Deniosphere Claimed Putin Funded Anti-Pipeline Efforts, Then Claimed His War Ended Climate "Hoax"
Links at original.
When President Joe Biden only mentioned climate and clean energy a few times in the State of the Union earlier this month, one odd reaction was that this was an indication that fossil fuel prices had driven climate concern off the agenda. “The climate crisis disappearing act” was Ben Zycher’s take, for his Koch-funded employer AEI, and it was echoed by one of the longest-running professional climate disinfo operations, Myron Ebell’s Cooler Heads newsletter. That one-two tap was concerning, but what ended up getting a bit more attention was the GOP’s playing puppet for a Dr. Evil disinfo attack falsely accusing environmental groups of being funded by Putin to oppose pipelines. WashPost’s fact checkers gave it a very serious Four Pinocchios, while Scott Waldman’s coverage called it “the GOP climate conspiracy theory that won't die.”
But having gotten its initial splash, it seems to have died back down, for the time being. It’s hard, after all, to sustain outrage about something that evaporates as soon as you actually spend even the smallest amount of time looking into it. And in that time, the disinfo machine trudged along, making what’s long disproven seem new and fresh enough to ask questions about, until it too is once again debunked, then turning to the next card in the disinfo rolodex to repeat the cycle.
Which brings us back to the idea that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed aside the possibility that anyone could also still continue to care about climate change. Having entertained the false notion that Putin was funding the environmental movement, conservative disinfo outlets now have decided that no, perhaps the opposite, Putin has struck down the once-mighty Big Green lobby. “Biden Is in Climate Denial,” according to Kimberley Strassel’s WSJ column citing polling about methane gas and the Green New Deal to claim that “Mr. Biden’s climate agenda– no matter how much the liberal press wants to differ– has never been popular.” (Fact check: President Biden won with the support of 81 million Americans who voted for his climate agenda, which did not go near as far or fast as the Green New Deal.)
Over at the Washington Examiner, Stephen Moore took a crack at the narrative as well, with an op-ed headlined “the end of the climate change legend.” The piece by Moore, former advisor to one-term President Trump who now stalks the GOP party like an obsessive ex plotting a come-back while dampening the party’s prospects in the suburbs it needs to win against moderates who take climate change seriously, claims that “we’ve now discovered with certainty that climate change is a political albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party.” And because three makes a trend and Steve Milloy’s tweets that “the climate agenda is dead” doesn’t count because he always says that, there’s Viv Forbes’ in the rightwing Spectator. He’s advancing Nigel Farage’s message of “Power not poverty,” and claiming at the outset of the op-ed that “the green fairy-tale is over.”
EDIT
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/3/23/2087600/-After-Putin-Funded-Climate-Advocacy-Disinfo-Liars-Shift-To-Claiming-Putin-Killed-Climate-Advocacy#view-story