Full Disclosure for All, Including “Selfless Defenders of the Environment”
Full Disclosure Preamble by Stephen Heins
Full Disclosure for All, Including “Selfless Defenders of the Environment”
I have suggested years before (as early as 2013) that all scientists/futurists/businesses/Wall Street financial markets/countries and larger entities/universities/federal agencies/NGO's/forecasters/analysts/energy predictors/environmental activists, should have to disclose all “material” information—especially including private funding, direct NGO funding, cross NGO’s contributions, federal and state funding, out of country funding, individual studies and projects, university grants, and direct payments.
As Judith Curry put it, these material facts help create a “funding bias” in a world looking for some humility and humanistic objectivity. We deserve such disclosures.
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Climbing Onto the Climate Change Gravy Train: The Popular Perception, Encouraged by the Media, Is That the Battle Over Climate Change Features David Against Goliath
propaganda
Selfless defenders of the environment are pitted against greedy multi-billion-dollar corporations and their lavishly funded stooges who only care about profits and don’t give a hoot about the Earth or future generations.
Thus in 2007 NBC Nightly News breathlessly reported a claim by the environmental pressure group Union of Concerned Scientists that Exxon-Mobil 1 had “given almost $16 million” over seven years to “denier groups”.
To the mainstream media, this $15,837,873 was the smoking gun—proof that climate change skeptics were in the pay of the world’s largest oil company.
Case closed. Or was it?
Left unreported by NBC News was that just a few years earlier Exxon-Mobil had given a $100 million grant to Stanford University to combat global warming. The oil company pledged the $100 million in 2002 to “research on ways to meet growing energy needs without worsening global warming,” according to the New York Times.
Did you know?
Global warming promoters receive “3,500 times as much money as anything offered to skeptics”.
The world is spending nearly $1 billion a day to prevent climate change.
Al Gore took millions of dollars in Qatari oil money for his Current TV network
The media finds outrage that $15,837,873 was allegedly given to skeptical organizations over seven years, but is silent on the over $100 million grant to Stanford to fight global warming.
Deep Pockets
Let’s put this $16 million of alleged funds to skeptics in some perspective.
A single 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant of $20 million to study how “farm odors” contribute to global warming exceeded all of the money that skeptical groups reportedly received from oil giant Exxon-Mobil.
The USDA awarded “nearly $20 million in Conservation Innovation Grants to fund 51 research projects across the country designed to refine new technologies helping dairy and other agricultural producers cut back on their greenhouse emissions and cash in on governmental incentives for the research”.
USDA reports have stated “that when you smell cow manure, you’re also smelling greenhouse gas emissions”.
In comparison to the hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. government funding of activist climate change research, the few million dollars Exxon allegedly gave the skeptics is a drop in the bucket.
A 2017 report from the Capital Research Center revealed how climate activists have repeatedly tried to inflate the financial clout of groups affiliated with skepticism of climate change.
“In a widely cited 2014 study, the sociologist Robert Brulle purportedly exposed a network of nonprofit groups executing ‘a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public’s understanding of climate change,” reported Steven Allen, the vice president of the Capital Research Center.
The media ran with the story, portraying skeptical groups as lavishly funded, with endless resources at their disposal. But the analysis by the Capital Research Center found “that no more than 6%” of the spending by the ninety-one conservative groups “engaged the public on climate science”.
Biologist turned filmmaker Randy Olson excoriated his fellow climate activists in 2017 for what he called their inaccurate claims about skeptics’ funding.
“There is so much money in this climate community, in the foundations, the gargantuan sums of money over a billion dollars as of 2011 poured into this issue of climate and energy,” Olson said. “Matt Nisbet documented that in his Climate Shift report”.
Olson, who made the 2008 climate film Sizzle and wrote the 2009 book Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style, pointed out:
“It isn’t right for them to be crying poor or somehow Exxon outspends them. That’s a myth”.
And, according to Allen at Capital Research Center, government spending on climate issues is massive.
“The best estimate, based on Office of Management and Budget data, is that from 1993 to 2014, federal expenditures exceeded $166 billion in 2012 dollars,” Allen wrote. “Who really has the power?” he asked.
Another analysis, by the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), a group of scientists skeptical of man-made climate change fears, came to similar conclusions, which were published in a 2014 report:
“Based on US government reports, SEPP calculated that from Fiscal Year (FY) 1993 to FY 2013 total US expenditures on climate change amount to more than $165 Billion. More than $35 Billion is identified as climate science.
The White House reported that in FY 2013 the US spent $22.5 Billion on climate change. About $2 Billion went to US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).
The principal function of the USGCRP is to provide to Congress a National Climate Assessment (NCA). . . .
Much of the remaining 89% of funding goes to government agencies and industries claiming they are preventing global warming/climate change, even though they do not understand the natural causes of climate change and, likely, far overestimate the influence of COP. These entities have a vested interest in promoting the fear of global warming/climate change.
But even more revealing is the work of Australian researcher Joanne Nova, who examined funding of just U.S. climate skeptics versus the proponents of man-made global warming. What Nova’s research revealed is that global warming promoters in the United States receive “3,500 times as much money as anything offered to skeptics”.
