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Today's Top News
02.20.12 - 1:32 PM
Thank AT&T, Bud, Pfizer Et Al For Heartland's Non-Global Warming
At least 19 publicly traded companies gave the climate-denial think tank Heartland Institute over $1.3 million for an array of projects, including one to teach kids that global warming is a hoax - a lie the LA Times blasts today. From ThinkProgress Green.
The companies backing the Heartland Institute:
| DENIERGATE COMPANIES | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Company | Ticker Symbol | 2010-2011 Total | Project Code |
| Altria Client Services Inc. | MO | $90,000 | BTN |
| Amgen, USA | AMGN | $25,000 | HCN |
| Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. | BUD | $5,000 | ITTN |
| AT&T | T | $100,000 | ITTN |
| BB&T | BBT | $16,105 | ECN |
| Comcast Corporation | CMCSA | $35,000 | ITTN |
| Diageo | DEO | $10,000 | GO |
| Eli Lilly & Company | LLY | $25,000 | HCN |
| General Motors Foundation | GM | $30,000 | SRN |
| GlaxoSmithKline | GSK | $50,000 | HCN |
| KCI | KCI | $115,000 | FIRE |
| LKQ Corporation | LKQX | $24,500 | FIRE |
| Microsoft Corporation | MSFT | $59,908 | ITTN |
| Nucor Corporation | NUE | $502,000 | ECN |
| PepsiCo, Inc. | PEP | $5,000 | BTN |
| Pfizer | PFE | $130,000 | HCN |
| Reynolds American Inc. | RAI | $110,000 | FIRE |
| Time Warner Cable | TWC | $20,000 | ITTN |
| XL Group | XL | $35,000 | FIRE |
| Projects: BTN=Budget & Tax News; ECN=Environment & Climate News; FIRE=Finance Insurance and Real Estate ; GO=General Operating; HCN=Health Care News; ITTN=Information Technology & Telecom News; SRN=School Reform News. |
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29 Comments so far
Show AllI was a bit surprised to see so many pharma corps on that list. Excuse my ignorance but what motivation does the pharmaceutical industry have to deny global warming?
These corps are in tha same boat as the flat worlders. >_<
"what motivation does the pharmaceutical industry have to deny global warming?"
It probably doesn't have any particular motivation in debunking the AGW myth.
According to its own website "(The Heartland Institute's) mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems."
Basically it's a free market think tank. But if Abby would say that it would kinda sound like blah, blah to most people. It's much more efficient to associate it with one thing that would resonate and ignore everything else. It's good political strategy on the part of "ThinkProgress Green".
Pharma are usually anti-envrionment. They've got all kinds of crap in our drinking water from their toxic dumping. Every now and then if you read about clean water you'll hear how big cities have things like antidepressants and dangerous drugs in their water from their local pharma companies.
Here's one where 24 major metro areas in the US found pharma in the drinking water:
http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/drugs-in-our-drinking-water
-----------------
Just google, "antidepressants in drinking water," and you'll find there is a whole lost of drugs and hormones in there.
After that google "pharmaceutical dumping"
Here's a nice one:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/20/us-water-contaminated-by-_n_188852.html
Or better yet, deliberately put lithium in the drinking water to create a more docile society.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/science-scope/why-putting-anti-depressants-in-our-water-supply-is-perfectly-reasonable/11613
Not to mention that petroleum products are used to produce their drugs!
Question :what motivation does the pharmaceutical industry have to deny global warming?
Answer: Money..what else?
Money is the obvious answer. I was a bit more interested in how global warming affects the profits of these pharma corps. Will not the cancer, and boner pill market be lucrative regardless of the planet surface temp? Where does global warming cut into thier profitablity and for what reason?
Google. It looks like it's because global warming is an environmental problem. Pharma companies are into dumping in the environment - mostly land and water but it looks like chemicals are going into the air too.
There's lot's of misc. stuff:
Inhalers And Pharmaceutical Companies: How Environmental Regulations Were Used Against Asthma Sufferers - Look further and it's about CFC's.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/11/inhalers-pharmaceutical-environment-regulation_n_894865.html
----------
Air Pollution has pharma as an offender:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution
" Ammonia, either directly or indirectly, is also a building block for the synthesis of many pharmaceuticals. Although in wide use, ammonia is both caustic and hazardous."
"including one to teach kids that global warming is a hoax."
Abby, you're so 20th century. Get with the program. It's called climate change. That way it covers any and all meteorological phenomena.
It also matches what Lyndon Johnson called it in a speech to Congress in 1965.
Chameleon, you watch too much tv. Global Warming is the correct term. Climate change is a framing phrase that conservative think-tanks invented to make it all sound, you know, kinda harmless. Luntz advises that, “’Climate change’ is less frightening than ’global warming.’
Check this link for Luntz double-speak;
http://www.ewg.org/project/luntz-memo-environment
"Global Warming is the correct term."
Why isn't it called the IPGW then (instead of IPCC).
Dmadrone, you are mistaken. Climatologists have used both terms all along. (A quick look at scientific literature from years back will demonstrate that to you if you're incredulous.) They're both correct; they merely point to different aspects of the phenomenon.
