John Vidal of the Guardian is getting all excited by a Greenpeace report linking sceptics to...Big Oil. The wicked capitalists in question are Koch Industries, "a little-known, privately owned US oil company" (which just happens to be the largest privately owned business in the world). Now that the truth about their corporate largesse has been revealed by the tireless efforts of Mr Vidal and his colleagues at Greenpeace, we can presumably ignore everything said by...
...Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato institute, the Manhattan Institute and the Foundation for research on economics and the environment.
The article is rather indicative of the intellectual vacuum that exists at the Guardian these days. It also smacks of desperation in the face of the rapid decline in public faith in the global warming orthodoxy. It's no secret that Koch funds Cato - the information is there on their list of sponsors. Where is the news here?
Of course, when an organisation like CRU is funded by Big Oil, it's an entirely different story. When the capitalists fund sceptics, they are paying to advance their carbon-belching interests. When they fund alarmists they are promoting sound science, and any interests they might have in alternative energy sources are irrelevant.
But here's another thing. Read this quote from Radicals for Capitalism, a history of the libertarian movement in the USA:
During the waning years of the 1970s, ....the Cato Institute [and a load of other libertarian organisations]...were all largely Koch financed and/or controlled by people who were.
So if Koch were funding these organisations back in the 1970s, before anyone had heard of global warming, it's surely even more vacuous than it would be otherwise to insinuate that Koch is using Cato as a corporate mouthpiece. Do you think the possibility that the Koch brothers are libertarians and free-marketeers - you know, people who might fund free-market-promoting organisations - even occurred to Mr Vidal?