A lobbyist for a giant oil company admitted in a video that the industry spreads disinfo to stop efforts to combat climate change and no one really talked about it. OK, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did a segment, but that was it for the most part. What the hell is going on?
Molly Jong-Fast had Emily Atkins, climate reporter and author of the daily climate newsletter HEATED, come on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal to find out.
“Officials are investigating over like 500 deaths that could have been from the extreme heat, these wildfires and these storms. As this is happening, you have a guy saying, literally he said on camera, ‘Did we deny the science? Yes. Did we join some of these shadow groups to prevent action? Yes, but that’s not, like, illegal, you know, like we were just protecting our shareholders and protecting our investments,’” she tells Molly.
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“Not only are we seeing this absolute fuckery happening with the media, not really covering climate change very much. It’s like nothing has really happened significantly legislatively on climate,” she adds.
Atkins actually sees a lot of parallels between the response to COVID and climate change, too.
“You don’t see a global crisis that’s killing people across the world as your responsibility because it hasn’t hit you yet. And then it became too late,” she says.
She also tells Molly why she doesn’t have faith in what we know as the Green Party and why “the old guard of media needs to get their heads out of their asses.” It’s a good story: “The fuckery is immense.”
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