Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (8 page)

“There was plenty of money for the anti-Kyoto cause in the oil patch, but the Friends dared not take money directly from energy companies. The optics, Mr. Jacobs admits, would have been terrible.

This conundrum, he says, was solved by University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper, a well-known associate of Stephen Harper.

As is his privilege as a faculty member, Prof. Cooper set up a fund at the university dubbed the Science Education Fund. Donors were encouraged to give to the fund through the Calgary Foundation, which administers charitable giving in the Calgary area, and has a policy of guarding donors’ identities. The Science Education Fund in turn provides money for the Friends of Science, as well as Tim Ball’s travel expenses, according to Mr. Jacobs.

And who are the donors? No one will say.

“[The money’s] not exclusively from the oil and gas industry,” says Prof. Cooper. “It’s also from foundations and individuals. I can’t tell you the names of those companies, or the foundations for that matter, or the individuals.”

This was a sweet deal for the “Friends” and for their funders. The fledgling association got all the money it needed without having to account for its origins, and the oil and gas companies got tax receipts from the Calgary Foundation for donating to “educational” causes, even though the Friends’ activities were overwhelmingly political rather than educational. But what had arguably started as a grassroots collection of retired oil-patch workers with a perhaps sincere belief in their position became an industry-funded political action group.

After the Montgomery story ran in the
Globe and Mail,
the Friends of Science became something of a political hot potato. The University of Calgary launched an internal audit that found Barry Cooper had sluiced hundreds of thousands of dollars through his “educational” accounts without meeting any of the university’s standards for such actions. He had personally written checks as large as C$100,000 (to a Canadian arm of the public relations firm APCO Worldwide) and he had used some of the money to employ his wife and daughter, in contravention of University of Calgary policy. The University auditors also found that the uses to which the bulk of the money had been put “were not legitimate scientific research and education and were funded by anonymous donors to promote special interests.”
²

As punishment for all of this, Barry Cooper—fishing buddy of Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper—has paid no price whatsoever. He maintains his position. He still writes a weekly column, often on climate change politics, in the local “newspaper of record,” the
Calgary Herald,
which has neither reported the Friends of Science story nor ever advised its readers of Cooper’s extracurricular activities.

Nevertheless, the Friends seem to be damaged goods generally, and though the Web site was still operating in early 2009 and the organization continues an annual luncheon, most of its activities have ground to a halt. But Tim Ball never missed a beat. Working with a former APCO public relations executive named Tom Harris, Ball reemerged in 2006 as the “chief science advisor” of a new organization called the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP), which, as a first order of business, promised to launch “A proactive
grassroots
campaign to counter the Kyoto Protocol and other greenhouse gas reduction schemes while promoting sensible climate change policy” (emphasis mine). Harris, who once had organized the public launch of the Friends of Science, stood in as executive director and, along with Ball, populated the list of other “science experts” with most of the scientists who had appeared on the Friends of Science honor roll.
³

Tim Ball, who seemed during this period to get more work than ever, was famously reluctant to talk about who was paying his bills. For example, in August 2006 Harris flew Ball to Ottawa, where he briefed a committee in Canada’s House of Commons. (This was a time when fiction writer Michael Crichton, author of the denial book
State of Fear,
was being asked to give climate change briefings to both then-U.S. president George W. Bush and the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, then under the gavel of chair James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.) Before returning to his home on Canada’s west coast, Ball stopped at the
Ottawa Citizen
for a meeting with that newspaper’s editorial board. In a taped podcast of that meeting Ball says, “to my knowledge, I have never received a nickel from the oil and gas companies.” Prodded about who was financing his cross-Canada speaking tour—picking up his expenses and paying him for his appearances—he says, “I made a point of not trying to find out who pays me.”
⁴
Pressed further, Ball acknowledged that the High Park Group was paying his expenses in Ottawa. High Park, which had been Tom Harris’s employer immediately before Harris launched the NRSP, states on its own Web site, highpark group.com: “Our client work is focused on natural resource and infrastructure sectors including power generation, energy transmission, transportation, and mining.”

With a bit more investigation, it became obvious that High Park was more than a periodic funding source. Sleuthing about early in 2007, DeSmogBlog’s Kevin Grandia discovered that two of the three directors on the board of the NRSP were senior High Park executives. Timothy Egan was the president of the High Park Advocacy Group and a retired lobbyist for the Canadian Gas Association and the Canadian Electricity Association. Julio Legos was the High Park Group’s director of regulatory affairs, and his High Park biography said, “Julio’s practice at HPG is focused on federal and provincial energy and environmental law and policy, particularly as they affect Canadian industry.”
^5,
6

Creating the NRSP as an “arm’s-length,” “grassroots” organization enabled High Park to avoid identifying who was paying for the NRSP’s public campaign against climate change regulations. The Canadian government restricts this kind of “grassroots” lobbying under the Lobbyists Registration Act
,
subject to an important loophole. The question and answer section under the “General Registration Requirements” of the act states:

4. What is “grass-roots” lobbying?

Grass-roots lobbying is a communications technique that encourages individual members of the public or organizations to communicate directly with public office holders in an attempt to influence the decisions of government. Such efforts primarily rely on use of the media or advertising, and result in mass letter writing and facsimile campaigns, telephone calls to public office holders, and public demonstrations.

