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Tag: GB News

  • GB News Owner’s Hedge Fund Has $2.2 Billion Fossil Fuel Investments

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    Original article by Sam Bright and Joey Grostern republished from DeSmog.

    One of the owners of GB News runs a hedge fund that has a major financial stake in more than 100 oil and gas firms, DeSmog can reveal. 

    This news comes after former prime minister Boris Johnson was announced as a new presenter on the television broadcaster on Friday.

    An investigation by DeSmog in May found that one in three GB News presenters had spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while more than half had attacked climate action. GB News presenters have used their platforms to urge the UK to “drill, baby, drill” for more coal, oil and gas.

    Paul Marshall is the chairman and chief investment officer of Marshall Wace, a London-based hedge fund that he co-founded in 1997.

    Marshall Wace is now one of the world’s largest hedge funds – an investment vehicle that bets on rising and falling share prices – with around $63 billion (£51.9 billion) in assets under management.

    According to DeSmog’s analysis of Marshall Wace’s filings with the US financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), his fund owns shares worth $2.2 billion (£1.8 billion) in fossil fuel firms. This includes companies that specialise in extracting, refining, transporting and distributing fossil fuels.

    In its latest SEC filing, for the quarter ending 30 June 2023, Marshall Wace reports a $213 million (£175.6 million) shareholding in the oil and gas supermajor Chevron, as well as stakes in Shell, Equinor, and 109 other fossil fuel companies. 

    The value of Marshall Wace’s stake in Chevron, the world’s eighth largest fossil fuel company, has more than doubled from $105 million (£86.6 million) to $213 million (£175.6 million) in two years, even though its total number of shares and equity options has increased over that period by just 35 percent. 

    The hedge fund’s stake in Chevron appears to be one of its top 50 most valuable investments, among the thousands of companies in which it currently holds shares.

    This reflects the soaring value of fossil fuel companies following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which pushed up the price of fossil fuels and therefore the profits of suppliers. At the end of June 2021, Chevron’s share price stood at $107.30 (£88.27), rising to $157.35 (£129.45) by June 2023.

    Marshall Wace held shares in 112 fossil fuel companies as of June 2023. Two years earlier, in June 2021, the hedge fund held shares in 50 of these firms. The value of the stakes in these 50 firms almost trebled over the period, from $565.4 million (£466.1 million) to $1.4 billion (£1.15 billion). 

    “I’ve always wondered why anyone would invest in comically inept, loss-making GB News,” said John Nicolson MP, a member of Parliament’s influential Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee. “Step forward one major investor who makes bundles of cash from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, a disturbing number of GB News presenters question climate science. I’m beginning to see a connection.”

    Marshall Wace has 22 partners and its latest company accounts, for the period ending February 2022, show that they shared bumper profits of more than £720 million as the firm’s annual turnover jumped 62 percent to more than £1.5 billion. The average salary at Marshall Wace is £561,000 a year.

    Paul Marshall, who is one of these partners, is also a lead investor in the startup broadcaster GB News, holding a 45 percent stake. Marshall, estimated to be worth £800 million, reportedly invested £10 million in GB News when it first launched two years ago. In August 2022, he joined the Dubai-based investment firm Legatum Group in a £60 million capital injection and buyout of GB News’s other major investor, Discovery. 

    On the announcement of the buyout, Marshall said: “This is more than a financial investment. As investors we’re proud of what GB News [sic] doing for media plurality in the UK, bringing fresh perspectives to the national conversation on issues that matter to real Britain.”

    Marshall also owns UnHerd, a publication founded in 2017 that claims to give a platform to marginalised views. UnHerd has published multiple articles and videos critical of climate action, including an interview in July with Bjorn Lomborg about “how global warming will save lives”.

    Marshall is involved in other projects that are linked to key opponents of climate action. He is one of the directors of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new group established by the backers of GB News. The ARC advisory board features a host of individuals who have denied climate science, downplayed the extent of the climate crisis, and attacked net zero policies. A number of these advisers are speaking at a conference hosted by ARC in London this week, alongside Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch.

