We promise that next week it'll be back to bad news only here, but for the third day in a row we're going to do a bit of celebrating, because once again, deniers are losing!
Lesley Clark reported yesterday at E&E News that "Minnesota’s highest court has delivered a victory to Attorney General Keith Ellison in legal action surrounding the state’s climate liability lawsuit against the oil and gas industry."
More specifically, the Minnesota Supreme Court decided not to let tobacco-turned-fossil-fuel-backed lawyer and harasser of climate scientists and public servants Chris Horner's front group try and recreate Climategate, but this time with emails from Attorney General Keith Ellison's office concerning their litigation against fossil fuel companies.
Meanwhile, it was heartening to see that CFACT is so desperate for signs of its effectiveness that it's emailing people to brag about the "six hit pieces referencing [Marc] Morano since July."
Two of those are from MediaMatters, one where Morano is mentioned by name only once, in passing, and another where his appearance was noted in a larger piece on Tucker Carlson. The other four are from yours truly, who CFACT describes as seeming "to have a love-hate relationship" with Morano.
Which is true, in that we love how easy it is Morano makes it to write about how deniers are wrong on purpose for money by constantly saying dumb stuff, like that some 1930's New Deal book is proof of a 2022 plot for world domination through a Great Reset. The other example they linked also only mentioned Morano in passing, as one of many disinfo-spreaders proving YouTube is failing to enforce its demonetization policy. Not exactly evidence of effectiveness.
They unfortunately did not clear up the mystery of whether our memory that Marc Morano told Bill Nye that he uses Ambien to sleep at night is accurate, but the fact that even our petty sniping is enough to warrant an email blast to subscribers shows how little evidence they actually do have that they're making a real impact. People ridiculing you does not necessarily mean they're threatened by you. Sometimes it just means you're ridiculous.
Because this is, admittedly, not exactly a big news outlet with the largest readership in the world, and we're happy about that! This space is for people who have to deal with deniers, the general public shouldn't have to know about professional goobers!
Similarly, if some equally small-time, dedicated opposition outlet like the Daily Caller were to run something on anti-climate disinfo efforts, that wouldn't be worth writing home about either.
But if the paper that does have one of the largest subscriber lists, the Wall Street Journal, took the time to complain about something its opposition is doing, that might be something worth celebrating!
And what do you know, Thursday's print edition of the Wall Street Journal, going to some 2 million subscribers, featured an editorial complaining about "the climate-change censorship campaign."
Yes, one of the biggest papers in the country decided that a letter from green groups asking Big Tech companies to include climate disinformation when complying with the EU's Digital Services Act was worth its column inches and readers' attention.
Given that Bloomberg, Common Defense and The Hill were the only other coverage, landing news of the letter on the WSJ's pages was quite a score, if even in the shape of it calling on Elon Musk to use Twitter to "shut down the climate censors."
Sounds like the WSJ's the one that wants to censor its opponents!