How Big Money Impacts Environmental Policy

Climate change advocates have long asserted that the fossil fuel industry “bought” science—i.e., paid scientists for favorable findings—to strengthen its efforts to defend techniques such as offshore drilling and, in recent years, hydraulic fracturing or fracking. The latest example of this is the case of Willie Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who made enemies when he published a peer-reviewed paper in January that questioned the mathematical models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to predict climate change. More...