I've Heard This Song Before

Litigation can unearth some really juicy information. The Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, part of the Global Climate Coalition, is suing the state of California over the state's environmental regulations. In the process of discovery, they Association turned over some internal Coalition documents (the GCC ceased to exist in 2002) that were subsequently leaked to the New York Times.

Those documents show an industry bullshitting the public over the science of global warming:

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

'The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,' the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The GCC spent millions of dollars trying to convince the public of something they knew was false. Sound familiar? Sounds like the tobacco industry, which for decades tried to pretend that smoking cigarettes wasn't a health threat.

In my mind, the tobacco companies lost any benefit of the doubt in public discourse once their bullshitting was exposed. Seems only fair to treat the emissions industry the same way. So much for "clean" coal, et. al..