DeSmog Blog Shows Its True Colours

DeSmog cannibalizes its contemporaries, gets indigestion

If there's anything climate alarmists have embraced as their top tool of intimidation, it's the awarding of "prizes" to prominent people who either disagree with them or don't quietly go along with their political agenda.

The DeSmog blog's SmogMaker awards have turned out to be a prime example.

Who won? Well, predictably, the Canadian government won in the governmental category for "environmental hypocrisy". The award organizers showed the restraint of criticizing the government's inaction as an institution, as opposed to slinging partisan mud, noting the failings of both the sitting Conservative government and the preceding Liberal government.

They should be applauded for that.

Toyota was named Industry's worst polluter. Again, this may be a fair assertion.

However, once one gets past these two justifiable awards, one gets a real idea of how the publishers of the DeSmog Blog think, and unfortunately, it isn't a very pretty picture.

In the media category, Rupert Murdoch was "honoured". Despite noting that Murdoch has recently expressed concern about climate change, DeSmog gave him the media award apparently for failing to fire Brit Hume and Steve Milloy, who runs the junkscience.com news aggregator.

Apparently, failing to correspond to the DeSmog publishers' belief that anyone who disagrees with them should be fired earned this particular award.

Two of the awards, however, demonstrate nothing less than the proclivity for some people who would probably describe themselves as progressives to cannibalize their own, and in the end prove themselves to be a good deal less than progressive.

In the "non-profit" category (quotation marks as original), the Copenhagen Consensus and its organizer, Bjorn Lomborg, were awarded for disagreeing with climate alarmists about whether or not Kyoto represented the best choice for spending money to help people. In fact, the Copenhagen Consensus ranked Kyoto as the worst choice, and spending money on fighting AIDs as the best choice.

They reached these conclusions via a cost-benefit analysis. Their conclusions have consistently been very damaging to the Kyoto protocol, so naturally DeSmog's publishers have been very annoyed -- to say the least.

Perhaps where the DeSmog publishers overreached the most, however, is in naming Barack Obama the SmogMaker of 2007.

This was the category where, quite frankly, the said publishers simply demonstrated that they aren't the smartest people, when they castigated him for treating climate change as a political issue. "Global warming is an environmental problem, not a political one. And people who try to ‘solve’ it with political or public relations spin are just making the problem worse,” said James Hoggan, DeSmogBlog co-founder.

This despite the fact that the DeSmog blog has been linked to David Suzuki who, despite the entirely benign intent of his lobbying, has very much treated climate change as a political issue (and rightfully so -- because regardless of whether or not one buys into the panic, it is a political issue). Also, despite the fact that the DeSmog blog is a prime supporter of the Kyoto protocol -- a political "solution" to an environmental problem.

They also hammered Obama for his support of the coal industry, despite the fact that coal can be used to produce the clean-burning fuels that climate alarmists should favour, even if they lack the mental acuity to recognize it. Obama is a strong supporter of developing such technologies.

Yet going after legitimate progressive and golden boy of the hour, the illegitimate progressives at the DeSmog blog must have found the resulting backlash simply too much to handle, as they fucked off, kissed ass, and apologized.

They made the claim that they were attempting to highlight the lack of attention given to climate change during the ongoing presidential campaign. Yet it seems much more likely that they were attempting to give a boost to the most likely alternative to Obama, Hillary Clinton, with whom DeSmog's golden boy, Al Gore, would most certainly hold the most sway.

The SmogMaker awards has rendered the DeSmog blug utterly transparent: no debate regarding climate change can be tolerated, even amongst those who agree on the science, and political preferences always trump the facts.

That isn't how real progressives would conduct themselves. To real progressives, debate is always welcome. To real progressives, the facts matter. To stifle debate or disregard the facts for political gain is actually regressive in nature.

The DeSmog blog's desperate need to stifle debate and disregard fact seems only to demonstrate that they feel whatever scientific advantage they felt they hold in the climate change debate -- and like it or not, children, there is and will be debate on the matter -- is slipping away.

The DeSmog blog's true colours may well be green, but it's a much darker shade of green than they would otherwise like to think.