After years as a federal officer helping the Drug Enforcement Administration hunt drug lords across Central Asia and years more teaching in Maryland classrooms, Robin Shaffer anticipated a quiet retirement watching the deep swells roll across the Atlantic and crash onto the broad Jersey Shore.
It has been an uphill battle, with the group “taking in nickels and dimes” and “selling T-shirts and magnets.” The local press seems indifferent to their cause, he said, noting that no outlets covered a public event he held at a pub, perhaps fittingly, with “Cheers” and “Frasier” actor Kelsey Grammer, one of Hollywood’s few prominent conservatives.
“There’s this argument made that we must be bought off, sort of, ‘Why fight the Green Revolution? Don’t you care about the environment?’” Mr. Shaffer said. “But we don’t have any corporate sponsors or major funding. It’s very much a David vs. Goliath kind of thing.”
Protect Our Coast NJ, an all-volunteer outfit with a budget of less than $100,000, is one example of an overwhelming disparity that has emerged in the debate over the aggressive push for renewable energy in response to what President Joe Biden calls the “existential threat” of climate change. While once upon a time there may have been scrappy environmentalists combating the corporate might of Big Oil, major fossil fuel producers and conservative philanthropies provide little supporting research challenging climate change, according to Mr. Shaffer and other people interviewed for this article. As a result, the money, the muscle, and the lawyers are now aligned with what they call Big Green.
Government largesse, shot into the stratosphere by hundreds of taxpayer billions that President Biden shoveled to green energy companies and backers through the Inflation Reduction Act, is just the crest of this wave of momentum on behalf of a “climate emergency.”
“You think, ‘What can you do?’” Mr. Happer said. “They have the media under control, they have politicians, professional and scientific groups and publications are controlled by them, and it’s all driven by money.”
“The Sabin Center conducts legal analysis and supports strong action on climate change,” Mr. Gerrard said. “The Sabin Center does not file lawsuits, but it often files amicus briefs and comment letters.”
A Who’s Who of Wall Street and Silicon Valley
The David versus Goliath dynamic is compounded by government funding. Academic grants, scientific funding, and now, through the Inflation Reduction Act, U.S. taxpayer money for the environment go almost exclusively to what advocates characterize as green energy projects. Ultimately, the Inflation Reduction Act, which supporters predicted would cost taxpayers $391 billion, will likely cost some $1.2 trillion, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs.That money flows almost exclusively to those who support the climate emergency argument.
“It’s real. If you were to submit a proposal to the federal government—whether it’s NSF, NOAA or NASA—that was challenging the narrative, you would not have much chance at all of getting funded,” said former Obama energy official Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist and engineering professor at New York University. “Whereas if you wrote a proposal that supported the narrative, you’re in.”
RCI sought comment from all three of the federal agencies Mr. Koonin mentioned. Only NASA acknowledged receipt of the questions; none have responded.
Judith Curry, a prominent skeptic of apocalyptic warnings regarding climate change and a former professor at Georgia Tech, looked at academe’s politicization and dependence on government financing in her book “Climate Uncertainty and Risk.”
Tarred as Shills for Big Oil
Despite the disparity in funding and resources, climate emergency skeptics are often dismissed as shills for energy companies. Yet the CO2 Coalition, for example, includes Mr. Happer, a member of the National Academy of Science; John Clausen, who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; and Patrick Moore, a co-founder and former director of Greenpeace.A cursory web search on the Coalition turns up multiple stories of how it once received $1 million from ExxonMobil and articles about Mr. Happer’s brief stint with the Trump administration, all couched in language suggesting the Coalition’s work is biased.
In addition, the big energy companies appear to have largely stopped funding research challenging the climate emergency narrative, in some cases bending to the prevailing winds—or solar rays or what have you—of political expediency.
RCI reached out to numerous major energy companies. ExxonMobil asked for specific questions, which a spokeswoman did not answer, and the others did not respond.
Mr. Watts has run his site, which dubs itself “the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change,” since 2006. In that time, the issue of global warming has gone from a computer model theory to “settled science” to a “climate emergency,” and the money and power have grown accordingly, he said.
“I thought, when I started, if I demonstrated biases in the temperature readings—significant biases—there would be a correction, because it’s science, there would be this ‘we got this wrong, let’s fix this,’ thinking,” he said. “But it has morphed from its infancy of studying numbers and data to some big business conglomerate.”
Wildly Inflated Numbers
Similar institutional moves, along with the marked funding disparities, have largely muffled the arguments made by those who disagree with the “climate emergency” conclusion.“The truth is, we are essentially a grassroots movement of people who don’t believe a crisis exists, certainly not one worth destroying the economy of the world,” he said.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and the Environment at Heritage, said that it gets “less than 5 percent of its money from corporate sponsors, and no company contributes more than 1 percent.” And that money is spread out over various departments so that only a fraction of it is devoted to combatting the alarmist global warming narrative, she said.
Climate skeptics say such figures are laughable.
“We have comparatively few dollars while the other side now literally has trillions,” Steve Milloy, who operates the Junk Science website, said, pointing to money that European countries, the United Nations, and other bodies have given for global warming research or to prop up green energy companies with loans and tax credits.
Others in the trenches, more or less, echoed Mr. Shaffer’s experience in New Jersey.
Role Reversal
“It’s no longer just an ideological fight where one group of people may have the better view,” Ms. Furchtgott-Roth said. “This has become a matter of theological importance; they see this as a matter of good versus evil.”For now, the role of scrappy opponent, once held by environmentalists, has switched to opponents of massive “green” energy projects. Small players such as Protect Our Coast NJ take some solace in the rising costs of such projects, which has delayed the introduction of Ocean 1 until 2026. The group drew more than 100 people—but only one reporter—to a recent event marred by a downpour. Mr. Shaffer, pointing to polling that shows support for the project has plummeted in New Jersey, vowed to keep up the fight.
“Despite obvious attempts by the Fourth Estate to ignore the efforts of thousands of New Jerseyans to protect the marine ecosystem and the Jersey Shore, our message is getting out,” he said.
That message will win in the end, even with the lopsided nature of the debate, Mr. Happer predicted. He compared the current landscape to what prevailed with the eugenics movement a century ago.
“Every little town had its ‘Eugenics Society,’ decent white ladies got together to drink tea and discuss it, the presidents of Harvard and Princeton, the scientific journals—the whole ‘establishment’ believed in eugenics,” he said. “It was all nonsense, of course, and ended when Germany took eugenics to its logical conclusion. Now, some unfortunate county or state will implement all this and the people will rise up in fury, the policies are so crazy people will simply rebel. It happens again and again in human history when something seems invincible.”