Global Warming and Energy

Chevron stands up to green blackmail and wins.

"The initial expert assessments of the damage had been conducted by a man driving past the pollution sites at 50 mph; the supposedly neutral and independent expert testimony had been in fact written by a US environmental company in the pay of Donziger; the presiding judge had been bribed with a promised $500,000; the judge's decision had been written for him by the plaintiffs; Ecuador's left wing president Rafael Correa - a close ally of the late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela - had cheerled the affair."

It sounds like the plaintiff's attorney adopted his tactics straight from US prosecutors. It's standard in the US conviction system for prosecutors to engage in sloppy investigations, the outcome of which is predetermined; the supposedly neutral and independent experts are on the payroll of prosecutors; there's obviously a "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" agreement between prosecutor and judge since they work for the same organization; prosecutors submit information for judge's decisions; and in bigger cases, government bigwigs convict the defendant in the press long before jury selections begins.

"There have been several long articles about the Chevron/Ecuador story - one in The New Yorker, one in Vanity Fair, one in Bloomberg Business Week - each one more sympathetic to Donziger than to Chevron.
The same has been true virtually everywhere the story has been reported in the media from The New York Times and the Telegraph to the Guardian and The Huffington Post.
This isn't just lazy journalism. It's a salutory reminder of the degree to which our media, not just on the left but in corners of the centre right, is in thrall to the green propaganda machine."

There's no doubt they control the media.

"The reason this case is so important is because it very nearly didn't happen. Though environmental activists like Michael Mann, James Hansen and Al Gore often like to claim that their enemies are in the pay of Big Oil, the truth is the exact opposite.
Few corporate entities pump quite so much money into environmental causes as the Big Oil companies - Shell sponsored the Guardian's environment pages; BP invested heavily in renewables as part of its Beyond Petroleum rebranding under the card-carrying greenie CEO Lord Browne - because for years they have been running scared of the green movement, because they're big enough to wear the additional costs of green regulation and because it suits them to "greenwash" their image."

They can afford green regulations. Their smaller competition can't.

Neither CBS nor ABC has aired a skeptical scientist in over 1,300 days to promote the false premise of consensus.