Video: Glenn Beck brings ExxonMobil-linked religious front group to tell Christians not to believe in “man-caused” climate change
"Video: Glenn Beck brings ExxonMobil-linked religious front group to tell Christians not to believe in “man-caused” climate change"
Share:
“How is it we’ve had ice ages — and yet there were no SUVs?”
In June, ThinkProgress published an exclusive investigation into the Cornwall Alliance “” a corporate front designed to deceive evangelicals into doubting the science underpinning climate change. Yesterday, Fox News hate-talker Glenn Beck brought on a representative from the group to tout Cornwall’s new DVD, “Resisting the Green Dragon,” which claims the climate change movement is a “false religion,” and a nefarious conspiracy to empower eugenicists and create a “global government.” TP’s Lee Fang has the story.
The DVD, which Cornwall is distributing to evangelical churches around the country, seems to be designed perfectly for Beck’s world view, and unsurprisingly, the Cornwall guest and Beck exchanged bizarre conspiracy theories. Watch it:
The Cornwall Alliance appears to be a creation of a group called the James Partnership, a nonprofit run by Chris Rogers and Peter Stein, according to documents filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. Rogers, who heads a media and public relations firm called CDR Communications, collaborates with longtime oil front group operative David Rothbard, the founder and President of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and Jacques Villarreal, a lower level staffer at CFACT, for his James Partnership group. In the past, Rogers’ firm has worked for the Bush administration and for the secretive conservative planning group, the Council for National Policy.
According to public records, the following entities are all registered to the same address, 9302-C Old Keene Mill Road Burke, VA 22015, an office park in suburban Virginia:
- Rogers’ consulting firm, CDR Communications
– Rogers’ nonprofit hub, the James Partnership
– The Cornwall Alliance
– The new “Resisting the Green Dragon” website
In late 2005, evangelical leaders like Rick Warren joined a drive to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying “millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.” To counter this historic shift in the evangelical community, a group called the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance” (ISA) was launched to oppose action on carbon emissions and to deny the existence of climate change. One of the men guiding this group was Paul Driessen, a consultant for ExxonMobil, the mining industry, and for CFACT.
For “stream lining” reasons, ISA relaunched as the Cornwall Alliance in 2006. With the new name came a redesigned website, highly produced web videos, and an organized network of churches to distribute climate change denying propaganda to hundreds of pastors around the country. The branding for the Cornwall Alliance is derived from the “Cornwall Declaration,” a 1999 document pushing back against the creation-care movement in the evangelical community. The Declaration “stressed a free-market environmental stewardship and emphasized that individuals and private organizations should be trusted to care for their own property without government intervention.” CFACT President Rothbard has been hailed as the “driving force” behind the Cornwall Declaration public relations effort.
CFACT is a gimmicky right-wing organization that does everything it can to try to discredit the science underpinning climate change. For instance, staffers from the group traveled to the Copenhagen conference on climate change to stage silly press conferences with Rush Limbaugh’s former producer and stunts aimed at mocking Greenpeace.
But who is the “driving force” behind CFACT? According to disclosures, CFACT is funded by at least $542,000 from ExxonMobil, $60,500 from Chevron, and $1,280,000 from Scaife family foundations, which are rooted in wealth from Gulf Oil and steel interests.
CFACT and the Cornwall Alliance, according to disclosures filed with the Washington State Secretary of State’s office, share a common fundraising firm, ClearWord Communications Group. ClearWord has helped raise millions of dollars not only for CFACT and Cornwall, but also for infamous polluter front groups like FreedomWorks, the Institute for Energy Research, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Last year, Cornwall produced a video with former Sen. George Allen (R-VA) attacking clean energy legislation as part of a campaign by the ExxonMobil-funded “American Energy Freedom Center.”
In a call to the Cornwall Alliance’s media office, spokesman Quena Gonzalez said Cornwall has no relationship to CFACT and said CFACT President Rothbard has no official capacity with his group. Gonzalez said that in “several years of working” at Cornwall, he had never heard any questions about working with CFACT, and instructed ThinkProgress to contact Calvin Beisner, the national representative for Cornwall. Beisner is a board member of CFACT.
Rothbard had a central role in sparking the founding of Cornwall and is currently a partner with Chris Rogers, the man who runs Cornwall and CDR Communications. Nevertheless, under his capacity as CFACT President, Rothbard’s anti-Greenpeace publicity stunts are reported regularly on the Cornwall blog as breaking news, without any acknowledgement of Rothbard’s relationship with Cornwall.
