Environmental Engineering Reference
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whether this really is the case, as a secret conduit for anonymous donations has
come into being. A paper by a sociologist at Drexel University, published online on
21 December 2013 in
Climatic Change
, provides some insight into more recent
sources of funding of what he calls the 'climate change counter movement'. He
found that 140 foundations had made 5,299 grants worth $558 million to the 91 out
of 118 prominent climate denial organisations between 2003 and 2010.
However, about three quarters of the hundreds of millions of dollars donated
were from unidentifi able sources. Two organisations called Donors' Trust and
Donors' Capital Fund provided 25% of all traceable funding. But organisations or
individuals which in turn funded the Donors' Trust were untraceable. They are both
'donor-directed' foundations, which make grants based on the priorities of the con-
tributing individuals or groups. The identity of the original donor remains out of
sight, so that large sums can be ploughed anonymously into climate change denial
operations. Therefore '… we need to focus on the institutionalised efforts that have
built and maintain this organised campaign' (Brulle
2013
).
2.5.3
Utilising Misgivings About Regulation and State Intervention
These climate sceptic groups have to be seen as part of a general campaign by
vested interests against state intervention, fi rst set in motion by the fear of regulation
of tobacco products back in the 1960s in response to the US 1964 landmark report,
Smoking and Health
. Oreskes and Conway describe how a sustained campaign by
vested interests originated in the USA. Executives of the tobacco industry enlisted
the help of the Marketing Company R.J. Reynolds, which began by developing a
strategy of doubt regarding the validity of, to begin with, the results of medical
research, in order to ward off a likely attack on profi tability (2010: Chapter 1).
R.J. Reynolds then established a fund for the Biomedical Sciences and Clinical
Research at the Rockefeller Institute, amounting to a cool annual $500,000 for a
5-year period (Ibid.: 25-26). The programme proved a powerful tool in the fi ght
against regulation in general, not least because it was seemingly unrelated to contro-
versies regarding vested interests such as the tobacco industry (Ibid.: 10-35). The
scientists involved, already hostile to regulation of any kind, showed themselves
more than prepared to submit critical reviews of research papers which might be
harmful to their benefactor. 'If the public could be convinced that science in general
was unreliable, then there was no need to argue the merits of any particular case.…'
(Ibid.: 217). Hostility against regulation of any kind, including the causes of acid
rain, CFCs, greenhouse gases and second hand smoke, is seen as an attack on lib-
erty, a dangerous step on the path to communism: 'environmentalists were like a
watermelon, green on the outside, red within.' Many groups were (and still are)
fervently opposed to any conclusion they conceive as being hostile to American ide-
als. The early eighties saw major changes in the economic climate, allowing a liber-
tarian thought pattern to become dominant worldwide. Free-market principles
replaced the belief that the state has a duty to regulate potentially harmful activities
in order to protect both the environment and human health (Ibid., 2010: 248-250).
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