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Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year; to fight action on climate change
Topic Started: Dec 22 2013, 09:53 AM (970 Views)
Brewster
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The Guardian
 
Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change

Conservative groups have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort.

The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change. Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, the study found.

“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” said the author of the study, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle. “It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.”

Brulle's study, published on Friday in the journal Climatic Change, offers the most definitive exposure to date of the political and financial forces blocking American action on climate change.

It was not always possible to separate funds designated strictly for climate-change work from overall budgets, Brulle said. “Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizations, not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.”

Some of the think tanks on Brulle's list – such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – said they had no institutional position on climate change and did not control the output of their scholars. In addition, Brulle acknowledged that he was unable to uncover the full extent of funding sources to the effort to oppose action on climate change. About three-quarters of the funds were routed through trusts or other mechanisms that assure anonymity to donors – a trend Brulle described as disturbing and a threat to democracy.

“This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power,” he said. “They have their profits and they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hear people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. It ends up that people without economic power don't have the same size voice as the people who have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy.

“That is the bottom line here. These are unaccountable organisations deciding what our politics should be. They put their thumbs on the scale … It is more one dollar one vote than one person one vote.”

Top-tier conservative think tanks

The vast majority of the 91 groups on Brulle's list – 79% – were registered as charitable organisations and enjoyed considerable tax breaks. Those 91 groups included trade organisations, think tanks and campaign groups. The groups collectively received more than $7bn over the eight years of Brulle's study – or about $900m a year from 2003 to 2010. Conservative think tanks and advocacy groups occupied the core of that effort.

The funding was dispersed to top-tier conservative think tanks in Washington, such as the AEI and Heritage Foundation, which focus on a range of issues, as well as more obscure organisations such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the John Locke Foundation.

Funding also went to groups that took on climate change denial as a core mission – such as the Heartland Institute, which held regular conclaves dedicated to undermining the United Nations climate panel's reports, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which tried and failed to prosecute a climate scientist, Michael Mann, for academic fraud.

AEI was by far the top recipient of such funds, receiving 16% of total funding over the eight years, or $86.7m. Heartland Institute, in contrast, received just 3% of the total, $16.7m. There was also generous support to Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group affiliated with the conservative Koch billionaires, which received $22.7m.
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The full study is in a Peer Reviewed journal, Climactic Change, unfortunately behind a Paywall.

All that money wasted trying to convince people Climate Change is a fraud. A half page of rubbish scattered around the Right Wing Echo Chamber is enough to convince people like Bertie and Neut.
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colo_crawdad
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Question. How much influence on reducing climate change could that money purchased if spent in that endeavor rather than fighting against such actions.
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Neutral
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Probably now a waste of money (if it's even true) now that most know the facts and they dang sure aren't going to change the cultists.
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Brewster
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colo_crawdad
Dec 22 2013, 10:15 AM
Question. How much influence on reducing climate change could that money purchased if spent in that endeavor rather than fighting against such actions.
It would have a tremendous impact on the single biggest research project needed - High temperature superconductors - if we could move electric power easily from the areas of biggest generating potential to the areas of greatest need, Electric cars, Heating, etc. would take over with the new supply of large quantities of extremely cheap, clean electric power.

Note: "Semiconductor / Superconductor" typo corrected...
Edited by Brewster, Dec 23 2013, 09:46 AM.
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Neutral
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Why are you giving us a source such as the Guardian Brew?
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Berton
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The Alarming Cost Of Climate Change Hysteria

The US government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change
Edited by Berton, Dec 22 2013, 12:09 PM.
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colo_crawdad
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Berton
Dec 22 2013, 12:08 PM
Hmmmmmmmm that's somewhere aroung $3 billion per year. Add to that the more than $1 billion yearly spent by conservatives attempting to fight those policies, and think of how much more we could have accomplished in that 24 years.
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Berton
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The fact is that doing Climate Change research is a money making machine. Contrary to what some people would have us believe. Keep in mind that is just the money the US has spent.
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colo_crawdad
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It appears to me that, at over a billion dollars a year, fighting against doing research into climate change and adopting any policies to deal with climate change is a money making machine. Surely someone is collecting those billions of dollars conservatives are spending to fight such research and other policies.
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Berton
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It might seem that way but governments around the world are spending much, much more in attempts at putting more control over our lives by funding the junk science of Climate Change.
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