The New York Times editorial board attacked skeptics of man-made global warming on Sunday by accusing them of financially benefitting from their opposition to more and stricter environmental regulations.
“Virtually everyone accepts the overwhelming evidence of human influence on climate change and the urgent need to address it, except for a handful of hardened skeptics and those who benefit financially from less regulation,” writes the Times’ editorial board.
While there are large amounts of money at stake in the global warming debate, the New York Times conveniently neglected to mention that there are people who stand to financially gain from government efforts to stem global warming.
“Given that the global warming proponents have a massive funding advantage, it is quite odd for the New York Times to assert — without evidence — that skeptics are ‘hardened’ or motivated by funding,” Marc Morano, publisher of the skeptic website Climate Depot, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
For example, former Vice President turned environmental activist Al Gore has made millions of dollars urging for government action on global warming. His movie “An Inconvenient Truth” brought the global warming discussion to the political forefront and spurred lawmakers to start regulating.
Gore pushed ideas like carbon credits and investing in green energy technologies as ways for entrepreneurs to help fight global warming. Gore and his partner David Blood wrote an oped in the Wall Street Journal last year that warned against investing in fossil fuels, like coal and oil, in favor of investing in green energy, like solar and wind.
It just so happens that Al Gore’s firm Generation Investment Management (GIM), which he founded with Blood in 2004, that invests in companies that were “going green”. Forbes reports that GIM “raised profits of nearly $218 million between 2008 and 2011, split among 26 partners.”
By 2008, Gore had $35 million to invest into hedge funds and private partnerships. In the White House, he had a net worth of less than $2 million — he’s now worth $200 million, according to Bloomberg.
It’s not just Gore who has benefitted, but also from the businesses he has invested in and the firms he has associated with.
In 2009, the New York Times reported that the electrical grid hardware company Silver Spring Networks went to Gore’s other firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) looking for “$75 million to expand its partnerships with utilities seeking to install millions of so-called smart meters in homes and businesses.”
Gore decided to help Silver Spring, so they retained the failed presidential candidate and another KPCB partner as unpaid corporate advisors.
It paid off big time.
“The Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants,” the Times reports. “Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts.”
“The man-made global warming machine is all about funding an ideological cause,” Morano added. “The media needs to deal with the new reality that has many former UN IPCC scientists and others are reversing their support of man-made climate claims.”
Environmental groups are able to fundraise off of hyping up global warming and lobbying for more government regulations. On Groundhog Day, the Environmental Defense Fund sent a fundraising email saying that they were making fighting global warming their number one priority.
“Your tax-deductible gift will do so much: it’ll defend EPA in federal courts here in the U.S., slow deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, develop carbon markets in China, and promote clean sustainable energy use by leading businesses and organizations,” the EDF’s fundraising email said. “Wherever we see opportunity, we’re committed to identifying our best hope for meaningful and lasting forward progress.”
“But since the NYT is a prime example of both a ‘hardened’ and financially interested promoter of AGW, we should expect nothing less than this kind of subpar climate journalism,” Morano said.
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