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Guardian: Google Continues to Fund Climate Denying Organizations!

mutantmagnet

mutantmagnet

Member
Oct 28, 2017
8,420
I'm really surprised to not see a thread exist yet.

www.theguardian.com

Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers

Firm’s public calls for climate action contrast with backing for conservative thinktanks
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com


Google has made “substantial” contributions to some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington despite its insistence that it supports political action on the climate crisis.
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That link is a PDF Google themselves provided about which organizations they fund the most officially.

Oh boy. It's one thing to bribe politicians because they'll take money for different reasons but to fund groups with the explicit goals of pretending climate change is a hoax with some of them actually having quantifiable achievements to meet that goal...


The list includes the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative policy group that was instrumental in convincing the Trump administration to abandon the Paris agreement and has criticised the White House for not dismantling more environmental rules.
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Google is also listed as a sponsor for an upcoming annual meeting of the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella organisation that supports conservative groups including the Heartland Institute, a radical anti-science group that has chided the teenage activist Greta Thunberg for “climate delusion hysterics”.
SPN members recently created a “climate pledge” website that falsely states “our natural environment is getting better” and “there is no climate crisis”.
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Google has defended its contributions, saying that its “collaboration” with organisations such as CEI “does not mean we endorse the organisations’ entire agenda”.
It donates to such groups, people close to the company say, to try to influence conservative lawmakers, and – most importantly – to help finance the deregulatory agenda the groups espouse.
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Yeah no. This type of funding could already be done without tying yourself to actual organizations trying to ensure we maximize shareholder value at the cost of our ability to live sufficiently on this planet. While both types of corruption are bad only one of them is explicitly dangerous.

More in the article on who else they funded if going through that PDF isn't useful enough for you.
 
Byakuya769

Byakuya769

Avenger
Oct 29, 2017
2,012
De-regulatory agenda and climate change denial go hand-in-hand. Profits over governments responding to systemic threats is climate change denial distilled to its base cause.
 
JJDubz

JJDubz

The Fallen
Oct 27, 2017
492
Less regulation > climate change action

Just so happens that one leads directly to capital growth.
 
bionic77

bionic77

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,283
Google has been way too powerful for a long time.

They really need to be broken up into several different companies.
 
Eylos

Eylos

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,253
i wished there's a way for me to not use any google stuff, but unfortunately there's no way
 
JadeGiveTwoRides

JadeGiveTwoRides

Member
Oct 27, 2017
489
This has been known for years - it’s the same company that couldn’t wait to get into the business of helping to develop weapons of war after all.

I said in another thread that unfettered capitalism has compromised our economies and made us reliant on places like China, but there remain degrees of awfulness. I'm not sure that there’s a major tech company on the planet that is worse than Google from an ethical standpoint - it's rotten to the core.

It’s not being weak or submissive towards bad actors, it is actively seeking to empower them.
 
Alcotholic

Alcotholic

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,201
Denying climate change is such a short term outlook. Google, Amazon, Disney, and all the other massive corporations should know this, but god forbid you do something that doesnt make money today.
 

CyclonatorZ

Member
Sep 28, 2019
45
On this subject: a few days ago, I discovered that if you search for "climate change hope" on google.com, the number one result is Jonathan Franzen's piece of defeatist bullshit published by the New Yorker. I called that this was bulllshit from the outset: there is no way that particular article landed there naturally. And sure enough, if you go to a search engine that isn't owned by fucking captain planet villains - like duckduckgo.com - the top results are much more hopeful.

This is in line with my belief that, now that we are finally seeing real progress in overcoming climate change denial, corps that want to preserve the status quo until our literal dying breath, are shifting to promoting climate change defeatism instead. Makes perfect sense: if it's getting harder and harder to convince people that climate change as a hoax, the logical path of action is to start convincing people that its too late to meaningfully combat climate change, so we might as well stay the course.
 
jelly

jelly

Member
Oct 26, 2017
10,681
Yeah but how about those lifestyle ads. Look how perfect life is. Join us in Google utopia.

I always thought companies fund most flavours that help them make money in some way, covering all bases so to speak but the most they spend is not a good look when it comes to one like this.
 
Jakke_Koala

Jakke_Koala

Member
Sep 28, 2018
691
aisback said:
Time to boycott google?



i think I’m going to use duck duck go instead. I’ve never heard of Ecosia before
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Ecosia is a non profit search engine where 80% of the income goes to different charities like planting trees and stuff.
It's pretty good, but you have to use more specific searching terms
 
Kill3r7

Kill3r7

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,687
I think what’s far more fascinating is that google is another company (in the long list of companies) that started out to do good in the world and ended up here.
 
kittens

kittens

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,579
Yeah I've been trying to de-Google my life too. It's fucking scary how much power and reach they have.
 
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