Articles Tagged "Funding"

Last week the environmental lobbying group the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a new report entitled "A Climate of Corporate Control: How Corporations Have Influenced the U.S. Dialogue on Climate Science and Policy" [PDF]. Among other things, the report claims to trace corporate donations in 2008 and 2009 to think tanks and politicians as a way to uncover the true corporate attitudes and intentions toward climate change science and policy. According to the UCS, its analysis reveals that some corporations are climate-change science hypocrites, claiming to support the climate-change “consensus” in some venues but not in others. This climate hypocrisy allegedly produces confusion among both the public and policymakers, resulting in the defeat or delay of urgent policies needed to address climate change.

Several prominent news outlets swallowed these assertions from the UCS study. For example, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Some major U.S. corporations that support climate science in their public relations materials actively work to derail regulations and laws addressing global warming through lobbying, campaign donations and support of various advocacy groups.” In line with the findings of the UCS, the L.A. Times specifically declared, “General Electric has backed six environmental and non-partisan research groups that accept the scientific consensus on climate change, including the Brookings Institution and the Nature Conservancy. At the same time, it has funded four organizations that reject or question the consensus, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation.” Based on the UCS report, The Guardian (U.K.) stated, “Some of America's top companies are spending heavily to block action on climate change or discredit climate science, despite public commitments to sustainable and green values.” The Guardian specifically mentioned that UCS had identified General Electric as being two-faced about climate change. According to the UCS report, among the four GE-supported organizations that "misrepresent" climate-change science is the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.

Michael Hintze financially supporting organisation that regularly casts doubt on the science and cost of tackling climate change

Michael Hintze, a leading Conservative party donor who runs the £5bn hedge fund CQS, has emerged as a financial backer of the climate sceptic thinktank founded by former chancellor, Lord Nigel Lawson.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, launched by Lawson in 2009, regularly casts doubt on the science and cost of tackling climate change in the media and has called on climate scientists to show greater transparency, but has refused to reveal details of its donors. Leading Nasa climate scientist James Hansen calls it "one link in a devious manipulation of public opinion [regarding climate change]."

On Monday, Downing Street was forced to reveal that Hintze was among the leading Tory donors who were invited to privately dine with David Cameron at a "thank you" dinner following the general election in 2010. The revelation that Hintze, who has also donated £1.5m to the Tory party, is connected with climate change scepticism will be an embarassment for David Cameron, who has pledged to lead the "greenest government ever".

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As Canada prepares to release its open data action plan, London announces it will spend to buy data from its departments for release to the public

LONDON -- The British government has earmarked £7 million for the fiscal year starting in April for the purchase of more data from its departments to be released for free.

So far more than 40,000 public data sets have been released on data.gov.uk, as part of Whitehall's transparency agenda.

A new independently chaired Data Strategy Board (DSB) will have access to the money, which will come from Trading Fund organizations and potentially other public sector organizations from efficiency savings. (According to Wikipedia, Trading Funds are parts of government departments. Some already sell information to the public and private sectors.)

The DSB's role will be to advise ministers on what data should be released. It will also work with the Public Data Group (PDG), which comprises Trading Funds organizations the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Companies House, to develop a more consistent approach to improving access to government information.

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For those who've missed it, Tim Yeo MP has been engaged in an online debate with former chancellor Lord Lawson on the subject "Is there an economic case for going green in an age of austerity"? As you'd perhaps expect from a man named "Politician of the Year" at the inaugural 2011 Green Business Awards, Yeo very much believes there is. We'll examine more closely why a Tory MP might feel so strongly about this in a moment. But let's first see what Lord Lawson has to say:

It is sad that fashionable obsession can lead an intelligent man like Tim Yeo into such a farrago of factual error and economic illiteracy. The reason why there is no economic case for ‘going green’ is simple. It is that green energy is hugely more expensive than carbon-based energy, it always has been and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

That, and no other reason, is why the world relies on carbon-based energy – coal, oil and, increasingly, gas.

And that is why to ‘go green’ requires either a heavy tax on carbon-based energy, to make it less competitive, or a massive subsidy for wind power and other forms of green energy, to make them more competitive – and probably both. Either way, these represent a huge economic cost and a burden on the consumer that bears especially hard in an age of austerity, but which would be unjustifiable at any time.

MILLIONS of dollars in government research funding is being ploughed into studies of emotion in climate change messages, ancient economic life in Italy and the history of the moon.
Studies of sleeping snails and determining if Australian birds are getting smaller because of climate change have also been allocated funding in the latest round of grants totalling $300 million by the Australian Research Council.

A study of "an ignored credit instrument in Florentine economic, social and religious life from 1570 to 1790" secured $578,792 for a researcher from the University of Western Australia.

The council insists the study was approved because it had modern day relevance to the global financial crisis as it shows how Florence in ancient times recovered from an economic downturn and because no one had studied that element of history before.

