When it comes to spending in the climate change debate, Big Oil’s supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.
Follow the money
Money for Skeptics: Greenpeace has searched for funding for man-made global warming skeptics and found $23 million dollars paid by Exxon over ten years (which has stopped).But in the end, everyone spends more on carbon friendly initiatives than on skeptics—even Exxon: (how about $100 million for Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project and $600 million for Biofuels research).
Money for the Climate Industry: The US government spent $79 billion on climate research and technology since 1989—to be sure, this funding paid for things like satellites and studies, but it’s 3,500 times as much as anything offered to skeptics. It buys 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. The $79 billion figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, and is not adjusted for inflation. In other words, it could be…a lot bigger.
There is no question that there are vastly more financial rewards for people who promote a carbon-made catastrophe than for those who point out the flaws in the theory.
Ultimately the big problem is that there are no grants for scientists to demonstrate that carbon has little effect. There are no Institutes of Natural Climate Change, but plenty that are devoted to UnNatural Forces.
It’s a monopsony [a market situation in which there is only one buyer], and the main point is not that the scientists are necessarily corrupted by money or status (though that appears to have happened to a few), but that there is no group or government seriously funding scientists to expose flaws. The lack of systematic auditing of the IPCC, NOAA, NASA or East Anglia CRU, leaves a gaping vacuum. It’s possible that honest scientists have dutifully followed their grant applications, always looking for one thing in one direction, and when they have made flawed assumptions or errors, or just exaggerations, no one has pointed it out simply because everyone who could have, had a job doing something else. In the end the auditors who volunteered—like Steve McIntyre and AnthonyWatts—are retired scientists, because they are the only ones who have the time and the expertise to do the hard work.
Money for the Finance Houses: What the US Government has paid to one side of the scientific process pales in comparison with carbon trading. According to the World Bank, turnover of carbon trading reached $126 billion in 2008. PointCarbon estimates trading in 2009 was about $130 billion. This is turnover, not specifically profits, but each year the money market turnover eclipses the science funding over 20 years. Money Talks. Every major finance house stands to profit as brokers of a paper trade. It doesn’t matter whether you buy or sell, the bankers take a slice both ways. The bigger the market, the more money they make shifting paper.
Banks want us to trade carbon…
Not surprisingly banks are doing what banks should do (for their shareholders): they’re following the promise of profits, and urging governments to adopt carbon trading. Banks are keen to be seen as good corporate citizens (look, there’s an environmental banker!), but somehow they don’t find the idea of a non-tradable carbon tax as appealing as a trading scheme where financial middlemen can take a cut. (For banks that believe in the carbon crisis, taxes may well “help the planet,” but they don’t pay dividends.)
The stealthy mass entry of the bankers and traders poses a major force. Surely if money has any effect on carbon emissions, it must also have an effect on careers, shareholders, advertising, and lobbying? There were over 2000 lobbyists in Washington in 2008.
Unpaid skeptics are not just taking on scientists who conveniently secure grants and junkets for pursuing one theory, they also conflict with potential profits of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and every other financial institution or corporation that stands to profit like the Chicago Climate Exchange, European Climate Exchange, PointCarbon, IdeaCarbon (and the list goes on… ) as well as against government bureaucracies like the IPCC and multiple departments of Climate Change. There’s no conspiracy between these groups, just similar profit plans or power grabs.
The largest tradeable “commodity” in the world?
Commissioner Bart Chilton, head of the energy and environmental markets advisory committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has predicted that within five years a carbon market would dwarf any of the markets his agency currently regulates: “I can see carbon trading being a $2 trillion market. The largest commodity market in the world.” He ought to know.
It promises to be larger than the markets for coal, oil, gold, wheat, copper or uranium. Just soak in that thought for a moment. Larger than oil.
Richard L. Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Climate Exchange Plc, agrees and predicts trades eventually will total $10 trillion a year.” That’s 10 thousand billion dollars.
Only the empirical evidence matters
Ultimately the atmosphere is what it is regardless of fiat currency movements. Some people will accuse me of smearing climate scientists and making the same ad hominem attacks I detest and protest about. So note carefully: I haven’t said that the massive amount of funding received by promoters of the Carbon Catastrophe proves that they are wrong, just as the grassroots unpaid dedication of skeptics doesn’t prove them right either. But the starkly lop-sided nature of the funding means we’d be fools not to pay very close attention to the evidence. It also shows how vapid the claims are from those who try to smear sceptics and who mistakenly think ad hominem arguments are worth making.
And as far as evidence goes, surprisingly, I agree with the IPCC that carbon dioxide warms the planet. But few realize that the IPCC relies on feedback factors like humidity and clouds causing a major amplification of the minor CO2 effect and that this amplification simply isn’t there. Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements failed to find the pattern of upper trophospheric heating the models predicted, (and neither Santer 2008 with his expanding “uncertainties” nor Sherwood 2008 with his wind gauges change that). Other independent empirical observations indicate that the warming due to CO2 is halved by changes in the atmosphere, not amplified. [Spencer 2007, Lindzen 2009, see also Spencer 2008]. Without this amplification from water vapor or clouds the infamous “3.5 degrees of warming” collapses to just a half a degree—most of which has happened.
Those resorting to this vacuous, easily refutable point should be shamed into lifting their game. The ad hominem argument is stone age reasoning, and the “money” insult they throw, bounces right back at them—a thousand-fold.
Be helpful to see some weight behind new technology energy - such as that recently given freely to the world and demonstrated by Dr Mehran Keshe. (keshefoundation.org) - The psycho-bullies have been sitting on this since Tesla and as a cross-disciplinary, clean, limitless power AND health tech,, it has the legs to change the world.
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