ExxonMobil Spends Millions Funding Global Warming Skeptics

[donsu]

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/22/1338256


A new investigation by Mother Jones magazine has revealed that ExxonMobil has spent at least $8 million dollars funding a network of groups to challenge the existence of global warming. We speak with the author of the report, a member of one the organizations that receives money from Exxon and a journalist covering environmental and climate change issues.
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Today is the 35th anniversary of Earth Day. To commemorate the occasion we take a look at the debate over global warming.

A new investigation by Mother Jones magazine has revealed that ExxonMobil has spent at least $8 million dollars funding a network of groups to challenge the existence of global warming.

We are joined on the line from Washington DC by Chris Mooney, the reporter who broke the story. His article - "Some Like It Hot" - appears in the May/June issue of Mother Jones magazine. We are also joined on the line by Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of 40 organizations identified in the report that receives funding from Exxon/Mobil. According to the article, CEI has received $1,380,000 dollars from Exxon. And on the line from Massachusetts we have journalist and author Ross Gelbspan. He also has an article titled "Snowed" in the latest issue of Mother Jones that explores why the U.S media pays relatively little attention to the issue of global climate change.
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interview starts
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I'm sneaking in one comment from the interview:

ROSS GELBSPAN: Well, before I respond as to whether it's a problem, Amy, I'd like it respond to what Myron said about the amount of money spent on this disinformation campaign. I had figures a few years back – and when there was a large organization called the Global Climate Coalition. It had 54 industry members. These were mostly representatives of the coal and oil and auto and every manufacturing sector, and a few years ago, the last year for which I had figures, the Global Climate Coalition spent millions and millions of dollars on lobbying and public relations to say that climate isn't happening. One member group of this 54 group organization, the A.P.I., paid $1.8 million to a public relations firm on this issue, and by comparison, the five biggest environmental groups that also focused on climate change spent a total of $2 million, according to their own organizations. So there's a huge mismatch in terms of the financial issues that -- the financial outlays in terms of fighting this battle for reality, basically, and for the public perception.
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"FIGHTING THIS BATTLE FOR REALITY"

bottom line

[rodeodance]

1. how sad--not surprized--just fed up!

[AmandaRuth]

2. wonder how much of that

money Penn and Teller took?

[G_j]

3. here is the excellent Mother Jones srticle

Mother Jones Article:


http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html


Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil.

By Chris Mooney

May/June 2005 Issue

WHEN NOVELIST MICHAEL CRICHTON took the stage before a lunchtime crowd in Washington, D.C., one Friday in late January, the event might have seemed, at first, like one more unremarkable appearance by a popular author with a book to sell. Indeed, Crichton had just such a book, his new thriller, State of Fear. But the content of the novel, the setting of the talk, and the audience who came to listen transformed the Crichton event into something closer to a hybrid of campaign rally and undergraduate seminar. State of Fear is an anti-environmentalist page-turner in which shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change. However fantastical the book’s story line, its author was received as an expert by the sharply dressed policy wonks crowding into the plush Wohlstetter Conference Center of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI). In his introduction, AEI president and former Reagan budget official Christopher DeMuth praised the author for conveying “serious science with a sense of drama to a popular audience.” The title of the lecture was “Science Policy in the 21st Century.”

Crichton is an M.D. with a basketball player’s stature (he’s 6 feet 9 inches), and his bearing and his background exude authority. He describes himself as “contrarian by nature,” but his words on this day did not run counter to the sentiment of his AEI listeners. “I spent the last several years exploring environmental issues, particularly global warming,” Crichton told them solemnly. “I’ve been deeply disturbed by what I found, largely because the evidence for so many environmental issues is, from my point of view, shockingy flawed and unsubstantiated.” Crichton then turned to bashing a 1998 study of historic temperature change that has been repeatedly singled out for attack by conservatives.

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are causing global average temperatures to rise. Conservative think tanks are trying to undermine this conclusion with a disinformation campaign employing “reports” designed to look like a counterbalance to peer-reviewed studies, skeptic propaganda masquerading as journalism, and events like the AEI luncheon that Crichton addressed. The think tanks provide both intellectual cover for those who reject what the best science currently tells us, and ammunition for conservative policymakers like Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who calls global warming “a hoax.”

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