'World Growth': Masters of Truthiness

Remember "World Growth," the group I dug into Friday, after it was featured in a Thursday blog post at The New York Times web site?

The Times covered a newly-released report by World Growth, a report terming it "green global welfare" to compenstate developing nations for preserving their forests as carbon sinks that will help curb on global warming, instead of razing them for agriculture.

Turns out that in addition to promoting disingenous "solutions" to hunger and poverty that would result in chopping down forests for export crops like oil palms, Mr. Oxley and World Growth are also professional global warming deniers.

World Growth apparently backs the web site "Climate Change Issues: Improving understanding in the climate change debate." According to information on the site, it is edited by Steven Macmillan, an employee of Mr. Oxley's firm ITS Global.

Under "Science," the site notes that "Whereas the policy findings of the IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] depend on political consensus, in the science of climate much remains unknown." This is a true lie, a standard tactic those who have an interest in stalling political and economic action to curb global warming. There's still much to learn about climate and many other phenomena on Earth. But the vast majority of scientists worldwide agree, based on the evidence, that global warming is happening, and that it's caused by human activities.

The value of the information on climatechangeissues.com pretty much flows from that crumbly foundation.

There are dozens if not hundreds of "World Growth" entities out there, defying both reason and logic to promote their agendas. Why make so much about this one group?

First, because it was featured in a blog post at the web site of one of the world's most influential news sources -- giving other journalist/bloggers like myself the opportunity to continue reporting the story.

Second: What's especially damaging about this sort of well-funded and well-distributed truthiness* is that is delays and even undermines the solutions that really need to happen, like: coming up with a successor treaty that really is stronger and more effective than the Kyoto agreement; preparing to protect people and infrastructure from the impacts of global warming that will come no matter what; and transforming our economy -- nationally and globally -- into a steady-state system that doesn't depend on eternal, unmaintainable growth to create prosperity.

Under a guise of prudence and concern about the future, these entities help prevent us from achieving any real safety and security.

* truthiness (noun)
1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)
2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)
Source: Merriam-Webster Online

"Truthiness is a term first used in its current satirical sense by American television comedian Stephen Colbert in 2005, to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts." Source: Wikipedia