US

The U.S. Government's campaign to prevent its own scientists from speaking about climate change has all the earmarks of a professional Public Relations effort to control the flow of information.

When California started insisting, in the late 1960s, that automakers clean up exhaust emissions, industry screamed at the notion, threatening that the state's tough standards would bankrupt car owners and put the industry out of business.

Forty-odd years later, North American's love affair with the car has reached new heights of rapture and the air in every major city is more breathable than it was in the mid-70s, despite a tripling of  the number of vehicles on the street during those years.

Grab your sense of humour and run to Steven Milloy's most recent post on the "national conservative weekly" Human Events.

Touting a list of the "Top 10 Worst Moments for Free Enterprise in 2005," Milloy opens by saying:

This annual list spotlights companies who have most egregiously abandoned their fiduciary and moral responsibilities to their shareholders and our free enterprise system, respectively, in favor of embracing the false and harmful social activist-promoted notion of “corporate social responsibility.”

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C.'s favorite industry-funded "environmental think tank," offered up a definitive article on climate change in July of this year.

The CEI began by saying: "Global warming is happening and man is responsible for at least some of it."

You can click here and read the entire, tortured, outdated 2,913-word argument about how that's really okay -- how facing the problem might cause economic dislocation among CEI's major funders -- but we think we have excerpted the most important part of the paper in those opening 14 words.