Hightower Lowdown

Throughout the 1990s, an outfit called the Global Climate Coalition was desperately trying to debunk assertions by most environmental scientists that the pollutants emitted by Big Oil, automakers, utilities, and other major users of fossil fuels were causing Earth's drastic climate change. The GCC was a front group organized and funded by these industries to run a multimillion-dollar PR and lobbying campaign to create doubt that global warming was happening, much less that its members had any responsibility for it.

Now an environmental lawsuit has unearthed documents revealing that nearly fifteen years ago, GCC was told by its own expert advisory committee, "The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied." The report added that coalition members were just as certainly a central cause of it.

When the advisory committee's 1995 report was issued, this inconvenient finding was deleted so industries and their political enablers could keep insisting that the scientific community was "divided" on the causes of climate change and to forestall governmental action.

This is the same tactic that the tobacco giants used for decades, pretending that there was no link between smoking and lung cancer--even though their own scientists said otherwise. Corporate interests have learned that they don't have to prove their innocence, but just puff up a "scientific" smokescreen to dupe the media and the government. Surely there's an especially hot spot in hell awaiting such people.