Here, for example, is Al Gore pushing this line in An Inconvenient Truth:
The misconception that there is a serious disagreement among scientists about global warming is actually an illusion that has been deliberately fostered by a relatively small but extremely well-funded cadre of special interests, including ExxonMobil and a few other oil, coal and utilities companies. These companies want to prevent any new policies that would interfere with their current business plans…
One of the internal memos prepared by this group to guide the employees they hired to run their disinformation campaign was discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan. Here was the group’s stated objective: to ‘reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact’.
You see this same strain of paranoia – and I will show you why it is paranoia – running through the Climategate e-mails. Here is one (October 2003) from our friend Michael Mann to Robert Matthews, science correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph. Matthews has politely written to ask Mann whether he has any response to the critics who have questioned his methodology on a paper about the Medieval Warm Period. Mann replies:
These comments have not been made by scientists in the peer-reviewed literature, but rather, on a website that, according to published accounts, is run by individuals sponsored by Exxon Mobile [sic] corporation, hardly an objective source of information.
It’s as if somehow this formula absolves him of all responsibility to defend his claims.
You might suppose that this is just a convenient ruse, intended only for public consumption. But no, even when the Warmists are writing to one another rather than to journalists, it seems they view themselves as maverick outsiders engaged in a thankless and heroic struggle against a vastly more powerful, better-funded political and industrial Establishment.
Or, as Michael Mann hilariously put it in February 2010 when complaining about the ‘very well-honed, well-funded organised machine’ he was up against:
It’s literally like a marine in battle against a cub scout when it comes to the scientists defending themselves …. [What? Really literally, Mike?] We’re not PR experts like they are, we’re not lawyers and lobbyists like they are. We’re scientists, trained to do science.
To understand the absurdity of such ‘poor little me’ laments, let us continue doing the maths. We’ve already established a generous ballpark figure for the amount of money Big Carbon has spent encouraging AGW scepticism: call it $20m a year over a ten-year period. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? At least it does until you realise how much money goes to the other side of the debate.
Consider, for example, this job advertisement from April 2010 from the charity Oxfam:
Senior Press Officer – Climate Change
Date posted: 15/04/10
Closing date: 25/04/10
Employer: Oxfam
Salary: £33,700–£41,710
Location: Oxford
Campaigning for action on climate change is Oxfam’s key priority. It is already happening and it is the world’s poorest that are already feeling its effects, even though they are often the least responsible. By joining our press office you will lead the media work in publicising actions to cut emissions, plus the need for money to help people adapt to the impact of climate change.
Note that as far as this particular employer is concerned, the debate on AGW is over. The candidate’s job, as the ad makes quite explicit, will be to fight in the propaganda war demanding greater political action on climate change.
That’s just one AGW-promoting job (among many, I think we can safely assume, given that Oxfam has 4,371 employees, a staff payroll budget of £43m and an income in 2010 of £318m; and that ‘campaigning for action on climate change’ is its stated ‘key priority’) at just one UK-based organisation. Now think of all the thousands of similar organisations out there throughout the world promoting a similar message, each with its own paid-up team of activists, policy wonks, directors, press officers and PR managers singing from the same AGW hymn sheet. When you realise that of these, the World Wide Fund for Nature (the World Wildlife Fund, as it’s still known in the US) had an annual income of more than £457m in 2010 – not a penny of which, we can be fairly sure, goes on encouraging climate-change scepticism – you’ll begin to appreciate that ‘Big Eco’ is a rather more significant player in the AGW propaganda game than anything Big Carbon can muster.
Here are a few more examples of the vast network of financial support backing the AGW industry:
£1.1m – spent by British Council on ‘Challenge Europe’, a three-year project which ‘aspires to make a definite and lasting impact on the climate change debate, and is ambitious in its aim to accelerate change to a low carbon future’.
£2.5m – spent by British Council on International Climate Champions programme which ‘engages young people around the world as communicators who will help to influence and educate their peers and the general public on the urgency of climate change’.
£6m – spent by British government on ‘hard-hitting’ Bedtime Stories ad to target climate sceptics, which claims unequivocally that Man is causing global warming and endangering life on Earth (October 2009).
£13.7m – received in grants since 1990 by Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia.
A$13.9m – spent by Australian government on its 2009 ‘Think Climate Think Change’ ad campaign.
US$70m – pledged by Rockefeller Foundation for five-year Initiative on Climate Change Resilience to help cities and towns prepare for potentially damaging effects of global climate change (August 2007).
$100m – donated by ExxonMobil (yes that ExxonMobil) to Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project.
£243m – paid by UK government since 1990 to fund Met Office’s ‘climate prediction’ programme.
£650m – paid by European Union for ‘Specific programme of research and technological development in the field of environment and climate’ (1994–8).
$4bn – allocated in 2011 US Federal budget for climate research.
