Watch Hot Politics on Frontline detailing US policy on global warming from 1988 until now. It’s fun to take a trip back in time before An Inconvenient Truth and Hurricane Katrina made green hip.
My favorite footage is:
* An energy lobby ad from the 1992 campaign claiming global warming is a hoax: (Images of plants inhaling, humans exhaling) : “Carbon dioxide - They call it pollution, we call it life.”
* A group of protesting coalminers, also in the 1992 campaign, with signs that say “Coalminers - the new homeless.”
Also of note:
* Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush’s first EPA director, saying that the science behind global warming is real on national television. She is then told that the White House’s position is otherwise as dictated by Dick Cheney and his Energy Task Force. The US then pulls out of the Kyoto Protocol. (here is her interview)
* Section 6 on censorship of scientists under the Bush administration
* Section 7 on TXU, the largest utility in Texas, its drive to build coal power plants and the subsequent environmentalist-supported private equity buyout that halted the construction of 8 out of 11 plants.
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