Revealed: oil-funded research in Palin's campaign against protection for polar bear - Guardian

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Source: The Guardian

Revealed: oil-funded research in Palin's campaign against protection for polar bear

• Paper authored by known climate change sceptics
• Governor suing over threatened species ruling

Ed Pilkington in New York
The Guardian, Wednesday October 1 2008

The Republican Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan
state government drew on the work of at least six scientists
known to be sceptical about the dangers and causes of global
warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected
as an endangered species, the Guardian can disclose. Some
of the scientists were funded by the oil industry.

In official submissions to the US government's consultation
on the status of the polar bear, Palin and her team referred
to at least six scientists who have questioned either the
existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or
its severity. One paper was partly funded by the US oil
company ExxonMobil.

The status of the polar bear has become a battleground in
the debate on global warming. In May the US department of
the interior rejected Palin's objections and listed the bear
as a threatened species, saying that two-thirds of the
world's polar bears were likely to be extinct by 2050 due
to the rapid melting of the sea ice. Palin, governor of
Alaska and the Republican nominee for US vice-president,
responded last month by suing the federal government, to
try to overturn the ruling. The case will be heard in
January.

Though the state of Alaska has no polar bear specialists
on its staff, the governor's stance has pitted it against
the combined scientific fire-power of the US Fish and
Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and world
experts on the mammal.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/01/sarahpalin.climatechange

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