American Enterprise Institute Critiques of Warming Questioned

[jpak]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/04/AR2007020401213.html

Think Tank Defends Money Offers to Challenge Climate Report

A Washington-based think tank has been soliciting critiques of the just-released international assessment of the evidence on climate change, a move that prompted some academics and environmentalists to accuse the group of seeking to distort the latest evidence for global warming.

Advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and the Public Interest Research Group questioned why the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has offered $10,000 to academics willing to contribute to a book on climate- change policy, an overture that was first reported Friday in London's Guardian newspaper.

Greenpeace spokeswoman Jane Kochersperger, who noted that AEI has received funding from Exxon Mobil in recent years, said yesterday that the think tank "has clearly hit a new low . . . when it's throwing out cash awards under the rubric of 'reason' to create confusion on the status of climate science. Americans are still suffering the impacts of Hurricane Katrina, and it's clearly time for policymakers on both sides of the aisle to take substantive action on global warming and ignore Exxon Mobil's disinformation campaign via climate skeptics.

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[kenny blankenship]

1. This was always implicit in the RW jabber about 'a marketplace of ideas'

Capital buying its own preferred version of the truth and then using its money to amass captive news media assets --pundits, public affairs programs, and later on, whole networks--to flood the public discourse with repetitions of its approved 'truths' and to crowd out inconvenient viewpoints including those of academia and scientists.