The Climate Change Denial Business

The businesses who profited from the cancer delivery system known as cigarettes knew for decades how lethal they were, but they engaged in a long, deliberate and very successful coverup, bribing and intimidating scientists and lying to the news media and in sworn testimony. That was their business model.

We are seeing it again today, not with a lethal product line but with the careful and well-funded denial of what scientists have been warning us about for more than a decade: that our climate is warming because of fossil fuel use. And because civilization itself depends on existing climate patterns, rainfall patterns and temperature ranges this denial is endangering the survival of human life as we know it. We and our children are being put at grave risk to allow the fossil fuel giants to squeeze huge profits from peak oil. They don’t care what history might say about them because, as George W. Bush said “by the time that happens we’ll be dead.”

There's a new film out about the Denial Business. It's called MERCHANTS OF DOUBT. Big Oil is paying to suppress it.

Here are the main perpetrators in the climate change denial business, as reported by a Pulitzer Prize winning climate news service.

In The Guardian today: the Kochs refuse to testify about their climate change denial apparatus. Are the powerful allowed to plead the Fifth on the extinction of the human species?