Funding From Energy or Fossil Fuel Companies
On January 25, 2011, Rep. Henry Waxman sent a letter to Rep. Fred Upton seeking to call in Michaels for questioning about his science and funding. In the letter, Waxman wrote that Pat Michaels testified before the Energy and Commerce Committee in February 2009 "that widely accepted scientific data had 'overestimated' global warming and that regulation enacted in response to that data could have 'a very counterproductive effect.' Among the scientists who testified before this Committee on the issue of climate change in the last Congress, Pat Michaels was the only one to dismiss the need to act on climate change ... Dr. Michaels may have provided misleading information about the sources of his funding and his ties to industries opposed to regulation of emissions responsible for climate change."
On July 27, 2006 ABC News reported that a Colorado energy cooperative, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, had given Michaels $100,000. An Associated Press report said that the donations had been made after Michaels had "told Western business leaders ... that he was running out of money for his analyses of other scientists' global warming research" and noted that the cooperative had a vested interest in opposing mandatory carbon dioxide caps, a situation that raised conflict of interest concerns.
According to Fred Pearce, fossil fuel companies have helped fund Michaels' projects, including his World Climate Report, published every year since 1994, and his "advocacy science consulting firm", New Hope Environmental Services.
Read more about this topic: Patrick Michaels
Famous quotes containing the words energy, fossil, fuel and/or companies:
“Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Beware the/easy griefs, that fool and fuel nothing./It is too easy to cry “AFRIKA!”/and shock thy street,/and purse thy mouth,/and go home to thy “Gunsmoke,” to/thy “Gilligan’s Island” and the NFL.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Socialite women meet socialite men and mate and breed socialite children so that we can fund small opera companies and ballet troupes because there is no government subsidy.”
—Sugar Rautbord, U.S. socialite fund-raiser and self-described “trash” novelist. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 2, section 7, by Studs Terkel (1988)