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Bribing is not good science

February 02, 2007 ( politics )

The Guardian reports:

"Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments [up to $10000 plus travel and "additional payments"] for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

"Right now, the whole debate is polarised," he said. "One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don't think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy."

But, bribing, on the other hand, is a time-honored tradition in policy making.

The AEI, for what it's worth, is clearly a non-partisan group (up there with Diebold!):

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

Posted by griffjon at February 2, 2007 12:02 PM

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