    It has been reported that Marshall is preparing to expand his media investments and is “readying a bid” for the right-wing Telegraph newspaper and Spectator magazine, with both expected to be put up for sale in the coming weeks.

    The Conservative Party has also received funds from Marshall, who donated £500,000 in 2019. 

    GB News lost more than £30 million during its first year on air and has been hit by multiple scandals over its use of Conservative MPs as presenters, its alleged lack of impartiality, and its habit of platforming of conspiracy theories. 

    The broadcast regulator Ofcom ruled in March that Mark Steyn had broken its rules on harmful content by claiming on GB News that the third Covid vaccine was causing higher infection, hospitalisation and deaths. Steyn’s claims were “potentially harmful and materially misleading,” Ofcom ruled. Steyn, who has also questioned the existence of climate change, resigned from the channel in February after GB News reportedly demanded he personally pay the fines issued if found in breach of the broadcasting code.

    Ofcom currently has 12 open investigations into GB News. Its TV output reached 2.87 million viewers in December, while its website had a UK audience of 5.7 million in April. 

    Paul Marshall’s investments in GB News and UnHerd have been made in a personal capacity and there is no evidence that Marshall Wace’s investments have influenced the editorial output of either outlet. 

    Marshall Wace claims on its website that “sustainable investing is an organisational focus” and that the firm is “committed to achieving positive social and environmental impact”.

    GB News and UnHerd did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. Marshall Wace declined to comment.

    ‘State Control Over Your Life’

    Since it launched in June 2021, GB News has been a prominent mouthpiece for individuals who support more fossil fuel extraction and oppose the UK’s target to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050.

    The UK’s 2050 net zero target is legally binding and is backed by the world’s top climate scientists. They agree that rapidly cutting carbon emissions is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, including drought, famine, and ill health.

    On 5 November last year, GB News host Neil Oliver used his show to attack “net zero [and] the green agenda”, which he claimed was part of “a hellish potpourri of policies guaranteed to condemn hundreds of millions to death by poverty, death by starvation”. 

    Host Nigel Farage – who has a long record of opposing climate action – used his GB News platform to launch a campaign for a Brexit-style referendum on net zero. 

    GB News host and Conservative MP Philip Davies was one of five MPs to vote against the Climate Change Act in 2008. Fellow presenters and Tory MPs Jacob Rees Mogg, Lee Anderson and Esther McVey are all supporters of the anti-climate action Net Zero Scrutiny Group of backbench Conservative MPs. 

    This opposition to net zero is often tied to a denial of established climate science, which has been expressed repeatedly by GB News presenters. 

    During last summer’s record UK heatwave, on 16 July 2022, then GB News host Calvin Robinson accused the Met Office of “alarmism”, adding: “Man-made climate change, I don’t buy it, because how much of an impact do we really make if we’re talking about carbon levels?”

    Five days later, presenter Beverley Turner called summer heat warnings “fear mongering” in order to “facilitate state control over your life”.

    The IPCC has warned that false and misleading information “undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency” of cutting emissions.

    Several GB News hosts have also been vocal about their support for policies that would maintain and even extend the UK’s reliance on oil and gas. 

    Flagship presenter Dan Wootton argued on 10 March 2022 that the war in Ukraine meant “for now the rush to net zero must die”. He urged the government to “frack, frack, frack” for shale gas. Wootton has recently been suspended by the channel.

    In a 9 December show, host Mark Dolan praised plans to open a new coal mine in Cumbria. He said the UK should “drill, baby, drill” for coal, oil and gas,  adding: “I think the push for net zero here is another element of liberal progressivism which is infecting the West.”

    The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that any new fossil fuel projects would be incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5C.

