CASE STUDY: Dr. Willie Soon, a Career Fueled by Big Oil and Coal (and the Southern Company)

Story excerpt by Kert Davies for GreenPeace USA June 28, 2011

Of all the climate deniers, one scientist has been particularly closely involved in the campaign against the climate science consensus for the majority of his career: Dr. Willie Soon. 

Since 2001, Willie Soon has received direct funding for his research of $1.033 million from Big Coal and Big Oil interests. In contrast, he received $842,079 from conventional government or university funders in the same period. The last grant he received from a funder with no ties to dirty energy interests was in 2002 (a grant that carried through to 2006). Since then, he has been entirely funded by the fossil fuel industry.

The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave two grants to Dr. Soon totaling $175,000. The 2005-6 grant for $110,000 from the “Koch Foundation” is titled  "Koch/Mobile [sic] Charitable foundation." This two year grant came from the Charles G. Koch Foundation according to Media Matters Transperancy.

Beginning in 2002, Soon's funding mostly came from oil companies, including Southern Co., one of the largest coal burners in the United States, and the American Petroleum Institute, according to documents uncovered in a Freedom of Information Act request by Greenpeace and seen by Reuters.

"A campaign of climate change denial has been waged for over twenty years by Big Oil and Big Coal," said Kert Davies, a research director at Greenpeace US.

"Scientists like Dr. Soon who take fossil fuel money and pretend to be independent scientists are pawns."

Read more here 

 

FOIA requests revealed a "previously unknown" money source and the presence of a 'Southern player' in the investigation: The Southern Company (SOCO). This should come as no surprise to informed watchers of the company, and it's something to keep in mind whenever you hear SOCO's and Alabama Power hired guns propagandizing climate change to suit their end of the equation.

Sometimes they rely on elected 'pawns' like Ms. Cavanaugh for assistance.

In an editorial from the Anniston Star earlier this year, Alabama Public Service Commissioner, Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh railed against increased environmental regulations on APCO and other heavy polluters with a gusto. She referred to global warming as "medicine show tonic" and carried the water for Alabama Power Company (APCO) by claiming "more stringent regulations would increase power bills by 30-40%."

BamaFactCheck.com dismantled her claims one by one and revealed that Ms. Cavanaugh made these claims based on information from APCO:

Public Service Commissioner Twinkle Cavanaugh says she attended a December presentation by Alabama Power at the PSC’s Montgomery offices. The power company outlined its costs for compliance with EPA regulations.
Cavanaugh, whose job is to regulate Alabama Power and other electrical suppliers, was upset by what she heard.
“I literally got so incensed by what was going on, I wrote something that was maybe 10 or 12 pages handwritten,” she said. Cavanaugh said she later whittled the piece down to the op-ed that ran in The Star and other papers. 

Clearly, Ms. Cavanaugh is a malleable sort who blindly accepts one-sided propaganda as fact to rant about publicly, and we no longer wonder why she became a member of the Alabama PSC. She's a perfect fit in this industry apologist agency. Maybe the next time she decides to attend presentations by industries her agency is charged with regulating, she will think first and become "incensed" second instead of the other way around.

In the meantime, it might be helpful for the PSC to be aware of what the Southern Company has been paying for. This might assist them in making more thoughtful decisions about serious issues under their authority, and hopefully dissuade any other members from taking to the editorial pages and coming off like industry shills rather than informed, non-biased and responsible regulators.

Big polluters know that if they buy 'experts' to prop up their claims of 'no harm from our industry' who give false credence to their scare tactics of 'jobs will be lost, costs will rise' they'll gain ground with the uninformed. It's one of their oldest and most frequently used tricks because it works. So does the money that pours into the expert's pockets.

Dr. Soon does not deny that he received the money from these industry groups, but he claims it had "no influence on his research and findings"-- the standard defense when the dirty tricks get exposed. Soon can claim his results are unbiased, but it's difficult to escape the traceable money trail of a career fueled by big coal and oil.

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