Posted by The Green Miles
Few climate skeptics get as much attention as Patrick Michaels. Virtually all climate scientists agree our climate is in crisis & we need to reduce our carbon emissions as quickly as possible -- so opponents of climate action treat Michaels, who thinks the crisis is overblown & carbon pollution isn't so bad, as a conquering hero.But it turns out Michaels hasn't just sold out politically as a senior fellow at the ExxonMobil-funded Cato Institute. Newly uncovered documents reveal Michaels' research has been directly & lavishly funded by polluters:
Greenpeace recently obtained an older copy of Michaels' curriculum vitae via a Freedom of Information Act request that shows that the Western Fuels Association, a coal and fuel-transportation business group, gave him a $63,000 grant in the early 1990s for "research on global climatic change." He also received $25,000 from the Edison Electric Institute, an association of electric utilities, from 1992-95 for "literature review of climate change and updates." And a 2006 leaked industry memo revealed that he received $100,000 in funding from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association to fund climate denial campaigning around the time of the release of An Inconvenient Truth. Reporter Ross Gelbspan wrote in his 1998 book The Heat is On, one of the earliest works documenting industry funding for climate change skepticism, that Michaels also received $49,000 from the German Coal Mining Association and $40,000 from the western mining company Cyprus Minerals.Makes you wonder who Pat Michaels was really working for all those years he was going around claiming to be "Virginia's official state climatologist."
