Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by Richard Littlemore James Hoggan Page B
Authors: Richard Littlemore James Hoggan
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tried to point out the connection, reporters shrugged it off. No corpse, no bloodstained assassin, no story.
So Greenpeace researchers did what any conspiracy theorist (or smart police detective) does in this situation: they followed the money. A group called the Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research had started to build a database in the 1990s that included records of major industry contributions to the wise use movement, a property-rights coalition that had been opposing environmental regulations ranging from wetland protection to the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Green-peace picked up the group’s material and research techniques and started composing a specific database of contributions that ExxonMobil was making to think tanks—and especially to think tanks participating in the campaign to promote uncertainty about climate change.
Davies said Greenpeace picked Exxon for two reasons. First, as the biggest and wealthiest corporation in the world, it had the capacity to exercise an immense influence. And second, it was the only major oil company in the world that had not by the turn of the century acknowledged that climate change was a problem and that the burning of fossil fuels was the principal cause.
The Greenpeace team set up a Web site called ExxonSecrets .org. Based on tax information and on Exxon’s own annual corporate giving report, ExxonSecrets laid out which think tanks were receiving money and how much. Through creative use of “mind-mapping” display technology, the site also drew connections among the institutions and “experts” who were making themselves famous (and increasing their incomes) by claiming that the science of climate change was still in doubt. For example, the scientist Dr. S. Fred Singer, a hardworking climate change denier who has done no obvious scientific work in the field for years, was shown as president of his own think tank, the Science & Environmental Policy Project; editorial advisory board member for the Cato Institute; advisory board member for the American Council on Science and Health; adjunct scholar for the National Center for Policy Analysis; research fellow for the Independent Institute; distinguished research professor at the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University; former adjunct fellow at the Frontiers of Freedom Institute; former fellow at the Hoover Institution; former fellow at the Heritage Foundation; former fellow at TASSC; and editor of the newsletter Global Climate Change. ExxonSecrets also showed that all of these organizations receive money directly or indirectly from Exxon.
ExxonSecrets established that in the ten years after the creation of the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon invested more than US$20 million in think tanks that dedicated a large amount of effort to questioning whether climate change was sound science.
While Greenpeace was nailing down the dollars, three academics were conducting a peer-reviewed study of actual think tank output from the early 1970s forward. Peter Jacques and Mark Freeman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and Riley Dunlap of the Department of Sociology at Oklahoma State University-Still-water looked at the rise in publications that express all kinds of “environmental skepticism.” Their paper, titled “The Organization of Denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental Scepticism” and published in June 2008 in the journal Environmental Politics, searched all the available English-language books published between 1972 and 2005 that denied the seriousness of environmental problems. They found 141 such books denying or downplaying the seriousness of issues including climate change; stratospheric ozone depletion; biodiversity loss; resource shortages; chemical and other pollutants in the air, water, or soil; threats to human health of trace chemical exposure; and the potential risks of genetic manipulation. Of those 141 books, 130 (92.2
So Greenpeace researchers did what any conspiracy theorist (or smart police detective) does in this situation: they followed the money. A group called the Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research had started to build a database in the 1990s that included records of major industry contributions to the wise use movement, a property-rights coalition that had been opposing environmental regulations ranging from wetland protection to the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Green-peace picked up the group’s material and research techniques and started composing a specific database of contributions that ExxonMobil was making to think tanks—and especially to think tanks participating in the campaign to promote uncertainty about climate change.
Davies said Greenpeace picked Exxon for two reasons. First, as the biggest and wealthiest corporation in the world, it had the capacity to exercise an immense influence. And second, it was the only major oil company in the world that had not by the turn of the century acknowledged that climate change was a problem and that the burning of fossil fuels was the principal cause.
The Greenpeace team set up a Web site called ExxonSecrets .org. Based on tax information and on Exxon’s own annual corporate giving report, ExxonSecrets laid out which think tanks were receiving money and how much. Through creative use of “mind-mapping” display technology, the site also drew connections among the institutions and “experts” who were making themselves famous (and increasing their incomes) by claiming that the science of climate change was still in doubt. For example, the scientist Dr. S. Fred Singer, a hardworking climate change denier who has done no obvious scientific work in the field for years, was shown as president of his own think tank, the Science & Environmental Policy Project; editorial advisory board member for the Cato Institute; advisory board member for the American Council on Science and Health; adjunct scholar for the National Center for Policy Analysis; research fellow for the Independent Institute; distinguished research professor at the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University; former adjunct fellow at the Frontiers of Freedom Institute; former fellow at the Hoover Institution; former fellow at the Heritage Foundation; former fellow at TASSC; and editor of the newsletter Global Climate Change. ExxonSecrets also showed that all of these organizations receive money directly or indirectly from Exxon.
ExxonSecrets established that in the ten years after the creation of the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon invested more than US$20 million in think tanks that dedicated a large amount of effort to questioning whether climate change was sound science.
While Greenpeace was nailing down the dollars, three academics were conducting a peer-reviewed study of actual think tank output from the early 1970s forward. Peter Jacques and Mark Freeman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and Riley Dunlap of the Department of Sociology at Oklahoma State University-Still-water looked at the rise in publications that express all kinds of “environmental skepticism.” Their paper, titled “The Organization of Denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental Scepticism” and published in June 2008 in the journal Environmental Politics, searched all the available English-language books published between 1972 and 2005 that denied the seriousness of environmental problems. They found 141 such books denying or downplaying the seriousness of issues including climate change; stratospheric ozone depletion; biodiversity loss; resource shortages; chemical and other pollutants in the air, water, or soil; threats to human health of trace chemical exposure; and the potential risks of genetic manipulation. Of those 141 books, 130 (92.2
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