Watch: Senate Grand Old Partiers pacify planet polluters at climate change cover-up hearing
United States Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) played defense for planet-polluting petrochemical producers in his opening statement at Wednesday's Senate Budget Committee hearing on the fossil fuel industry's shadowy propaganda.
At the heart of the Dollars and Degrees: Investigating Fossil Fuel Dark Money's Systemic Threats to Climate and the Federal Budget proceeding was Big Oil's deliberate decades-long cover-up of their own studies that unequivocally established that the burning of hydrocarbons will lead to an increase in average global temperatures through the atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gases: water vapor, nitrous oxide, methane, carbon monoxide, and worst of all, carbon dioxide.
Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) spoke first, teeing up ninety-ish minutes of blistering expert testimony dissecting how the trillion-dollar extra-national energy enterprises have subjugated human civilization for fifty years.
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The data collected since the latter half of the Nineteenth Century is an elementary example of the greenhouse effect beyond a reasonable doubt. Still, Republicans constitute the only major conservative party in the world that in its platform disputes said consensus.
But million-dollar-federal-family-farm-subsidy-benficiary Grassley did not just dispute the science — he also accused Democrats of being the recipients of "funding from secret dark money groups" and waging political warfare against contrarians.
Other GOP senators played goalie in their own ways.
Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, for instance, claimed that it can be "hard to discern the truth" about climate change because progressive environmental organizations outspend their right-wing counterparts. But those campaigns pale in comparison to the breadth of the fraud conducted by companies such as Exxon-Mobil.
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Meanwhile, John Kennedy of Louisiana berated former President George W. Bush's White House ethics czar, Richard Painter, on trivialities that had no nuclear connection with the topic at hand.
Painter was not, however, having it.
"So I will just say the one thing that I learned in high school debate," Painter recalled. "When you have no argument, change the subject."
Please watch the proceeding in its entirety below or at this link.
Republicans And Dems Spar At Senate Budget Committee Hearing Over Fossil Fuel Dark Moneywww.youtube.com
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