The long legacy of denial and deception will never be erased for members of what we call the Carbon Club.  They know who they are. We know who they are.  And we know exactly they have done...

We have the files, in fact file cabinets full, of twenty plus years of industry efforts to slow down the uptake of climate science, replace urgency with uncertainty and derail the policy train that is pulled along by that scientific consensus.

Greedy Lying Bastards is the most complete telling of this story to date.

The likes of ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers, electric companies like Southern Company and the whole coal industry, have dumped millions of dollars into front groups and think tanks they could pay to say and do things they couldn’t be caught dead saying or doing themselves.  The corporate puppeteers knew that selling doubt and uncertainty would buy them time.  The free market front groupers hit pay dirt.

So what?  What can be done to hold these individuals and corporations accountable for their actions? What court of law will find them guilty of obstruction and deception?  The film shows the similarity to the tobacco industry, who fought on for years after knowing full well that cigarettes caused health problems and nicotine is addictive – straight up denial.  There will be hearings, trials, cases, whistle blowers. The truth will be known.

And real people are craving answers as extreme floods and hurricanes sweep away everything they own, as “extraordinary” drought knocks farms off the map one by one, as heat waves make life unbearable.  The weather is out of whack and people are waking up one by one and want to know who to blame for their misfortune.

The culprits try to change their stripes, say they have been “misunderstood” in the case of Exxon, but you cannot change history.  Their actions have contributed to two decades of inaction, costing us lives, property loss, economic and ecological damage.  Species are going and will go extinct due to this inaction. This is no joke.

The latest academic treatment linking the Arab Spring to climate change raises the stakes again.  Climate security is national security. Inseparable. Climate change is about where we live and how we live there.  About how we grow our food, our water sources, the way we build our homes and buildings…All these things are adapted to the climate of the place where we are.  All this is now turning upside down. When 100 year events happen every year, when thousands of weather records are broken in a single year, it is inescapable.

There will be accountability, and not only in the court of public opinion. These are moral crimes, crimes against humanity.  The stakes are high and the consequences are only starting to fall out.  People are starting to realize they have been lied to, led to believe that global warming was some figment of Al Gore’s imagination, told to look the other way…

And if there is one thing that gets people right, left and center all riled up, its being lied to.  Good luck explaining yourself to our children and grandchildren, David and Charles Koch, Rex Tillerson and Lee Raymond before him and all the others in your denial army.  You better start now.