by frog
This won’t come as much of a surprise to many – a report from Greenpeace shows that Koch Industries have been spending tens of millions of dollars to create an echo chamber of inaccurate and misleading information on climate change. In recent years Koch has out-spent even ExxonMobil by a ratio of 3 to 1
Treehugger.com has a good summary of the story, some of which is
Among the organizations and people funded through the various Koch foundations are:
1) “At least 20 organizations central to the global echo chamber which have repeatedly rebroadcast, referenced and appeared as media spokespeople” in reference to Climategate.
2) In 2007, an astrophysicist to write an article about polar bears which, masquerading as a piece of peer-reviewed literature, attempted to refute the threat to the species due to climate change.
3) A Danish think tank which produced a “dubious study about the Danish wind industry”, rejected by the Danish environment minister, which was then used to challenge President Obama’s support of wind power.
4) Groups which supported a “widely debunked study” which claimed that Spain’s support of renewable energy had lost the country jobs.
Other groups receiving large amounts of funding include: Mercatus Center ($9.25 million, 2005-2008), Americans for Prosperity ($5.18 million 2005-2008), The Heritage Foundation ($3.36 million, 1997-2008), Cato Institute ($5.28 million 1997-2008).
The 44 page report includes 9 pages of references to mainstream sources of information, which I find very impressive.
There should be little doubt in anyone’s mind as to what we are up against.
UPDATE 4/4/2010: This story on MSNBC
Published in Environment & Resource Management | Featured by frog on Wed, March 31st, 2010
Tags: climate change, climate change denial, climategate, koch industries
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
It is sad that humans don’t learn from their mistakes.
Greed will prevail over everything else, even life.
Yet another civilisation will disappear from this planet, as many others did centuries ago. All because they didn’t heed the warnings.
I’m glad not to be 18, and have to face a life of misery. Who can blame the young for their pessimistic outlook. Life for them will never be as good as ours.
Gadgets, motorised everything, i this and i that are not much use when the air you breathe, or the water you drink are contaminated, is it.
And yet we keep promising ourselves that everything will be alright.
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Shock horror!
How about a headline: “Billions in taxpayer’s dollars behind climate-change “research”?
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Here’s a list of government funding for AGW research in the last 10 years in NZ, just to compare the amounts in question:
Landcare Research New Zealand Ltd $41,993,168
National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd $34,867,745
Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences Limited $33,520,132
Pastoral Greenhouse Gases Research Consortium $20,522,000
Lanzatech $12,000,000
Research Trust of Victoria University of Wellington $6,439,473
Lincoln University $5,238,414
DairyNZ $5,236,150
AgResearch Limited $5,144,796
University of Auckland $3,940,000
Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Trust $2,587,500
University of Waikato $2,387,250
Institute of Environmental Science and Research Limited $2,275,686
New Zealand Forest Research Institute Ltd $1,927,500
University of Otago $1,444,875
Industrial Research Limited $1,158,333
Opus International Consultants Ltd (OPS) $540,000
Geoscience Research and Investigations New Zealand $300,000
University of British Columbia $265,208
Building Research $147,000
Meridian Energy $22,943
Nelson Forests Ltd $19,500
Total $181,977,673
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How wide a net are you casting with “AGW”? Are you including research into improvements to building insulation for example?
And how come the University of British Columbia is on that list?
Trevor.
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Ha! And research money is the same as money spent on media based denial?
Sometimes people bring up irrelevancies that take a long time to get sorted.
This isn’t one of those times.
BJ
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http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/phil%20jones%20house%20of%20commons%20report.pdf
The so-called “skeptics STILL haven’t got a case.
The planet IS going to warm up and it is OUR doing… that’s the science. The amount of BS that has been published in the popular press notwithstanding.
Libertarians can understand that science isn’t affected by political ideologies or scientists desire to raise taxes or create a world government. It is quite unfortunate that so many so very often do NOT understand this.
BJ
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Actually all the pro-environment campaign being done today like the Copenhagen climate change summit were nothing but just a big showoff. I dont even believe much in the Earth hour although it will help in spreading global awareness but switching your lights off will do little to minimize carbon emissions and that only applies to coal power plants. I dont see any real solution to these problem preseted by our leaders. None yet.
There is only one solution to the issue of climate change and that is we must focus on our vehicles. Imagine millions of cars are trekking the roads of the world releasing greenhouse gasses everyday. It is the main culprit the biggest contributor to global warming. We should go hydrogen or electric and stop using oil first and foremost. There are a lot of technologies available it’s just it’s being suppressed perhaps the greedy oil corporations are behind it.
You know, way back year 2003, in the Philippines, an inventor converted his car into a water powered engine although I know this technology is not new. It was granted approval by Department of Science and Techology but later it was retracted. I believe the giant oil companies here are behind it. Greed is the main culprit.
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Would you please explain how an oil company or anyone else for that matter can “retract” an invention or “Supress” an invention?
Think before you leap.
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Thanks Owen…
Wilson
“There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”
Shorthand is “TANSTAAFL”.
The guy in the Philippines you are citing is simply replicating work done in the 1990′s, 80′s. 70′s and 60′s that made exactly the same claims.
Doesn’t need to be suppressed.
