Myron Ebell

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Myron Ebell (* 1953 in Baker County , Oregon ) is an American lobbyist . He worked for various libertarian and conservative think tanks such as B. the Competitive Enterprise Institute and is counted among the central minds of the organized climate change denial scene. He has no scientific training; instead, he calls his dissenting opinion on global warming the "informed layman's perspective". After Donald Trump was elected, he became head of the transition team to rebuild the US environmental agency EPA according to his plans. After this activity he resumed his position at the CEI.

Life

Ebell grew up on a farm in the US state of Oregon and then studied philosophy , which he completed with a master's degree. After graduating, he worked as a lobbyist for various think tanks and also worked for the tobacco industry , among other things . He gained his first experience at the Frontiers of Freedom , founded by the Republican Senator Malcolm Wallop , which campaigned for a minarchist state (night watchman state). He later worked for Republican Congressman John Shadegg , where he fought against a law to protect endangered species. Among other things, he worked for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that plays an important role in the denial of global warming. One of the goals of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is to present the unanimous view in scientific research that global warming is man-made as nonsense. It is largely financed by industrial grants, both directly from the coal industry and indirectly from the fossil energy sector, with the Donor's Trust in particular playing an important role, which in turn has a close relationship with Koch Industries .

Ebell is also the head of the Cooler Heads Coalition , an association of conservative think tanks that has committed itself to the goal of "exposing the myths of global warming by exposing the flawed economic, scientific and risk-analytical assumptions". The Cooler Heads Coalition is a front group of the organized climate denial industry that was formed in 1997 and consists of the Competitive Enterprise Institute , the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), the Heartland Institute and the George C. Marshall Institute , all of which are donations from sides industry as well as conservative associations.

Ebell led the restructuring of the EPA environmental agency on behalf of US President Trump. The aim was in particular to abolish the environmental and climate protection measures adopted under Obama's presidency . Trump had said during the election campaign, among other things, that environmental protection was a waste of money, that huge budget cuts were necessary for the environmental protection agency EPA and that this would make it impossible for the country to be competitive. He then returned to his post at the CEI.

Positions and work

Ebell is considered one of the most important and most visible climate deniers in the United States. He is not a specialist and does not do research himself. Instead, he doubts the unpopular results of climate research across the board or suggests that climate researchers have manipulated climate data (cf. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt ). Through the Cooler Heads Coalition and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, he distributes a variety of materials denying global warming, and holds press conferences and briefings for Congressmen , among other things ; In addition, it has an important function in reinforcing the (media) messages of "climate-skeptical" scientists. Together with Christopher C. Horner , he was also a key figure in the defamation of the IPCC and the propagation of the hacking incident at the University of East Anglia's climate research center as an alleged Climategate scandal. Ebell is also known for repeatedly launching verbal attacks on climate researchers, especially James E. Hansen . He described climate researcher Kevin Trenberth as a “member of a gang” and accused him of manipulating climate data for years.

Regarding global warming, Ebell claimed that the scientific consensus was a fake and instead just a political consensus, which some climate researchers had also subscribed to, that the hockey stick diagram was wrong, that global warming was not a cause for concern because of the carbon dioxide concentration The earth's atmosphere had already been higher in the past, the earth had entered a cooling phase analogous to the Little Ice Age , the oceans would not warm up and the current emissions only ensured that the earth remained a pleasant place to live. Climate models wouldn't even pass a laugh test; the warming would not shift animal habitats and data showing warming in the Arctic would be falsified.

The climate protection movement called Ebell as "forces of darkness" because it was supposedly their aim to let out all over the world the lights. He called the encyclical Laudato si ' written by Pope Francis in 2015 , among other things, "scientifically poorly informed, economically illiterate, intellectually incoherent and morally dull", and it is also "theologically suspect and large parts of it a leftist antagonism". The US Senate, he called that at the UN Climate Change Conference in 2015 adopted the Convention of Paris rejected.

Another important goal for Ebell is to reverse Barack Obama's climate protection plan , which provides for the emission reduction of the American power plant fleet. The new government should abolish the guidelines of the environmental protection agency EPA, which could be economically harmful. He considers Obama's original Clean Power Plan to be illegal and should rather be called the “costly power plan”. The best way to respond to global warming is to burn more fossil fuels , as the better it is economically, the faster the energy industry can adopt new technologies. Even if global warming should actually turn out to be a threat, it would be better to wait and then to intervene later in the future with better methods than to do something today. In addition, the state should provide federally owned land for the expansion of coal, oil and gas production and deforestation.

The environmental movement considers Ebell to be "the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity". In the election of Donald Trump, he sees a deselection of experts, which in his view have failed in many aspects, including climate policy. Experts are also full of arrogance and hubris . The fact that the People's Republic of China is now also relying on an ambitious climate protection policy and the expansion of renewable energy is explained by Ebell with economic policy. China is therefore investing so heavily in regenerative energy technology such as wind turbines and photovoltaics in order to sell them to "gullible consumers in the western world" so that electricity prices can rise there and the Chinese economy becomes more competitive.

In 2019, he accused the Trump administration of not abolishing environmental protection regulations aggressively enough. Although this had gutted all the major environmental protection laws that were passed under the previous Obama administration, there is still an EPA guideline according to which carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have negative effects on public health and welfare. According to Ebell, this should also be abolished. Also in 2019 he gave a lecture via Skype at the annual conference of the German climate change denial organization EIKE .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Organized Climate Change Denial , in: John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, David Schlosberg (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society . Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 144-160, esp. 151.
  2. ↑ a b James Lawrence Powell: The Inquisition of Climate Science . New York 2012, p. 108f.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h Trump’s Climate Contrarian: Myron Ebell Takes On the EPA . In: The New York Times , November 11, 2016. Retrieved November 13, 2016.
  4. ↑ a b Donald Trump to sack climate change scientists and slash Environmental Protection Agency budgets, says official . In: The Independent , January 27, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
  5. ↑ How Trump wants to poison the climate . In: Spiegel Online , November 11, 2016. Accessed November 13, 2016.
  6. ^ Riley E. Dunlap and Peter J. Jacques: Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks: Exploring the Connection . In: American Behavioral Scientist . tape 57 , no. 6 , 2013, p. 699-731; here p. 700. , doi : 10.1177 / 0002764213477096 .
  7. ↑ a b c A Climate Change Denier for the Environmental Protection Agency . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 12, 2016. Retrieved November 13, 2016.
  8. ↑ a b deniers of climate change . In: Die Welt , November 12, 2016. Retrieved November 13, 2016.
  9. ↑ a b c d e Trump’s transition team has tapped a longtime climate skeptic to set environmental policy . In: The Washington Post , September 26, 2016. Retrieved November 13, 2016.
  10. ↑ Republican candidates' calls to scrap EPA met with skepticism by experts . In: The Guardian , February 26, 2016. Retrieved November 16, 2016.
  11. ↑ a b James Lawrence Powell: The Inquisition of Climate Science . New York 2012, p. 108.
  12. ^ Green movement 'greatest threat to freedom', says Trump adviser . In: The Guardian , January 30, 2017. Retrieved January 30, 2017.
  13. ↑ Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers . In: The Guardian , October 11, 2019. Retrieved October 11, 2019.
  14. ↑ Climate Change Deniers: Unequivocal Doubts . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 24, 2019. Accessed December 23, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Ebell, Myron
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lobbyist
DATE OF BIRTH 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Baker County , Oregon