Look who’s paying global warming’s top bloggers

My nominee for climate hypocrite of the year is, strangely enough, not Al Gore.

Instead Canadian PR man James Hoggan of DeSmogBlog takes line honours.

This man has just published a new book, favourably reviewed by the sycophants at Hot Topic.

I'm not holding that against him. What irks me is this – his book (and his blogsite) allege climate skeptics are in the pay or control of big oil. The possibility of genuinely held belief based on genuine science appears to have escaped him. Hoggan is the master of this conspiracy theory.

"Unfortunately, a well-funded and highly organized public relations campaign is poisoning the climate change debate. Using tricks and stunts that unsavory PR firms invented for the tobacco lobby, energy-industry contrarians are trying to confuse the public, to forestall individual and political actions that might cut into exorbitant coal, oil and gas industry profits. DeSmogBlog is here to cry foul - to shine the light on techniques and tactics that reflect badly on the PR industry and are, ultimately, bad for the planet."

This would be the same James Hoggan, PR man, who got paid $300,000 to set up a website attacking critics of global warming. That's right, DeSmogBlog is bought and paid for, and the irony is that its founding donor John Lefebvre, although a greenie, is now a convicted criminal done on money-laundering conspiracy charges. His company reportedly was also dabbling in carbon trading allowances as an offshoot from its online gambling business.

One wonders what Hoggan needed $300,000 for. The fee for a blogsite is around $10 a month. The only other investment is your time.

Hoggan's client list, meanwhile, reads like a who's-who of alternative energy, as Canada's Financial Post noted:

"There has been no mention on the blog, nor on The Fifth Estate, of James Hoggan's client list. They include or have included the National Hydrogen Association, Fuel Cells Canada, hydrogen producer QuestAir, Naikun Wind Energy and Ballard Fuel Cells. Mr. Hoggan, in other words, benefits from regulatory policy based on climate change science."

Expressed another way, PR hack Jim Hoggan's DeSmogBlog is a godsend for Hoggan's paying PR clients, spinning everything that could help them get a financial edge in the new carbon emissions markets.

Interestingly, the DeSmogBlog founder also has Air New Zealand as a client, which may explain that airline's mad rush to fly its jets on mung beans and lentil emissions.

Hoggan throws down the gauntlet in his new book urging people to check sourcewatch for the dodgy connections of various players:

"Whatever you do, you must keep a wary eye. By all means, read the sites that deny the reality of climate change. But then check on www.sourcewatch.org to see who paid for those opinions. Read the DeSmogBlog. Don't accept the word of people who pass themselves off as "skeptics."

And yet. And yet. When you go to sourcewatch, strangely there is no mention of James Hoggan's alternative energy clients or that pesky $300,000 payment to fund his website from felon John Lefebvre.

So who's who at DeSmogBlog? Apart from paid shill James Hoggan, there's former Boston Globe editor Ross Gelbspan who I pinged in Air Con. Gelbspan wants the UN given the power to tax all international currency transactions (anything you buy and sell from overseas):

"I think we need to use a tax on international currency transactions to finance the transfer of climate-friendly technologies to the developing world…the currency transaction tax was conceived by Dr James Tobin."

The UN, as noted in Air Con, estimates it could earn US$1.5 trillion a year from imposing the Tobin Tax on everyone.

Gelbspan apparently doesn't believe in free speech, either, or balance. He only wants you to hear his (and DeSmogBlog's) point of view:

"[Journalists] have a responsibility not to report what [skeptical] scientists say!"

Then there's Kevin Grandia, Hoggan's right-hand man at DeSmogBlog, and we know he doesn't have an agenda, right?

"Kevin Grandia has been trained by Al Gore as part of The Climate Project, an initiative designed to educate the public about climate change."

And get this, as an employee of the Hoggan Public Relations firm, Grandia should know how to manipulate the poor simple fools who read DeSmogBlog and believe it, because he is a trained psychologist.

Who else is DeSmogBlog in bed with? Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, and Hoggan sits on the board of the David Suzuki Foundation, a radical environmental group.

Hoggan donated money to the British Columbia Liberal Party, and also happened to receive lucrative BC government contracts.

The B.C. Liberal Party received six donations totaling $8,943 from James Hoggan and Associates from 2005 to 2008. Hoggan's company was paid $353,855 by the B.C. government from 2005-2006 to 2007-2008, according to Public Accounts. Contracts included the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion project and Canada Line.

Let's turn now to RealClimate, spiritual home of global warming belief because of its association with climate scientists Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann. Turns out RealClimate is being financially supported with its website provided by a company called Environmental Media Services, who are in turn a front for another PR company, Fenton, and also intricately hooked up to The Tides Foundation.

Readers of Air Con will know that the Tides Foundation is funded by drug liberalization billionaire and convicted crook George Soros, thus proving the point I made in Air Con about the little publicized PR network funding various Chicken Little bloggers. RealClimate's launch was handled by Fenton and EMS, although RealClimate denies any major funding or influence, Still, as Hot Topic's Gareth Renowden has said, "with friends like these…"

We're sitting here at Investigate magazine on video news footage from one of the agencies we are affiliated to, and a story about how 90 "opinion-setting" climate bloggers were brought on an all-expenses paid junket to Copenhagen so they could learn how to spin climate change on the internet and "save the planet" ahead of the conference proper next month.

