Here’s your chance to offer them messaging advice

The big story today is that two different groups of scientists are organizing efforts to respond to the most effective and self-destructive disinformation campaign in human history.

This is a welcome, but the challenge is enormous given that the disinformers and confusionists have many advantages including a big head start, much more money, a status quo media that prefers drama to substance, and a simpler task — creating a compelling narrative that does not have to have any basis in fact to convince people to keep doing nothing.

As if to underscore the challenges, the story of the two different groups became conflated, leading the far bigger group to put out a news release with this banner headline:

In the rest of this post, I’ll try to clear up the confusion and offer some basic messaging advice.  Some of the members of one of the groups of scientists read this blog, so if you have any advice on what they should be doing and how, post a comment.

Here’s the AGU release:

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Koch Industries, the privately owned industrial conglomerate, is using any available method to fight the enforcement of laws to limit its toxic pollution. This summer’s “Regulation Reality Tour,” produced by Koch’s grassroots marketing arm Americans for Prosperity (AFP), featured a “moon bounce in the shape of a SWAT car for children,” ostensibly symbolizing the boogeyman of Environmental Protection Agency “Carbon Cops.” “Let’s make sure we keep doing our part to ensure that our generation passes on to our children and grandchildren the same freedoms we enjoyed,” AFP cries, in protest of sewage overflow rules.

While AFP stokes fear in its Tea Party network about the supposed economic and libertarian disaster of reducing pollution, Koch’s lawyers and contractors flood the Obama administration with submissions challenging proposed rules so that it can keep pumping out pollution for free. Here are just a few of the health and environmental rules that Koch Industries and its many subsidiaries are challenging:

– Koch Industries is protesting the EPA’s effort to update the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Chemical Substance Inventory. [Docket EPA-HQ-OPPT-2009-0187]

– Koch Nitrogen Co. LLC, the Koch Industries fertilizer subsidiary, is challenging the disclosure of unit-specific or facility-specific greenhouse pollution, calling it “misguided.” [Docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2008-0508]

– Flint Hills Resources, LP, the Koch Industries oil and gas subsidiary which operates six major hazardous air pollutant facilities, is protesting EPA’s proposed national emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants from industrial boilers. [Docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2002-0058]

– Flint Hills Resources “supports the elimination of all crude oil data reporting requirements” for greenhouse pollution compliance. [Docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2010-0109]

– Georgia Pacific, the Koch Industries forestry product subsidiary, claims that dioxins aren’t really toxic or carcinogenic. [Docket EPA-HQ-ORD-2010-0395]

– Georgia Pacific, is fighting the EPA’s efforts to tighten water quality standards for stream-dumping. [Docket EPA-HQ-OW-2009-0596]

– Invista, a Koch Industries chemical subsidiary, argues that chemical plant greenhouse pollution should not be monitored. [Docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2008-0508]

After eight years of inaction under the Bush presidency, the health and safety of the American public is now a higher priority than polluter profits — but Koch Industries and other industrial polluters are fighting tooth and nail, even if they have to poison our democracy to win.

CARB Chair: “Prop 26 does not impair the scoping plan adopted in 2008 or any regulations developed under that plan. AB 32 is on track.”

Some commenters were worried that California proposition 26 would somehow vitiate the overwhelming win on killing Prop 23, which preserved California’s landmark climate and clean energy bill.  I was on a press call where Mary Nichols, Chair of the California Air Resources Board, explained to reporters that it would not.

Kristin Eberhard, Legal Director for NRDC’s Western Energy and Climate Projects in Santa Monica, has a good post on the subject that I will reprint below:

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Climate science 1956: A Plass from the past

Yes, I know everybody used to think we were headed toward an ice age.  Well, except Dr. Frank Baxter (and Frank Capra) in 1958. And except for James Hansen for three decades, of course. And the National Research Council along with the vast majority of climate scientists from the 1970s on.

I have previously written about the work of physicist Gilbert Plass (see 1953 Popular Mechanics: Growing Blanket of Carbon Dioxide Raises Earth’s Temperature).

Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has a new video with a “General Electric:  Excursions in Science” recording from 1956 on Plass’s work:

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One of the best polling and political analysts in the country, Ruy Teixeira, is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. I thought readers would be interested in his analysis of last week’s election.

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First generation biofuels worse for climate than fossil fuel – study

BRUSSELS, Nov 8 (Reuters) – European plans to promote biofuels will drive farmers to convert 69,000 square km of wild land into fields and plantations, depriving the poor of food and accelerating climate change, a report warned on Monday.

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