The Money Trail The Global Warming Science Machine: $79 Billion and Counting
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07 August 2009
Over the last two decades, US taxpayers have subsidized the American climate change industry to the tune of $79 billion. That’s the headline from Climate Money, a report published last month by the Science and Public Policy Institute.
The report’s author, Joanne Nova, points to a “well funded, highly organized climate monopoly” that she says is spending billions of dollars without any proper scientific audits. Those audits, she maintains, are instead being conducted by “unpaid volunteers” who have exposed the climate industry’s “major errors time and again.”
Nova also says these government expenditures have “created a powerful alliance of self-serving vested interests” drawn by the prospect of lucrative profits soon to be garnered from carbon trading. The result: the establishment of a near-monopsony that is distorting climate science in favor of climate alarmism.
Climate Money claims that the US Government has “poured in $32 billion for climate research – and another $36 billion for development of climate-related technologies” over the last 20 years. Yet, “after spending $30 billion on pure science research no one is able to point to a single piece of empirical evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has a significant effect on the global climate.” The report makes the telling point that a burgeoning industry employing thousands and receiving billions in free government handouts simply has no “real incentive to ‘announce’ the discovery of the insignificance of carbon’s role.”
Nova also perceives a “ratchet effect”, whereby pro-AGW (anthropogenic global warming) theory is “reported, repeated, trumpeted and asserted” while anti-AGW findings, often the work of unfunded, retired scientists, “lie unstudied, ignored and delayed.” The SPPI report shows how it is largely left to unfunded bloggers and scientists to expose errors like that perpetrated by Michael Mann’s now infamous and discredited Hockey Stick Graph. The report also cites how, once again, it was left to “unfunded volunteers” to expose how 89 percent of the NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) temperature sensors, showed that the national statistics were being collated from sites located too near to heating and air conditioning outlets, car parks and other artificial sources of heat.
Climate Money also highlights the vilification of “Big Oil” and, in particular, the “Exxon Blame-Game.” Nova’s report reveals that while Exxon Mobil gave a mere $23 million, spread over ten years, to climate sceptics, climate alarmism was funded to the tune of $2 billion by the US Government. Yet as stark as the funding difference is, it is Exxon that has, and still is, been attacked mercilessly for allegedly “distorting the debate.”
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