capitalism trashing the planet

The world has lost 10 crucial years in the race to stop a cataclysm of runaway climate change, due to the massive secret funding of US 'climate skeptics', really obscene criminals cashing in on the trashing of our planet....

Now it’s a straight fight with the billionaires and corporations.

By George Monbiot Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers(1).

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”(2)

Luntz’s technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution or burning fossil fuels causes climate change is still wide open, and that both sides of the “controversy” should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multi-millionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools, which teaches that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy” and “whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial.”(3).

read much more HERE (with thanks) http://www.monbiot.com/2012/02/20/plutocracy-pure-and-simple/

Heartland Institute's Denialgate includes funding from Microsoft to undermine the IPCC: Breaking Heartless-news for Valentine’s Day: “Dissuading teachers from teaching science …”