The ClimateGate money trail
For the last few decades, when it’s come to the debate over global warming and whether or not it is “man-made”, alarmists in both the activist community and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) usually will immediately point to any money tie global warming skeptics have to “big oil” and related industries as if to suggest that a money tie alone is good enough reason to dismiss claims made by “the deniers.” On the other hand, very little attention is paid by our so-called “objective” MSM to the extensive money ties of those who have made pushing the AGW agenda their life’s work.
The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens levels the playing field in a piece he wrote outlining some of the players in the ClimateGate scandal and the dough they’re rolling in – and how it’s pushing the “research” in a pre-determined direction:
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.
Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.
And it’s not just ClimateGate’s scientists who are “in the money.” Fox Business Network’s David Asman wrote a column on the “climate change” money trail back in April 2007 that you should also read and bookmark.
For the latest developments in the ClimateGate scandal, click here and here and keep scrolling.
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