Tonight, the Center for American Progress Action Fund is screening the documentary (Astro)Turf Wars. Following the screening, the ThinkProgress Wonk Room will host a panel with director Taki Oldham, Americans for Prosperity’s Phil Kerpen, and Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. The panel will be streamed live here.

The pollution-funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) claims not to question the science of global warming, arguing that its massive Astroturfing campaign against climate policy hinges purely on economic arguments. However, footage from the new documentary (Astro)Turf Wars reveals that AFP officials in fact are radical climate science deniers, promoting untenable conspiracy theories to challenge the overwhelming scientific consensus that fossil fuel pollution is dangerously warming the planet.

“We’re not arguing the science of climate change,” Steve Lonegan, AFP-New Jersey state director told Taki Oldham, (Astro)Turf Wars’ filmmaker, last year, at an AFP “Hot Air Tour” event challenging climate legislation. “What we’re saying is the price tag put on it is so destructive as to be reckless and irresponsible.” However, when Oldham asked Lonegan about the science, the AFP official launched into a denier tirade:

The science is not finished, the debate is not over, as the left who support this legislation would tell you. It is quite far from over. There is some very doubtful science into whether or not manmade global warming is causing significant climate change, or whether that climate change is bad or not.

Oldham also attended AFP’s annual summit in October 2009, where the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, also funded by Koch, told AFP members that global warming is “phony”:

First I want to talk about global warming for a minute. Here’s the last 30 years. You’ll see for the last ten years we haven’t had any global warming. I think that shows the models are phony.

Watch it:

Ebell spoke at a panel moderated by AFP’s vice president of policy, Phil Kerpen, which also included radical climate conspiracy theorist Phelim McAleer and Koch front-group lifer Daniel Simmons.

When the Wonk Room noted that numerous Republican candidates who question climate science are also signatories of the AFP “No Climate Tax” pledge, AFP argued that “our pledge has nothing to do with science,” complaining, “Why can’t Think Progress approach this issue with intellectual honesty, instead of distorting our sincere efforts to fight government growth as some sort of scientific position?”

“We’ve strived to encourage an intellectually honest debate on the scientific basis for claims of harm from greenhouse gases,” Koch Industries spokeswoman Melissa Cohlmia claimed in March, 2010.

Lonegan and Ebell’s denial of climate science is, in fact, the default policy position of AFP and Koch Industries:

– “The scientific establishment has dropped the ball. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” said Peggy Venable, AFP’s State Director for Texas, in 2009. “On the contrary it makes crops and forests grow faster. We exhale carbon dioxide.”

– AFP’s website flatly claims that the fact that global warming could cause an eventual 7-meter sea level rise is a “falsehood.”

– “Endangerment of public health and welfare is not ‘reasonably anticipated,’” AFP argued in an April 15, 2009 letter challenging the EPA’s endangerment finding.

– Koch Industries’ official position on climate policy explicitly questions the science of manmade global warming, arguing it may be “simply part of the earth’s natural cycle” and claiming that “the past 10 years or so of data” indicate “we have emerged from a warming cycle and are now entering a cooling cycle.”

Tea party favorite and would-be GOP Senator from Colorado, Ken Buck, has burst into the national scene with his climate denial (see Buck embraces Inhofe: “Global warming is the greatest hoax”).

Sure a study by the Aspen Global Change Institute forecasts that if global carbon emissions continue to rise at their current pace, Aspen could warm by some 14 degrees by century’s end “”giving it a feel similar to Amarillo, TX.  Hey, there will always be hiking!

And sure another Colorado-based study, from NCAR, finds that listening to opponents of action like Buck risks the state of Colorado facing a drought index post-2050 permanently worse than Oklahoma ever saw during the relatively brief Dust bowl.

And sure the National Academy of Sciences says the median annual area burned by wildfires is projected to jump 300% to 600% over much of the state by mid-century.

But why listen to all those experts, when, as Buck told The Coloradan, some guy he heard said it isn’t true:

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Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie (R-VT), Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona (R-HI)

Out of 37 gubernatorial races this November, only two feature Republicans that are climate hawks, saying on the campaign trail that global warming pollution must be slashed. In the liberal states of Vermont and Hawaii, Republican lieutenant governors Brian Dubie (R-VT) and James “Duke” Aiona (R-HI) explicitly acknowledge the greenhouse threat of fossil fuel pollution. The island state of Hawaii is profoundly threatened by the global warming and ocean acidification caused by fossil fuel pollution. Aiona has “set a bold and ambitious goal for Hawaii to cut its consumption of foreign oil in half within eight years”:

Cut in half Hawai’i's polluting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. [Aiona-Finnegan Campaign]