Gonzalez also said he had never heard of CDR Communications. But according to his own LinkedIn profile, Gonzalez works for CDR Communications as the “Director for Religion and the Environment” at the firm. ThinkProgress contacted Chris Rogers on Monday, who contradicted Gonzalez and said his firm CDR Communications provides “support” for Cornwall but did not clarify.
It appears that Cornwall attempts to carefully hide its backers. Not only did Gonzalez refuse to provide much information, but Cornwall’s website is registered with a special service to hide the identity of the person or group who purchased the domain address.
— Lee Fang, in a ThinkProgress cross-post.
JR: I’m sure CP readers know how it is we had ice ages before there were SUVs (see In must-see AGU video, Richard Alley explains “The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History”) — and indeed why the fact of those ice ages (and the whole paleoclimate record) should make us more worried about unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases:
- Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks
- Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred
- Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher “” “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”
Indeed, it is kind of amazing that evangelicals would cite the ice ages as evidence against human-caused climate change, since they predate the biblical creation story.
Finally, there is a growing group of evangelicals who understand the reality of climate science and the moral obligation to reduce emissions (see “Creation Care Embraces Climate Change“). Sadly, they aren’t as well funded.
Related Posts:
FRONT
The corporates have, again, bought off church-types with cash and promise of more cash. They draw from a bottomless account dedicated solely to brainwashing Americans that AGW is a hoax and swindle machine for scientists. What do we throw back at them….CP…thanks to Joe’s devotion to exposing them. Not nearly enough!!!!
What else, really?
An occasional report or public denouncement from the big green. Where is Al Gore? Where is Cong. Ed Markey? Busy doing whatever they do when not in the public spotlight.
We will never have the money to match big energy and we cannot win this one by merely promising building retrofit, EVs, biochar, wind and solar as the ‘fix’. Average Americans could not find Burma on a world map or give the chemical symbol for table salt. How are we going to combat the Beck thugs with our devotion and anxiety? We are no match.
We need some wide shouldered public figures who will command attention when they go to the podium and denounce those liars and paid mercenaries of the church who are propagandizing with their pseudo-science trash as fact and policy. Repugs are of one brain and righty dems are not so far from the repugs’ script.
Wake up people and realize it is not the enviros who are going to pull victory from the jaws of the “climate dragon”.
We are in a war that will be the true war to end all wars and every living form on our planet. We must get serious and stop chasing after worthless, meaningless legislation..as if the future even presents that as an opportunity. We are not being believed nor listened to. Go find some American leaders not attached to environmental movements and buy their support if we have to.
Get some new voices into the fight because our tired President and his team of climate change strategists and not pulling their weight and are quickly being surrounded.
Will we hear the bugle sounding the retreat after Nov. 2? What then?
John McCormick
Off-topic: worth a read, New climate denialism: Who promotes it, and how to answer it. Joe, you get a nice mention in it.
Joe: A typo, “c” for “g”. “…a group called the ‘Interfaith Stewardship Alliance’ (ISA) was launched to oppose action on carbon emissions and to deny the existence of climate chance.”
[JR: Thanks.]
John M: Do not despair. We will not have wide-shouldered leaders until we have a widespread movement of people. People understand “free public transit” even if they do not understand the science of climate change. We are growing steadily. Join us.
.
By the way — the oil companies are having trouble getting the religious to go along … see http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/green/nae_response.pdf
That was my thought too. I’ve known numerous groups who have claimed that evidence of large-scale glaciation is just misinterpreted evidence of Noah’s flood. I wish all the groups issuing contradictory ideas would fight among themselves over whose idea is correct instead of going after science and reality. We might actually make some progress without their obstructionism.
“How is it we’ve had ice ages — and yet there were no SUVs?”
This statement is backwards. In other words, it claims that a lack of SUVs caused ice ages! The correct statement would be “How is it we’ve had global warming — and yet there were no SUVs?”. Not that that would be right either since it is assuming that climate change must be all natural and that GHGs play no role, which isn’t true at all. Also, the climate doesn’t care where they come from, natural or man-made, or what caused the increases (CO2 can be a feedback but also a forcing).
I think half my brain cells died watching that Glenn Beck clip. How can people cram so many utterly stupid comments into a minute and a half?
First the guests contradict each other – the climate isn’t changing, wait, yes it is (apparently you can tell by visiting Texas?!), but it’s not man-made. How do we know that? Because the climate has changed in the past. And there were ice ages before there were SUVs, because we all know SUVs cause global cooling.
