Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said that he hopes the DOJ files a lawsuit against the climate change “denial apparatus” in a Google hangout with the League of Conservation Voters streamed on May 21, 2015.
Whitehouse, in response to a question about why people “don’t believe scientists on climate change?” Answered, “Well, you go all the way back to the tobacco fight. And the tobacco industry created a kind of false parallel science to go alongside the real science, and try to compete with it. They had the advantage that they didn’t have to win the fight, all they had to do was create enough doubt that people kept smoking, and so they created the Tobacco Institute — supposed to sound so academic. Well, the polluters have gotten a lot more sophisticated since then, but this vast denial apparatus that propagates the false doubt, that props up the phony science, that gets these yahoos who can’t peer-reviewed scrutiny onto Fox News, onto the cable shows, saying that they’re scientists, they create an artificial conflict about this, and that’s why, I think, there’s doubt. A lot of people haven’t seen through the scam that’s being perpetrated. So, that’s one of the reasons I hope that we get another lawsuit out of the Department of Justice, like the one that they brought against the tobacco industry, that showed that that whole fraudulent scam was a racketeering enterprise and held them accountable for it.”
(h/t YouTube channel The HARRY READ ME File)
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