No. 10: Tennessee Center for Policy Research (A.K.A. Carnival of Climate Change)

Meet the 12 loudest members of the chorus claiming that global warming is a joke and that CO2 emissions are actually good for you.

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The Tennessee Center for Policy Research runs the website Carnival of Climate Change, which provides “a skeptical look at climate change alarmism.” Much of its content is reposted from amateur blogs. One of the blogs that it promotes, The Global Warming Heretic, argues that “Environmentalists may be to BLAME for recent warming” because efforts to stop acid rain limited coal particulates that reflect sunlight. Even so, the blogger adds, “I’m not ready to concede any human influence in the climate cycle.” Another “Climate Blogger” in the Carnival’s tent suggests that obese Americans are a “natural resource” because their fat can be harvested for its stem cells.

The TCPR’s president is Drew Johnson, who made a splash in 2007 when he revealed that Al Gore’s Tennessee mansion used roughly 20 times more energy than the typical American household. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment,” he crowed. (Gore’s supporters countered that his house has solar panels and other energy efficient technologies.) Johnson previously served as a Koch Fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies and the American Enterprise Institute, which are both funded by foundations tied to Koch Industries, a company with extensive oil interests.

In an interview, Johnson claimed that TCPR has never taken any money from energy interests and that Carnival of Climate Change was a minor side project that is “not supposed to be a hard news or hard research site.” He added, “What we put up there, or what is put up there [through an automatic news feed] isn’t reflective of our research, our opinions, or our thoughts.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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