    ‘Genuinely Independent Thinking’

    Marshall has defended GB News’s output on the basis that “in a world of too much groupthink”, the broadcaster provides a “space for genuinely independent thinking”. 

    However, Marshall appears to share the opposition to net zero, and support for more fossil fuel extraction, expressed by a number of GB News presenters.

    In July, Marshall shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) from Reform UK Leader Richard Tice, on the subject of Norway’s approval of new oil and gas projects worth $18 million. Tice’s post claimed that these fossil fuel resources are “essential to Europe’s energy security” and that the UK “could have these jobs and prosperity. But selfish wallies in Westminster want to make us poorer and colder with net zero”.

    Tice has recently been hired by GB News.

    A month later, Marshall claimed in a post that “The public are still being shamefully ill informed by the BBC about differing views on climate change policy”. This post linked to an article by Charles Moore, which argued that “Voters can see the disparity between the highly speculative and distant achievement of global net zero and the concrete and imminent prospect of becoming colder and poorer”. 

    In fact, the UK government’s failure to implement green reforms has added an estimated £2.5 billion to domestic energy bills due to the rising costs of fossil fuels and poor energy efficiency in homes. A reliance on gas has also cost the UK an additional £50-60 billion since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, equivalent to around £1,000 for every adult.

    Original article by Sam Bright and Joey Grostern republished from DeSmog.

  • Cabinet Ministers Set to Speak at GB News Linked Conference Alongside Climate Science Deniers

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    Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

    Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0
    Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0

    The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, run by the owners of GB News, is hosting an event next week that it claims will be attended by 100 parliamentarians from across the world.

    Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch are due to speak at a major event next week alongside leading critics of climate action, DeSmog can report.

    The three-day conference is being hosted in London by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which shares its directors with the startup broadcaster GB News. 

    ARC was launched in March to address six “fundamental issues of our time”, including “energy and resources” and “environmental stewardship”. The group is fronted by psychologist Jordan Peterson and its advisory board includes senior politicians and academics from the UK and abroad.

    As revealed by DeSmog, a number of ARC advisers have a history of attacking net zero policies and questioning climate science, many of whom are speaking at next week’s conference.

    Levelling Up Secretary Gove and Business and Trade Secretary Badenoch will be speaking alongside these individuals at the conference, which culminates on 1 November in a public event at the 20,000-seat O2 arena.

    Peterson, who is headlining the O2 event, has regularly posted about “climate apocalypse insanity” and “eco fascists” to his millions of online followers. He claimed in a Telegraph article in October that “eco-extremists are leading the world towards despair, poverty, and starvation”. 

    Gove and Badenoch will also be speaking alongside Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who has called climate change a “hoax”, and former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott – a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group.

    Badenoch has not always been supportive of climate action. During the 2022 Conservative leadership contest, she suggested that the UK government’s legally binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 should be pushed back.

    ARC claims that over 1,000 people will be attending its conference, “including over 100 parliamentarians from across Europe, the UK, and Australia, as well as a delegation of congressional leaders from the USA”.

    This news comes after UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month watered down a number of flagship policies designed to achieve net zero emissions – moves that were welcomed by climate science deniers. 

    ARC, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and the Department for Business and Trade were approached for comment.

    ARC’s Origins

    ARC has extensive ties to GB News, which has prominently platformed climate science denial since its launch in June 2021. 

    According to Companies House, the same five individuals who own GB News’s parent company are also the people who control the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Limited: Paul Marshall, Alan McCormick, Richard Douglas, Mark Stoleson, and Christopher Chandler.

    McCormick, Chandler, and Stoleson are all executives at Legatum Group, the Dubai-based investment fund that, alongside Marshall, is a principal financial backer of GB News. 

    ARC’s CEO, Tory peer Baroness Stroud, formerly served as chief executive of the Legatum Institute think tank, founded by the Legatum Group. The institute received $77,000 in 2018 from the Charles Koch Foundation, funded by the proceeds of Koch Industries, one of the largest privately owned companies in the United States, which trades heavily in fossil fuels.

