The Money Trail Warming millions good, sceptics’ thousands bad
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03 July 2009
The ABC’s Emma Alberici yesterday tried to smear Senator Steve Fielding [pictured] as the dupe of corrupt scientists, paid by Big Oil to deny global warming.
ALBERICI: Bob Ward (above) - a policy director at the London School of Economics - first wrote to ExxonMobil in 2006. He was concerned about the financial support the company provided to climate change deniers…
WARD: They have stopped funding for a number of the groups that have been denying climate change but they haven’t stopped funding them all. Yet they have been telling people that they have stopped all that funding. So I think they should either own up that they are continuing funding for some of these groups or they should keep their promise.
ALBERICI: How many groups and what are the kinds of figures we are talking about as far as sums of money?
WARD: Several hundred thousand dollars a year… These organisations are not informing public debate on climate change, they are trying to mislead people...
Already a couple of things scream out from this report. First, if Fielding’s facts are wrong, then why not simply show why, rather than smear? But if they are right, then what does it matter if Big Oil helped to fund some of the groups publicising the science? All I see here are red herrings.
Second, why does Alberici - who is better than this - stoop to use the term “denier”, which is not only false but a deliberate and disgraceful attempt to align sceptical scientists and politicians with Holocaust deniers?
But here is the most astonishing thing about Alberici’s report. Not only is the money ExxonMobil gives an insigificant fraction of the billions handed out to global warming scientists and spruikers, but it’s also a fraction of the money that Ward’s own Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the LSE got from a global warming evangelist to preach the doomsday gospel:
Jeremy Grantham has given British universities £24m in a bid to save the planet… The British financier, who founded the Boston-based investment fund GMO, which has £55 billion under its management, gave the money to the London School of Economics (LSE) to fund an institute for researching the economics of climate change. A similar amount went to Imperial College London to study climate science.
Altogether, the £24m is one of the largest donations ever made to climate research… So why did Yorkshire-born Grantham do it?
“Because climate change is turning into the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. I wanted to invest my money in places where it might actually help tackle that problem,” said the financier last week…
Which makes Ward a monumental hypocrite.He complains that a few hundred thousand dollars from Big Oil corrupts debate, but says nothing about the more than $20 million his own university gets from Big Warming.
Why did Alberici not mention this?
So here’s the deal for the ABC. Debate the science, but if you must claim that the funding corrupts, at least admit which side gets the most of it.