As for one term being the more alarming than the other, I don't buy it. The Earth could conceivably warm without the climate going haywire, and conversely, the climate could change in a non-catastrophic way. The trouble is that neither of those is the case. The terms are both scary if you know what they mean.
What I still find amusing is the ease with which climate change deniers switch between "climate change is not happening" and "climate change is happening, but it's not due to human activity" without batting an eye. Those are two mutually exclusive positions, but it's no problemo for the skillful doublethinker!
Just as pathetic is the fact that millions of Americans who couldn't handle junior high science and don't understand even the most basic things about the subject, (like the difference between weather and climate, or that greenhouse gases absorb infrared energy emanating from the Earth, preventing it from escaping into space and thereby warming the atmosphere, or that the greenhouse effect is not disputed by ANY scientist), are nonetheless dead certain that they know more than all of those climatologist PhD's put together.
It'll be interesting going forward (as in, the chinese curse). I personally think all those junior high grads are going to have to wise up fast in the near future, or the planet will shrug us off as a pest. This 'baby's rolling and no one's sure where she's going to stop. As I recently said, on another thread: "I don't think we are past the 'point of no return' yet, but I'm upset that a bunch of conservatives put me in the position of having to worry if Arctic methane holds a different opinion"
Just to clarify, commenters need to need to read the whole table - including the codes on the right!
There are only companies that gave to the "ECN" (Environment and Climate Change propaganda) project - they are BB&T Bank and Nucor Steel.
The rest gave to other propaganda projects. The Pharm Companies gave to Heartland's "HCN" or Health Care News" _not_ climate change and environment.
But does Heartland keep its donations compartamentalized?
Pharma? oil? Global warming? Climate change? what are you talking about, since I started watching fox news they told me we have the best health care in the world. I should trust big pharma, even though lipitor nearly killed me and left me crippled.
Sorry to hear that Constitutional. The FDA should ban statins as they have such terrible complications such as muscle wasting. But doctors must take lots of the blame because the literature has shown the negative effects of statins for years and during that same time the literature has shown that changes in life style, especially diet, can reverse heart disease. Yet doctors blithely prescribe it.
Hard not to believe how well the propaganda on controlling cholesterol to make people to believe themselves healthy when in actuality controlling or inhibiting cholesterol production and functions can be a most deleterious effect to one's health. I have more than a couple of friends who accepted their doctors' idea of taking statins and they have for the most part become more ill.
There is good literature on the pathways in the body and how to control cholesterol as eating the wrong foods can create an excess in the arteries and cause what is the subject of the need to inhibit cholesterol functions and it is curious, exercise has a good part to play in stabilizing cholesterol, but dad gummit, that just means one has to get out and get active.
Once my doctor called and said the results of a lipid profile indicated that I should get on the program of statin maintenance, and I fused and went back to a decent exercise routine and next visit, blood work was in good shape. But the idea of doctoring is becoming much more suspicious to me of late as I feel as if I or we are being used more for money laundering purposes than the old fashion quaint doctors who felt it their duty to use their knowledge and experience to treat people.
Not like today where the insurance companies, government( in roundabout ways) and big pharma dictate treatments which where I will most likely be jailed because I do not believe in any attempt thus far for a reliable and unadulterated national healthcare system that is not used to create another corporate tax revenue for the almost worthless big insurance, pharma and medical businesses which in themselves means they are looking for profits and not much in health for people.
Maybe that is why in today's world they are called doctors of medicine.
We have for too long suppressed the idea that nature can be altered by human stupidity. There has always and will be humans that disagree on things that only they cannot understand.
As far as Fox News goes it really is news-less show that I find has nothing positive about it except to find faults in our society especially in the political world. I am so sorry that Lipitor almost killed you. It is why I find these television drug advertisements so dangerous.
.
It's good to see General Motors back on its feet again, after they came hat in hand and the government bailed them out. Is this a sign that GM is back to its normal behavior?
It doesn't matter what the kids will be taught now ~Abby~.
By 2020 or very possibly much sooner, the kids and everyone else on this world will know what global warming means, even ~chameleon~ here and the Koch brothers will know.
By 2020 or very possibly sooner, (billions of tons) of methane gas, CH4, will have entered the atmosphere's greenhouse gas mix from the melting Arctic's permafrost and planet Earth will then be a hot place, very, very hot, like "Death Valley" on steroids all around the world.
If any do not believe that, just wait and see. We have 8 years or less to see. We may see it by 2013 or 2015,,, we'll see.
It is a truly a tragedy that the companies are not demanding something be done to prevent that world wide catastrophic disaster from occurring.
One billion tons of Ch4 = 105 billion tons of Co2 added to the already very high greehouse gas mix... Three billion tons and we will be cooked... A trillion tons and we will (*all*) be dead... It is going to happen if action is not taken to prevent it.... Reality is reality and truth cannot be altered, except by lying.
There is nothing even close to importance as the melting Arctic ice and permafrost melting like it is now doing.... Nothing else.