    Conservative peer Helena Morrissey, one of the directors of GB News’s parent company, is an ARC adviser, as is ex-GB News presenter Colin Brazier. Two Conservative MPs – Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates – are also ARC advisers. 

    Morissey, Marshall, Kruger and Cates are all set to speak at the ARC conference.

    GB News has been a prominent opponent of climate action since it launched in June 2021. A DeSmog investigation in May revealed that one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while half attacked climate policies.

    Its presenters have claimed that net zero will cause “death by poverty and starvation”, that the policy “poses an existential threat to the free world”, and have called for the UK to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels. 

    ARC’s 44-member advisory board includes a number of climate science deniers and leading critics of climate action.

    Writer Douglas Murray, who will be speaking alongside Peterson at the O2, has suggested that climate policies will “impoverish” Brits, and has argued that “terrifying our children with doom-mongering propaganda on climate change is nothing less than abuse”. 

    ARC adviser Tony Abbott has previously said that “climate change is probably doing good” and is a long-standing advocate for coal power, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.

    Abbott is joined on the ARC advisory board by fellow ex-Australian prime minister John Howard, who told Sky News in March that he was “increasingly sceptic [sic]” about climate policies, adding that Australia should “continue to benefit” from coal and gas.  

    ARC adviser Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be speaking at the conference alongside Gove, Badenoch, Abbott and Howard, recently tweeted to his 1.3 million followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) that the “real emergency isn’t climate change, it’s the man-made disaster of climate change policies that threaten U.S. prosperity.”

    Tupy and Cato

    ARC also plans to publish regular research papers, which it claims will be “written by leading thinkers and researchers across the world” and “provide deep analysis and offer solutions to the problems we face”.

    The first papers were published earlier this month, including one from Cato Institute researcher Marian Tupy on the topic of “superabundance” – in other words, if the world and its natural resources can sustain population growth.

    In the report, Tupy suggests that critics of established climate science have been censored by the media. He claims that “Inconvenient questions about ‘sensitive’ issues, such as the extent of climate change and the long-term threats posed by global warming, are being silenced in the media, and their proponents are being condemned as ‘denialists’”. 

    In reality, climate science denial is given a significant platform in the press and via social media. DeSmog reported in September that otherwise fringe climate crisis deniers are being exposed to millions more people due to the promotional efforts of ARC’s Jordan Peterson.

    Tupy echoes Peterson’s language in his ARC study, claiming that the “precursors” to “extreme environmentalism” include “fascism and communism”. He claims that extreme environmentalism maintains a hold “on the public imagination, thus contributing to a sense of despair and decline”.

    Tupy has commented on the topics of natural resources and global warming for a number of years. 

    Interviewed in April 2021 about “the true risk of global warming”, Tupy said that “I’m more or less convinced that human economic activity contributes to slight increases in global warming that we are currently experiencing”. 

    However, he suggested that the planet was merely “lukewarming”, and that “it is not… an existential crisis”. Tupy argued that humanity would be able to “adapt and technologically innovate” its way out of the problem. He said this would happen by slowly lessening our reliance on fossil fuels and creating solutions that allow people to adapt to the consequences of climate change. 

    “We don’t need to do it immediately; we don’t need to do it in the scope of 10 or 20 years, but it would be nice if say in 40 years time most of the world’s energy was provided by energy sources that do not spew CO2 into the atmosphere,” he said.

    For 21 years, Tupy has worked at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C.. He currently holds the position of senior fellow at the group’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. 

    The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Charles Koch of Koch Industries. Charles Koch and his late brother David have channelled millions into right-wing organisations over recent decades, donating almost $9 million to the Cato Institute between 1997 and 2015. 

    The institute has downplayed the need to take urgent action on climate change and has in the past suggested that lawmakers shouldn’t pass any legislation to restrict the emissions of carbon dioxide.

