Climate Denial Crock of the Week
with Peter Sinclair
WindBaggers hire “Grassroots” Anti Wind Activists: 20 Bucks a Head to Break Wind
Important job opportunity, everyone. From Craigslist:
Our firm needs 100 volunteers to attend and participate in a rally in front of the British Consulate/Embassy in Midtown Manhattan on the East Side on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 12 noon. The event is being held in order to protest wind turbines that are being built in Scotland and England. Your participation will be to ONLY stand next to or behind the speakers and elected officials/celebrities that will be speaking at the rally.
“Volunteers” will each get $20. That’s the going rate in New York City for a closely held political principle.
Most Americans like clean energy. So when conservatives wage campaigns against clean energy initiatives, they have typically resorted to fronting astroturf groups and paying fake protesters to generate noise.
Needing 100 anti-wind protesters by next week and apparently unable to find them, a mysterious firm advertised a “quick and easy $20″ on Craigslist. According to the ad, the only thing the “volunteers” would need to do for their pay is “stand next to or behind the speakers and elected officials/celebrities” at a rally against a wind turbine project in the UK.
A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate “counter movement” to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.
The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.
However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.
Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.
Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has estimated that over the past decade about $500m has been given to organisations devoted to undermining the science of climate change, with much of the money donated anonymously through third parties.
- Astroturf Gone Wrong: Fake Protesters Offered $20 To Stand At Anti-Wind Energy Rally (thinkprogress.org)
- Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science (refreshingnews99.blogspot.com)
- Cash vs climate science (nzherald.co.nz)
- Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science (sott.net)
- How the ‘Kochtopus’ stifled green debate (independent.co.uk)
- Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science (independent.co.uk)
- Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science (Audit Trail Leads To Charles Koch) (democraticunderground.com)
- WindBaggers hire “Grassroots” Anti Wind Activists: 20 Bucks a Head to Break Wind (climatecrocks.com)
- Exclusive: Billionaires Secretly Fund Attacks on Climate Science (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
- Meet The Climate Denial Machine | Greed-Driven Shills for Corporate Oligarchs (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)