Over the weekend, deniers got very excited about a potential Climategate repeat, only instead of private emails from climate scientists being hacked, it was a leak (of sorts) of Extinction Rebellion’s internal documents.
Blogger Paul Homewood was the first to get his hands on them, and his crack(pot) analysis was quickly picked up by James Delingpole (as is his lazy lying wont.) That pair of posts was then picked up and highlighted at WUWT, where you can read the most explosively scandalous excerpts.
The thrust of their story is that, gasp, people have given the group money! Surely this is the next Climategate, Watt’s intro implies.
The story goes like this. Extinction Rebellion (XR) is not like most organizations, in that it’s not exactly organized. Instead it’s decentralized, allowing anyone who cares enough to protest to do so in its name, and is open to any and all who want to join. Apparently someone signed up and received access to XR’s internal documents, which include guidelines on how to carry out direct action and otherwise begin preparing for the coming climate collapse. But of course, that’s not what this nefarious figure was interested in.
Instead, this person sent those files to Homewood to comb through and post. Seems like there isn’t anything too juicy, because the best they could find were some funding documents. And these are hardly revelatory, given that XR already has a link to that information posted on their website (something Homewood acknowledges.)
Undaunted by XR’s transparency, deniers have run with the story, particularly the angle that George Soros may be one of the funders. They’re also making hay out of the fact that XR is reportedly flush with a half-million dollars in cash, about half of what they’ve raised in the past year. Which again, is something that you hardly needed to hack into their database to find out- the Guardian reported last month that US philanthropists are mobilizing exactly that amount of financial support for XR and others.
And while six and seven figures of fundraising certainly sounds impressive, let’s put that figure in context.
A single denier scientist, Willie Soon, has received at least that much from the fossil fuel industry to fund his research. So one single denier has gotten as much money as this world-wide organization.
Meanwhile, the Kochs spent $7 million lobbying in 2019 alone, and Chevron and ExxonMobil have both spent some $5 million. And across five major oil companies, some $200 million is spent every year on lobbying, ads and other efforts to oppose climate action.
The field is similarly tilted when looking at the larger fight, with the fossil fuel industry out-spending climate advocates by at least a 10 to 1 margin when lobbying Congress.
Plus, of course, there are the trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies that the fossil fuel industry receives.
Pay no mind to those figures though. Instead, deniers want you to believe they’ve uncovered a major scandal by revealing information that anyone who wants access to can get. Information that’s largely already been posted online by the organization itself, and which was already reported by the Guardian.
Apparently deniers are so accustomed to hiding their own funding from the fossil fuel industry, they think transparency is a weakness.
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