Greenpeace exposes climate change deniers professors William Happer and Frank Clemente

AN UNDERCOVER sting has exposed how supposed experts are paid by the hour to spruik bogus science that rejects global warming.

The business of climate scepticism

CLIMATE change, according to general consensus, is real.

The Earth is warming and our polar ice caps are melting and human activity is the main cause of it.

But there are some sceptics in the scientific community who cast doubt on this assessment.

Some controversially claim global warming isn’t happening or is even a risk to the planet, while others have tried to downplay the role of humans, and even suggest greenhouse gas emissions are beneficial for the environment.

These academics are always called upon to bolster the anti-climate change argument.

But their independence has frequently been questioned by environmentalists who claim their research is funded by unscrupulous fossil fuel companies keen to stamp out climate change policies.

With the world’s eye firmly focused on the outcome at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, Greenpeace set out to prove these claims.

This week the activist group revealed details of its undercover investigation that has exposed two top climate change deniers to such scrutiny.

In a complex sting, the environmental organisation posed as representatives of energy companies and offered to pay the academics to write papers explaining the benefits of coal and carbon emissions. They also asked the payments not be disclosed.

The academics, Professor William Happer from Princeton University, a physicist, agreed to write a paper on the benefits of rising CO2 emissions at the request of an unnamed oil and gas company in the Middle East; Professor Frank Clemente from Penn State, a sociologist, agreed to write a paper on the benefits of coal on behalf of an Indonesian coal mining firm.

In a series of email exchanges both also agreed to hide the funding source, and revealed details of other arrangements they had made with other companies.

Happer is considered one of the most prominent climate sceptics in the US.

Not only is he chair of the US Senate science committee, he is also chairman of the George Marshal Institute in the US and an adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK.

His controversial views on carbon emissions — that “more CO2 would benefit the world” — has made him the go-to man for fossil fuel companies.

He is also a favourite among conservative politicians. This week he appeared at the congressional hearing into climate change organised by Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who has staked out a position as a climate change denier.

In the email exchanges with Greenpeace, the fake consultant tells Happer, who also served as an energy adviser to former president George Bush senior, the proposed report should highlight the negative aspects of the climate agreement being negotiated in Paris.

Happer responded favourably but added he wanted to make sure they understood that he supported regulations for “cost-effective” control of pollutants associated with fossil fuels but that he did not agree with that CO2 was bad for the environment.

“This is completely false,” he wrote. “More CO2 will benefit the world. The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”

He then goes on to say that he no longer has his own research laboratory, or external funding, adding that his work to “push back against climate extremism” was a “labour of love” and was done to “defend the cherished ideals of science that have been so corrupted by the climate-change cult”.

He then set out his terms for his fee — $250 per hour — and asked that it be donated to the CO2 Coalition, a lobby group set up to promote the benefits of fossil fuel generated carbon emissions, adding that it was the same group the Peabody Coal Company, which paid him thousands of dollars to testify at a separate state hearing, donated his fee to.

When asked by The New York Times about the sting and if there should be full disclosure regarding funding from industry sources, Happer said yes but added: “I don’t think that full disclosure was the point of the Greenpeace article at all. The aim was simply to smear their enemies.”

Professor Clemente, who was asked by the undercover Greenpeace activists to write a report countering the damaging studies on Indonesian coal deaths as well as promote the benefits of coal, told The New York Times he stood by his statements contained in the email exchanges.

“I fully stand behind every single statement I made in the emails apparently pirated by Greenpeace,” he said. “I am very proud of my research and believe that clean coal technologies are the pathway to reliable and affordable electricity, reduction of global energy poverty and a cleaner environment.”

In the Greenpeace emails, Clemente says from the outset that he thinks it was “wise” the company was taking a “proactive role in countering anti-coal hyperbole”.

He said he had “written, spoken and testified quite a bit on coal’s importance to the quality of life around the world, especially in developing nations” and listed the many pro-coal lobby groups he “worked with”.

He also revealed that he wrote a $50,000 report for Peabody Energy, called the Global Value of Coal, and only contained the sponsorship details in the small print but not the amount.

After the release of the report Clemente wrote an opinion piece arguing against the coal divestment movement in universities, which was picked up by more than 50 newspapers across the US, Greenpeace’s Energy Desk reported.

“In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar,” Clemente wrote in an email.

Greenpeace said its investigation exposed how the fossil fuel industry was able to pay for research that sowed doubts about climate science and promoted the industry’s own interests.

“Our research reveals that professors at prestigious universities can be sponsored by foreign fossil fuel companies to write reports that sow doubt about climate change and that this sponsorship will then be kept secret,” Greenpeace UK director John Sauven told The Guardian. “Down the years, how many scientific reports that sowed public doubt on climate change were actually funded by oil, coal and gas companies? This investigation shows how they do it, now we need to know when and where they did it.”

Earlier this year, The New York Times uncovered the controversial links between another academic and the fossil fuel industry.

The newspaper found Dr Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had accepted more than $US1.2 million from fossil fuel companies and lobby groups in exchange for producing climate-sceptic scientific papers.

Dr Soon, the Times says, often appears on conservative news programs, has testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

Following the newspaper’s expose, The Smithsonian launched an investigation.

Greenpeace also said the investigation uncovered how fossil fuel companies were able to channel the secretive funding through an organisation called Donor’s Trust which would ensure contributions would remain secret.

Donor’s Trust it said was referred to the “dark money ATM” of the US conservative movement.