Academics for hire: Fossil fuel Industry deliberately misleads the public on climate science
Greenpeace went undercover to show that prominent academics
were willing to take money from corporations for their research.
An undercover Greenpeace investigation released on Tuesday suggests that fossil fuel
companies secretly funnel money into prominent scientists' pockets to
manufacture doubt about mainstream climate change science.
Greenpeace UK took an unconventional approach to the
research: Members of the environmentalist group posed as representatives of
fake oil and coal companies and asked two climate change skeptics to write
papers promoting the benefits of carbon dioxide and coal in developing
countries. The two academics the group approached -- Frank Clemente of
Pennsylvania State University and William Happer of Princeton University --
reportedly agreed to pen the reports and not to reveal their funding source.
The group's expose follows revelations from The New York Times earlier this year
that Willie Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, accepted donations from fossil fuel companies and anonymous
donors to write papers that challenged the consensus on climate science --
without saying where his funding came from.
This academics-for-hire tactic has "materially changed
the debate about climate change,"said Jesse Coleman, a Greenpeace activist
who participated in the probe. "You could say that one of the reasons
we're facing such dire climate change risks is because these fossil fuel
companies are funding climate change denial." "It's the exact same playbook" tobacco companies
once used to "convince people of something that is just not true,"
Coleman added.
For decades, tobacco corporations deceived consumers about
the dangers of smoking by covertly funding contrarian research. Manufactured
data, concealedconflicts of interest and misleading conclusions, as
The Huffington Post has previously reported, are also evident in influential
research on vaccination, organic food, secondhand smoke, lead paint and chemical flame retardants. But perhaps no environmental or
public health issue is as high-stake as global warming.
Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy for the Union
of Concerned Scientists, said that if the Greenpeace findings were true, they
were "deeply, deeply disconcerting." He emphasized that while accepting money from industry to do
research is not itself a breach of ethics, taking money from any source without
transparency is "totally unacceptable."
The Greenpeace release comes during the final week of the
COP21 climate talks in Paris, published just hours before Happer appeared at a congressional subcommittee hearing on climate change chaired
by Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). In Happer's submitted testimony for the hearing, which leaned
heavily on the contrarian side, he stated that "climate science is far
from 'settled.'" As of Tuesday afternoon, he had not responded to
HuffPost's request for comment.
Clemente told HuffPost in an email that he stands behind the
statements he made in the emails he exchanged with the undercover Greenpeace researchers.
"I am very proud of my research and believe that clean coal technologies
are the pathway to reliable and affordable electricity, reduction of global
energy poverty and a cleaner environment," he said. He also referred to
his communications with Greenpeace activists as "pirated" emails.
In the emails, both Happer and Clemente discussed ways to hide the source
of funding for their reports, including the use of a secretive channel called Donors Trust, a foundation that encourages anonymous
donations to support limited government. Happer also offered a route to get the paper through an
informal review process by a major climate change-denying think tank, the
Global Warming Policy Foundation. He suggested to the undercover researchers
that it would be "fine to call it a peer review," despite
acknowledging that the paper would struggle in peer review at other
journals.
Coleman defended Greenpeace's decision not to disclose the
true identities of its undercover researchers to Clemente and
Happer. “Unfortunately, there just aren’t the disclosure measures
necessary for us to find out by different means which corporations are funding
this climate denial work," he said.
Teasing out the truth isn't easy for policymakers or the
public, thanks in part to industry tactics, according to two studies published in late November that chart the
climate change counter-movement. The research found that corporate funding,
including money from Exxon Mobil, materially changed the public and political conversations about climate
change. (Exxon Mobil, along with Peabody Energy, are also under
investigation in the state of New York over claims of misleading the
public and investors about climate change.)
Justin Farrell, a researcher at Yale University who authored
the papers, suggested in an email to HuffPost that "much more analysis
will no doubt continue to shed light on the important implications of dark
money, and the role of financing in what are ostensibly 'scientific'
issues."
"The social and political landscape of our country has
changed in ways that have made it easier for money to influence science and
politics," Farrell said. "We need to pull back the curtain and
let academics and other researchers in on the flows of financial and political
influence that are important for identifying the influential actors in a given
issue. Without the ability to do that, the American public is often left in the
dark, and has a difficult time knowing who to trust."
Frumhoff agreed. "We all need to be highly watchful and
make sure that when someone speaks before Congress, or produces a statement of
fact from a purported expert perspective, that we ask to know what their
funding sources were," he said from Paris, where he is currently attending
the climate conference. There, more than 190 nations are currently deliberating on
how to address climate change and not, said Frumhoff, "whether the basic
facts are real."
