Who is bankrolling climate change denial?
It's mostly secret. A new paper finds:
• The biggest known funders of organizations orchestrating climate change denial are foundations such as the Searle Freedom Trust, the John William Pope Foundation, the Howard Charitable Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.
• Koch and ExxonMobil have pulled back from publicly visible funding. From 2003 to 2007, the Koch Affiliated Foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation were heavily involved in funding climate-change denial organizations. But since 2008, they are no longer making publicly traceable contributions.
• Funding has shifted to pass through untraceable sources. Coinciding with the decline in traceable funding, the amount of funding given to denial organizations by the Donors Trust has risen dramatically. Donors Trust is a donor-directed foundation whose funders cannot be traced. This one foundation now provides about 25% of all traceable foundation funding used by organizations engaged in promoting systematic denial of climate change.
• Most funding for denial efforts is untraceable. Despite extensive data compilation and analyses, only a fraction of the hundreds of millions in contributions to climate change denying organizations can be specifically accounted for from public records. A group of 91 climate change denial organizations has a total income of $900 million per year - but only $64 million in identifiable foundation support!
You can read the paper here:
• Robert J. Brulle, Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations, Climatic Change, 2013, http://www.drexel.edu/~/media/Files/now/pdfs/Institutionalizing%20Delay%20-%20Climatic%20Change.ashx.
It would probably be hidden behind a paywall if someone hadn't liberated it! Get your copy now, while you can.
For more on Donors Trust read this:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/DonorsTrust
spnetwork DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7 climatechange