    Tupy’s arguments around “lukewarming” and technological innovation reflect the statements of the Cato Institute towards global warming. 

    “Fortunately, and contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding climate change, there is ample time to develop such technologies, which will require substantial capital investment by individuals,” claims the institute’s public statement on global warming. 

    In December 2015, Patrick J. Michaels and Chip Knappenberger wrote a Cato Institute “working paper” making the “case for lukewarming”.

    “[W]e conclude that future global warming will occur at a pace substantially lower than that upon which US federal and international actions to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are founded. It is high time to rethink those efforts,” they wrote.

    In 2009, Cato’s “Handbook for Policymakers” on global warming began with the suggestions that Congress should “pass no legislation restricting emissions of carbon dioxide”. In the same year, more than 100 scientists signed a statement, circulated by the institute, disputing the climate change “consensus”.

    A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.

    The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”. 

    The IPCC also states that global warming will cause “increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, heavy precipitation, and, in some regions, agricultural and ecological droughts; an increase in the proportion of intense tropical cyclones; and reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost.”

    The IPCC’s chair, Jim Skea, has said that “Without immediate action to reduce emissions and adapt to continued warming, threats to planetary health and human systems are inevitable.”

    The Cato Institute and Marian Tupy were approached for comment.

    Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

    Related: GOP Climate Denier Vivek Ramaswamy Headlining Jordan Peterson’s ARC Conference

  • Jordan Peterson Generates Millions of YouTube Hits for Climate Crisis Deniers

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    Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

    The conservative influencer has ‘become a central cog in the denial machine,’ says climate scientist Michael Mann.

    ByGeoff Dembicki on 5 Sept, 2023 @ 09:46 PDT

    Imag eof climate change denier Jordan Peterson.
    ‘Climate change is the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card,’ Peterson recently tweeted. Image:  Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.

    Fringe climate crisis deniers who claim that the earth is “cooling” and greenhouse emissions are good for “biological productivity” are getting exposed to millions more people than they normally would on YouTube thanks to conservative influencer Jordan Peterson. 

    That’s according to viewership data newly reviewed by DeSmog, which reveals a massive visibility boost for public figures who’ve been active in the climate denial movement for years but whose ideas — such as the claim that plants are growing much better due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — are now rarely taken seriously by most legacy media outlets.  

    They include climate crisis deniers like Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Richard Lindzen, Alex Epstein and Bjorn Lomborg. Despite having either a modest YouTube presence or none at all, these figures have collectively garnered nearly five million views after being interviewed on Peterson’s channel, which has 7.31 million subscribers. The New York Times, by comparison, has 4.33 million YouTube subscribers. 

    This is especially worrying to climate scientists and disinformation experts because Peterson for years has been actively courting alienated males in their 20s and younger. Traditionally, people who are “doubtful” or “dismissive” of climate change have tended to skew older. Peterson is now planting doubt via his podcast and social media posts about the severity and urgency of global warming in the minds of younger generations.

    “‘Climate change,’” he tweeted in June, is “the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card.”

    And he is now in the process of putting real political power behind the climate crisis denial movement. In late October and early November, a new group Peterson founded called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) will hold in London, England, its first ever meetings. It has on its advisory board Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who during GOP debates in August said that “the climate change agenda is a hoax.”

    Image of climate change denier Vivek Ramaswamy.
    ARC advisor Ramaswamy: ‘the climate change agenda is a hoax.’ Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.

    Advisors to the group include Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who earlier this year argued on Peterson’s podcast that “climate change is a real problem, but it’s not this catastrophic end of the world.” Lomborg didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog. Other advisors are Texas Republican congressmember Dan Crenshaw; Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee; former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott; and dozens of conservative policymakers, financiers, activists and journalists from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.  

    The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is being supported by founders and leaders of the Legatum Group, a Dubai-based investment firm behind The Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit think tank in London with close ties to the U.K. Conservative Party. The Legatum Group is a leading investor in the rightwing British television network GB News. Read DeSmog’s in-depth report on ARC’s U.K. links here.