But in setting up the NRSP as a de facto subcontractor, High Park was able to claim an exception, which is also explained in the Q&A section of the registration requirements:

5. I am involved in organizing and directing a grass-roots lobbying campaign. Do I have to register?

If you are a registered lobbyist, you must report grassroots lobbying as a communications technique. If you are not engaged in any registerable lobbying activity, it is not necessary to register for the grass-roots lobbying campaign.
⁷

So Tom Harris dropped off the lobbyist registry and moved his office across the hall (the NRSP mailing address was #2-263 Roncesvalles Avenue in Toronto; High Park’s address was #4-263 Roncesvalles Avenue), after which he was able to carry out this “grassroots” campaign against energy industry regulation without incurring what the Lobbyist Act describes as the “obligation to provide accurate information to public office holders and to disclose the identity of the person or organization on whose behalf the representation is made and the purpose of the representation.”

The federal lobbyists registry was created specifically so that politicians and members of the public can know who is paying to influence the political decision-making process. To that end the federal government’s Lobbyist Code of Conduct says: “Lobbyists shall, when making a representation to a public office holder, disclose the identity of the person or organization on whose behalf the representation is made, as well as the reasons for the approach.”

But Tom Harris is not technically a lobbyist, and Timothy Egan and Julio Legos may well have been “volunteering” their time as directors of the NRSP.

So during this period Egan was a registered lobbyist for the Canadian Gas Association, which is part of an energy industry coalition that includes the Canadian Nuclear Association, the Canadian Association of Oil Well Drilling Contractors, the Canadian Energy Alliance, the Propane Gas Association of Canada, the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, and the Coal Association of Canada, as well as some conservation and alternative-energy interests such as the Canadian Energy Efficiency Alliance, the Canadian Wind Energy Association, and Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Canada. But regardless of that status, and irrespective of the NRSP’s stated purpose to block government action on climate change, the nearly arm’s-length relationship between High Park and the NRSP meant that the Canadian public had no right to ask who was paying the bills for the NRSP campaign.

Harris continued to run the NRSP through all of 2007, even after Canada’s largest newspaper, the
Toronto Star,
ran a feature (“Who’s Still Cool on Global Warming?”) on January 28, 2007, exposing his energy-industry connections. But in March 2008 he popped up as the new executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, which operates from the same IP address and with most of the same “experts” (hello, Tim Ball and Albert Jacobs) as the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and the Australian Climate Science Coalition. The International Climate Science Coalition Web site, climatescienceinternational .org, states that the group “is an international association of scientists, economists and energy and policy experts working to promote better public understanding of climate change science and policy worldwide. ICSC is committed to providing a highly credible alternative to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thereby fostering a more rational, open discussion about climate issues.”

Although Harris doesn’t tend to invoke the word “grassroots” quite so often at the International Climate Science Coalition, he remains committed to the old tactics. At a strategy session at the “2008 International Conference on Climate Change,” a gathering of climate deniers organized by the Heartland Institute, Harris said this (emphasis added):

We need regular high-impact media coverage of the findings of leading scientists—not just one or two publications, but we need to have hundreds all over the world. We need to have a high degree of information sharing and cooperation between groups, so that when [the well-known New Zealand climate change denier] Vincent Gray, for example, has an article published in New Zealand, we can take the same piece and we can submit it to newspapers all over North America and Europe.

Then we have a nicely well-coordinated response, where letters to the editor and phone calls are made. “Congratulations on publishing that article!” You know, it’s interesting because I’ve had many of my articles opposed so strongly, by environmentalists through phone calls and letters to the editor, that they just simply dry up, they just won’t publish us again. So this does have feedback, I mean, these are people that run these newspapers, and they’re scared, and impressed, and encouraged, depending on the feedback they get.

We have to have
grassroots organizations
doing exactly that kind of thing: coordinated local activism.

And finally, as I said, we need unbiased polling and good press coverage.
⁸

Nowhere in any of this material does Harris say that we need good science. The kind of articles that Vincent Gray is writing these days don’t turn up in the reputable pages of
Science
or
Nature.
They appear on the opinion pages of middle-market newspapers, whence they are photocopied and submitted to other middle-market newspapers, as Harris says, “all over North America and Europe.” And if one of those newspapers actually runs the article again, Harris has his “grassroots” legions follow up with flattering phone calls and congratulatory letters.

We are left, then, with a trail of misdirection. It began with an organization (the Friends of Science) whose principals admitted they were trying to cover up their funding sources. It transformed into a second organization that was clumsy enough to allow its sources to be exposed. And that transformed into a new and more international organization that is not directly subject to Canadian or American laws demanding financial disclosure. Then again, transparency has never been the order of the day. After the University of Calgary audit showing the adventures of Professor Barry Cooper—the transparent attempt to hide the source of oil-and-gas industry funding—no one paid a price. No taxes were recaptured from people who had received tax receipts to which they were not legally entitled. No wrists were slapped. The University changed some of its internal processes, but the government of Canada dropped its investigations without prosecuting or imposing tax penalties.

The Friends of Science also dodged a bullet on their campaign activities. Having solicited money and targeted swing ridings for a radio advertising campaign during the 2006 Canadian federal election, after stating publicly that its purpose was “to have a major impact on the next election,”
⁹
the Friends of Science were absolved of responsibility by Elections Canada. Without explanation, and certainly with no mention of the relationship between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Barry Cooper—the federal regulatory agency announced that it was dropping its investigation and planned no further action, even though on the face of it, the Friends’ activities were apparently designed to affect a federal election in a way that is specifically proscribed in law.
¹⁰

Thus we have a series of “grassroots” organizations whose actual roots appear to track directly to the fossil fuel industry. We also have a continuing campaign, first outlined so clearly in the Western Fuels Association, TASSC, and API strategy documents, to sow doubt and confusion—to raise questions about science in the public mind without ever actually embracing or referencing the work of leading scientists in the field. Once again, if doubt reigns in the minds of the public, it appears to be anything but accidental.