If you missed it, the Yes Men spent the day yesterday rendering (even more) ridiculous a new Chevron ad campaign that purports to show an oil company acting responsibly. There's a great Fast Company account of how events unfolded here.
I have to say, each time the Yes Men pull one of these counter campaigns, I find myself longing for the content to be true - wishing that an oil company (in this instance) really would own up to its failings and indicate a real willingness to move on. Naive in the extreme, I know, but if the bad guys can live in denial, why can't I enjoy the occasional delusion?
Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.
There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.
So just in case anyone wasn’t sure, a major study of almost 12,000 scientific papers on global warming between 1991 and 2011 finds less than one per cent disagree that humans are the main cause.
Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the study led by John Cook, the Australia-based founder of Skeptical Science, confirms the debate about the causes of global warming had all but vanished in the scientific literature by the early 1990s. ...
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