House Republicans invited Marc Morano, a semi-frequent Infowars guest and climate change denier, to speak before the House Committee on Natural Resources’ Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife regarding reports that 1 million species are threatened with extinction due to man-made climate change.
Morano is the founder of Climate Depot and gets his paychecks from the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which receives contributions from big oil companies. He was named Media Matter’s “Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year” in 2012, and to this day, conservative media programs regularly turn to him to provide a contrarian voice against the overwhelming scientific consensus and warnings about the consequences of climate change.
To justify his climate change denial, Morano often alludes to conspiracy theories alleging that global warming is a hoax and part of a mass-scale effort to deceive the general public on the state of the planet. Morano has appeared numerous times on Infowars with the wearer of the tin foil crown, Alex Jones, to further these conspiracy theories.
Morano appeared on Infowars as recently as February of this year and has multiple bylines at Infowars dating back as far as 2008. On Feb. 19, 2019, Morano joined Infowars host David Knight and alleged that Democrats advocating for the Green New Deal legislation wanted to declare climate change a national emergency so party leaders could implement totalitarian control over America. Claims like this are standard of Morano’s Infowars appearances; Morano told Infowars in 2011 that government leaders wanted to build a world government centered on eco-fascism. Four years later, Morano told Infowars that global warming was a ruse used to further efforts to establish a one-world government.
Because Infowars has been widely deplatformed across social media websites, the archives on Infowars’ website are incomplete; embedded videos in posts featuring Morano have since been removed. One post from 2012 advertised that Morano used his guest appearance to explain a “crafted artificial scarcity deception designed to empower a takeover of earth’s resources.” Media Matters reported that in one appearance on Infowars, Morano said that Barack Obama may “start a war” to win re-election.
Democrats on the committee tweeted out a screenshot of Morano’s appearance on Infowars, writing that it was “truly odd” that Republicans would invite Morano to “a serious hearing on the future of the planet.”
It’s truly odd that @NatResources Republicans would invite Marc Morano to a serious hearing on the future of the planet. If this is who they listen to on policy, why should anyone take their arguments seriously? Or is extinction a joke to them? #BiodiversityDay
— Natural Resources Committee (@NRDems) May 22, 2019
At the hearing, Morano predictably testified before House members that reports about climate change’s threat to biodiversity were “authoritative propaganda.”