Thursday, November 20, 2014

The Financial Climate

Jonah Goldberg is the right-wing pundit who told the world that it’s the liberals who are the real fascists and that conservatives are endangered because lesbians can get married or something.  Now he’s out with a new bit of Orwellian logic: climate change scientists are in it for the money.

Fox News provided American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Jonah Goldberg a platform to attack climate scientists as profiteers who are “financially incentivized” to advocate climate change action, without disclosing AEI’s own financial incentive to undercut action on climate change. AEI has taken over $3 million from ExxonMobil, and once offered money to scientists to write articles criticizing a UN climate change report.

On the November 18 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Goldberg argued that climate scientists have a conflict of interest reporting on climate change because they are “deeply invested in the whole industry of global warming” for their university programs. Goldberg also called climate scientists and advocates “people who are financially incentivized to go one way.”

As CLW noted, “that must explain why I see all the climate scientists driving Bentleys and the oil company execs driving 20-year old Volvos.”

It’s also interesting that Mr. Goldberg would bring up the idea that climate change scientists are cashing in on it.  He knows whereof he speaks.

Though host Neil Cavuto did disclose that Goldberg is a fellow at AEI, he did not mention AEI’s ties to the oil industry or its history of offering money to climate scientists to write articles undermining a climate change report. In 2013, The Union of Concerned Scientists reported that AEI received $3.04 million from ExxonMobil between 2001 and 2011. According to ExxonMobil’s website, in 2012 the company also donated $260,000 to AEI.

There’s your financially incentivized people right there.

2 barks and woofs on “The Financial Climate

  1. Interesting that to the Reichwing, lefty eggheads aren’t supposed to make (any) money, and that any lefty egghead that has two nickels to rub together is somehow a sellout. But the Reichwingers, in contrast, having already sold their souls to Mammon (as a matter of principle), are somehow immune to the influence their not-so-small fortunes might apply.

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