More Money In Climate Skepticism? “Hardly.”

01 Dec, 2009 by Duane Lester

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I don’t know if New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is simply ignorant, or if he was simply lying, but he said something this Sunday on ‘This Week” with George Stephanopoulos that I have to discuss. He said:

KRUGMAN: There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter.

They were discussing Climategate. George Will handled the Krugman statement with one word. “Hardly.”

Mr. Krugman obviously missed this headline from the Telegraph:

Al Gore could become world’s first carbon billionaire

Last year Mr Gore’s venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology.

The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.

The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts.

The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.

Speaking of government grants, one of the people in the center of the Climategate storm is University of East Anglia Professor Phil Jones. He received millions of dollars in government grants (Hat Tip: Don Surber):

A lot is on the line. Jones, according to the disclosures, has collected about $22.6 million in research grants since 1990, a money pit that could — and should — dry up with the disclosure of the deception by him and his co-conspirators.

(Source.)

Van Helsing at Moonbattery noted an article from Jeff Jacoby, detailing the money associated with global warming proponents:

NASA’s wild-eyed James Hansen, for example, won a $250,000 Heinz Award in 2001, and last month was co-winner of the $1 million Dan David Prize. As Jacoby notes:

Other awards have gone to other prophets of doom. And the potential rewards don’t stop there. For those who toe the politically correct line on global warming, there have been big book contracts, hefty speaking fees, worshipful magazine profiles, softball TV interviews. Should any of that call their objectivity into question.

Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal follows the big climate change money:

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called–without irony–the climate change “consensus.”

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts–amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion–you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

…

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California–apparently not feeling bankrupt enough–devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”–largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes–of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

One last thing to note in order to fully crush Krugman’s assertion. In refuting Krugman, George Will said, “Speaking of the marketplace, the biggest industry in the world right now may be fighting climate change.”

How big? Maybe twice as big as oil:

The carbon market could become double the size of the vast oil market, according to the new breed of City players who trade greenhouse gas emissions through the EU’s emissions trading scheme.

The ETS market may see $3tn (:£1.8tn) worth of transactions a year in the next decade or two, according to Andrew Ager, head of emissions trading at Bache Commodities in London, with it even being used as a hedge against falling equities or rising inflation. “It is still a relatively new industry with annual trades of around €300bn every year. But this could grow to around $3tn compared to the $1.5tn market there is for oil,” says Ager, who used to be a foreign currencies trader.

The speed of that growth will depend on whether the Copenhagen summit gives a go-ahead for a low-carbon economy, but Ager says whatever happens schemes such as the ETS will expand around the globe.

$3,000,000,000,000.

That is a lot of incentive to continue a hoax in the face of cooling temperatures and growing skepticism. When the left tells us that “Big Oil” or “Big Energy” is behind skepticism, it always makes me laugh. There is so much more money in blind faith.

Cross posted at All American Blogger.