From the Greenpeace announcement:
Posing as representatives of oil and coal companies, reporters from
Greenpeace UK asked academics from Princeton and Penn State to write
papers promoting the benefits of CO2 and the use of coal in developing
countries.
The professors agreed to write the reports and said they did not need to disclose the source of the funding.
Citing industry-funded documents – including testimony to state hearings
and newspaper articles – Professor Frank Clemente of Penn State said:
“In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is
published as an independent scholar.” Leading climate-skeptic academic,
Professor William Happer, agreed to write a report for a Middle Eastern
oil company on the benefits of CO2 and to allow the firm to keep the
source of the funding secret.
Dr. William Happer is Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at Princeton University.
In emails to reporters, Happer also revealed that Peabody Energy paid
thousands of dollars for him to testify at another state hearing. The
funds were paid to a climate-skeptic think tank.
Greenpeace claims their investigation also found:
• US coal giant Peabody Energy also paid tens of thousands of dollars to
an academic who produced coal-friendly research and provided testimony
at state and federal climate hearings, the amount of which was never
revealed.
• The Donors Trust, an organization that has been described as the “dark
money ATM” of the US conservative movement, confirmed in a taped
conversation with an undercover reporter that it could anonymously
channel money from a fictional Middle Eastern oil and gas company to US
climate skeptic organizations.
• Princeton professor William Happer laid out details of an unofficial
peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK
climate skeptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil-funded
report through a similar review process, after admitting that it would
struggle to be published in an academic journal.
• A recent report by the GWPF that had been through the same unofficial
peer review process, was promoted as “thoroughly peer-reviewed” by
influential columnist Matt Ridley - a senior figure in the organisation.
The report echoes an investigation published earlier this year in the
New York Times about Wei-Hock ("Willie") Soon, of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He accepted donations from
fossil fuel companies and anonymous donors in return for producing
climate-sceptic scientific papers. He described those studies as
“deliverables,” and did not disclose who funded the research.
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