Guardian | Greenpeace Blogs

For those familiar with the effort of ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers to bankroll a network of organizations denying basic climate science, a new article in the Guardian offers some revelatory information on the secret funding network that outweighs even top denier sugar daddies like Koch and Exxon.

Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, based out of the DC suburb of Alexandria, VA, have sent $118 million to the ‘climate denial machine‘ from 2002-2010, according to a Greenpeace analysis featured in the Guardian. The graph above, from the article, illustrates the significance of this money as compared to giants like Koch and Exxon.

Of course, the Koch brothers are part of the Donors Trust network, using the DONORS groups to hide their own giving to a variety of corporate front groups. Because of the obscurity provided by DONORS, we don’t know exactly who is getting exactly how much of the Koch payments to Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. Continue reading →

In today’s Guardian, Fred Pearce calls out BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” greenwash.

He states:

“BP likes to say that it is investing $1.5bn (£980,000) a year in ‘alternative energy’. True, I am sure. But that word ‘alternative’ is clever. Delve a little further and it turns out that BP’s alternative energy division includes not just wind and solar and biofuels but also natural gas-fired power stations. Natural gas may be less polluting than coal and oil, but at the end of the day it’s a fossil fuel filling the atmosphere with CO2. Alternative? Not by my definition.”

He goes on:

“Also sheltering in the alternative energy division is BP’s ‘emissions assets business’, which makes money out of carbon trading, and a venture capital unit. But even if we lump all this ‘alternative’ activity together, it still only makes up 7% of the company’s planned $21bn (£13.85bn) investment this year. The remaining 93% is oil, spiced up with some coal.”

Read the full article – Greenwash: BP and the myth of a world ‘Beyond Petroleum’