As Nova discovered, “Skeptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme”.
Her 2009 financial analysis uncovered how the “global warming science machine” had been financed—up to that time—to the tune of “$79 billion and counting”.
The report revealed a “well-funded, highly organized climate monopoly”.
And what does all this money buy?
According to Nova, it “buys a bandwagon of support, a repetitive rain of press releases, and includes PR departments of institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the Climate Change Technology Program. The $79 billion figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, and is not adjusted for inflation. In other words, it could be ... a lot bigger”.
The report’s bottom line:
“Big Oil’s supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government”.
In the fall of 2013, the White House reported to Congress that there were a total of eighteen federal agencies involved in the global warming debate, spending an estimated $22.2 billion in 2013, and $21.4 billion in 2014. And in 2017 Bloomberg News reported that the Obama administration had “stashed” $77 billion in “climate money” across various agencies to elude budget cuts.
“Obama aides spread money across the government to elude cuts,” the news agency reported. The goal was to make “programs hard to disentangle” by “integrating climate programs into everything the federal government did”.
At the National Science Foundation, the geosciences program almost doubled to $1.3 billion. The budget for NASA’s Earth Science program increased 50 percent, to $1.8 billion. Feds awarded $1 billion through its Community Development Block Grant program to projects protecting against climate change- related natural disasters. In 2012, the Federal Highway Administration made climate- adaptation projects eligible for federal aid.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs created the Tribal Climate Resilience Program. The range of climate programs is vast, stretching across the entire government. The Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies have climate-related activities, and calculated $77 billion in spending from fiscal 2008 through 2013 alone. But that figure could well be too low.
The hidden climate funding has spread to almost every aspect of the federal government, with sometimes wacky results.
The Department of Transportation, for example, has studied the alleged link between climate change and fatal car crashes. The agency asked in a study: “How might climate change increase the risk of fatal crashes in a community?”
The Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney declared that there would be no more of the “crazy stuff the previous administration did.
Mulvaney said in 2017:
"What I think you saw happen during the previous administration is the pendulum went too far to one side, where we were spending too much of your money on climate change and not very efficiently”.
Aside from government funding of the climate change issue, environmental groups have massive private financial funding to promote climate fears. A 2014 report from the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE) revealed just how deep Big Green’s pockets actually are.
“U.S. environmental activist groups are a $13-billion-a-year industry—and they’re all about PR and mobilizing the troops. Their climate change campaign alone has well over a billion dollars annually, and high-profile battles against drilling, fracking, oil sands and Keystone get a big chunk of that,” explained CDFE executive vice president Ron Arnold.
“The liberal foundations that give targeted grants to Big Green operations have well over $100 billion at their disposal. Making Out like a Bandit And it’s not just universities, professors, and green organizations that have reaped financial benefits from the climate panic.
Former vice president A1 Gore has done quite well for himself, too.
As Bloomberg News reported:
“In the last personal finance report he filed as vice president, Gore disclosed on May 22, 2000, that the value of his assets totaled between $780,000 and $1.9 million”.
But by 2007 Gore’s wealth had skyrocketed. By that point he had a net worth “well in excess” of $100 million, including pre-public offering Google stock options, according to an article at Fast Company
MIT scientist Richard Lindzen declared that Gore wanted to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire”. After the Obama administration bloated climate and energy stimulus packages, Gore was on the path to that achievement.
By 2008, Gore was so flush that he announced a $300 million campaign to promote climate fears and so-called solutions. And he just kept raking it in.
According to a 2012 Washington Post report:
“14 green-tech firms in which Gore invested received or directly benefited from more than $2.5 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks, part of Obama’s historic push to seed a U.S. renewable-energy industry with public money”.
The Post explained that Gore “benefited from a powerful resume and a constellation of friends in the investment world and in Washington. And four years ago, his portfolio aligned smoothly with the agenda of an incoming administration and its plan to spend billions in stimulus funds on alternative energy. The recovering politician was pushing the right cause at the perfect time.
Gore’s orbit extended deeply into the administration, with several former aides winning senior clean-energy posts.
Republican Congressman Fred Upton of Michigan, the chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has been a critic of Gore’s profiting off the taxpayer funds using his government connections.
Gore’s portfolio “is reflective of a disturbing pattern that those closest to the president [Obama] have been rewarded with billions of taxpayer dollars . . . and benefited from the administration’s green bonanza in the rush to spend stimulus cash".
Gore was essentially either a founder, a member, or a partner in a whole wide range of groups that were profiting or poised to profit from a green energy stimulus and federally mandated carbon trading schemes if they became law. Gore would have personally benefited if the carbon cap-and-trade bill he supported had become law.
The media never treated his Congressional testimony in support of the climate bills for what it actually was—a former vice president supporting legislation that would make him richer.
These reports prompted one sarcastic skeptic to suggest, “Maybe A1 Gore Should Be the Subject of a RICO Investigation”.
The “Well-funded Campaign” Myth