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Cato Serves Up Anti-EV Propaganda Next To Their Tobacco Disinfo [1]
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Date: 2023-05-05
Everyone knows smoking causes cancer and that the tobacco industry lied about it for decades . When it finally got caught and was held accountable, some of the people and organizations the industry funded to protect its profits from regulations turned to the fossil fuel industry and continued plying their trade.
Some twenty-odd years later, ExxonMobil and other oil companies are fighting for their proverbial lives in court to defend against accusations that they acted just like Big Tobacco in funding a decades-long disinformation campaign .
While they're trying all sorts of legal stalling strategies , the reality is that it's not hard to prove that the tactics Big Tobacco got busted for are also being used by defenders of Big Oil.
Case in point? A newsletter that the Cato Institute sent out Tuesday. It featured three pieces of content.
The first was a Cato blog touting a study that they claim shows "efforts to reduce teen vaping deprive adult tobacco smokers of a proven harm-reduction strategy." Got that? Keeping kids from consuming addictive and dangerous substances is bad, because then adults can't buy those addictive and dangerous substances that are slightly less deadly than the products they're replacing.
In climate lingo, it's like Cato is arguing that we should reduce fossil fuel emissions by investing in "clean" coal or "natural" (methane) gas .
And sure enough, their second post was an EV hit piece that calls policies encouraging a shift away from fossil-fueled transportation “unrealistic.” That’s interesting, because it means denier dogma is now arguing that companies should be left alone to solve climate change through innovation, but any government requirement that companies innovate apparently renders it impossible for them to do so. Funny how that works!
But even that is giving the argument too much credit. Anyone who, in the year 2023, is still arguing against regulations on behalf of the tobacco industry immediately exposes themselves as obvious disinformation-spouting liars!
And the third piece highlighted only confirms Cato's got nothing but disinformation to offer: it’s a podcast in which a Cato pundit explains why she thinks "liberty is the secret sauce of growing prosperity."
The liberty to sell people products that give them cancer and destroy the climate, that is.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/5/2167637/-Cato-Serves-Up-Anti-EV-Propaganda-Next-To-Their-Tobacco-Disinfo
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