My Ten Most Wanted list of shills, hacks, and mixed nuts has a new member: Patrick Michaels, pictured on the right, is the energy industry’s go-to “climatologist.” Mother Jones has a thorough disposal here. My favorite section is the part describing his withdrawal from a major auto-industry case out of embarrassment over his funding sources:
As it turned out, Michaels’ attempt to keep his client list secret wasn’t entirely successful. The court documents reveal that lawyers for the defense saw records revealing that Michaels had received money from at least one very large energy company.
In addition, Greenpeace recently obtained an older copy of Michaels’ curriculum vitae via a Freedom of Information Act request that shows that the Western Fuels Association, a coal and fuel-transportation business group, gave him a $63,000 grant in the early 1990s for “research on global climatic change.” He also received $25,000 from the Edison Electric Institute, an association of electric utilities, from 1992-95 for “literature review of climate change and updates.” And a 2006 leaked industry memo revealed that he received $100,000 in funding from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association to fund climate denial campaigning around the time of the release of An Inconvenient Truth. Reporter Ross Gelbspan wrote in his 1998 book The Heat is On, one of the earliest works documenting industry funding for climate change skepticism, that Michaels also received $49,000 came from the German Coal Mining Association and $40,000 from the western mining company Cyprus Minerals.
The list is coming together fast. I’m even considering a separate domain. One thing that would have to be very clearly posted on each and every page: ANY news agency using any of these guys should be considered to have automatically failed its source-checking.
