Climate 'skeptic' Roy Spencer's oil industry ties

http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/09/climate-science-contrarian-roy- spencers-oil-industry-ties.html

Spencer's Big Oil connections

As a global-warming contrarian with strong climate-science credentials, Roy Spencer is a relative rarity. He earned his doctorate in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981 and went on to serve as a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where he and Christy received an award for their work monitoring global temperatures with satellites. Spencer became a research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville in 2001.

While his personal website notes that his research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies and not oil companies, he does have a leadership role in groups with financial ties to Big Oil. They include:

* George C. Marshall Institute. Spencer currently serves as a director at the George C. Marshall Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit that receives substantial funding from oil and gas interests -- including Exxon, which has given the group at least $840,000 since 1998, according to Greenpeace's ExxonSecrets.org database. The Marshall Institute used to restrict its funding to private foundations and individual donors, but in the late 1990s, after it began working to cast doubt on global warming, the group made the decision to accept money from corporations and their foundations.

The Marshall Institute's former executive director, Matthew B. Crawford, wrote an essay for the New York Times back in 2009 that accused the group -- which he did not name -- of distorting facts in pursuit of its ideological agenda:
But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn't fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style -- that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning.
* Cornwall Alliance. Spencer is a member of the board of advisors of the Cornwall Alliance, a conservative Christian public-policy group that promotes a free-market approach to environmental stewardship and whose "Resisting the Green Dragon" campaign portrays the climate-protection movement as a sort of false religion. The Cornwall Alliance has close ties to a conservative policy group called the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which has received over $580,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998, according to ExxonSecrets.org. Paul Driessen, who played a guiding role in forming the group now known as the Cornwall Alliance, also served as a consultant for ExxonMobil and CFACT, which has also received at least $60,500 from Chevron and $1.28 million from the the foundation of the Scaife family, whose wealth comes in part from Gulf Oil, as Think Progress reports.

* Encounter Books. Spencer is the author of three books critical of mainstream climate science: Climate Confusion, published in 2008, and The Great Global Warming Blunder and The Bad Science and Bad Policy of Obama's Global Warming Agenda, both released last year. All of those works were published by Encounter Books, which is a project of the conservative nonprofit Encounter for Culture and Education. That group's major funders include the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, which in turn is controlled by one of the owners of Kansas-based Koch Industries, among the world's richest privately held companies with extensive holdings in oil refineries and pipelines. The Kochs have played a critical role in funding climate-denial efforts, contributing $24.9 million to organizations that have worked to cast doubt on mainstream climate science.

* Tech Central Station. Spencer served as a columnist and a member of the science roundtable for Tech Central Station. Until 2006, TCS was run by DCI Group, a lobbying and public-relations firm that has represented ExxonMobil.

So while Spencer may have "never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service," he has certainly served the oil industry's interest in amplifying doubt about climate change and downplaying the scientific consensus that it's real and caused in large part by human activity.