Willie Soon and David Legates made a presentation in Delaware explaining why they believed man-made global warming is overblown and illustrated their position by showing the data that belies the alarmist computerized predictions of CO2-caused global catastrophe. How did the major Delaware newspaper cover this? Poorly, because they are in the tank for man-made global warming. How can you know that, you are wondering. The paper’s reporter felt it necessary to make anything that Soon and Legates said suspect by using “Some environmental groups have pointed to Soon’s and Legates’ ties to organizations financed by fossil fuel and deeply conservative interests, including the George C. Marshall and Heartland institutes.” This is the usual innuendo that greens and their allies in the media use. They have a dearth of factual data so they make personal attacks.
Actually this piece of untruth was pretty tame compared to that by Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post where she embellished the story by putting in the amounts of funding she believed had been given to Marshall and Heartland by Exxon and the Koch Brothers. But more on this later.
I suppose that you know there are many issue oriented organizations –Non-Government Organizations (NGO)– out there trying to persuade people to their point of view. A very large number of them have the mission of persuading you that global warming is a crisis and that unless we stop using fossil fuels, we are dooming the future generations to terrible catastrophes. Where do they get their money? Before we try to shed some light on that question, lets look at the relative size of the green NGOs and the George C Marshall and Heartland Institutes.
A partial list* of Green NGOs is tabled below. The following data are from Charity Navigator which rates a NGOs using the information supplied by that NGO. The data is for 2012 or the last fiscal year of these organizations. “Program expenses” result from the direct effort to accomplish their mission. They also have administrative and fund raising expenses which I have not tabled.
Green NGOs Program Exp $K Assets$K CEO pay$K
Nature Conservancy 672,757 5,180,559 493
World Wildlife Fund 139,971 271,695 496
Environmental Defense 70,755 137,034 426
Nat. Resc. Defen. Council 76,931 197,413 381
Sierra Club Foundation 46,672 82,622 157
World Resource Inst. 34,831 59,902 376
Union of Concerned Scientists 18,029 29,879 240
Strats for Global Envir 5,641 4,945 355
Ctr for American Progress 31,390 36,626 250
Greenpeace US ** 9,601 9,407 153
subtotal 1,106,390
* As a means of approximating the numbers of the NGOs that are global warming advocates, we note that more than 700 NGOs registered to attended COP 17 held in Durban, South Africa. See here, here and here. (h/t to Willis Eschenbach) Those that attended are just a fraction of the total of all the green NGOs.
**Greenpeace International’s 2011 budget was € 241 million, their program expenditures were €160 million and it leads 27 regional offices, one of which is Greenpeace US.
Now lets look at what the Charity Navigator has to say about the non-green NGOs, George C Marshall and Heartland Institutions and see how they match up with the green NGOs:
George C Marshall 342 154 24
Heartland 4,008 -157 154
subtotal 4,350
The difference is vast. Can you imagine if you are a green being frightened of these “pipsqueaks” so much that you have to take every opportunity to tell lies about their funding. That is $1,106,578,000 for programing versus the $4,350,000 for those fearsome little giants or stated another way, the expenditures for the little giants are 0.4% of the green NGOs. Note that Heartland is experiencing a deficit.
Earlier I said we would pick up on the Juliet Eilperin story. She said in a posting that: “The Heartland Institute received more than $7.3 million from Exxon Mobil between 1998 and 2010, and nearly $14.4 million between 1986 and 2010 from foundations affiliated with Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch.” She had issued a retraction after Joe Bast of Heartland provided the real numbers saying: “ExxonMobil over the course of a decade gave less than a tenth of the amount reported, never amounting to even 5 percent of our annual receipts. The reported level of support from the Kochs was even more egregiously wrong: Except for a gift of $25,000 last year for our work on health care reform, the Kochs hadn’t donated a dime since 1998.” Also it should be noted that ExxonMobil have not made any contributions to Heartland for the last 7 years. Why do reporters keep using this innuendo? Could it be that it is too good to give up even if it is not true? Or do they not do any research, but rather rely on Alarmist to tell them what to say.
By the way, the Washington Post have closed down their environment desk and have reassign Eilperin to other work. Did you know that her husband (Andrew Light) is a senior fellow on climate/energy issues at the Center for American Progress (see NGO chart). Did the Washington Post make this move concerned that there might just be a conflict on interest as she never made her husband’s employment known in her opinion pieces?
Lets get ExxonMobil out of the discussion. From the ExxonMobil 2011 Corporate Citizenship Report we learn that they are no longer funding anyone that “questions the science of climate change” and that they provided funding to the following advocacy groups and research in 2011:
MIT, Stanford (this is a $100million grant over two years), Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Research Economics and Science, Battelle Pacific Northwestern Laboratory, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, The Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, Resources for the Future, and Center for Strategic and International Studies.
I think that this decision by ExxonMobil was ill advised. However, fair is fair, so I guess all you who have been saying that a skeptic that took ExxonMobil money was bought and paid for, will say that about any Green NGO that takes ExxonMobil or other fuel supplier’s money. Can I plan on that?
While taking about the sources of “tainted” money, why is it the Greens go after the Koch Brothers but don’t mention George Soros? My guess is that because Soros is big source of funding and support for them, he is off limits.
While the Kochs believe that CO2 is not a major factor causing global warming, it is probably their political positions that most irritate those that deride the Kochs. The Kochs do support conservative candidates and conservative causes. But Soros supports political parties too. In fact according to Wiki, Soros spent over thirty million dollars in a failed effort to stop George W Bush from getting a second term. There is irony here in that he is said to have been a major force behind the McCain and Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Yet he now is heavily into 527 organizations which can and do spend large amounts of money in political campaigns. He always supports Democrats. He contributes heavily to liberal causes according to studies. He puts money into the Tides Foundations which mainly supports liberal causes and the man-made global warming theory.
There are other things that are not so acceptable. Soros said in 2006, according to Wiki,””the main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States”. In 2010 he said “Today China has not only a more vigorous economy, but actually a better functioning government than the United States”. He seems to agree with the NY Time economist that a dictator would be a better form of government. Simply stated, I do not believe his political views are shared by the majority of the US population. See here for additional citations of his philosophy.
This posting shows that the Heartland and Marshall innuendo is bogus. To be fair, when warmers speak the media should saying something like this— “The non-radical environmental groups have pointed to So and So ties to organizations financed by fossil fuel and deeply liberal interests, including the Worldwide Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.” My preference is that media people don’t use these ad hominum attacks because as I have shown, the attacks are neither fair nor truthful. The use of these attacks only serve to show the media’s ignorance bias.
And we have not touched upon the Government funding which is even larger and perhaps even more imbalanced in the warmers favor.
And we have not shown how the NGOs operate to influence legislation, and the popular opinion.
More to come.
cbdakota
Climate Change Sanity 