$126bn – World Bank estimate of carbon trading industry turnover in 2008.
$45tn – 2008 estimate by International Energy Agency on the cost of halving global man-made CO2 emissions by 2050.
And so on.
So vast and labyrinthine is the funding mechanism behind the AGW industry, we shall probably never know exactly how much has been squandered on it. UK government spending, for example, is allocated among a number of different departments, including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, as well as to agencies and quangos such as the Carbon Trust.
The best estimate so far comes from Australian blogger Jo Nova, who in March 2010 calculated that US government spending on climate research and technology since 1989 had amounted to $79bn. Sure, she conceded, some of this funding paid for things like ‘satellites and studies’. But as she noted, it also bought ‘a bandwagon of support, a repetitive rain of press releases and includes PR departments of institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the Climate Change Technology Program’. It is, she observed, about 3,500 times as much as anything offered to sceptics. And she’s just talking about US government funding. Her figures don’t include spending by other Western governments and private industry, and are not adjusted for inflation – so the total spending is likely to be considerably higher.
At the EU Referendum blog, Dr Richard North did some of his own calculations. He calculated the amount spent on climate funding since 1989 by the European Union at well over $100bn. In terms of equivalent spending, he says, this means that AGW has proved five times more costly than the most expensive project in history – the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. But at the end of the Manhattan Project, having spent all those bucks, they did at least get a couple of decent-sized bangs.
So what conclusions are we to draw from all this?
&nb
sp; For me, almost as shocking as the outrageous sums of money (much of it extorted from you and me via the tax system) being hosed down the drain in the name of AGW is the Warmists’ sheer effrontery. Talk about spotting the mote in your brother’s eye but not the beam in your own! Surely, you would have thought, after this embarrassing discrepancy was revealed publicly, they would have had the decency to blush, study their footwear, change the subject and never mention it again.
But no. Even now, the ‘funded by Big Oil’ accusation remains one of the key weapons in the Warmists’ armoury, shamelessly brandished on every conceivable occasion to ‘prove’ the rightness of their cause. Are they dim-witted? Desperate? Too dumb to notice the difference between a few million and several billion?
Or could it perhaps be that the policy is entirely deliberate – that they know exactly what they’re doing and that they have made a ruthless and cynical calculation?
Before I answer, let me ask you a question: How stupid do you think you are?
I would hope you feel quite affronted by my impertinence. You’re clever and inquisitive enough to have read this far in the book, for goodness’ sake, and it’s not always an easy read – not with all these indigestible facts and figures the author keeps chucking in, and words like ‘synecdoche’, not to mention all the digressions and random asides he seems to find so amusing. How clever do I want you to be? Einstein? Stephen Fry?
OK: so we’ve established you’re not stupid. Now let me ask you to imagine yourself brainstorming two concepts: the first is the WWF. And the second is ExxonMobil. What kind of images come to mind?
Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question. I don’t expect you to conjure up a giant vampire bat with WWF written on its wings, sucking the blood from the neck of a small child labelled ‘Global Prosperity’. Nor do I expect you to sum up ExxonMobil with lush, rolling pastures abundant with spring flowers, leaping lambs and flopsy bunnies.
No, the sort of thing I expect you to imagine is the same thing I would. With the WWF, it would be the panda motif, which has been part of my consciousness since early childhood. Maybe images of stranded lemurs being rescued from flooded rainforests, or the world viewed from outer space. With ExxonMobil, on the other hand, the images would be mostly bad. Even that double ‘X’ in the middle of the name has something evil about it. And you, like me, might conjure up images of seabirds and sea otters coated in thick, gunky oil, splurged in Prince William Sound in the Exxon Valdez disaster. And heartless executives touring derricks in hard hats and surveying the devastated landscape and cackling ‘Mwah ha hahaha!’
My point here is that however independent-minded and politically acute we may think we are, we’re all prey to certain cultural attitudes so deeply ingrained that we’re probably not even aware of them. One of these is the popular notion that funding from Big Business (Big Oil, Big Carbon, Big Koch…) is tainted, compromised and almost inevitably corrupting, while funding from a nature charity, or even from a government agency with a nice-sounding concept like ‘Environmental Protection’ in its title must be well over 3,500 times nicer.
Why? Well, because charities are nice – aren’t they? They’re run by volunteers. They care. Their motives are pure.
Yeah right. Let’s have a look at one of them more closely. How about Greenpeace, whose name bespeaks verdancy and tranquillity and caring environmentalism? Surely its stirring propaganda videos of plucky young men and women being hosed down by evil, blood-stained Japanese whale fishermen cannot fail to awaken the Gaia-worshipper within us all?
