Screen shot from CSPAN
Your day today will most likely involve a few silly April Fools' jokes from your friends or from companies and organizations on social media. We thought instead of coming up with our own joke, there were plenty of real-life events in the energy and political arenas that are so absurd that they should be April Fools’ jokes, but alas, they are not.
So here are ten ridiculous moments that really happened recently.
1: Wait, who? Senator James Inhofe - a noted climate denier - was named the head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee when the new Congress took over in January. Or as The New Republic put it: “This Climate Denier (is) the Most Powerful Senator on the Environment.”
2: Senate Snowball- Once again, Senator James Inhofe makes the list, this time for his stunt in February where he threw a snowball on the Senate floor and claimed the winter weather in Washington, D.C., disproved climate change. You could almost hear everyone face-palming in response.
3: BP says the Gulf of Mexico is just fine- Like Leslie Nielsen’s character in "The Naked Gun" standing in front of an exploding fireworks factory saying, “There is nothing to see here!”, earlier this month BP released a report claiming that the Gulf of Mexico is just fine five years after the oil company's deadly and massive oil disaster. Um, no it's not, BP.
4: Climate Censor- When news broke that Florida Governor Rick Scott told state agencies to not use the words "climate change" or "sea level rise," we couldn't believe it was true. But it was, prompting us to create a new product:
Rick Scott: verb. To attempt to eliminate a problem by removing access to words that refer to it; to whitewash #scottaway
— Sierra Club (@sierraclub) March 10, 2015
When you don’t want to deal with a serious problem, just ban the words referring to it!
5: No, You're Not- Two climate-denying members of Congress say their rejection of climate science makes them just like Galileo: Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Senator Ted Cruz from Texas. This proves that not only do Senators. Wicker and Cruz not understand science, they also don’t know anything about history.
6: Everything Must Go! Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski wants to sell off public lands and national forests so oil and gas companies can drill the heck out of them, so she got it passed in a (thankfully) non-binding amendment to the budget.
Meanwhile, at the state level, many governments are trying to force the government to give them federal land to sell off for fossil fuel extraction. Big surprise that those moves can be tied to anti-clean energy front group ALEC!
7: This Won’t End Well- Shell will try to drill for oil in the Arctic again this year. You know, because their attempts last year were so successful (see: the grounding of one of their drilling ships, $1 million in pollution fines, and more).
8: Environmental Activists Are a Security Threat- In February, documents revealed that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police called environmentalists “violent anti-petroleum extremists”:
“This is absolutely the criminalization of peaceful protest,” Keith Stewart from Greenpeace Canada, one of the groups named in the document, said.
“The striking thing is that the U.S. has identified climate change as one of the greatest threats to national security, yet here in Stephen Harper's Canada it is the people trying to stop climate change that are identified as the threat.”
9: Cash Money and Politics- In January, a Koch brothers’ front group revealed that the two billionaires would be spending $889 million leading up to the 2016 elections. That’s right, almost a billion dollars to keep denying climate change, promoting fossil fuels, and fighting clean energy.
10: On the Payroll: On March 17, Professor Laurence Tribe, a Constitutional law professor at Harvard University, testified before a U.S. House’s Energy and Commerce subcommittee and attacked the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate-forward “Clean Power Plan.”
House Republicans have long made it known they either don’t believe in climate change or they don’t think we should take any action. So we suppose it should be no surprise that they brought in someone like Professor Tribe -- who counts the American Petroleum Institute, Peabody Energy (the nation’s largest coal company), and scads of other fossil fuel companies and front groups as his clients.
Did we miss anything you wish was an April Fools’ joke? Let us know in the comments.