Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Senator Whitehouse has unveiled his “web of denial”, a vast conspiracy theory about why his side is losing the climate debate.
US senators detail a climate science ‘web of denial’ but the impacts go well beyond their borders
By the middle of this week, about 20 Democratic senators in the US will have stood up before their Congress to talk about the fossil fuelled machinery of climate science denial.
The senators are naming the fossil fuel funders, describing the machinery and calling out the characters that make up a “web of denial”.
“The web is so big, because it has so much to protect,” said the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who bookended the first evening of speeches.
The Senate heard how fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy and the billionaire oil brothers Charles and David Koch had funnelled millions into groups that had spread doubt about the causes of climate change.
The following is a video of Senator Whitehouse’s presentation on July 7th;
Whitehouse’s conspiracy theory reminds me of some of the worst excesses of the anti-communist era, in which fantasies about shadowy conspiracies were used to ruin the lives of political opponents and innocent bystanders. But Whitehouse appears to mean every word of it. The Attorneys for Clean Energy effort appears to have faltered, for now, but who knows what the future holds? We can only imagine what will happen if people like Whitehouse win control of the US government, and are put in charge of a new era of “Unamerican Activities” style witch hunts.