How can anybody with half a brain at the very least not see the obvious logical fallacies in those 90 seconds? It’s just painful to watch people in a position of authority on an absurdly popular TV show making such ridiculous stupid comments under the guise of educating their viewers.
This is what happens when you have uneducated morons talking about Climate change. Obviously these people do not have an elementary understanding of climatology, ice core data over the past 100,000 years, sun spot activity, biology, oceanography, chemistry etc. They deserve a diet of pork fed on GMO corn. They always refer to what happened in the past year when talking about Climate change. Stupid people and they are getting paid well for being so stupid.
John McCormick, thanks for your cogent and hearfelt comment.
Retail is the way to reach church members. A Green organization or donor needs to hire a small team to attend evangelical and traditional religious gatherings to make the case. Included in their literature should be references to the troubling information above, that the oil companies are sticking their rancid paws into our churches.
There should also be an information team traveling the country in a van, calling on pastors and rabbis and distributing information packets.
This team could be recruited from Warren’s congregation or one of the environmentally aware evangelical groups.
A huge percentage of Americans are religious, and respect the guidance of their church leaders. They are getting bad information due to ignorance and oil company influence, as in the example in the clip. There is no good reason why religious people should be less receptive to climate science, and plenty of reasons why they can learn and act. Lots of churchgoers and their pastors are loving and responsible people, and when they hear the truth, it will resonate.
There is actually a better public education opportunity here than in the media, where newspapers, Fox, and the other networks have built firewalls against “alarmists”. Even school boards are being pressured to gag on climate science. Let’s move on this- Joe, can you find some money to do it?
Please don’t call them the Tea Party. They are totally connected to another liquid.
Let’s start a viral campaign to call them the OIL PARTY.
As for the GOP? they are the BOP -BIG OIL PARTY.
say it loud, say it often
Dana wrote: “I think half my brain cells died watching that Glenn Beck clip.”
That’s no laughing matter.
Fox News doesn’t merely misinform viewers to keep them ignorant.
Fox News is actually engineered, at every level from the layout of the screen, to the overall video presentation, to the appearance and the scripted mannerisms and tone of voice of the “on-air personalities”, to the not only false and misleading, but deliberately incoherent and irrational content of their discourse, to systematically degrade the cognitive capabilities of its viewers.
Fox News not only makes people ignorant, it makes them stupid.
i’m amazed that people can praise our ingenuity & resolve one moment then the next declare hundreds of millions of preventable deaths an act of god. the human brain: awesome!
This is or should be called “the argument from ignorance.” “I don’t know anything about this subject, but the experts must be wrong and I am right.”
Glenn Beck is the most dangerous guy on the planet today. I can’t think of another way to say it.
It’s like we have a 3rd grader leading a political movement in America today.
Watched the video…I must say,the Three Stooges material is as strong as ever,and they’ve updated their look nicely.
Fox News is a Fifth Argument for the Elimination of Television. It kills brain cells.
You’re right, Nick. That one Stooge looked a lot like Glenn Beck.
So Adam and Eve got thrown out of the Garden of Eden for lying. Is there any chance that we might retain whatever of the Garden that remains, as long as we allow the Princes of Electronic Lies to rule our land? Lies got us into this mess and lies are going to keep us here. If we let them.
They got one thing right; we need to develop a society that can withstand changes. Even if we stop CO2 emissions right now there is still more change from what we have already dumped into the atmosphere.
For the last 800,000 years we have had a steady cycle of ice ages. We are now out of that box, CO2 concentrations are beyond those levels.
If we do not mitigate and adapt, then we will suffer. It is too late for mitigation alone, but if we do not mitigate then we face the unadaptable.
I’ve captured some of the crazy denial moments of Glenn Beck in this Radio Ecoshock piece: Glenn Beck, Climate Quisling
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/ecoshock/ES_Glenn_Beck_Quisling.mp3
Of course, first I explain to younger listeners what a “Quisling” is. And Glenn is, when it comes to climate.
Alex, Radio Ecoshock
Thank you for bringing this to light. Members in my church have promoted the Cornwall Alliance as having a good perspective on climate change. It can be very exhausting trying to convince them that climate change is a real problem, and that we need to significantly reduce C02 emissions. I will look more into Cornwall’s connection with Exxon. This is very helpful.
to SecularAnimist. Very,very true mate.
We can no longer just raise an eyebrow or two at the sheer naivite of those gleefuly throw up more brushwood at the stake. These are sly operators who knowingly slip scrog into the pyre. Usanians are being dimwitted on purpose and without remorse. Hillbillys will have resorted to cannibalism after proper advice through zombiebox. This is war and it’s getting harder to remain a pacifist.
