Year 3, Month 6, Day 13: Sexy Sadie…You Made A Fool Of Everyone

The story finds a few legs in England (not much Stateside, though — gee, I wonder why?):

Some of America’s top companies are spending heavily to block action on climate change or discredit climate science, despite public commitments to sustainable and green values, a new report has found.

An analysis of 28 Standard & Poor 500 publicly traded companies by researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists exposed a sharp disconnect in some cases between PR message and less visible activities, with companies quietly lobbying against climate policy or funding groups which work to discredit climate science.

The findings are in line with the recent expose of the Heartland Institute. Over the years, the ultra-conservative organisation devoted to discrediting climate science received funds from a long list of companies which had public commitments to sustainability.

Bitch, bitch, bitch. All ya ever do is bitch. Sent June 3:

I can remember the launch of the “New Nixon” in 1968 — a cynical public relations gambit that provided a discredited politician sufficiently shiny new trappings to get him elected president of the USA. H.L. Mencken famously noted that “no one ever went broke underestimating the American public,” an observation verified by countless advertising campaigns in the ensuing decades.

When major American corporations make public statements about the seriousness of climate change, our first instincts should be ones of suspicion: are their words supported or undercut by their actions in the policy domain? The Union of Concerned Scientists’ report confirms yet again that the “corporate persons” exerting such disproportionate influence on US governance are morally deficient hypocrites driven entirely by greed.

As an intensifying greenhouse effect brings us perilously close to a planetary emergency, we cannot afford to let capitalism run amok, crassly savaging Earth’s resources in the service of profit.

Warren Senders