{"id":9809,"date":"2007-02-02T10:24:02","date_gmt":"2007-02-02T15:24:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9809.html"},"modified":"2007-02-02T10:24:02","modified_gmt":"2007-02-02T15:24:02","slug":"bribing-experts-to-deny-global-warming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bribing-experts-to-deny-global-warming\/","title":{"rendered":"Bribing experts to deny global warming"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in September, it appeared that ExxonMobil was beginning to turn a corner. The “Competitive Enterprise Institute,” a propaganda machine for Big Oil that created some unintentionally hilarious<\/a> ad campaigns, would no longer be funded by the energy behemoth. What’s more, ExxonMobil told the Royal Society, Britain\u2019s premier scientific academy, that the company would \u201cnot be providing any further funding<\/a>\u201d to groups that distort global warming science. Progress?<\/p>\n

Apparently not<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world\u2019s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.<\/p>\n

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN\u2019s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered. [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, it makes some sense. If ExxonMobil isn’t going to fund its own propaganda machine anymore, it stands to reason that they’d start outsourcing the propaganda efforts to freelancers through fairly lucrative bribes.<\/p>\n

Of course, in this instance, it’s particularly egregious. Legitimate policy experts and professionals already have outlets in which they can comment on the “strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.” But that’s not really what ExxonMobil is going for here — they wanted experts to manufacture<\/i> concerns about the IPCC report in exchange for money. In other words, ExxonMobil wanted to perpetrate a fraud about an environmental crisis. And got caught.
\n
\nWhat’s more, as Brad Plumer noted, even the good news about ExxonMobil severing ties to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is a bit of a sham<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So let’s see: Exxon has donated $1.6 million to AEI over the years, and there’s no indication that it plans to stop anytime soon. And that’s not all. Two weeks ago, ExxposeExxon — a coalition of environmental groups, including the NDRC and the Sierra Club — asked Exxon whether it had cut off funds for all<\/i> of the 43 organizations on its payroll that have attacked climate-change science. Exxon never replied. There’s a strong suspicion that the company hasn’t really<\/i> decided to quit spreading confusion about global warming. Instead, it just stopped funding CEI and a few other unnamed groups in order to garner some positive press, and that’s it. I believe “greenwashing” is the appropriate term here.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can think of a few other terms that might apply, but none of them are “appropriate.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in September, it appeared that ExxonMobil was beginning to turn a corner. The “Competitive Enterprise Institute,” a propaganda machine for Big Oil that created some unintentionally hilarious ad campaigns, would no longer be funded by the energy behemoth. What’s more, ExxonMobil told the Royal Society, Britain\u2019s premier scientific academy, that the company would \u201cnot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9809\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}