Bush Backers Offer Bribes to Undercut Global Warming Report

Friday, 02 February 2007

*This is my latest column for Truthout.org.*The new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just been released, and it looks like bad news for the home team, i.e., the entire human race. Things are going to get hotter, coastlines are going to go under, deserts are going to get wider, and millions if not billions of people are going to be on the move, in need, in conflict, in increasingly desperate straits – and it's all our own fault. What's more, the effects set in train by our epic debauch with fossil fuels are going to keep on keeping on – although the worst outcomes can still be avoided, if the leaders of the world can bestir themselves to take action to slow the poisoning of the planet.

This is the consensus of more than 2,500 leading scientists from more than 30 countries – including the United States. But not to worry: that nattering nest of neocons, the American Enterprise Institute – which also functions as an employment agency for the Bush White House, sending innumerable nabobs into the higher reaches and greasy guts of the Administration – have come up with a perfect solution to this threat to the life of the world: bribing scientists to say it ain't so.

As the Guardian reports, the good folks at AEI – whose members were instrumental in bringing us the "splendid little war" in Iraq and are now agitating for an even more glorious bloodletting in Iran – are offering scientists and economists $10,000 each (plus extras) to tear down the IPCC report and snowjob the hoi polloi into believing that the crack pipe of the Carbon Era will never be empty.

AEI, its coffers bulging with funding from ExxonMobil (whose former honcho, Lee Raymond, is vice-chairman of the group's board of trustees), is flashing ten grand (plus "travel expenses" and "additional payments") to any scientist, economist or policy analyst willing to rip the IPCC report as "resistant to reasonable criticism…and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work." These bold global warming revisionists can trouser the loot in exchange for their scholarly contributions to an "independent review" of the IPCC report, the Guardian reports. >>>cont

Chris Floyd