Well, almost all. I have to say, those videos leave me cold. I’ve seen a fair few of them quite often between sets on the main stage at Glastonbury Festival. They are broadcast on a loop on the big screens either side of the speakers. You can almost hear the people in the crowd either side of you, mentally urging the protestors on: ‘Way to go, Greenpeace! Stick it to those whalers! Block those sewage outlet pipes into the sea! Abseil down that chimney and show those polluting power stations just how horrid they are!’ That’s what happens when you’re young and you’re stoned and direct action in the name of the environment seems a desirable, sexy thing.
But not me. I’m the one grinding his teeth, and hissing to his wife: ‘That white stuff coming out of that cooling tower isn’t pollution, for God’s sake. It’s steam! It’s bloody water vapour! So why are they pretending it’s pollution!’ and ‘What? They expect us to be grateful, do they? They think, what, it’s a good thing that the operation of the power station was shut for a day, making our electricity even more bloody expensive than it was before they started adding on all those carbon taxes?’ And my wife’s the one hissing back: ‘Shh! Someone might hear you.’
Look, I’m not saying that everything Greenpeace does is evil. (I, too, have a soft spot for whales.) What I am saying is that it most definitely isn’t the force for unmitigated good you might infer from its public image and its holier-than-thou press releases. Morally speaking, I’d put Greenpeace on a rough par with ExxonMobil. Economically speaking, with Karl Marx. Certainly, in terms of the way it operates and the way it behaves, there’s scarcely a cigarette paper’s difference between the sanctimonious prigs of ‘Big Eco’ and the card-carrying Satan-worshippers at ‘Big Oil’.
In fact, their aims are much the same. A charity, like big business, depends on growth for its success. How does it achieve this? By boosting its public donations. How does it get more donations? By raising its profile. How does it raise its profile? By what Tony Blair used to call ‘eye-catching initiatives’ – publicity stunts – which help generate in its target audience a constant, and preferably ever-heightening, sense of imminent crisis.
Clearly, this sense of imminent crisis is key for a charity like Greenpeace. You’re not going to give a fiver to Greenpeace’s Project Thin Ice to save the polar bear if you think the species is good for another 10,000 years. You’ll only hand over the dosh if Greenpeace takes a more persuasive approach, along the lines of: ‘This is worse than we thought. It seems our very latest models are telling us that polar bears are going to be entirely wiped out by next summer at the latest. Unless, of course, you hand over that fiver – in which case they’ll all be OK, especially the cute baby ones that slide down that snow bank like on BBC’s Planet Earth. Up to you, mate.’
So that’s what Greenpeace does – and so do all its rival green pressure groups. Part of their job is saying what their customers want to hear. Kind of like the sales assistant in the expensive boutique who is asked by the woman trying on a new pair of jeans ‘Does my bum look big in these?’ they are required by the needs of their business to be somewhat economical with the actualité.
Greenpeace has plenty of form in this regard. In 1995, for example, it launched a noisy, highly successful campaign against Shell’s plans to dispose of a disused oil rig – Brent Spar – by sinking it in the mid-Atlantic. As the UK’s Natural Environmental Research Council subsequently confirmed, this was by far the most eco-friendly option and, as shipwrecks do, would have provided a fine habitat for all manner of marine life.
Unfortunately ‘Environmental group applauds oil company’s common-sense eco-solution’ doesn’t make a very good headline. Europe-wide boycotts of all Shell petrol stations, on the other hand, do – so that’s what Greenpeace did. It subsequently apologised for the inaccuracy of some of its claims but by then, the damage was done. Greenpeace got its publicity, but at the expense not only of Shell’s blameless shareholders but also of the environment Greenpeace is supposedly committed to saving.
You and I might call this bare-faced lying. But Greenpeace is a master of PR tactics, employing a more nuanced explanation on this as on other occasions. In July 2009, it was caught out on a press release claiming that ice was going to vanish from the Arctic as early as 2030. When BBC interviewer Stephen Sackur (against all standard BBC conventions that Warmists are to be given an easy ride) accused then-director Gerd Leipold of talking nonsense, Leipold defended his position thus: ‘We as a pre
ssure group have to emotionalise issues and we’re not ashamed of emotionalising issues.’
(Brilliant. Must try that one at home some time. ‘No darling, I wasn’t lying when I told you the only reason I made mad passionate love to that blonde twenty-year-old fan at the literary festival was because she had a gun and said that if I didn’t do exactly as she told me she would kill a puppy. I was just emotionalising the issue.’)
But it wasn’t always this way. At least not if we’re to believe Patrick Moore, the Canadian environmentalist who co-founded Greenpeace in 1971 – but quit fifteen years later, in disgust at the aggressively politicised direction taken by his beloved organisation.
He described his decision in The Wall Street Journal:
At first, many of the causes we championed, such as opposition to nuclear testing and protection of whales, stemmed from our scientific knowledge of nuclear physics and marine biology. But after six years as one of five directors of Greenpeace International, I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs. Ultimately, a trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favour of political agendas forced me to leave Greenpeace in 1986.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 8