A company called Brilliant has put together a video detailing how U.S. officials and scientists were alarmed about climate change as early as the 1970’s and then how a FUD (fear-uncertainty-doubt) campaign financed by various industries kept us from doing anything about it for four decades.
I mention the video because it highlights the role played by John Sununu, former New Hampshire governor and father of our current governor, who as Ronald Reagan George Bush’s chief of staff was a climate denier par excellence. (His son, Chris, isn’t quite as bad but isn’t good, either.) Sununu comes in at the 45 minute mark in the video, which you can see on YouTube here.
In 2019 NH Public Radio did an excellent deep dive into the family’s connection with fossil-fuel industries. The podcast, with links to full interviews, is online here.
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Thanks for sharing. John Sununu appears in the video at about 32:20. The entire video is only 45:20, including the credits.
Fun fact: John Sununu attended MIT at the same time as David Koch. Koch studied in the engineering department of MIT for 5 years, simultaneous with John Sununu. Both finished their Master’s degrees in 1963. – https://dianeravitch.net/2022/07/04/the-koch-libertarian-project-vs-america/.
But it’s not just father John Sununu and son Gov Chris that aren’t quite in sync with what the IPCC tells us needs to be done about climate pollution from fossil fuels. Another son, Micheal, has published some of the state’s most outrageous climate denier materials, consults with the industry, and at a BIA energy symposium panel discussion on carbon pricing, brought out a litany of disinformation about climate science, climate economics, and policy options.
Also, from the link above, “In 1993, an executive of Charles and David’s Koch Industries Michigan subsidiary, Guardian Industries, became a founding trustee of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy [JBC] in NH. Its mission was to advance many of the policies listed on David Koch’s platform of 1980. John Sununu, and later his son James, would chair the JBC board through today.” As the NPR story described, climate denial seems to be a Sununu family business.
Another Sununu anti-climate angle is a home-grown big energy money-powered set of local groups described by this article: https://www.energyandpolicy.org/new-england-ratepayers-association/.
It’s a tangled web of Kochs (fossil fuel industry and free market fundamentalist billionaire) and Sununus, dating back to the 1980s, and still impeding efforts to clean up our state and national energy acts.
John Sununu was George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, not Ronald Reagan’s.
John Sununu was George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, not President Reagan’s.