Dismissing the risks of global warming as “baseless and undisguised propaganda,” a John Birch Society blogger has pronounced that evidence for climate change is “shoddy,” and that, on the basis of Bjorn Lomborg’s (thoroughly discredited) analysis, “a little warming wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.”
None of this is news. At least, none is “new.” The logic for this attack on conservation legislation traces back to the work of Swiftboater Marc Morano, whose flagrant distortions get such good reviews on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works minority weblog.
This is classic “Echo Chamber” PR: you start with a lie; you pass the lie around; and after you repeat it enough times, it starts to sound like the truth.
In this case, it’s hard to know whether the guileless John Bircher is even to blame – hard to know whether she has been sucked in by Morano’s sleazy tactics or whether she is consciously part of the campaign to confuse. But there’s no question that Morano and his boss, the Senator for Oil and Gas James Inhofe, are in this – consciously – up to their slippery chins. At the risk of sounding like someone who actually believes in government: there oughta be a law.