    Experts argue this makes Peterson a key organizer at the global level for efforts to oppose and delay action on climate change. “I would say that Jordan Peterson has become a central cog in the denial machine,” Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, told DeSmog. 

    “It’s concerning that he’s poisoning the minds of so many influenceable people with his pseudo-intellectual and pseudoscientific drivel, drivel that is being weaponized in the right-wing assault on science and reason,” Mann added, referring to Peterson’s frequent downplaying of climate risks, including the conservative influencer’s insistence that rising levels of carbon dioxide are good for the planet.  

    Spreading Denial, Making Money

    Peterson’s influence depends to a significant degree on his gigantic YouTube following, which is larger than that of the liberal-leaning news network MSNBC. It also surpasses the following of The Daily Wire, a digital conservative outlet co-founded by Ben Shapiro that has a partnership with Peterson, which last year claimed a yearly revenue of $100 million.   

    Google, which owns YouTube, announced a policy in October 2021 prohibiting advertisements on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Elaborating on the policy in an email to DeSmog, a Google spokesperson wrote that “Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.” 

    Yet a Peterson interview from this year entitled “The Great Climate Con,” during which he framed rising greenhouse gas emissions as a positive for making the planet “green in the driest areas,” was accompanied by ads for Birch Gold and Masterworks. Climate scientists say that is a misleading argument because it doesn’t take into account the massively negative effects that intensified droughts, wildfires and heatwaves due to global warming have on plants and ecosystems. 

    “Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”— Google spokesperson

    “We’ve reviewed the videos,” the Google spokesperson wrote, “and did not take action on them.”

    “What’s the point of having policies if you’re not going to enforce them?” Claire Atkin, co-founder of the anti-disinformation watchdog group Check My Ads, told DeSmog. “YouTube and its ecosystem of marketing tools allow Jordan Peterson to not only spread [misleading statements], but to make money off them.”

    Peterson didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog about his current income nor his recent shift towards promoting climate crisis denial online. 

    ‘Twisted Symbiotic Relationship’

    One example of Peterson’s amplifying effect is his interview with Judith Curry, a former Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist who now does consulting work for clients including petroleum companies and natural gas traders. In testimony to Congress in 2015 she claimed incorrectly that recent data “calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.” 

    While appearing on Peterson’s podcast earlier this year she argued that due to “natural variability” the planet could grow cooler over the next three decades rather than warmer, a position with no credible scientific basis, especially considering that July was the hottest month in recorded human history. Posted to YouTube, where Curry has no official channel, the interview garnered more than 960,000 views. She didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog.

    Conservative author and fossil fuel activist Alex Epstein had a modest YouTube following of 15.2 thousand subscribers when he was interviewed by Peterson. “It’s out!” he tweeted after the video was posted. It now has over 1.04 million views, a significant boost considering that the vast majority of videos on his page have under 500 views.  

    “I think Jordan Peterson has become more interested in humanistic thinking about fossil fuels,” Epstein wrote in an email to DeSmog. “He has become even more convinced, thanks to my work and others, that the popular movement to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use is based on invalid thinking methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values.” 

    Image of climate change denier Alex Epstein.
    Most videos on Epstein’s YouTube page receive fewer than 500 views.  Image: Gage Skidmore, wikimwdia,  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

    During his interview with Peterson, Epstein claimed that “It’s kind of obvious if you have a warmer world with more CO2, it’s a more tropical world with more life. It’s a more green world in the life sense of green. And yet the green movement hates it.” 

    Peterson has echoed that statement frequently in his podcast, despite actual scientists saying that greening caused by rising greenhouse gases shouldn’t be celebrated. He claimed during his interview with Steven Koonin, author of a book on climate change science called Unsettled, that “since the year 2000 the world has greened by 15 percent … why the hell isn’t that good news?” That interview has since been viewed more than 1.1 million times. Koonin didn’t respond to a media request. 

