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The Republican vice presidential candidate uses junk science to lobby for the oil interests. This is not the first time lies have been used to drive public policy, as we can remember from the selling of the Afghan, Iraq, Iran wars, and the "just trust us" 1990s dereg of the financial industry.
What is surprising is the flagrancy of the party's lies. Ed Pilkington reports in the UK Guardian 1 Oct 08.
Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six [deniers]... to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species....Some of the scientists were funded by the oil industry.Other scientists have strongly refuted the Palin-commissioned report.
Paul Ruschmann comments in DailyKos:
This spring and summer, I worked on a book on global warming for Chelsea House Publishing's "Point / Counterpoint" series. These books, which are aimed at high school debaters, present the arguments on both sides of current controversies... In my research, I soon discovered that [the denier/skeptic] side of the debate was dominated by a tiny group of scientists. Which shouldn't be surprising since most members of the scientific community believe that greenhouse gases are raising the Earth's temperature, and that human activities are putting those gases into the atmosphere. Many of the [deniers], the astroturf organizations and faux think tanks they are affiliated with, receive at least some of their funding from energy companies.
Back to the polar bear report... Two of the authors are Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Soon completed the study with funding from ExxonMobil. At one time, he was a senior scientist at the George C Marshall Institute [closely associated with Dick Cheney and COMPASS], which has received $715,000 in funding from ExxonMobil since 1998. [Baliunas' Hoover Institute received $300,000 -- for denials like these.]
Soon and Baliunas have collaborated on a number of published works, including a 2003 paper they submitted to a journal called Climate Research. Pilkington notes that the paper was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute, 13 scientists whom they cited issued a rebuttal, and several editors of Climate Research resigned because of the "flawed peer review". Nevertheless, this article is still widely cited by global-warming deniers.
There's more. According to SourceWatch.com, Baliunas and Soon are both winners of the Petr Beckmann Award, which is awarded for "courage and achievement in defense of scientific truth and freedom" at the annual meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness [a subsidiary of the extreme-rightwing AAPS]. Other past winners include S. Fred Singer and Sherwood Idso, both of whom are veterans of the global warming denial industry. [See George Monbiot's Heat ch.2 The Denial Industry]
According to SourceWatch, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness is closely linked to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a small institute which put itself on the map by distributing -- allegedly, under false pretenses -- the Oregon Petition. That petition was circulated in an effort to discredit the Kyoto Accord on climate. It claims, among other things, that: "There is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth." Baliunas and Soon are among the petition's authors.
Then there's Senator James Inhofe, the king of global warming deniers. He cited Baliunas and Soon in his 2003 "global warming is a hoax" floor speech.
By now, you might be noticing a pattern. Contrary to what the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, the right wing and the energy companies have bought their own version of the facts, then invested in an elaborate mechanism for distributing those "facts" to the media and policymakers.
The Palin polar bear report is only the latest example of a 10-year-long, industry-funded effort to discredit the scientific consensus about climate.
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Contrary to ExxonMobil's claim that they have stopped funding junk science, see the Competitive Enterprise Institute's May 2008 video proclaiming the "positive" side of CO2.
Sourcewatch, Corpwatch, and ExxonSecrets are reliable ways to trace networks of climate deniers/skeptics and other corporate flacks.
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