Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
October 12, 2019 03:36 pm PDT

Google continues to funnel vast sums to notorious climate deniers

Google and the other big tech companies are some of the most lavish funders of climate denial "think tanks" and lobbying groups, something they've been at continuously for more than six years, without interruption.

Google doesn't fund these lobbyists because they're climate deniers, nor because they're indifferent to climate change and its human costs.

Google funds these lobbyists and astroturf operations because they also lobby for lax tax enforcement, lax labor laws, lax privacy laws, and so on. The fact that these groups also lobby for the right of corporations to render our planet uninhabitable (as well as against the rights of LGBTQ people, against reproductive freedom for women, etc) is merely an acceptable cost of greasing the skids to allow Big Tech to seek profits at the expense of their workers, suppliers, customers and society.

The latest round of revelations about Google's contribution to climate deniers comes from Google's list of "politically-engaged trade associations, independent third-party organizations and other tax-exempt groups that receive the most substantial contributions from GooglesU.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team."

It includes the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who claimed responsibility for getting Trump to pull out of the Paris Accord (CEI is also pro-monopoly, anti-Net Neutrality, pro-binding arbitration, anti-Obamacare, anti-Consumer Financial Protection Board, and fronts for the monopolists who dominate oil, tobacco, and alcohol).

Other recipients of "substantial contributions" from Google include the State Policy Network, who front for The Heartland Institute, a radical climate-science denial thinktank with major Koch funding. SPN's actively solicits signatures for a "climate pledge" that holds that "our natural environment is getting better...there is no climate crisis."

Google "substantially contributes" to the American Conservative Union (led by a Koch operative who takes credit for the climate gridlock in DC), the American Enterprise Institute (another prominent, lavish climate denial spender) and the Americans for Tax Reform whose radical anti-taxation agenda also includes condemnation of climate action as "corporate welfare."

Google funds the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, and Heritage Action, all of whom have led on climate denial. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/vCZWHWYNJa8/who-killed-the-world-2.html

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article