Excerpt from Rolling Stone
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To direct the White House’s spin on global warming, Connaughton appointed Philip Cooney as his top deputy. Cooney had the right experience for the job: He worked as “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute. In 1998, the API took part in an industry coalition that created the “Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan.” The plan, recently entered into evidence by the House Oversight Committee, maps out an elaborate disinformation campaign to prevent “precipitous action on climate change.” The strategy was to sow doubt about global warming, disseminating industry-funded research to challenge “the science underpinning the global climate change theory.”
Now, with Cooney in the White House, the industry had its own anti-climate man running the disinformation campaign. As the “action plan” directed, Cooney set out to censor the EPA’s science on global warming and inject the industry’s denialist positions into government documents. “They decided they didn’t need to win the debate on climate,” says Piltz, the former official who exposed Cooney’s tactics. “They just had to leave an atmosphere of uncertainty about it and dissipate the will for political action.”
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