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That's a lot of smears and hypotheticals, isn't it? You have to rely on those because the claim isn't true. If Shell are really spending billions then it shoul
by revelio 3y ago
That's a lot of smears and hypotheticals, isn't it? You have to rely on those because the claim isn't true.
If Shell are really spending billions then it should be trivial to find armies of thousands, or tens of thousands, all of whom are directly receiving grant money from Shell to talk about climate full time (negatively). But no such people exist. As the climatologists say, the only people who have the time to double check their work are retirees.
Now go look at how much money governments, BMG Foundation etc spend on climate related stuff. It's huge.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoIf Shell is spending billions on people to talk about climate full time negatively, it seems a rather obvious oversight that they wouldn't include instructions to not advertise that fact. But I wasn't talking about an army of paid human shills. The majority of the "discourse" around COVID misinformation came from 12 sources - not everyone who repeated their talking points was paid to do so, yet shaped the discourse was. Governments spending billions on "climate change related stuff", an existential threat to their continued existence, is not the conspiracy you think it is. (...And by the same token, Shell spending billions protecting its continued existence/economic model would also not be some conspiracy...)
- revelio 3y agoWhat exactly are you talking about then? What does this imaginary money get spent on, if not people? This whole idea is a classic conspiracy theory. Do you realize that? Obviously the only way to shape discourse is with people, because discourse is something done by people. How do you think it's possible to spend literally billions of dollars - call it $3B and that's enough to pay for 30,000 people on great salaries making reports and blog posts all day, that this could last for years - and not have anyone notice this? Nobody ever asks where the money is coming from? Not one of these tens of thousands of people have ever gone to the press and said, I was paid by Shell to say repeat things that aren't true? There are of course massive ecosystems of NGOs and the like that do exactly that, but they're all pushing doomerism. They're also pretty open about where the money comes from. They have to be, you can't hide movements of those sorts of sums. The Gates Foundation alone spends $1.4B on climate change "shills" as you'd put it, and it's only one of many. BTW, no governments existence is threatened by climate change, not even in the discredited IPCC worst case scenario. Not even in fiction - Waterworld has a government in it!
- specialist 3y agoWhat measure of proof do you require? The recent book Merchants of Doubt is just one of dozens of such investigations. In fact, the covert reactionary movement has begat its own little cottage industry working to expose the fraud.