Another Polluter Front Group Issues Fake Climate Report

The Cato Institute, a former big tobacco front group that now shills for big polluters, is putting out a phony report designed to fool reporters into thinking it's related to an actual U.S. government climate science report.

It's not the first time a polluter front group has tried to trick reporters. Back in 2008, the Heartland Institute put out the "NIPCC report," trying to glom onto the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

What's most bizarre is that Cato and Heartland then go around whining that no one takes them seriously as an authority on climate science.

It would be like me going up on stage in a wig & skinny jeans, calling myself Justin Biemer, and singing "Boyfriend," then complaining no one took me seriously as an artist.

New Documents Reveal Top Climate Skeptic Well Funded by Polluters

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 Patrick Michaels was really working for all those years he was going around claiming to be "Virginia's official state climatologist."

Cross-posted from Blue Virginia