"[23-Sep-2009] Ahead of COP15, the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December, 92 young climate bloggers from all over the world visited Denmark to get a perspective on the climate related efforts in the country. Bloggers from 40 countries visited, among other things the eco village of "Dyssekilde" in the north of Sealand. The future climate journalists are building up impressions for a web-debate leading up to the summit. Available material includes soundbites from the young bloggers..."

Who paid for it? Well, you'll read and see more on that in due course. There is also a plan to further indoctrinate youth leaders on global warming belief:

The contribution from the Netherlands enables 50 youthful delegates from developing countries to attend the Copenhagen climate summit in mid December. Ten children from what are known as the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) will head to Copenhagen. Rising sea levels directly threaten the very existence of these countries, including Fiji and Haiti. Five children from the developing countries will participate in the Children's Climate Forum. In addition, 25 young reporters from developing countries will have a workshop on climate change issues.

So next time Soros' paid minions at global warming websites take a poke a skeptics, remember that they are hypocrites funded or helped by cynical PR companies and UN agencies to brainwash the public and further the positions of "green" companies who, like Al Gore, stand to make (collectively) trillions of dollars if carbon trading becomes compulsory.

This is not about the fact that oil companies have funded some groups fighting carbon emissions. For what it's worth, those same oil companies have often funded the alarmists as well. Nonetheless, the issue is well known. But there is next to no coverage of the much bigger funding to global warming belief sites, so the purpose of this post is to shine a little light in those corners.

Hot Topic relies heavily on RealClimate, DeSmogBlog, Climate Progress (Soros-funded) and other tainted websites for its spin. Remember that.

And remember this: The Briefing Room, Howling At The Moon etc have not been paid a cent to write an opinion, article or book on climate change. Nor have the leading skeptic sites WattsUpWithThat or ClimateAudit.

It's a matter of trust, at the end of the day.

Comments

[AcidComments]

Of Interest:

Patrick Moore, head of the environmental advocacy group Greenspirit, and a former founding member of Greenpeace, called Smith's views "eco-imperialism at its worst."

Moore left Greenpeace in the 1980s after becoming disillusioned with what he considered the group's radical approach to environmental concerns.

Patrick Moore (founder of Greenpeace) now views the environmental movement as having lost its original mission of ecological protection and is now occupied with encouraging class envy and anti-capitalist rhetoric."The environmentalists try to inject guilt into people for consuming, as if consuming by itself causes destruction to the environment. There is no truth to that. You have the wealthiest countries on earth with the best looked after environment...Poverty, not wealth, is one of the biggest threats to the Earth's ecological health...Look at the environmental destruction caused by poverty. They have no money left to reforest, they have no money left to prevent soil erosion, there is no money to clean their water after they make it dirty... (Environmentalists) are mainly political activists with not very much actual science background who are using the rhetoric of environmentalism to push agendas that are more political than they are ecological..."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/739362/posts

[Thomas Everth]

Acid: all of humanities endeavors have an environmental impact and a sustainability index if you wish. You can safely say that fossil fuels rank rather badly in both regards.

If a high tech civilization as such was unsustainable in principle - and there are many voices that say so - then its back to the stone age after we burned through our fossil reserves.
I pin my hopes on the fact that human ingenuity will prevent this and I see latest advances in solar technology as one of the pillars underpinning this.

[Thomas Everth]

I'm not a great fan of Greenpeace either

[Rick]

Enjoyed reading the desmog stuff but it was disappointing that Richard Littlemore was left out. What is he? a nobody? He must have some skeletons in his closet

[peter]

Ian says:

" And remember this: The Briefing Room, Howling At The Moon etc have not been paid a cent to write an opinion, article or book on climate change. Nor have the leading skeptic sites WattsUpWithThat or ClimateAudit.

It's a matter of trust, at the end of the day.

Posted by iwishart on November 08, 2009 at 09:20 PM | Permalink "

And there are no advertisments in "Investigate".

And copies of "Air Con" are free.

Yeah, right.

[iwishart]

You miss the point Peter. This blog represents my opinions, not those of an undisclosed, or disclosed-if-you-know-where-to-dig special friends paying me to write things that might be advantageous to them.

 

I have had no special funding from any third party paying me to write Air Con. My books and magazine are commercial projects yes, just as anyone else earning a wage, and stand or fall on their merits.

 

I could have made a fortune in PR. I chose not to.

[CM]

Everything stands or falls on it's merits, no matter how it's funded. Funding can give us some context, and can help with determining conflicts of interest, but at the end of the day if something stacks up, it stacks up. If something is shown to be misleading or a misrepresentation, then that's what it is.
Which is why I find it strange that you're so keen to 'play the man and not the ball' (e.g. dismissing a link to RealClimate and refusing to engage on the substance).