#Climategate - following the money

For years now, one of the traditional chants of the sandalista brigade is that those who argue against man-made global warming are in the pockets of "big oil" or other people with a vested interest in keeping CO2 emissions going, whereas those who were trying to get us to give up the benefits of civilisation were doing it out of the nobility and purity of their spirit.

Well, given the normal rent-seeking practices of big business, it should come as no surprise that "big oil" are doing their best to climb on the "green" bandwagon, because it's much, much easier to steal taxpayers' money via some incompetent government functionary than it is to bother with all that nasty drilling and processing and transporting crap. So it wouldn't surprise me in the least if people arguing in favour of man-made global warming or anthropogenic climate change or whatever the fuck it's called nowadays were even more in the pocket of "big oil" than the skeptics ever were.

But were these watermelons ever really pure at heart? Consider the following numbers:

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."

Whereas:

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

And what's even worse is that ExxonMobil were giving out their own money. Phil Jones has been paid handsomely by the fucking taxpayer!

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal. [As do we lucky Brits!]

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Ah yes, the Goracle: flying round the world to promote his movie, recipient of the (in my mind completely worthless and utterly devalued) Nobel Prize, telling us ever-so-grateful proles how to live our lives while suckling massively at the teat of his buddies' largesse. He must be pissing himself at how he managed to con the world with his lies.

I hope the Nobel judges are all actively contemplating suicide, along with all the alarmists who have stolen money from us off the back of their mendacity, bullying and thuggery. It will be a lot less painful than what I have in mind for you.

You utter scum.