.... the Competitive Enterprise Institute has filed a FOIA request with the Environmental Protection Agency asking for correspondence related to climate change from Mr. Grijalva, Arizona Democrat, and three Democratic senators — the same three investigating whether 100 fossil fuel companies and trade associations have funded climate research.
Mr. Grijalva’s probe into academic research funding has been likened to McCarthyism, but Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christopher Horner said the point of the latest round of requests isn’t that one good witch-hunt deserves another.
Rather, the inquiries are aimed at “reminding those who think it’s a one-way street that, since the congressman seeks only information from people who dare disagree with him, we can do what they do,” said Mr. Horner, who also filed the Grijalva-inspired FOIAs on behalf of the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic and the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.
“You believe information is necessary for the public to properly assess claims, then so do we,” said Mr. Horner. “We are even using laws enacted for the purpose, unlike the gentleman sailing in under the flag of congressional letterhead and whatever that implies, but not even a pretense at citing any authority that I can see.”
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Elsewhere, reports are seeping out about funding of climate research by pro-“warmist” nonprofits such as the Park Foundation in Ithaca, New York.
The foundation began funding Cornell marine biologist Robert Howarth after approaching him in 2010 to write an “academic article that would make a case that shale gas was a dangerous, polluting fuel,” according to a Summer 2014 article in Philanthropy magazine.
“By simultaneously funding an interlocking triangle of sympathetic scientists, anti-fracking nonprofits, and media outlets, Park helped move the idea that natural gas is environmentally unfriendly from the activist fringe to the mainstream,” said the article by Jon Entine, senior research fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication at George Mason University . “The foundation has continued to provide numerous grants (in the range of $50,000 to $60,000) directly to Howarth and his research colleagues.”
Mr. Howarth said his research is not motivated by financial considerations. The report also points to Ithaca College biologist Sandra Steingraber, a recipient of Park Foundation funding who was active in the anti-fracking fight in New York as a co-founder of New Yorkers Against Fracking — which also has received Park funding, according to the pro-industry website Energy in Depth.
In addition, Ms. Steingraber was a peer reviewer on a research paper cited by the Cuomo administration in New York when enacting its statewide fracking ban last year, although she told a reporter afterward that she was “absolutely objective about the data.”
The largest source of research dollars, of course, is the federal government, which spent $32.5 billion on climate research from 1989 to 2009, according to the Science and Public Policy Institute.
The White House has placed itself firmly the “warmist” camp with President Obama’s Climate Action Plan and declarations on the website such as “Due to climate change, the weather is getting more extreme.”
“Billions of dollars have been poured into studies supporting climate alarm, and trillions of dollars have been involved in overthrowing the energy economy,” Richard Lindzen, a retired professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the “Grijalva Seven,” said in a March 4 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “So it is unsurprising that great efforts have been made to ramp up hysteria, even as the case for climate alarm is disintegrating.”
Still, it’s tough to prove that a federal grant into climate research, even one from the Obama administration, is somehow evidence of bias, and Mr. Horner isn’t trying.
Instead, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s FOIA requests ask the EPA for any communications between Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and four staffers in the EPA’s office of congressional and governmental relations.
Specifically, the FOIAs seek communications dating from Jan. 1, 2013, that mention Tom Steyer, founder of the left-wing advocacy group NextGen Climate, as well as the terms “denier,” “denial” and “deniers,” and liberal groups including the Climate Investigations Center, Greenpeace, the Energy Foundation, the Center for American Progress and the Sierra Club.
Mr. Horner’s FOIAs asking for funding information on four climate professors were sent to the University of Arizona, the University of Colorado, the University of Delaware and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Mr. Grijalva sent letters to three of those universities, as well as Arizona State University, Pepperdine University, MIT and the University of Alabama, focusing on professors who had testified to Congress about climate issues.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/11/climate-change-denier-scientist-funding-investigat/#ixzz3UBKcF66C
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