Thread by @DoctorVive

I really wanted to like @NathanielRich's @NYTmag piece about 70's & 80's climate politics. It does put AGW front-and-center for once. But I'm crushed to say that Rich suppresses important facts, covering up how organized climate denial created our current predicament.

[Thread]

For just one example: let's look at how Rich narrates the role of the scientist William Nierenberg in writing and disseminating “Changing Climate,” the @theNASciences report released in 1983.

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This is how Rich credentials Nierenberg (N)👇🏽. He doesn't report that N was a physicist, not a climate scientist. Nor does he say that N worked on the Manhattan Project. He hides the parts that undermine N's expertise on climate & that suggest N used science politically.

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Rich goes on to narrate that although N stated in “Changing Climate” that “action had to be taken immediately,” he lied about that fact “in the press interviews that followed” (although, of course, Rich doesn't' use the word “lied”).

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But Rich attributes N's misrepresentation of the report to the public as stemming merely from a commitment to what we now call Ecomodernism: according to Rich, N felt it was “better to bet on American Ingenuity to save the day.”

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And then, disingenuously attributing his own hagiography to unnamed “officials,” Rich doubles down on his characterization of N as a brilliant and transformative Regan-era optimist, “one of the elite class of scientists how had helped the nation win a global war.”

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And in case we didn't hear the silent implication of all this praise, Rich spells out the message: “Nobody believed that he had been directly influenced by his political connections.”

Nobody believed this? Really – nobody?

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What Rich actively SUPRESSES is that Nierenberg subsequently founded The George C Marshall Institute, a “conservative think tank” which “disputed” climate science.

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The GMI put out, for example, one report, authored by N himself, arguing that global warming was caused by the sun, and another that CFCs weren't bad for ozone, and yet another claiming that secondhand smoke was fine to breathe.

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This is all public record—I just found these screen shots on Wikipedia, for god's sake.

And @NaomiOreskes has written extensively about Nierenberg in *Merchants of Doubt*. Her article about him is here: jstor.org/stable/10.1525…

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It is unconscionable that Rich suppresses all this historical context.

And tragically this is just one moment out of an entire article that obscures the full truth about United States climate politics over the last forty years.

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The claim that “everybody knew,” & understood the stakes, but all collectively decided not to transition to clean energy due to “human nature” is outrageous.

It's absurd to suggest that these elite white men who denied climate change epitomize “human nature.”

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It seems to me that Rich, and by extension the @nytimes and @nytmag, failed to report the story accurately, instead pinning the cause for our current emergency on a discredited concept that ideologically obscures the political actions of conservative elites.

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This legerdemain is DANGEROUS. The actions of the Trump administration & the @GOP clearly demonstrate that elite conservatives are continuing to attempt to prevent the US from transitioning to safe energy. They are threatening our lives. People are already dying.

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Guess what, Mr. Rich and @NYTmag? It's NOT “us.”

It's not me, and it's not the vast majority of American voters desperate for governments to do something about climate change.

climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/p…

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And, most importantly, IT'S NOT TOO LATE.

We can still save billions of lives if we act to decarbonize NOW.

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@nytimes, you must #EndClimateSilence & tell the truth about politicians who serve the interests of climate-denier donors over the interests of the people.

Without that truth, your journalism carries water for those same climate deniers in the service of profit & death.

/fin