Clima di destra Skeptics Blast Drive Anti-Disinformation dell’UE

Climate change denialists and relativists nailed their colours to the mast in the European Parliament’s environment committee on Tuesday, as they laid into the EU executive over its campaign against fake news and climate disinformation.

“As citizens of a free society we are each entitled to our own opinions but not entitled to our own facts,” Emil Andersen, a mid-ranking Commission official, said at the start of the debate.

But his words weren’t welcome by several conservative and right-wing lawmakers, with some linking the European Commission’s anti-disinformation activism to the authoritarian dystopia famously imagined in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Neo-denialism Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) Anja Arndt questioned the scientific community’s consensus that climate change is caused by human activities, and argued that the fight against disinformation is a “front-on attack on freedom of expression, freedom of science, and the truth”. Fellow AfD party member Marc Jongen took a similar line: “If the Commission decides now what is a fact and what isn’t, and what is opinion and what isn’t, then we’re on the road to a totalitarian system.”

But the criticism of the Commission’s initiative was not limited to the fringes of the right wing.

Sander Smit, a Dutch member of the centre-right European People’s Party, said that fact-checkers tended to make “a certain type of discussion impossible”, and that the Commission would be going “a step too far” if it were to fund fact-checkers during election campaigns.

Liberal and social democrat lawmakers, on the contrary, highlighted the importance of a debate informed by science.
Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, the Renew group’s lead negotatiator on the 2040 climate bill, said that the acknowledgement climate change and willingness to fight it was not an ideology – while denying it was precisely that.

Gerbrandy urged his colleagues to keep the political debate “clean” and called for a coalition against climate change deniers. He also asked the European Commission to debunk in writing the climate “nonsense” spouted by the AFD – but failed to extract such a promise.

Belgian social democrat Bruno Tobback recalled the stories of Galileo and Copernicus – “who had science and facts on their side” but were persecuted by the practitioners of a “backwards ideology”.

“For God’s sake, let us not go back to the dark days of European history, where dogma and opinions held us back – or tried to hold us back, luckily without success,” Tobback said.

I hate the term “climate sceptics”, sceptics are people who think critically, not people who slurp up contrarian propaganda.

We all know from where this denial trend come from: big business and wealthies, not willing to concede any compromise or coercion to their core model, the economic growth. So lobbying.

And from there we’re all embedded, educated to this model, as the only one so called sustainable. Even if it carry a major flaw: the denial that we promote a growth model in a limited system: planet Earth ressources.

And that the saddest part: the more we develop a collective intelligence with hive interconnection all over humanity, the more the truth about our model became clear: we act, we are the cancer of ourself,  poisoning our habitat.

The scariest part? Some people in powerful position very much consider that total population  (and not the model) is the main and first problem to solve.

“Right wing disinformation groups complain about anti-disinformation efforts”

FTFY.