BJ
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“One notes that the House of Commons has brought out its first report on the CRU.”
That “enquiry” took exactly one day. It was a sham.
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For your reference, the information was from: “Parliamentary Question to Mapp: How many individual research projects have been funded in part or whole by Foundation for Research, Science and Technology since 1999 that either purport to study or to ameliorate the effects of global warming on New Zealand, or purport to study or to ameliorate the effects of activities in New Zealand (both past and present), that may affect global warming elsewhere; what were these projects, what was the cost of each project, who was the funding awarded to, and when the projects were completed?”
While not being a ‘denier’ nor a ‘warmist’ I am very suspicious of who is pushing what agenda (and I’m not talking about the Greens or this blog, don’t take this as an attack). I make real efforts to reduce my personal fuel and electricity consumption, to always dispose of my waste appropriately etc. I am particularly and vehemently anti Al Gore and all the delegates to Copenhagen who flew in their jets and were chauffered in their limousines. Not one of them makes any serious effort, it is all about telling others what to do. I guess you can’t choose your allies, but needless to say they’re not exactly great role models for the cause (ditto for scientists and the unreliable temperature data).
In my research I have discovered that perhaps up to a third of the recent warming could have been attributed to anthropogenic contribution, but that the error margins are themselves larger than the signal.
Given that Gore isn’t worried enough to stop flying around in a private jet, I don’t believe there is any cause for alarm.
In fact, I reckon I’ll wait and see the empirical results of the next decade before making up my mind.
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bjchip, I find it amazing that those scientists that accept GW are called “climate scientists” and their funding is called “research money” but scientists who question AGW (shock horror scientists questioning something) are called denialists and their funding is “money spent on media based denial”.
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Yea, why can’t organisations secretly hire hacks and still be taken seriously, bj?
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Do you enjoy Facebook, Twitter? Have your photos stored online. Bad people.
Stephen Foley of the Independent wrote from New York, published in NZ Herald Thursday about the electricity requirements for “data warehouses”
to store all the info that users create. (Not me).
In a nutshell, at current rates of growth, Greenpeace reckon data centres and telecoms infrastructure will consume about 1963 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, more than triple current usage and more than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.
Many of the sites Google, Yahoo and Apple have are served by coal burning power stations.
Also this week electric cars not efficient as coal power needed to recharge them, means emissions would be higher than petrol. Turns out petrol/diesel is most efficient fossil fuel. End of story.
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A point of view worth considering by everyone.
http://www.newgeography.com/content/001487-freeing-energy-policy-from-the-climate-change-debate
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The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins. Backlash in reaction to “Climategate” and recent controversies involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2007 assessment report are but the latest evidence that such efforts have evidently failed.
where is the evidence that it “lies in ruins”
having said that it’s 2010 and it’s “Easter”
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bjchip has risen!
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So everyone who keeps their photos online or uses Facebook, Twitter etc. are contributing to C02 emissions. Bad people.
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genji – it is not the amount of data stored on line that requires significant power. Rather it is accessing this data. Files that are accessed infrequently contribute very little to the overall power requirements. Technology is increasing the amount of data able to be stored on each hard drive, without causing an increase in the power to spin that hard drive. Other technological advances reduce the power consumption of the telecommunication equipment for a given data rate, as IC feature sizes reduce and operating voltages drop.
Trevor.
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So Trevor using online storage services is not causing an increase in power consumption and Greenpeace, who resaerched the article have got their facts wrong. Yeah Right!
See how people can manipulate to discredit any information that will impact on their enjoyment of what is offered to distract them from leading responsible lives.
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I presume that using on line data storage means that you do not need an external disc store on which to store your data using Time Machine or whatever.
I have two of these whirring away and I would have thought they would use more power than the online accessing of a cloud system.
Did Greenpeace consider that?
Frankly I suspect the total comparison would be about as difficult as calculating the carbon footprint of a pencil – which is near impossible.
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genji – I haven’t said that Greenpeace have got their facts wrong at all. You have paraphrased what a New Zealand newspaper has printed about what Stephen Foley and Greenpeace have said. I have no idea what either Greenpeace or Stephen Foley have said as you have not provided any references, and there are so few facts being provided here that it would be hard to say that any of them were wrong.
I was offering some additional technical information and insight.
Trevor.
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The story relates to Google, Yahoo and Apple who store data on behalf of users on their servers. ie online, available 24/7.
There are billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, i-tunes etc.
The hardware needed to store this data requires large amounts of coal generated power to run them.
That is the problem.
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Are there billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, i-tunes? Given that a large percentage of the 6 billion or so people on this Earth don’t have access to a computer and many of the rest are not interested, I suspect some exageration here. I am not familiar with i-tunes but how many people upload to it? Twitter doesn’t have large storage requirements that I know of. That leaves Facebook and You-Tube, and how many users upload to You-Tube? Millions perhaps but certainly no where near billions.
If the servers are that power hungry, perhaps New Zealand can contribute by hosting some of the servers here and powering them from our renewable resources.
Trevor.
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Well, yes, the root of which is that the cost of the electricity used to power them doesn’t include the environmental cost of it’s generation. If that was the case then renewable electricity would be far cheaper than coal and all the data centres would be using renewable sources instead.
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