Google's Eric Schmidt said they're outright lying when trying to cast doubt on climate change science

Sep 23, 2014 07:23 GMT  ·  By

The pressure seems to have finally paid off as Google has finally decided to leave the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). While the original purpose was to convince Google to leave ALEC because of its extremist views, especially when it comes to net neutrality, it was the group’s views on global warming that pushed the Internet giant to act.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman, didn’t just quit ALEC, he said it was a mistake to support the group that said that human-created climate change could even be beneficial for the world. ALEC has also been opposing environmental regulations.

Schmidt outright called them, and every other group out there that’s trying to cast doubt on climate change science, liars.

A few weeks back, Google was asked by about 50 advocacy groups to cut its connection to the American Legislative Exchange Council after the group expressed its opposition to net neutrality rules and municipal broadband. At the time, Google refused to comment, but it’s obvious that they’ve been looking over things.

During an appearance on The Diane Rehm Show, however, Google made it clear that they’re done. A listener asked whether Google still supports ALEC, describing the group as lobbyists that are “funding climate change deniers.”

“We funded them as part of a political campaign for something unrelated. I think the consensus within the company was that was sort of a mistake, and so we’re trying to not do that in the future,” Schmidt answered.

“They’re literally lying,” said Schmidt

While the chairman didn’t talk about ALEC’s position on the net neutrality issue, he did criticize the attitude towards climate change. Schmidt said that Google had a very strong view that political decision should be based on facts and climate change wasn’t something in question anymore.

“Everyone understands that climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And we should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying,” Google’s executive chairman said.

Google has been a member of ALEC’s Communications and Technology Task Force. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are also members of the same team, although Microsoft recently decided to leave the group.

ALEC has been involved not only in lobbying for various laws, but also writing model legislation that can be voted to become law. So far, they’ve made it difficult for cities and towns to compete against private ISPs by offering their own Internet service, which is one of the issues that pushed activists to ask Google to cut its ties with it.

ALEC is also known for pushing legislation that forces schools to teach skepticism when it comes to climate change or outright denial. One bill that the group has pushed claims that human activities bring beneficial climatic changes and goes as far as to say that there’s scientific uncertainty surrounding the nature of these prospective changes.