An Internet Troll In The Senate | Climate Town

The Gist

Senator John Kennedy uses performative confusion and internet memes in Senate budget committee hearings to deflect from Big Oil accountability and smear climate researcher Dr. Geoffrey Supran. In reality, Kennedy is an Oxford-educated lawyer backed by millions in oil money who recycles social media gags to distract from fossil fuel greenwashing.

Quick Overview

Senator John Kennedy weaponizes folksy routines and irrelevant internet memes during Senate Budget Committee hearings to derail investigations into fossil fuel greenwashing. A 65-page joint staff report released in April 2024 titled Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak exposes how oil companies spent decades funding climate denial and misleading the public. When the Senate examined this report alongside expert testimony from Dr. Geoffrey Supran, Kennedy side-stepped the substance by reading out-of-context social media posts and attacking witnesses. Despite cultivating a persona as a simple country lawyer, Kennedy received over 1.7 million dollars from oil and gas interests and graduated with top honors from Oxford University.

Key Points: A 65-page joint staff report titled Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak was released in April 2024 following a three-year investigation into Big Oil's climate deception. Senator John Kennedy deflected from the findings during Senate budget committee hearings by interrogating expert witness Dr. Geoffrey Supran about unrelated climate tweets. Oil and gas companies have contributed over 1.7 million dollars to Senator John Kennedy over the past three decades, placing him in the top twenty recipients in Congress. Dr. Geoffrey Supran earned degrees from Cambridge, a PhD from MIT, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard before dedicating his career to studying climate disinformation. Republicans introduced federal legislation to grant mining, extraction, and fossil fuel companies full legal immunity from climate lawsuits and the associated discovery process. Senator John Kennedy ran for the Senate as a Democrat in 2004 before switching parties and adopting a conservative populist persona. During the 2021 record-breaking boreal forest fire season, those fires emitted 0.48 gigatons of carbon dioxide compared to human-driven global emissions of 36.3 gigatons.