    “Peterson—who doesn’t appear to know much at all about the science or politics of global warming—has become an influential promoter of illogical ideas,” Benjamin Franta, a senior research fellow in climate litigation at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, told DeSmog.

    During an interview in 2022 on Joe Rogan’s podcast, for instance, Peterson argued that the climate is too complex a system to be modeled accurately, “and that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.” “He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong,” one climate scientist told the Guardian. 

    Though Peterson is among the most visible promoters of climate crisis denial, he’s also part of a wider digital network. Researchers with Climate Action Against Disinformation and the Center for Countering Digital Hate earlier this year found 200 videos on YouTube promoting delay or skepticism around measures to address the climate emergency, garnering nearly 74 million views altogether.    

    “[There’s] a twisted symbiotic relationship between these platforms and climate denial content,” Erika Seiber, a climate disinformation spokesperson at the nonprofit Friends of the Earth who is part of the disinfo coalition, told DeSmog. “YouTube runs ads on the content, incentivizing the creation of yet more misleading content, which allows deniers like Peterson to flourish and for their networks to grow.” 

    Enabled by Google and YouTube, climate crisis denial could be having real-world influence, disinformation experts say. A poll this summer suggested that 72 percent of U.S. Republican supporters think that the economy should be prioritized over addressing climate change, a 13 point increase from 2018, even as cities sweltered under record heat waves. Conservatives are opposing coastal wind turbines under the pretense of protecting whales. Republican Congressmembers in June passed bills protecting gas stoves in people’s homes. 

    “You can see how climate denial content from Peterson and others has informed policy discussions,” Seiber said. “It’s incredibly concerning.”

    Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

  • GB News hosts ‘in hysterics’ over climate change warnings

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    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/gb-news-dont-look-u-climate-change-interview-laughing-354968/

    In an eerie callback to a scene from Don’t Look Up, two GB News hosts had a bizarre reaction to the severe impacts of climate change.

    …

    Alex de Koning was invited to speak on the channel, after devastating wildfires in North America and intense flooding in Pakistan claimed many lives earlier this year. However, the activist didn’t exactly have a captive audience to speak to.

    Hosts Andrew Pierce and Beverley Turner met de Koning’s climate change warnings with outright skepticism. The pair questioned every point raised by the Just Stop Oil member, and instead, burst into a fit of hysterics while he addressed the global warming death toll.

    …

    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/gb-news-dont-look-u-climate-change-interview-laughing-354968/

  • Jacob Rees-Mogg’s GB News show under Ofcom investigation

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    https://leftfootforward.org/2023/07/jacob-rees-moggs-gb-news-show-under-ofcom-investigation/

    Image of Climte-change denier and Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg.
    Image of Climate-change denier and Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg. Chris McAndrew public-domain image via WikiMedia. Please see Notes.

    An episode of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s State of the Nation GB News show faces an Ofcom investigation on whether it complied with the rules of the broadcast regulator.

    The programme in question covered a breaking news story about the civil trial verdict involving Donald Trump, which led to 40 complaints being made to Ofcom. The investigation will focus on whether the programme complied with rules which prevent politicians acting as newsreaders.

    The regulator said, “our investigation will look at the programme’s compliance with our rules which prevent politicians from acting as newsreaders in any news programmes, unless exceptionally, it is editorially justified”.

    The right-wing news channel that boasts Nigel Farage as a presenter and most recently Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, is no stranger to Ofcom scrutiny. An investigation remains ongoing into the Saturday Morning show with Esther and Philip broadcast on GB News, related to the same rule.

    …

    https://leftfootforward.org/2023/07/jacob-rees-moggs-gb-news-show-under-ofcom-investigation/

    Notes. I claim that Jacob Rees-Mogg is a Climate-change denier and Brexiteer. These claims are confirmed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Rees-Mogg