Good luck to the hopeful and god bless GoldmanSachs,Obama and all the Indians!
It should be interesting to see where Beck, and a cadre of other shrill demagogues are in about 10 years- lets hope they have not squandered their money – they will be largely forgotten.
A former rodeo clown who looks like Marshall Applewhite and worships magic stones is appealing to viewers to send money to hasten the destruction of Earth.
Amazing. Glenn is able to simultaneously channel Tammy Faye, Rev. Ike, Hal Lindsey, Nancy Leider, Vernon Howell and Jim Crow. Next up is Benny Hill when when gold prices crash on the Branch Beckians.
At every level, humanity is looking more and more dysfunctional. From individual consumers to local, state, and federal governments, to most large institutions, to corporations, to international relations, it’s painfully clear that unless we stop acting like a bunch of Beck-influenced idiots, we are in unimaginable trouble. Instead of hitting the brakes or swerving away from the cliff edge, we’re competing to see who can mash the gas pedal down hardest.
Welcome to Planet Easter Island.
re John McCormick #1’s “The corporates have, again, bought off church-types with cash and promise of more cash.”
Is there hard evidence for this, re climate? And if not, how could we get it, given that churches are sort of spiritual Indian reservations, not subject to the disclosure regs. that constrain everyone else?
(pre-Citizens United, at least)
It’s hardly unprecedented –
“Following the 1992 elections, during a breakfast debriefing, [political operative Ed] Rollins admitted to journalists that one factor in the success of Christine Todd Whitman in the New Jersey governor’s race against incumbent Democrat Jim Florio had been the distribution of “walking around” money to influential persons in inner-city precincts, including African-American pastors. …Ministers who cooperated, Rollins said, received contributions to their “favorite charities.””
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ed_Rollins
19# bgoodtocreation – The group Interfaith Power and Light has a far different take on the problem.
They acknowledge that climate change is a problem to which people of faith are called to respond.
http://interfaithpowerandlight.org/
Jerry Falwell preached a sermon against AGW, claiming the warming is due to ‘solar variation’. He was a member/leader of the ISA. A week or two later he was recalled by God. I’d love to have heard his explanation to God, why he was preaching to ravage our green earth, God’s creation.
But there was stupidity in the 19th century, and yet there was no Glenn Beck. How is that possible, huh? Huh?
In all seriousness I have to say, though, that the most painful part of watching clips like that is that I know full well that there are many people (I know some) who think that Beck is a genius. They treat every single word he utters as the unquestionable word of the world’s foremost polymath. I’d really like to laugh at his nonsense, but knowing how seriously people treat it…
By the way, anybody who thinks there’s going to be some kind of accountability for the deniers, forget it. What you see here is the escape plan; after spending years claiming that there was no climate change, just as soon as they no longer think they can get away with that they’ll seamlessly shift to “it’s not anthropogenic – it’s just the way the planet works!”. And Glenn’s audience will lap it up.
Forget about trying to teach the physics of Green Houses to these people. They either have never seen one or did not think to ask how they work. They are the new incarnation, the back-from-the-grave, “Know-Nothing” party members from old.
Instead, ask these religious people if anything justifies putting the survival of Six Billion people at risk? To endanger the survival of the human race is something no self-described Religious-person, of any religion, can agree to take any chance. That is what is at risk.
Once the CO2, CH4 and H2O (Carbon Dioxide, Methane and water vapor) is in the air, nothing, got that, NOTHING will bring them down.
I even saw on TV, a very wealthy, gas-potentate, in a conference sponsored by people associated with the White House, say “How long will CO2 stay in the air? 100 years?” The fact is that the half life of these stable molecules is infinite or, more precisely, no evidence of decay has ever been measured or noted.
Want more proof? Ask them how long has CO2 been in Venus atmosphere? And, if they are still around, how hot is the Venetian atmosphere?
The second answer is about 845 Deg. Fahrenheit. Does that remind you of any religious concept? Does that remind them of their concept of Hell?
No need to bring Physics, keep it all on Morals & Religion.
In due time ALL formal religious institutions will see the immorality of killing, or risking the lives of one thousand times the number killed in Auschwitz. What does that make them: Holier-than-thou, super-dumb or Hyper-Hitlers? Nazis on Steroids?
Maybe they should read “The Last Poem” by Rev. Niemuller, c. 1945.
“First they came for the Communists, I did nothing, I was not one…”
This is Cynthia from ExxonMobil. Just for the record – ExxonMobil stopped funding CFACT several years ago and any suggestion of recent involvement is inaccurate.