Corporate Climate Coup Confirmed

by David F. Noble

In the wake of the climate change meltdown, we might perhaps still have something like a predictive science here but it's not about global warming. Back in May, 2007 I published an article entitled "the Corporate Climate Coup" in which I offered a brief history of the corporate campaign begun in the late 1990's to promote the profit-prospecting idea that the planet is warming up due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions (AGW). I described in some detail the corporate political agenda to derail the anti-globalization movement and the concurrent corporate economic agenda to supplant the moribund dot.com bubble with a new bonanza based upon carbon trading. I identified the central corporate players, notable among them the powerhouse investment bank Goldman Sachs, Generation Investment Management (Al Gore's Goldman Sachs spin-off), and two of the world's four largest oil companies, BP and Shell, both Goldman Sachs clients. The article pointed out how their campaign was grounded upon the restoration of faith in two of the main targets of the anti-globalization movement: the imagined beneficence of the self-regulating market and, most stridently, the allegedly unimpeachable authority of science. That ideological restoration effort is now doubly in doubt. As popular dismay mounts over the scurrilous surreality of the market-based carbon-trading scam, the corporate campaign has been thrown into possibly fatal disarray with the inelegant demolition of the preposterous pretensions of pure, peer-reviewed, science. And as the veil is lifted from the habitat of the gaming wizards of global warming, the UK Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, we would expect, given this historical review of the political economy of AGW, to find familiar faces, and we do. There they are, in the fine print of the history of the outfit (www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history), among the funders of the Nobel-lauded independent minds that supposedly certified our sanity in this madness: BP and Shell. You guessed it.

LINKS:
Corporate Climate Coup
Global Warming: Truth or Dare?
Regression on the Left

David F. Noble is a historian of science and technology and a professor at York University, Toronto, Canada.