the bone of every day life, strike people as less urgent than reducing the federal budget deficit or reforming the tax code?
MCKIBBEN: You know, I've had a longtime think about this. I wrote the first book about all this a quarter-century ago. And you're right. We won the argument over climate change, the scientific argument. We've so far been losing the fight. I think people perceive themselves as very small as individuals in the face of a very large, in fact, by far the largest problem human beings have ever faced. And so, the sense that any of us might be able to affect it seems a tiny, that we move on to the things that we can do something about and try to put it out of our heads.
SIEGEL: But one inference from what you're saying is that a very powerful American tradition of individualism, not of collectivism, may work against our potential optimism on this score.
MCKIBBEN: That's right but the thing that works the other way is that the minute people begin to perceive that there is something to be done working together, people come out of the woodwork to make it happen.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/05/climate-denial
Climate of Denial
One morning in Kyoto, we won a round in the battle against global warming. Then special interests and pseudoscience snatched the truth away. What happened?
—By Bill McKibben
| May/June 2005 Issue of Mother Jones
It was around eight in the morning in the vast convention hall in Kyoto. The negotiations over a worldwide treaty to limit global warming gases, which were supposed to have ended the evening before, had gone on through the night.
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Finally, from behind the closed doors, word emerged that we had a treaty. The greens all cheered, halfheartedly—since it wasn't as though the agreement would go anywhere near far enough to arrest global warming—but firm in their conviction that the tide on the issue had finally turned. After a decade of resistance, the oil companies and the car companies and all the other deniers of global warming had seen their power matched.
Or so it seemed. I was standing next to a top industry lobbyist, a man who had spent the last week engineering opposition to the treaty, huddling with Exxon lawyers and Saudi delegates, detailing the Venezuelans to change this word, the Kuwaitis to soften that number. Right now he looked just plain tired. "I can't wait to get back to Washington," he said. "In Washington we'll get this under control again."
At the time I thought he was blowing smoke, putting on a game face, whistling past the graveyard of corporate control. I almost felt sorry for him; it seemed to me (as sleep-deprived as everyone else) that we were on the brink of a new world.
As it turned out, we both were right. The rest of the developed world took Kyoto seriously;
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In Washington, however, the lobbyists did get things "under control." Eight years after Kyoto, Big Oil and Big Coal remain in complete and unchallenged power.
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At the very least, the "energy sector" needed to stall for time, so that its investments in oil fields and the like could keep on earning for their theoretical lifetimes. The strategy turned out to be simple: Cloud the issue as much as possible so that voters, already none too eager to embrace higher gas prices, would have no real reason to move climate change to the top of their agendas. I mean, if the scientists aren't absolutely certain, well, why not just wait until they get it sorted out?
The tactic worked brilliantly; throughout the 1990s, even as other nations took action, the fossil fuel industry's Global Climate Coalition managed to make American journalists treat the accelerating warming as a he-said-she-said story. True, a vast scientific consensus was forming that climate change threatens the earth more profoundly than anything since the dawn of civilization, but in an Associated Press dispatch the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn't look all that much more impressive than, say, Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute or S. Fred Singer, former chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
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It was all incredibly crude. But it was also incredibly effective. For now and for the foreseeable future, the climate skeptics have carried the day. They've understood the shape of American politics far better than environmentalists. They know that it doesn't matter how many scientists are arrayed against you as long as you can intimidate newspapers into giving you equal time. They understand, too, that playing defense is all they need to do: Given the inertia inherent in the economy, it's more than sufficient to simply instill doubt.
IN SHORT, the deniers have done their job, and done it better than the environmen- talists have done theirs. They've delayed action for 15 years now, and their power seems to grow with each year. How, even as the science grew ever firmer and the evidence mounted ever higher, did the climate deniers manage to muddy the issue? It's one of the mightiest political feats of our time, accomplished by a small group of clever and committed people. It's worthwhile trying to understand how they work, not least because some of the same tactics are now being used in debates over other issues, like Social Security. And because the fight over global warming won't end here. Try as they might, even with all three branches of government under their control, conservative Republicans can't repeal the laws of chemistry and physics.
