Dr. Willie Soon has been the go-to scientist favoured by climate change deniers for years. Used by the Fraser Institute and Koch Industries, Soon has proven invaluable in giving ammunition to the right to ‘prove’ global warming doesn’t exist.
Turns out it’s as we expected – nothing more than a scam. It seems Dr. Soon’s science is one more about the greenback than going green. Soon has been taking money from big oil companies – lots of money – to make dubious claims dressed up as science (emphasis mine).
Now, in response to a Greenpeace investigation, Dr. Soon has admitted that U.S. oil and coal companies, including ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries, and the world’s largest coal-burning utility, Southern Company, have contributed more than $1 million over the past decade to his research. According to Greenpeace, every grant Dr. Soon has received since 2002 has been from oil or coal interests. This despite the fact that he once told a U.S. Senate hearing that he had not been hired by, employed by, or received grants from any organization “that had taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
Dr. Soon has also been affiliated with a number of industry front groups, including the coal-funded Greening Earth Society, and Koch-Exxon-Scaife-funded groups including the George C. Marshall Institute, the Science and Public Policy Institute, the Center for Science and Public Policy, the Heartland Institute, and Canada’s Fraser Institute.
Correspondence uncovered by Greenpeace also found that Dr. Soon led a plan in 2003 to undermine the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report years before it was even released in 2007.
Cross posted at Sister Sage’s Musings.
