Denial 1.0 - Big Tobacco; Denial 2.0 - Climate; Denial 3.0 - Climate, But With Dark Money This Time
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Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, published the first peer-reviewed study in 2013 of who was funding what he called the climate change counter-movement that delayed action on the crisis. He found that between 2003 and 2010 more than $500m had been donated by private conservative philanthropic foundations to organisations whose output included material disputing the consensus. Thinktanks, trade associations and front groups were a key part of the effort, he concluded, with their major funders including foundations affiliated to the fossil fuel magnates the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil, and the ultra-conservative Scaife and Bradley foundations.
Brulle also found evidence of a trend to conceal the sources of funding once campaign groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace and the Climate Disinformation Database started tracking what they called dark money to climate denial from the mid-2000s. In the second half of that decade, Koch, Scaife, Bradley and ExxonMobil foundation funding to organisations involved in propagating doubt declined while donations to the same organisations via two anonymised vehicles, the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, increased rapidly.
Among the thinktanks most identified with spreading doubt are the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Marshall Institute (which folded in 2015), the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the campaign group Americans for Prosperity.
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Half a decade later some fossil fuel industry funding of climate contrarian science was exposed, when Greenpeace found out via freedom of information requests that a prominent academic at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Willie Soon, had attracted more than $1.2m in payments over 14 years from ExxonMobil, Southern Company, the API and a Koch foundation, to the centre for his work. Soon doubted the scientific consensus that emissions were the principal cause of global heating. He is now an affiliate of the Heartland Institute. Soon strenuously denied that his industry funders had any influence over his conclusions and the Heartland Institute said he was not even aware of who some of the donors to the centre were, making a conflict of interest impossible.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/10/vested-interests-public-against-climate-science-fossil-fuel-lobby