Sarahnkwok's List: Climate and environment

• April 1998, when the American Petroleum Institute first designed a comprehensive strategic manual for combatting global warming “alarmism” and the increasingly popular Kyoto treaty
• Documents such as this one remain the dominant model today. A leaked internal memo of the Heartland Institute, recipient of $13.5 million from Donors Trust, discusses the development of a science curriculum to be implemented in middle and high schools across the country with “great potential for success.” The curriculum is designed to introduce “sound science” to the masses, who are “heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” by informing the next generation of the fact that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy” because there is still doubt as to “whether CO2 is a pollutant.” As in the 1998 American Petroleum Institute memo, the primary goal is to portray climate change science as far too controversial to warrant comprehensive action.
• “worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational,” and therefore are incapable of understanding the basic truths that lie beyond their limited grasp, exhibiting such classic symptoms of ignorance as “anti-market bias,”
• “40 percent of Americans believe the scientists are still arguing about whether climate change is real”; 42 percent believe “the impacts are being exaggerated.”

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