Just a truly incredible galaxy brain:
I'm going to highlight this as a pull-quote, just so you don't miss it:
Wind power made the trans-Atlantic slave trade possible.
— Steve Milloy
Incredible.
Steve Milloy, it should be noted, is a lawyer and lobbyist whose entire career has been based on spewing pseudo-scientific skepticism on behalf of the tobacco and oil industries. He led the Advancement of Sound Science Center, a Phillip Morris-funded lobbying group created specifically to discredit claims that secondhand smoke is bad. He also worked for the Occidental Petroleum-funded National Environmental Policy Institute and several other oil-backed non-profits used to launder industry-backed climate denialism. From Mother Jones:
"Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice," blared FoxNews.comcolumnist Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000 from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two days later the conservative Washington Times published the same column. Neither outlet disclosed that Milloy, who debunks global warming concerns regularly, runs two organizations that receive money from ExxonMobil. Between 2000 and 2003, the company gave $40,000 to the Advancement of Sound Science Center, which is registered to Milloy's home address in Potomac, Maryland, according to IRS documents. ExxonMobil gave another $50,000 to the Free Enterprise Action Institute—also registered to Milloy's residence. Under the auspices of the intriguingly like-named Free Enterprise Education Institute, Milloy publishes CSRWatch.com, a site that attacks the corporate social responsibility movement. Milloy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article; a Fox News spokesman stated that Milloy is "affiliated with several not-for-profit groups that possibly may receive funding from Exxon, but he certainly does not receive funding directly from Exxon."
[…]
Citing a single graph from a 146-page overview of a 1,200-plus- page, fully referenced report, Milloy claimed that the [Arctic Climate Impact Assessment] "pretty much debunks itself" because high Arctic temperatures "around 1940" suggest that the current temperature spike could be chalked up to natural variability. "In order to take that position," counters Harvard biological oceanographer James McCarthy, a lead author of the report, "you have to refute what are hundreds of scientific papers that reconstruct various pieces of this climate puzzle."
In other words, this is the guy who pioneered the art of digging out random details or typos that cause surface-level confusion in every center-right idiot with a Facebook account, which in turn convinces them that "the science" is wrong or bad because they "did their own research."
So if you start seeing your uncle or whoever posting about how wind is responsible for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, well, now ya know why. From there, it's just a few steps to "The Nazis used oxygen to breathe, so maybe clean air is actually bad, too?"
