Online Rag Funded by Green Billionaires Peddles Cheap Smear About Tory MP and Shoots Itself in Foot

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

BY CHRIS MORRISON

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.