Time To Ask Professional Climate Liars - Who's Paying You? Guardian

[hatrack]

EDIT

There is still much more to discover. It is unclear how much covert corporate lobbying has been taking place in the UK. But the little I have been able to find so far suggests that here, as in the US, there seems to be some overlap between Exxon and the groups it has funded and the operations of the tobacco industry. The story begins with a body called the International Policy Network (IPN). Like many other organisations that have received money from Exxon, it describes itself as a thinktank or an independent educational charity, but a more accurate description, it seems to me, would be "lobby group". While the BBC would seldom allow someone from Bell Pottinger or Burson-Marsteller on air to discuss an issue of concern to their sponsors without revealing the sponsors' identity, the BBC has frequently allowed IPN's executive director, Julian Morris, to present IPN's case without declaring its backers. IPN has so far received $295,000 from Exxon's corporate headquarters in the US. Morris told me that he runs his US office "solely for funding purposes".

IPN argues that attempts to prevent (or mitigate) man-made climate change are a waste of money. It would be better to let it happen and adapt to its effects. The Network published a book this year arguing that "humanity has until at least 2035 to determine whether or not mitigation will also be a necessary part of our strategy to address climate change ... attempting to control it through global regulation of emissions would be counterproductive". Morris has described the government's chief scientist, Sir David King - who has campaigned for action on global warming - as "an embarrassment to himself and an embarrassment to his country".

Like many of the groups that have been funded by ExxonMobil, IPN has also received money from the cigarette industry. Morris admits it has been given £10,000 by a US tobacco company. There is also a question mark about his involvement in a funding application to another tobacco company, RJ Reynolds. In the archives that the cigarette companies were forced to open as part of the settlement of a class action in the US, there is a document entitled Environmental Risk. It is an application to RJ Reynolds to pay for a book about "the myth of scientific risk assessment". "The principal objective of this book is to highlight the uncertainties inherent in 'scientific' estimates of risk to humans and the environment." Among the myths it would be contesting were the adverse health effects of passive smoking. The application requested £50,000 to publish the book; the editors would be "Roger Bate and Julian Morris".

Morris insists that his name was added to the document without his consent. He says he had "nothing" to do with the book. It was published in 1997 under the title What Risk?, with a foreword by the MP David Davis. It claims that passive smoking is no more dangerous than "eating 50g of mushrooms a week", and attacks "politically correct" beliefs such as "passive smoking causes lung cancer" and "mankind's emissions of carbon dioxide will result in runaway global warming". Morris is not named as its coeditor, but he is the first person thanked in the acknowledgments, for his "editorial suggestions".

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1881021,00.html

[nam78_two]

1. k&r /nt

I posted on this exact same thing a week or so ago....

Except that was about scientists speaking about about Exxon funding stuff like this...

Great post..thanks for passing that on.

[glitch]

2. Time to ask in a very public and humiliating way too. K & R

What kind of a subhuman would get paid to lie when their own specie and a planet is at stake?

edit: specie or species?

[starroute]

3. There is a whole network of groups and interests here

Libertarian, free market, anti-regulation groups all tend to network together, and they all tend to be funded by the same corporate sources, mainly big oil and big tobacco. Many of them have ties to the Heritage Foundation as well, and also to Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute.

One textbook example is the National Center for Public Policy Research -- the group run by Jack Abramoff's pal Amy Ridenour, which served as a front for several of Abramoff's overseas junkets. There are a lot of groups like that one all over the country and they are in close contact with one another.

There are also the right-wing legal foundations, which were being mentioned in a thread here the other day, like the Southeastern Legal Foundation or the Pacific Legal Foundation.

And they have overseas equivalents as well, mainly in Europe and East Asia.

Opposition to environmental and smoking regulations isn't their only issue. They also tend to be strongly pro-privatization and anti-social security. They often support school vouchers -- lining up with the religious right on that and certain other causes.

This is a huge issue, because these people aren't going to go away even if we manage to take back Congress and oust the Bushites and Neocons. Bush has been stacking the courts with judges who favor their arguments, and we're going to need to learn how to fight them effectively.