Prof. Brulle (Drexel Uni, Phil) claims IRS helped track secret donations

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Prof. Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist of Drexel University, Phil., has published a study allegedly accusing “deniers” of being sock puppets in the pay of “dark money” from big oil.

http://www.hngn.com/articles/20257/20131223/study-reveals-source-of-dark-money-in-climate-change-denial-studies.htm

According to the story, Prof. Brulle enlisted IRS help tracking a correlation between big oil bogeymen such as the Koch Brothers withdrawing funding from climate studies, and significant increases in funding from other organizations such as the Donor’s Trust and Donor’s Capital Fund.

Quite apart from the outrageous invasion of privacy, if the IRS did actually lend special assistance to the study, the mundane explanation, that lead authors of studies simply turned to other sources when some donors withdrew their support, was not good enough for Prof. Brulle.

Instead, Brulle allegedly asserts the existence of a “dark money” conspiracy – a deliberate attempt to conceal the true sources of funding, by using a network of shadowy donor groups.

“The climate change countermovement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act on the issue of global warming,” said Brulle. “Like a play on Broadway, the countermovement has stars in the spotlight — often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians — but behind the stars is an organizational structure of directors, script writers and producers, in the form of conservative foundations.

All I can say Anthony, is where is my dark money cheque? I’ve been sending you these scripts for ages, so far not a dime :-).

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Some other viewpoints on this claim.

Dr. Lubos Motl: We received 1 billion dollars

‘Congratulations to all of us. A possible problem – one pointed out to me by the Galileo Movement via Twitter – is that I may find out that we just “may have received” the billion instead of the phrase “did receive” it.’ — ‘The funding of climate skepticism work is at most something of order $10 million a year and much if not most of the most influential work is being done on a budget that is smaller than that by additional orders of magnitude…This figure should be compared to $80 billion that have been paid to promote the climate hysteria pseudoscience, mostly in the recent decade or two…If Suzanne Goldenberg believes that the purpose of this funding is to change people’s minds, well, then I must say that the climate skeptics are more efficient by almost 4 orders of magnitude.’

Marc Morano:

This new study and the media reports surrounding it are pure bunk! The study counts all money raised by all conservative groups as somehow being for global warming issues! But the study itself admits this is not true.

Excerpt: ‘It was not always possible to separate funds designated strictly for climate-change work from overall budgets, Brulle said. ‘Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizations, not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.’

Tom Nelson:

After UK Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg makes a large, fraudulent claim about climate change spending, it gets very quietly ‘fixed’ with the addition of weasel words ‘may’ and ‘up to’

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