Cash for Climate Deniers?

Have you got academic credentials? Looking to make some serious change? Then you may already be a winner. The American Enterprise Institute has offered $10,000 to academics willing to contribute to a book on climate change policy, according to the San Jose Mecury News.

Greenpeace spokeswoman Jane Kochersperger, who noted that AEI has received funding from Exxon Mobil in recent years, said Sunday that the think tank ``has clearly hit a new low . . . when it's throwing out cash awards under the rubric of `reason' to create confusion on the status of climate science. Americans are still suffering the impacts of Hurricane Katrina, and it's clearly time for policy-makers on both sides of the aisle to take substantive action on global warming and ignore Exxon Mobil's disinformation campaign via climate skeptics.''

But AEI visiting scholar Kenneth Green, one of two researchers who has sought to commission the critiques, said in an interview that his group is examining the policy debate on global warming, not the science.
``It's completely policy-oriented,'' said Green, adding that one-third of the academics AEI solicited for the project are interested in participating. ``Somebody wants to distort this.''


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