I’ve been reposting the ThinkProgress expos© on the head-exploding tactics of Chamber of Commerce hacks (henchmen?), like Aaron Barr who heads the private security firm HB Gary Federal (see “Chamber lobbyists solicited firm to investigate opponents’ families, children“).  Daily Kos has a stunning post on HB Gary’s tactics that I reprint in below, since it involves:

creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated “persona management” software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other.

Many readers have joked that some of the comments at ClimateProgress seem to come from pre-programmed ‘denier-bots’.  Others have noted how the same arguments and phrasings keep cropping up in the comments’ section of the many unmoderated news sites on the web.

The extreme anti-government, pro-pollution crowd has a highly targeted effort to control the debate, even online (see “Digg this: Conservative efforts to manipulate the public discussion extend to social media“).  It is, of course, possible all those comments are from separate individuals, none of whom are paid by corporate polluters or conservative billionaires.  It is also possible we never landed on the moon….

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Back in July I wrote about uber-hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, a self-described “die hard contrarian,” telling it like it is in his blunt 2Q 2010 letter (see “Grantham: Everything You Need to Know About Global Warming in 5 Minutes“).

He wrote back then, “Global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future.”  He went through the basics of climate science and then wrote:

Do we believe the whole elite of science is in a conspiracy?  At some point in the development of a scientific truth, contrarians risk becoming flat earthers.

He noted that “the obfuscators of global warming actually use the same “experts” as the tobacco industry did” and wondered, “Have they no grandchildren?”

Grantham has earned his contrarian cred the legit way.  He is former Chairman and now Chief Investment Strategist of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), which has “more than US $107 billion in assets under management as of December 2009. Grantham is regarded as a highly knowledgeable investor in various stock, bond, and commodity markets, and is particularly noted for his prediction of various bubbles.”

In his January 2011 newsletter, “Pavlov’s Bulls,” he has a discussion of climate and commodity prices (emphasis in original):

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This 2010 post from Brad Johnson is even more timely today given the efforts by conservatives to stop the EPA from fulfilling their mandate to regulate harmful emissions of carbon dioxide.  I have comments from the study’s author at the end.

The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to set standards for plants, cars, and factories that emit greenhouse gas pollution. Because global warming is by definition a global problem, there is support for scrapping individual source standards for a national cap-and-trade system that limits the collective pollution, instead of local emissions. However, scientific research by Mark Z. Jacobson, finds that carbon dioxide pollution is a two-fold killer “” causing not just global warming but also forming “domes” that trap other pollutants in urban areas:

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By CAP’s Lee Hamill and Valeri Vasquez.

What happens when military leaders and CEOs join forces? A nation gets a plan for action. In their February 9^th report released by Secure America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, the Energy Security Leadership Council, or ESLC, follows through on a muscular statement of purpose and minces no words:

Hostile state actors, insurgents, and terrorists have made clear their intention to use oil as a strategic weapon against the United States.

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