Blog

Obama may be talking the climate change talk in Paris, but back home the Republican Party (GOP) is doing everything in its power to make sure there is no deal.

For twenty five years there has been one company that beyond all others has tried to undermine the UN Climate talks. For those twenty five years it has obfuscated the truth about climate by pouring millions into the funding of a network of climate sceptic and denial think tanks and politicians.

One of the most detailed studies of climate denial has concluded what many researchers have long known - that funding by the fossil fuel industry created a corrosive “ecosystem of influence” on both the content and language of the climate debate, especially in the US.

As I pointed out last week, one of the ground-breaking developments in the lead up to the Paris climate talks later this month has been the announcement by the New York Attorney’s office that it was investigating Exxon for misleading the public and shareholders about climate change.

To start with one huge, massive, significant step forward. Victories do not come sweeter than this. After years of campaigning by millions of people from grass-roots activists, First Nations, farmers and ranchers to environmental groups such as Oil Change International, Sierra Club, 350.org and many others, President Obama announced on Friday that the controversial Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline is dead.

There must be a certain pleasure if you are a climate activist in blockading a coal mine which is on the land of one of the country’s leading climate sceptics.

Irony. You have got to love irony. Just imagine, in a cartoonish kind of way, that there is a climate villain out there defying all logic and reason and hurting the planet at its most vulnerable point.

David Koch, the climate change-denying billionaire, currently sits on the board of two of our nation’s largest and most respected natural history museums. This needs to change.

For nearly two decades avid researcher, Kert Davies, has been hunting climate deniers and exposing their links to the fossil fuel industry.

Last week the polling company, Ipsos-Mori, published its first ever Global Trends Report, which examined our attitudes to a whole host of topics such as technology, privacy, marriage, migration, health, globalisation, inequality, science and the environment.