Ya got that ~chameleon~? The thawing Arctic is due to "global warmng", and global warming causes dramatic world wide "climate changes". A half-wit could understand that... Tired of hearing about it?///// Don't listen.
You'd think the frequency of yearly climate disasters being more than ever seen in history would be enough, at this point, to know something is up.
In a few months we will be in hurricane and tornado season again. Expect this year to be among the worst ever seen on record. Just like last year, the year before, the year before that, and so on. And no, Republicans, it was not always that way.
WayneWR, Don't forget the massive amounts of methane under the ocean floors, that scientists now believe caused the Triassic Extinction 200 million years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26obearth.html
And scientists also believe the Permian Extinction 50 million years earlier also resulted from release of methane from the sea floor due to global warming from volcanos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YddIuwHJtQs
I just watched this video again. I had forgotten how scary it is. In 1783-84, a small basalt eruption (watch the video) in Iceland, caused the year without summer. According to Benjamin Franklin the sun never shone, it snowed in Paris in August, and it was the hardest year of his life.
Yes ~Tom~... Most of the estimated trillions of tons of methane, termed "hydrates" in the Arctic are frozen in permafrost beneath the very shallow Arctic Ocean sea floor.
As the Arctic Ocean becomes ice free all summer long, the sub sea permafrost melts and the once safely locked in ice methane releases to enter the atmosphere.
Were it very deep ocean water, the released methane would not reach the surface, but the Arctic Ocean is very shallow and methane gas has already been spewing out of it's surface by the millions of tons in many areas... No CH4 is sequested by green plant life, it all enters the greeouse gas mix.
Top scientists have computed the Arctic Ocean will be ice free by 2015... By 2020 how much methane will have escaped? __ We'll find out.
On a far much smaller scale, methane gas once suddenly released from a lake in Africa and it almost immediately suffocated all life within about a 20 mile radius. No humans or any other animal life survived.
I don't know what a trillion tons or up to 4 trillion tons releasing would do, but only a billion tons releasing every year for two or three years will cause a catastrophic world wide disaster...That would not suffocate life around the globe, but we'd all better have a lot of ice cubes handy.
The truth is, it is by far the most serious isue humaity will ever face in all of human's recorded history, nothing at all is being done to address it. Nothing and time is now very short... So whatever the kids are taught now is near meaningless. They most likely won't see the year 2030, or even sooner... I don't like it either.
We are either doomed or not. But I would prefer a certain amount of input. Unfortunately, as a member of the "middle" to lower classes (albeit an educated person with much better circumstances than most; not saying much since most in the world, and the USA, live in dire circumstances), I have no input.
Millions of years from today when another sentient species looks into the geological and paleontological record, they will hypothesize various geologic or astronomical reasons for the great extinction of whatever they will call our age. They never will fathom that millions of us saw it coming, but had to stand by helplessly because our masters commanded it.
We have one hope -- a violent over throw of the established order. But since the established order owns the greatest military in the history of this planet (as far as we know), I don't hold out a lot of hope for success.
I like people like yourself. Always thinking something bad is happening and catastrophe is around the corner. I guess it makes life more exciting. My mom 's the same way. A couple of days ago she sent me an email about how HAARP and the x-37b were causing the freeze in Eastern Europe. I told her that's BS, everyone knows it was caused by global warming.
BTW, did you check out Fukushima unit #2? Looks like the sensor was fixed. Temp was always at 30C.
Well I am just thrilled that you like me ~chameleon~, I had the feeling you didn't understand what the word "Like " means. You certainly don't appear to know what common sense is.
No; I had not heard the Fukushima plants' number 2 unit's melted down reactor thermocouple had been fixed...Who reported that, Tepco officials?
I do not believe that anyone could get anywhere near the thermocouple at the base of the melted down reactor to fix anything and low temperatures do not explain why steam is rising from the destroyed buildings of all three melted down reactors, 1, 2 and 3.
In any case the temperature of the empty reactor is irrelevant, it is the temperature of the radioactive molten lava that matters and no one can measure it, but that is all way off topic here.
You have always had a big problem believing the Arctic’s perennial sea ice is melting away and the sub sea permafrost is now rapidly melting away and that trillions of tons of methane hydrates are locked up in that permafrost and if the methane releases into the atmosphere it will kill all life, life down to the bacterial level on Earth and it will happen if something is not done to prevent it.
Well, that's okay with me ~chameleon~, you are free to believe anything you desire. But it is foolish people such as yourself who are in power who have disbelieved or ignored those proven facts and have prevented anything from being done to avert a catastrophic world wide disaster.
Btw, I don't like ignorant, obtuse people like you, who refuse to become educated on an issue of such importance and just yak away with senseless comments. Since YOU brought it up, it sounds like in your case that wish to be ignorant may be hereditary.
If yo ever decide to relieve your ignorance on the subject ~chameleon~ google (arctic methane) and read and study for a month or so and you may get lucky and find a comment from some top scientist that reads as follows.
("The Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications report, released today, outlines dire global consequences of a warming Arctic that are far worse than previous projections... The unprecedented peer-reviewed report brings together top climate scientists who have assessed the current science on Arctic warming.").