So every so often, I have seen a story from inthesetimes.com and sort of surmised that it’s propaganda bullshit based purely on the URL, but I never really knew. This article seems like a good time to dive into it a little bit. TL;DR yes, it’s bullshit. It’s actually extremely cunning in how it assembles some true facts into a shape that doesn’t exist.

While the Act made unprecedented investments in renewable energy, it also faced criticism for being too little, too late and for compromising on fossil fuel extraction.

This part is 100% accurate. IDK why the headline focuses on Biden, instead of on every president before him and on Manchin for their role in causing it to be too late and too little respectively, when it’s making this accurate point, but let’s continue.

What if, on the contrary, all the tools only make a dire crisis even worse? Because that’s exactly what’s happening: Two years and close to $300 billion later, what we’re seeing is that increased renewable energy investment goes hand in hand with increased fossil fuel production.

Okay so this is where we dive into the real dishonesty.

Two things I want you to notice:

• The word “global” just kind of inconspicuously there
• The scale on these charts is laughably different. I sort of got lost in the math, so I don’t know exactly how different, but I know that holding up a chart of “our emissions are going up and up as our energy is going up” alongside a chart of “the laughably small scale of that that comes from renewable energy is going up and up” and then implying that there’s a causal relationship there is a bunch of bullshit.

So… without the word “global,” trying to analyze only the US’s contribution, what does it look like? Something like this:

OH LOOK IT’S FUCKIN GOING DOWN. It’s now below the 1990 levels, after a big drop this past year.

Why is this person going to so much trouble to lie about what’s happened to “emissions” by holding up US policy, next to global emissions? And holding up other charts next to each other and pretending that they relate to each other? And identifying (correctly) that all of this is too little too late, as a way of levying specific criticism at the most effective thing we’ve been doing, in service of depressing support for more solutions like that and consequently making it more like that we’ll go back to the days when the line actually is going up and up?

As HST says, to ask the question is to answer the question.