Climate Criminals — A preliminary to-do list

This almost counts as a "notes to self" list, but if anyone wants help with the information, please do.

This is the first set of data needed to start a Climate Criminals project — an operation that names and publicizes who's really bringing the planet so close to climate catastrophe.

To publicize the first group of perps — carbon CEOs — I think the following is needed:

• The top ten carbon extraction companies by income
• The CEOs of those companies
• The total compensation of each CEO
• The total wealth (if available) of each CEO
• Public domain pictures of each

This would allow us to put them in some kind of order.

Click here for more on this group and what I suggest we do. These are the real bad guys.

To deal with the second set of perps — political enablers and fence-sitters — I think the following would be useful.

• A list of the five most egregious anti-climate politicians (names like Inhofe come to mind, but the list should be longer)
  
  
• A sharpened "elevator speech" that makes the urgency case for the fence-sitters
  
  
• Confirmation that the following fence-sitters are the place to start — Barack Obama (or whoever secedes him), Hillary Clinton (or whoever is Secretary of State), Bill Clinton, Harry Reid, Joe Biden.

More on the plans for this group here. The proposed way to take the fence-sitters off the fence is Keystone Pipeline approval.

For the third group of perps — media enablers and fence-sitters — it would be nice to have the following:

• A list of the five most egregious anti-climate media pimps, people like George Will. We want the worst ones for this list.
  
  
• The sharpened "elevator speech" for the fence-sitters (same as above)
  
  
• A list of the key media people to be taken off of the fence and/or educated. My first suggestions included David Gregory, followed by Chris Matthews and Chris Hayes, maybe a CNN anchor, and some entertainment people like Leno, Letterman, Colbert and John Stewart.
  
  I think we need some people who are a likely Yes (like Matthews and Hayes), and some in key positions we can put on the spot (like Gregory). The goal is to get advocates and also to apply pressure. Suggestions appreciated.

Click here to see what the plan for this group is.

For the fourth group of perp — Koch-funded denier scientists — it would be good to have the following:

• A list from the scientific community of Heartland-paid or Koch-paid (etc.) scientists who are doing the most damage with the least apparently integrity
  
  
• A list of the primary denier-funding institutions (places like Heartland)
  
  
• A list of the primary funders of those institutions, with amounts if possible

As we noted here, we would push for the scientist to reject the suspect funding in order to "clear up any confusion about their motives."

The attack is only peripherally on the "tobacco scientists" in the climate field. The real push is to publicize the financing sources and help to deactivate them.

Note the similarity to the ALEC defunding campaign that has had such great success. If taking suspect money appears to be a black mark on integrity, it will make it more difficult for these funding operations to continue.

Will some "scientists" quit the field if they can't get Koch Bros financing? If they do, that's not a problem.

The effort to unconfuse the people offers different challenges. Here we will need information culled from a number of sources and assembled in an apples-to-apples way.

The list is long, but key elements are:

• How long before 1½°C arrives?
• At the current rate of carbon-dumping, how long before 3°C arrives?
• What does a 3°C world look like?

And so on. There are a great number of good studies, but it's difficult for the layman to evaluate them relative to each other, since each uses individual scopes, methodologies, and metrics.

For more on this, click here.

That's the last for now. With this information, a Climate Criminals project could boldly take the next steps. I'm going to be working on this myself.

If you'd like to help out, feel free to send information as you wish. Put "Climate Criminals to-do" in the subject line, and wse the lists above as a guide unless you think I've missed something important. I may not be able to reply, but I appreciate all the assistance that's offered.

Thanks,

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius