Hold the front page! DeSmog reports that the U.K.’s Energy and Net Zero Minister Claire Coutinho has taken a donation from a “climate science denial funder”. Lord Michael Hintze is alleged to have given £2,000 to the minister’s local constituency – a sum that should keep local volunteers supplied with paper clips and instant coffee for a short while. A pathetic smear, of course, simply blowing imaginary smoke where no fire exists. The donation is legal and without such local fund-raising political parties would cease to exist. But curiously missing from DeSmog’s reportage is any note of its own funding where, needless to say, the usual list of green billionaires are to be found.
DeSmog is an unpleasant operation noted for running a ‘blacklist’ of scientists who stick to the scientific method and discuss the causes of climate change with reference to empirical evidence. Called the ‘Climate Disinformation Database’, it lists many of the scientists who dispute the notion that humans control the climate thermostat and society must de-industrialise around a collectivist Net Zero agenda to avoid thermageddon. As part of a global political campaign, billionaire foundations are currently pouring hundreds of millions of dollars every year into organisations that can lobby for ‘green’ causes, as the Daily Sceptic has noted in a number of previous articles. Unsurprisingly, DeSmog is funded by some of these sources that seek to exert influence in all forms of media, politics and academia..
DeSmog is “predominantly” funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Polden Puckham Charitable Foundation, the Climate Emergency Collaboration and the Minor Foundation. Interestingly, the Board of Directors of DeSmog includes a representative from ClientEarth, a fund supported by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the European Climate Foundation (ECF), both groups heavily funded by Extinction Rebellion paymaster Sir Christopher Hohn. Also listed in this group is the Grantham Foundation, a green billionaire fund known for pumping money into British universities. This latter operation also helps fund the Imperial College-based World Weather Attribution which uses computer models to state with unassailable conviction that humans cause individual weather events. Another board director works for Climate Outreach, a lawfare outfit funded by ECF, along with IKEA and Joseph Rowntree. Sitting on a research advisory board of Climate Outreach is Saffron O’Neill, a geography lecturer from Exeter University who in the past has speculated on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for those heretics expressing scepticism about what she calls “well supported” science.
If all of this was oil money, we would never hear the end of it from the Guardian – $12 million from Bill Gates over the last decade and counting – as noted by the investigative journalist Ben Pile. “But climate change is a fig leaf,” he continues. “It allows corporate, big business and billionaire lobbying to go unchecked, despite the obvious consequences for democratic control of policymaking.”
Recently, DeSmog teamed up with the Guardian to state that 16 of the 31 presenters at the fast-growing GB News channel “attacked” U.K. climate policies including the Net Zero 2050 target. The Guardian reported that 10 of the presenters made statements rejecting or challenging “widely accepted scientific findings” about how humans are affecting the climate and the role the climate crisis plays in extreme weather events.
Neil Oliver, whose Saturday evening monologue is a social media hit, was singled out for criticism. In December 2022, he is said to have asserted that polar bears are “doing fine”, and the ice in Antarctica is getting thicker every year. In fact, polar bears are doing fine with surveys suggesting their numbers are at recent highs. Meanwhile, a paper in Nature noted that over the last seven decades, the Antarctica sea ice area has “modestly expanded”, and warming has been “nearly non-existent”. Terminally silly Brighton green MP Caroline Lucas noted the “truly toxic misinformation” on GB News, adding: “Ofcom cannot allow these statements to go unchallenged and un-investigated.”
Both GB News and the rival Murdoch-owned TalkTV allow journalists to discuss and consider all the facts and opinions surrounding climate change and Net Zero. But care needs to be taken with Ofcom. Any loon can talk about ‘global boiling’ and ‘climate collapse’ on the BBC and nobody bats an eyelid. But Ofcom seems to require ‘balance’ whenever anyone departs from the set text. For some inexplicable reason, no ‘settled’ climate science practitioners will debate their findings in public with critical interviewers, so both GB News and TalkTV are reduced to ‘balancing’ their coverage by platforming Armageddon hysterics.
Ben Pile has had practical experience of appearing on the 10 minute ‘debate’ slots and observes that over the last year he has appeared with a grown man wearing dungarees and plaits in his beard calling himself a “professor”, weather bloke Jim Dale, fire-and-brimstone eco-zeolot Donnachadh McCarthy and Dale Vince. “The Green Blob does not send out its best and brightest to fight its cause,” concludes Pile. “This is because it is not a movement that is founded on the best and brightest. It has no culture of debate, democracy or science, and it eschews these things, requiring only obedience and emotion from its adherents.”
Which brings us nicely back to DeSmog, with its factitious stories about piddling constituency donations, nasty attempts to destroy the reputations and employment prospects of eminent scientists, half-baked attacks on genuine, questioning journalists and sources of funding from agenda-driven green billionaires.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Thanks an excellent expose.
I also have my own suspicions over the use of Charitable Foundations for these donations.
Absolutely, the sock puppet game is one of the most transparent bits of political skullduggery (and tax avoidance whilst maintaining control over the business).
Lord Hintze also funded Hintze Hall at NHM including the Blue Whale, based. Perhaps he’s been able to talk a little sense into Claire Coutinho on Thermaggedon.
Both Jeremy Grantham and Christopher Hohn invest in ‘green’ technology businesses.
Their support for climate change activism is simply motivated by greed.
Follow the money.
Chris Hohn is evil made flesh.
Unbelievable. After you posted passionate support for completely unchecked capitalism yesterday, you’re now explaining the current mess we’re in with “greed” and “follow the money”. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up.
What a remarkably silly comment.
I have never supported unchecked capitalism. Complete nonsense.
Starting from where we are now, a socialist fascist state, I recommend a smaller state with fewer powers, lower taxation, less public spending, a smaller cabinet, higher pay for fewer MPs and less devolution, fewer politicians generally.
I do not support attempts to suborn democratic capitalism via monopoly, oligopoly or corruption.
Paying radical green activists to pressure politicians to support nut zero, all the while posing as an ‘environmentalist’, so that your own (particularly covert) investments in dubious ‘green’ technology make money through government subsidy (taxpayers hard earned cash) is, quite simply, corrupt, potentially illegal.
I’ve just reread your comments and, you’re right, you didn’t support unchecked capitalism. I’ll admit when I’m wrong, so, apologies, it was a “remarkably silly comment”.
I actually agree with a lot of your views on what the role/size of the state should be.
Thank you very much for your generous, good natured, retraction.
Absolutely no need for any apology. This is a debating chamber where forthright views are always welcome, the downticks (of which I certainly get my fair share) part of the fun!
I know you will not hold back from criticizing my views in the future if you believe that they merit criticism and I welcome it.
I am, of course, often hopelessly wrong about things and it is only right that you and others should point that out on those occasions.
Yes but the “green” business isn’t “unchecked capitalism”, it’s only made possible by way of the state manipulating the market through subsidies and legislation.
Grantham supplies old growth US hardwood pellets to Drax. That preposterous scam is now to be enhanced by carbon capture. More inefficient scams to benefit the ‘whoo’ oligarchical collectivists.
Yes, what we are seeing here is unbridled corporatism not capitalism
The US has or had quite strong anti-trust laws. They broke up Standard Oil and AT&T.
Assume you refer to T Roosevelt trust busting. But that was over a hundred years ago. Bill Gates is just one example how companies can successfully circumvent anti trust laws so I presume others are at it too. Globalisation possibly allows corporatism to prosper.
Correct
Globalisation may have something to do with it, yes. It doesn’t make sense for the UK to try and grow rice, and I quite like free markets, but we need to make global markets compatible with national sovereignty, democratic accountability and freedom of choice.
If you “follow the money” and find products and services that help people and make their life better then that is great. ——-When you “follow the money” and find products and services that impoverish people and tries to convince them what is good for them based on lies (Green ideology) that isn’t fine. Infact it is a diabolical disgrace.
Desmog the pr wing of the nut zero hunger game. Charitable status is being totally abused, the JR foundation clearly needs to be liquidated as it’s now in the control of Marxist lunatics.
Founded by a convicted murderer.
$cientism. Religion of ‘the science’, except there is no science to the Climate Bollocks pushed by Greentards and their billionaire Epstein loving chums. None of their solutions are practical, economical, gaia-friendly, nor good for the ecosystem. All of them are utterly dependent on renewable, yes renewable, self creating hydrocarbons.
Chinese Coal Powers Britain’s Net Zero
latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
Can the Daily Sceptic create a (black)list of “scientists” who believe that CO2 levels are a thermostat with which we can control the Earith’s temperature?
It is important to state it in those terms to highlight the stupidity and mendacity of the idiots on the list.
Call it the Thermostat List
Actually, they should stop referring to these people as climate change activists or climate change anything.
Climate change is a classic Orwellian term designed to put everyone in a linguistic headlock.
It is Thermostat Theory. The theory that CO2 is a weather temperature thermostat. More CO2, hotter temperature, less CO2 colder temperature.
That’s their entire theory.
So in conversation, when someone tells you about climate change the response should be oh, so you belive in Thermostat Theory?
We all believe in climate change. The climate indeed changes. But do we all believe in Thermostat Theory.
Very good, Thermostat Theory of Thermageddon. A scam to control the world and make a lot of money by demonising and taxing an invisible (unless you’re Greta) colourless, odourless, wholly beneficial (below 5,000 ppm, toxic at 50,000 ppm) gas without which there would be no life on earth. Abetted by midwit scientists hungry for grants, status and boondoggles. Arhhenius (Greta’s great granddad) disproved by Planck, Schwarzschild and now with the help of satellite measurements of outgoing radiation for their final proof by van Wijngaarden and Happer. Freeman Dyson famously sceptical too of course.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/svante-arrhenius-greta-thunbergs-great-grandfather-max-sevenhans
Another good question is “How do polytunnels work?”. When they’ve finished their school science lecture about greenhouses and IR, gently point out that polythene is transparent to IR (apart from special grades used to prevent scorching of lettuces etc). Woods disproved the school science explanation over a century ago of course.
Excellent work Chris.
If I strongly disagree about black holes, should I be sent to the anti science gulag? That would ofcourse be absurd, but that is what may people suggest should happen to people who question any aspect of global warming dogma. —–This reveals only one thing. It isn’t science these people are indulging in. They think they live in a scientific dictatorship where truth is simply declared from upon high.
All the cool kids would be in that gulag with us so there’s that.
CO2 the greenest of gases…
Gotta love this kind of arguments:
A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.
[From the Desmog article]
The first thing this brings to mind is an old joke, Manure tastes great! Millions of flies can’t be wrong! But that’s still taking this much too seriously. The statement really just means 99 of 100 published papers on climate science were written by global boiling believers who – absolutely certainly – got funding for their ‘research’ from global boiling proponents.
Wes Brot ich freß, des Lied ich sing.
[the German version of He who pays the piper calls the tune, literally I’m singing the song of those who are providing bread to me.]
It’s worse than you say. I believe it’s more like, “if no conclusions were drawn, we assumed wholehearted support”. I had a reference for that somewhere, but y’know it’s getting hard to keep track.
I remember reading that as well.
It is hard to get 99% of government funded data adjusters and “hide the decline” charlatans to disagree with something when their livelihoods entirely depend not just on agreeing, but on manufacturing and exaggerating the phony climate crisis.
“Society must de-industrialise around a collectivist Net Zero agenda to avoid thermageddon”. De-industrialisation is the objective, to obviate human environmental impact, and to end to our way of life. Thermageddon is the fear porn employed to convince sleepy turkeys to vote for Christmas.
Don’t expect the Charities Commission to sort out Cadbury and the other registered charities who are deeply involved in political campaigns.
Chair Orlando Fraser KCOn government appointments since 1997
Involved as a Board member since 2013 which suggests a need to bring in new blood
Helen Stephenson CBE
CEO since July 2017. Extensive experience of senior leadership across the public and voluntary sectors. ie no private secor experience
Pippa Britton OBEBoard member since (not stated)
Sports woman. Involved with various charities and government appointments
Rory Brooks CBEBoard member since (not stated)
Banker and venture capital fund manager.
Shrenik DavdaLay Member of the Board of IPSO, the independent regulator of the newspaper and magazine industry in the UK.Shrenik read Law at the London School of Economics and received his MBA from INSEAD.
40 years of banking experience in the CEEMEA (Central Eastern Europe Middle East Africa)
Will Lifford Chartered Accountant with big firmAppointed 2021
Several public sector board appointments
Ann Phillips Solicitor30 years’ experience advising on charity law and practice
Joanne ProwseAppointed 2019
BSc in Music from City University and a Master of Business Administration
History in trade association and government appointments
I have no reason to believe this board and its members think they are doing a good public service but the fact is they are deep insiders and the facts are they have permitted charities to conduct political campaigning of a partisan and controversial nature.
Charitable status is widely abused. Nobody on their side questions the presence of dirty money. Close them all I say.
Excellent reporting Chris!!
These groups are where communists went when the wall came down. We never held communism to account for its crimes and so it was able to go underground for a while and lick its wounds. They have re-emerged by insinuating themselves into other groups and organisations. Communism is a dangerous virus.
Why does nobody question the existence of Ofcom? I have never heard of such an institution in another country. The UK really seems to be leading the world with its phobia against disinformation, misinformation and information in general.