The Bush Administration's favourite think tank has been offering scientists $10,000 to attack the UN's new climate change report.
Greenpeace has acquired a letter from the American Enterprise Institute, an ExxonMobil-funded lobbying outfit, offering the payments for articles that attack the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC's fourth assessment report is published today. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012.
Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered by the AEI. It's not known if any scientists accepted the offer.
The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Vice-President Dick Cheney's wife Lynne is a senior figure at the Institute. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman the AEI.
The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere by the AEI's Kenneth Green, attacks the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".
Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a think tank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."
ExxonMobil is responsible for a fifteen year campaign of deception and denial on climate change. The world's biggest oil company, which yesterday posted the largest profits in global corporate history, funds front groups to distort the science of climate change.
Read the AEI letter in full here.
ENDS
