Comment by revelio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revelio | Hacker News Reader

Salon presents this article by a "professor of logic". She presents three pieces of evidence of manipulation by Big Oil:

1. "Another example of this subterfuge, also from the fossil fuel world, is the idea of carbon sequestration"

2. CO2 footprint calculators.

3. The UN Climate Change Conference.

To this Highly Credentialed Expert In Logic all the above are examples of manipulation by Big Oil.

Meanwhile, outside the ivory tower:

https://apnews.com/article/science-business-arts-and-enterta...

The Associated Press said Tuesday that it is assigning more than two dozen journalists across the world to cover climate issues, in the news organization’s largest single expansion paid for through philanthropic grants.

The grant is for more than $8 million over three years, and about 20 of the climate journalists will be new hires

“This far-reaching initiative will transform how we cover the climate story,” Pace said.

It’s the most recent of a series of grants the AP has received since the mid-2010s to boost coverage in health and science, religion, water issues and philanthropy itself. Some 50 AP journalists have jobs funded through grants.

For many years, Journalists and philanthropists were more wary of each other. News organizations were concerned about maintaining independence and, until the past two decades, financially secure enough not to need help. Philanthropists didn’t see the need, or how journalists could help them achieve their goals. Nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica and Texas Tribune led the way in changing minds. The Salt Lake Tribune, which in 2019 became a nonprofit to attract more donors, and The Seattle Times are other pioneers.

Ms Moore says: "You have to be alert and you have to be smart, I tell my students, because the people who would deceive you are sophisticated professionals". Quite.

You wrote this like Tucker Carlsen doing a takedown with Facts and Logic. If you had a good point, I wouldn't know, because how can I trust someone who can't even hold back derision until their done talking down to their interlocutor?

The author of the article isn't an interlocutor as there's no dialog here, just an article and a response she'll never read.

You don't like the capitalization on the Highly Credentialed Expert, presumably. The derision is there for a purpose. It's highlighting that the author presents herself as a logic professor, so we'd hope she's an expert in logic, but her argument isn't logical.

Her argument for why climate footprint calculators are a subtle manipulation by oil companies is that they're "red herrings". A red herring is a fallacy in which irrelevant information is presented alongside relevant information. Personal CO2 footprints seem pretty relevant to any discussion of climate change, but she doesn't like that because it implies that anyone other than oil companies needs to do anything. See, she assigns all emissions to oil companies alone. If you buy a car then drive it on a long trip you didn't need, the emissions don't come from you, you did nothing. Every last atom was emitted by whoever pulled it out of the ground originally. This isn't a logical way to talk about emissions because the act of putting oil in a tank doesn't emit any CO2. It's the decision to burn it that does.

BTW, if you judge an argument purely by its tone then you'd have to ignore all claims about the climate in outlets like Salon. They're all filled with derision, scorn and visceral hatred for anyone who disagrees. The Salon author says things like "If our collective philosophical literacy were better" and asserts anyone who disagrees with her are "pros" in misdirection who "assume that the average American is not much smarter than a Cocker Spaniel".

I understand why Big Oil wants to manipulate the way we think about climate change. What I don't understand is why Big News is so invested in manipulating the way we think about climate change.

Must be a lot of money and power at stake when it comes to climate change.

When will we get an article titled: "How Big News is manipulating the way you think about climate change"?

That's kinda what the AP article I cited is. They don't say it that way because, well, it's Big News reporting on itself. But you can tell it was written by someone who isn't 100% on board with this trend. The whole idea of letting rich billionaires hire whole news teams inside once-respected organizations to push their chosen agenda would have been considered a massive ethics violation 15 years ago. Now it's normal :(

The AP article you linked to doesn’t actually name the providers of the grants.

"Five organizations are contributing to the effort: the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation."

You seem to have a long history here of outright making up claims and pushing bad logic to downplay the effects of climate change [1], in case people were wondering where this is coming from.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35978553

That post is only a few sentences and makes two claims. Which is made up?

1. If there was a crisis people would be dying but deaths from weather are massively down over the last 100 years.

2. You can't actually perceive climate change with your senses because the changes are far too small and slow, so you have to rely on news media and academics

Reply on news.ycombinator.com