Who is Marc Morano? And why should we care?

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And speaking of Senator James Inhofe, many of our new readers might not be familiar with Inhofe‘s communications director Marc Morano. DeSmogBlog used to cover Morano’s activities a lot closer until his boss’s fall from grace as the chair of the powerful Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works.

So why am I bringing up Morano again if he is now nothing more than a spin-doctor for a low-ranking political dinosaur?

Well, because it’s almost time for this year’s Society of Environmental Journalist’s National Conference. A conference that last year saw Morano received way too much attention for his boss’s “controversial” viewpoint. You can check here (podcast) for more details on what transpired. In a nutshell, Morano challenged members of the SEJ to a panel debate on the media’s coverage of climate change.

Rising to the challenge were NYU‘s Dan Fagan, ABC News’s Bill Blakemore and NY Times reporter Andrew Revkin.

To be fair to Morano, it took a lot of guts to get up on stage to square off against the likes of a senior journalist like Revkin. But the entire discussion was a gong show and really didn’t accomplish much other than entertaining us all on a Thursday night.

The only thing it may have accomplished is raising the profile of a spin-doctor whose boss refuses to accept the realities of human-induced climate change, despite the lack of scientific evidence to the contrary.

It’s one year later, and the scientific realities of global warming are even stronger, making Morano and Inhofe’s point-of-view considerably more out of sync with reality.

This year, I hope the SEJ organizers do not delve into the fantastical world of Inhofe and Morano, and we can spend our Thursday night instead talking about things that matter around the issue of climate change.

 

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Kevin is a contributor and strategic adviser to DeSmogBlog.

He runs the digital marketing agency Spake Media House. Named a “Green Hero” by Rolling Stone Magazine and one of the “Top 50 Tweeters” on climate change and environment issues, Kevin has appeared in major news media outlets around the world for his work on digital campaigning.

Kevin has been involved in the public policy arena in both the United States and Canada for more than a decade. For five years he was the managing editor of DeSmogBlog.com. In this role, Kevin’s research into the “climate denial industry” and the right-wing think tank networks was featured in news media articles around the world. He is most well known for his ground-breaking research into David and Charles Koch’s massive financial investments in the Republican and tea party networks.

Kevin is the first person to be designated a “Certified Expert” on the political and community organizing platform NationBuilder.

Prior to DeSmogBlog, Kevin worked in various political and government roles. He was Senior Advisor to the Minister of State for Multiculturalism and a Special Assistant to the Minister of State for Asia Pacific, Foreign Affairs for the Government of Canada. Kevin also worked in various roles in the British Columbia provincial government in the Office of the Premier and the Ministry of Health.

In 2008 Kevin co-founded a groundbreaking new online election tool called Vote for Environment which was later nominated for a World Summit Award in recognition of the world’s best e-Content and innovative ICT applications.

Kevin moved to Washington, DC in 2010 where he worked for two years as the Director of Online Strategy for Greenpeace USA and has since returned to his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.

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