According to ABC News, a small rural electric cooperative in Colorado paid a notorious climate change denier $100,000 without first informing or asking its members.
"It's outrageous," Ron Binz, a public utility consultant formerly with the state of Colorado, told ABC. "It's an abuse of authority. The customers are member-owners. [General Manager] Stan Lewandowski is basically spending other people's money."
In a memo (PDF) sent to 900 fellow members of a rural co-op industry group, Lewandowski essentially admitted the effectiveness of Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, writing that "Although our preference would be for this issue [climate change] to simply go away, that is not going to happen."
For that reason, Lewandowski wrote that his co-op, serving 133,000 members living in an area between Denver and Colorado Springs, paid University of Virginia researcher Patrick Michaels $100,000 "to stand up to the alarmists."
According to Exxonsecrets, which tracks donations made by the huge oil company to deniers, Michaels, probably the best-known climate change denier, has already made well over $100,000 from coal and oil interests, but this appears to be his biggest pay-off yet.
Michaels is infamous among climate change scientists for arguing that global warming could be beneficial. In a 2004 editorial available on the Cato Institute website, he argues that "scientists exaggerate global warming [and] ignore its positive aspects." As an example, Michaels claimed that "global warming is likely to increase winds, several kilometers aloft, that actually destroy hurricanes," a pleasant fantasy that has been blown apart by numerous studies, including this one from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
In the memo, Lewandowski also said that several large fossil-fuel companies, including Koch, The Southern Company, and AEP, are talking about "possibly financing a film that would counteract An Inconvenient Truth." That statement has yet to be confirmed.
(hat tip: DeSmog Blog, and more from ThinkProgress)
Comments
View as Flat
idahoooo Posted 3:49 am
29 Jul 2006
This has been bugging me for a long time, and it is not just you. I keep hearing this phrase, and I hate it. Can you tell the people who come up with the talking points to tone down the "denier" rhetoric a notch or two? At least refrain from doing it yourself. I formally call shenanigan on this style of argument. It makes you sound more like a religeous zealot shouting "heretic" than people who are concerned with a correcting a problem. Mr.Michaels may very well be a rent-a-geek schilling for the energy industry. Calling him a climate change obfuscator might is a lot more accurate (although not as catchy), but shouting "Heretic!" when somebody questions the prevailing conventional wisdom makes y'all sound like Pat Robertson in Birkenstocks. Are the Jesus approved diet shakes next? Save the denier talk for people who think the holocaust was a hoax and the earth is flat. The Earth's climate is an extraordinarlily complex thing, and there is abundant credible evidence to indicate that the addition of billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere over the past two centuries is causing our planet to retain more heat. Because climate is a global phenomena, there are bound to be a lot of changes when we mess with it. Duh. What those changes are, how fast they occur, and what we do to either counteract or adapt to them is a whole other ball of wax, with a lot less certainty. Language that conflates those who disagree with predictions of future events in extraordinarilly complex systems such as the climate, with the wackjobs who deny the occurrence of well established historical facts, like the holocaust and the shape of the planet does a disservice to your argument, and is easy ammo for those who would like to discredit your argument.
BTW, I reserve the right to take back everything I said here if Mr. Michaels ever authors a paper stating that global warming is impossible, because the exra CO2 simply falls off the edge of the planet before any warming can occur.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:57 am
30 Jul 2006
Cato and other corporate supported think tanks are the brokerage firms in this market.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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