Pot, Kettle, Black

What fun to find Dana Nuccitelli’s dirty little secret (WUWT, Andrew Neil (BBC)) that he is now at pains to play down.

Apparently he works in contaminated land cleanup.

Happy to dish it out but can’t take it, eh? As James Delingpole explains Dana and his cohorts are convinced that:

“…the main reason we climate sceptics say the pesky sceptical things we do is because we’re paid to say so by various oil interests.“

When funding sources for CRU and others were exposed in the Climategate emails, climate scientists’ links with Big Oil came to light. I did think at the time that this may have played a large part in the development of the ‘sceptics are funded by Big Oil’ meme.  If Big Oil had that much money to throw at climate science research, how much more would they be secretly pouring into efforts undermining it?

I’ve since realised that there’s another mindset driving the meme. It’s the ‘anti’ stuff.  You see climate sceptics tend to side with the anti-wind and anti-renewable energy lobby (because so much of current policy is ludicrous and costly).  So many of the environmental arguments for policy change are ludicrous and sceptics are only too happy to ridicule them. And here’s where the mindset comes in. You see the Green Movement feels it is inalienable in its stance, and anyone critical of its pronouncements must be anti-environment. Big Oil is anti-environment and uses all these arguments.  So if sceptics use the same arguments they MUST be getting them from Big Oil, because no-one in their right mind would be critical otherwise. They cannot perceive that others see actual, genuine flaws in Green Policy.

Here’s a recent post from WUWT, where Paul Driessen expounds against biofuels:

Ethanol mandates have caused US corn prices to rocket from $1.96 per average bushel in 2005 to as much as $7.50 in autumn 2012 and $6.68 in June 2013. Corn growers and ethanol makers get rich. However, soaring corn prices mean beef, pork, poultry, egg and fish producers pay more for corn-based feed; grocery manufacturers pay more for corn, meat, fish and corn syrup; families pay more for everything on their dinner table; and starving Africans go hungry because aid agencies cannot buy as much food.

A while back I happened to meet a guy in the US renewable fuel lobby and we got to talking. One thing he said surprised me (I paraphrase):

“All this Food vs Fuel stuff is of course coming from the oil companies.  They hate us.”

“Really?” I said. 

“Oh yes.  It’s been a very effective campaign for them.”

Having said I felt it (food vs fuel) was a legitimate concern, he quietly talked through a lot of the arguments with me. I wish I had taken notes, but a couple of things did stick in my mind. Having done some fact checking I have accepted that a lot of his arguments were sound, or at least had more merit than I’d given them credit for. But I digress.

That conversation got me thinking about the rocks tossed at sceptics.  It’s a bit like that phrase, you know – “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, but a sort of twisted version. If you are ‘anti’ something, you are taken to be ‘anti’ it for the same reasons as everyone else who is ‘anti’ it, as some of your arguments are the same even if your reasons are different.  So I guess the thinking goes – if Big Oil is anti-ethanol and is funding disinformation campaigns, and climate skeptics come out as anti-ethanol, it stands to reason they must be funded by Big Oil.

In the strange world of Green Thinking, only their opinions count. So it is perfectly OK for Mr Nuccitelli to work for a large private corporation with significant operations for and with the fossil fuel sector; his conscience is clear.  However, Barry Woods on Twitter was right – sceptics with even the remotest connections to such industries would be lambasted for less.

It is the pot calling the kettle black. Josh hits the nail on the head once again.