Another project titled "Sending and responding to messages about climate change: the role of emotion and morality" by a Queensland university secured $197,302. The council said it was an important psychology project.

The study to determine if birds are shrinking was awarded $314,000 and another of sleeping snails to determine "factors that aid life extension" was given $145,000. Studying the early history of the moon will cost taxpayers $210,000 and another study looking at "William Blake in the 21st century" comes with a $636,904 bill.

DAVID Cameron is under fresh pressure from his own backbenchers to slash subsidies for controversial onshore wind farms.

Dozens of Tory MPs are joining forces in a new group pressing for the Government to review funding for a technology they argue does “more harm than good”.

Selby and Ainsty MP Nigel Adams, one of those who attended the group’s first meeting, urged the Prime Minister to act in the House of Commons yesterday by focusing support on “cost-effective and reliable” technologies like biomass rather than “inefficient, costly, large-scale onshore wind farms”.

He told the Yorkshire Post onshore wind farms were “cash cows” and added: “One person’s subsidy is another person’s tax, but if you do have this pot of money to encourage green energy I’d much rather see if be used on proven, reliable, cost-effective technology like biomass.”

The group, led by Daventry MP Chris Heaton-Harris, marks a significant shift in pressure on the Government from its own MPs over onshore wind farms which have often proved controversial, particularly when located near some of Yorkshire’s beauty spots.

Leading experts lend support to Freedom of Information request concerning climate sceptic foundation chaired by Lord Lawson

Leading climate scientists have given their support to a Freedom of Information request seeking to disclose who is funding the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a London-based climate sceptic thinktank chaired by the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson.

James Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies who first warned the world about the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, has joined other scientists in submitting statements to be considered by a judge at the Information Rights Tribunal on Friday. They will argue that Lawson's foundation routinely misrepresents and casts doubt on the work of climate scientists. Their statements will form part of the supporting evidence being presented by an investigative journalist who is appealing against an earlier rejection of his FOI request to the Charity Commission for it to make public a bank statement it holds revealing the name of the educational charity's seed donor, who gave £50,000 when it launched in 2009.

Brendan Montague, the director of an organisation called the Request Initiative, a "community interest company that makes Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of charities, NGOs and non-profits", is seeking to argue that, by authorising his request, the public interest will be served by ending the secrecy around the financing of Lawson's charity.

Click source to read FULL report from Leo Hickman

East Antrim MP Sammy Wilson has said that it absurd that MET Office staff have received performance related bonuses of almost £14million over the last five years despite some of their forecasts being wildly inaccurate. Mr Wilson had received the figures through a Parliamentary Question to Liberal Democrat Ed Davey and was shocked to find out that the total bonuses had actually increased in 2010/11 from the previous year. 2010/11 was the year that they predicted that winter would have been one of the mildest, when it was actually one of the coldest, with it being the coldest December since records began in 1910. Sammy Wilson MP said:

“It does not make sense for performance related bonuses to be paid out on such a large scale when their some predications have been so wrong. Barbecue summers and mild winters did not materialise but it seems that they have not only been left with egg on their faces but big bonuses as well.

It's a bit ironic in the week that the Prime Minister has talked about ending this bonus culture and bonuses for failure, that a Government body has awarded its staff a 30% hike in bonuses.

The Government needs to account for why these bonuses were paid. I am sure most people in the country would be horrified to hear that should a large sum of money is being spent on performance related pay when the performance has been shoddy at best.”

The Journal of Irreproducible Results, a science-humor magazine, is, sadly, no longer the only publication that can lay claim to its title. More and more published scientific studies are difficult or impossible to repeat.

It’s not that the experiments themselves are so flawed they can’t be redone to the same effect -- though this happens more than scientists would like. It’s that the data upon which the work is based, as well as the methods employed, are too often not published, leaving the science hidden.

Many people assume that scientists the world over freely exchange not only the results of their experiments but also the detailed data, statistical tools and computer instructions they employed to arrive at those results. This is the kind of information that other scientists need in order to replicate the studies. The truth is, open exchange of such information is not common, making verification of published findings all but impossible and creating a credibility crisis in computational science.

Federal agencies that fund scientific research are in a position to help fix this problem. They should require that all scientists whose studies they finance share the files that generated their published findings, the raw data and the computer instructions that carried out their analysis.

With one day to go until the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, the economic outlook is bleak.

Growth forecasts are expected to be downgraded to 1 per cent both this year and next – forcing George Osborne to borrow tens of billions of pounds extra to pay the nation’s bills.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is predicting the situation will be even worse, with Britain slipping back into recession at the start of next year.

So it’s imperative that, when he rises to address MPs tomorrow, the Chancellor finally produces a growth strategy worthy of the name.

To be fair, some of the early signs are encouraging.

The plan for the Government to underwrite up to £40billion of loans for small firms may finally get money into the hands of entrepreneurs who have been disgracefully starved of cash by the banks – even those propped up by the taxpayer.