This is going to confuse our environmentalist friends. Readers will recall that the only one of GWPF's funders identified to date turned out to be, not a representative of big oil from Dallas or Houston, but an obscure hedge fund guy from Australia, Sir Michael Hintze. Across the world, big-oil-conspiracy theorists scratched their heads in confusion.
Hintze has now upped the ante by giving a £5m donation to the Natural History Museum.
[Hintze] said that museum director Dr Michael Dixon, who said some of the money would be spent on climate change research, was free to spend it as he wished.
Sir Michael, who was knighted by the Conservative Party last year, said that he liked to “challenge the orthodoxy” and denied that funding climate change sceptics and the Natural History Museum was a “weird fit”.
“I am not religious about it. If Michael’s guy says there’s climate change well fine. The fact that we have not had any temperature increase for the last 15-16 years is what makes me worry that we are spending all our money on CO2 rather than cleaning up the crap in the world [plastic islands in oceans for example].”
“If you want to have an argument about CO2, God bless, there’s a lot more to think about in terms of water policy, recycling policy, how we live our lives, whether we have sustainable urbanism, how we protect our species, make sure that we don’t just have dodoes in cages and they are still wandering about.”
Is that exploding heads I hear over at Friends of the Earth?