Befitting its nickname, Vermont is one of the greenest states in the nation. In 2005, Gov. Jim Douglas (R-VT) joined RGGI and enacted a renewable energy standard. However, in 2007, Douglas vetoed H.520, “a comprehensive climate-change bill that would have greatly expanded” the state’s efficiency program to cover all fuels, not just electricity. Dubie, after avoiding a stand on climate science for years, recognized the reality this June:

I believe that scientific data clearly show that climate change is real and, as a result of human behavior, the world is getting warmer. Carbon emissions are playing a large role in the warming of our planet. We have to stop burning fossil fuels, which emit carbon into our environment. [Vermont League of Conservation Voters, 6/18/10]

Their Democratic opponents — like nearly all their counterparts in the Democratic Party — similarly recognize the threat of global warming and the promise of a clean energy economy. “The time for a long-term statewide plan for the effects of climate change is now,” says Democratic candidate Neil Abercrombie, who supports increased funding for clean energy programs.

“We need a governor who believes that climate change is real every year, not just in an election year,” charged state Sen. Peter Shumlin (D-VT), the frontrunner in the increasingly tight Vermont race. “Governors should be right the first time. I worked hard to pass what Al Gore called the ‘toughest climate-change bill in the nation,’ only to have the Douglas-Dubie administration veto it.”

Every other Republican running for governor either explicitly denies the threat of global warming (22 candidates), ignore it (11 candidates), or claim that the costs of doing anything would be too high (two candidates — California’s Meg Whitman and Arizona’s Jan Brewer). There are no Republican U.S. Senate candidates who support climate policy to limit greenhouse pollution.

In their zeal to live free from outside interference, the Tea Parties are shooting at the wrong target.

They would be right to be angry with an oil industry poisoning their water, an auto industry polluting their air, and agribusiness providing unsafe food.

Instead they are attacking the government, the only entity that can protect their water, their atmosphere, their food.

So begins an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch by Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, and James Gerstenzang, the campaign’s editorial director.  Here’s more:

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Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), right-wing conspiracy theorist and oil-industry apologist, has promised that Republicans are “certainties” to win at least the ten seats necessary to regain control of the U.S. Senate on November 2. Brad Johnson has the story.
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James Fallows wrote a blog post, “The Phenomenal ‘Chinese Professor’ Ad.”  I usually find myself in agreement with the National Correspondent for The Atlantic, but not this time.

I have difficulty labeling an ad “phenomenal” that even Fallows himself shows is completely false, even if it weren’t flawed in other wasy.

But it did lead to an awesome spoof ad and it got me thinking about what were the best ads of the season.  So here are a bunch.  Let’s start with that Chinese professor:

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Today CAN Europe released a new report based on an analysis of publicly available campaign finance records, definitively proving that polluting European companies are funding climate legislation blockers in US politics. Their overseas support is all the more galling because the same companies argue that additional emissions reductions in Europe cannot be pursued until the United States takes action.

CP reported over the weekend that the ‘U.S.’ Chamber of Commerce’s pro-GOP, pro-pollution ad blitz was fueled by foreign oil, especially companies in India.  Now Climate Action Network Europe is out with a new report, “Think globally, and sabotage locally,” that documents European companies are backing Senate opponents of climate action — while shamelessly arguing in Europe that the EU must not make stronger commitments because of U.S. inaction:

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McConnell: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

It’s not a surprise the Senate minority leader McConnell believes that his top priority has nothing to do with the health and welfare and security of Americans.  Obviously, the planet can fry and countless future generations can needlessly suffer as far as he is concerned, as long as a Republican wins in 2012.

Destroying Obama was McConnell’s plan all along, as discussed here.  The only surprises are:

1. Obama still hasn’t figured this out
2. McConnell would actually blurt out the truth in an interview.

Even MSNBC host — and former GOP Congressman — Joe Scarborough was stunned this morning:   “Mitch McConnell said that?!? “¦ He admitted that on the record?!? That is embarrassing,” he said. “Can I just say for the record – that is pathetic.”

ThinkProgress has the story and the video:

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Brazil plans a price on oil to accelerate climate efforts

Brazil expects to see its lowest rates of illegal deforestation since 1988 by the end of this year. Minister of Environment Izabella Teixeira said the government will reduce the annual chopping and burning of the Amazon rainforest to between 4,000 and 5,000 square kilometers. The figures will be announced in the run-up to this year’s U.N. climate change conference in Cancun, Mexico, this December.

The Amazon clearing is a far cry from the 24,000 square kilometers the so-called “lungs of the Earth” lost in the beginning of this decade. But, Teixeira said, it’s also not enough.

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