“Greedy Lying Bastards” follows “An Inconvenient Truth” in the climate change alarmism documentary film genre. The difference is this film lacked Al Gore’s name to give it momentum, although it has gotten some help from CNN [1].
The film is the creation of former eco-terrorist Craig Rosebraugh and actress Daryl Hannah [2] of “Splash,” “Kill Bill” and “Bladerunner” among others. The film made a mere $45,000 its March 8 opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo [3], which rated it the 400th movie of the past 365 days, and the 46th movie its March 8 opening weekend.
The documentary [1] says it “investigates the reason behind stalled efforts to tackle climate change despite consensus in the scientific community that it is not only a reality but also a growing problem that is placing us on the bring of disaster,” according to the official website [4]. The trailer, website and reviews for the film all make it out to be a collage of tried and true lefty climate change claims, complete with storm footage and villainization of the Koch brothers and the oil industry.
The Los Angeles Times [5] said that “longtime followers of this hyper-partisan topic may not find much terribly new or revealing here.” After an initial limited showing, the film was released in more theatres on March 29.
Rosebraugh, the film’s director, has been an outspoken activist for both the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, both of which are classified as domestic terror groups by the FBI [6]. In a press release on both groups, the FBI stated that “eco-terrorists and animal rights extremists are one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats in the U.S. today.”
One of the movie’s main targets is U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. Inhofe told The Tulsa World [7] that he was not surprised that the film targeted him, and he was proud of it on March 28. Inhofe was formerly the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. An outspoken conservative, Inhofe was also a winner of the Family Research Council [8]’s “True Blue” award for a consistent conservative voting record.
"As
I said in July 2003, when I first called global warming the greatest
hoax perpetrated on the American people, science has been co-opted by
those who care more about peddling gloom-and-doom fear tactics to drive
their own broader political agenda," Inhofe told The Tulsa World.
"Just
by watching the trailer, that's exactly what this video seems to do as
well, leveraging the unknown to incite fear and raise money to make
people like Al Gore even wealthier," he continued. Since his first
speech on the topic, Inhofe has been surprised by how organizations have
credited him as being “capable of singlehandedly bringing about the end
of the world.”
Director Rosebraugh claimed that the media was biased in favor of “climate change deniers,” even comparing global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers in an interview with The Huffington Post [9]:“Fox [News] is far and away the extreme example. They’ll have a known Holocaust denier debating a Holocaust survivor. Or a tobacco industry representative still arguing that smoking isn’t linked to cancer.”
The Business and Media Institute has demonstrated the opposite, exposing the liberal media’s bias against climate change skeptics over [10] and over again [11].
Rosebraugh also called out Republicans in the same interview, saying that as “long as they continue to publicly question the science of climate change, so will the media.” Just like Gore has said, Rosebraugh claims the debate about climate change is “already over.”
Rosebraugh’s Holocaust statements echo CBS’s Scott Pelley [12] from 2006, who argued against including climate change skeptics on the news, saying that “If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”
The film’s list of scientific “experts” included NASA scientist James Hansen [13] who’s predictions have failed to come true. In 1988, he warned that global temperatures would rise by 0.45 degrees Celsius. This was not the case [14]. However, Hansen began an August 2012 opinion piece for the Washington Post by saying that his predictions that year were too optimistic.
Hansen also called for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity [15]” in a 2008 speech to Congress, according to the U.K. news outlet the Guardian [16].
The film has gotten some publicity from the news media. During a March 9 CNN interview [1], the film’s executive producer, Daryl Hannah, was able to slam "false information" by the Koch brothers, compare herself to Martin Luther King, and call for the "eradication" of Citizens United during the interview. CNN completely ignored that the director and writer of the film, Rosebraugh, was a former spokesman for eco-terrorist groups for years before abandoning his work.