George C. Marshall Institute

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The George C. Marshall Institute was founded in 1984 and funded by industrial companies, a conservative think tank originally founded to defend the controversial SDI armaments project. With the collapse of the Soviet Union from the end of the 1980s, the GMI changed its mission and focused on the fight against the introduction of environmental protection policies and especially climate protection measures . It then contested the scientific state of research on the ozone hole , acid rain and global warming and became one of the key players in the climate change denial scene . It was financed by ExxonMobil and conservative foundations such as the Sarah-Mellon-Scaife and the John M. Olin Foundation, among others . In 2015 it dissolved and became part of the CO 2 coalition , another climate denial organization .

History and work

The GMI was founded by the three physicists Frederick Seitz , William Jungs and Robert Jastrow . The starting point was Ronald Reagan's SDI initiative, which was rejected by many scientists, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and Carl Sagan . Thereupon Robert Jastrow, a strongly anti-communist scientist who was convinced of the SDI project, set about founding an organization with which he could counter the UCS. This resulted in the GMI, of which Fred Seitz was the first chairman. Seitz was a former president of the National Academy of Sciences who, after retiring from academic research in the 1970s, began to provide scientific insights into environmental and health research for industrial companies such as the tobacco industry .

When the Cold War came to an end and the justification for the SDI project was no longer applicable, the GMI realigned itself and concentrated on environmental policy, with "environmental alarmists" replacing the Soviet Union's lost image of the enemy. The central mission of the think tank became the denial of man-made climate change, even if the three central founding figures did not have any expertise in the field of climate research. They were then joined by other scientists who denied man-made climate change, including the climate researcher Roy Spencer . Originally, climate change was not generally denied, but initially only the fact that it was man-made. Instead, the GMI blamed the sun.

Key figures in the denial of man-made climate change were Fred Seitz and Steven Milloy , who, like Seitz, had already participated in disinformation campaigns for the tobacco industry. There were also close ties to the ExxonMobil oil company , from which the GMI received $ 630,000 between 1998 and 2005. At the same time, 7 out of 11 "scientific speakers" who, according to a UCS report published in 2007, were in contact with front groups funded by Exxon were also active at the GMI. These were Sallie Baliunas , Sherwood Idso , David Legates , Richard Lindzen , Patrick Michaels , Fred Seitz and Willie Soon .

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literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Michael E. Mann , Tom Toles: Der Tollhausffekt. How climate change denial threatens our planet, destroys our politics and drives us insane . Erlangen 2018, pp. 81–83.
  2. ↑ a b James Lawrence Powell: The Inquisition of Climate Science. New York 2012, pp. 101-103.
  3. ↑ See Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway: The Machiavellis of Science: The Network of Denial . Wiley-VCH Verlag , Weinheim 2014, chapter 2.
  4. ↑ See Michael E. Mann, Tom Toles: Der Tollhausffekt. How climate change denial threatens our planet, destroys our politics and drives us insane . Erlangen 2018, pp. 81–85.
  5. ↑ a b Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway: The Machiavellis of Science: The Network of Denial . Wiley-VCH Verlag , Weinheim 2014, p. 237.
  6. ^ Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Organized Climate Change Denial. In: John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, David Schlosberg (Eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 144-160, p. 151.