Seeing Green Through Rose-Colored Glasses

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"From the heated debate on global warming to the hot air on forests; from the muddled talk on our nation's waters to the convolution on air pollution, we are fighting a battle of fact against fiction on the environment -- Republicans can't stress enough that extremists are screaming 'Doomsday!' when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day," proclaimed an email memo sent to the press secretaries of all Republican congressmen. The email -- sent on February 4 -- bases its assertions that "global warming is not a fact" and that other kinds of environmental degradation aren't really happening on claims by industry supported scientists and organizations, including the Pacific Research Institute (a think tank which has received $130,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998), the discredited Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, and Richard Lindzen, a climate-skeptic scientist who has consistently taken money from the fossil fuel industry. The memo, which was obtained by the Observer, was sent by Republican House Conference director Greg Cist. "It's up to our members if they want to use it or not," Cist told the Observer. "We wanted to show how the environment has been improving. ... We wanted to provide the other side of the story."