INTERNATIONAL

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NEGLECTED 1 26

MERRI OK

SEE SUPRA-NATIONAL

RECALL HEARTLAND ORIGINS

JBS RED SCARE ANTI-COMMIE

NATO --> 2ND ON GREENLAND BS 1 26 NOTE // UN WHO WITHDRAW AGAIN

DONROE DOCTRINE VENEZ CUBA

MUSK DOGE USAID WOOD CHIPPER

PSEUDO-POPULIST AM 1ST MAGA BS

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FROM NATO:

trump antagonist vestigial isolationism? transaction? plays into his myth that dem wimps get played and he will be better dealmaker, strict fr make euro-weenies pay their share; mostly he is just ignorant in foreign policy, reductionistic

all international orgs suspect (tho before wd get macho militaristic exemption, but now we have woke mil/corps

who suspect vax etc etc anti-commie new world order BS, now like Putin, troll caucus ukraine waR

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simon clark 1 26

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1 26 ICN It landed as one fell swoop after a year of relentless cuts to U.S. climate programs, personnel and policy.

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday he would withdraw the United States from more than 60 international organizations and treaties, including the framework agreement for addressing climate change that a Republican administration helped to craft 33 years ago.

The moves, which face certain legal challenges and will take at least a year to execute in any case, go far beyond the nation’s exit from the Paris Agreement, which Trump announced at the start of his second term. They would mean that the U.S., the largest historic contributor to the world’s greenhouse gas overload, would be the only nation with no role in international negotiations to reduce pollution or aid poor nations that are bearing the brunt of climate impacts. The action invites a legal reckoning over Constitutional questions, such as whether a president can unilaterally abandon a treaty that has been Senate-ratified, as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was.

Trump is even seeking to remove the United States from the process of assessing climate science, although it is not clear that he has any power to block the 50 U.S. scientists from non-governmental institutions who are currently serving on the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In effect, the clearest impact of an exit from the IPCC would be giving up any leverage the United States has over the shape of the key findings of the panel, known as the Summary for Policymakers.

Climate action advocates pledged that state and local governments across the United States will remain committed to reducing greenhouse gas pollution. But the Trump administration also is engaged in a legal strategy to stop that from happening, this week filing suit against two California cities that have adopted ordinances to restrict natural gas infrastructure and appliances in new construction.

More of our coverage of the biggest story on the planet:

As President Trump met with U.S. oil executives on Friday, Exxon CEO Darren Woods called Venezuela “uninvestable” at present and others expressed caution in response to the president’s overtures to pour billions of dollars into the country.

The latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans, like previous editions, ignores the climate impacts of livestock and could make them worse, environmental groups worry.

The EPA budget for 2026 rejects extreme cuts proposed by Republican representatives and the Trump administration. But advocates warn that significant cuts still jeopardize the agency’s ability to protect Americans’ health.

Outcry Builds Over Trump’s Withdrawal From International, Climate Treaties

BY MARIANNE LAVELLE

Environmental advocates have blasted the administration’s unprecedented retreat as unwise—and possibly illegal.

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AN 1 26

During the first few weeks of 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump has generated plenty of headlines — from capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to sending even more U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to Minneapolis, Minnesota following the fatal shooting of unarmed 37-year-old U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good in that city.

Trump's actions have plenty of defenders in MAGA media outlets. But MS NOW's Vaughn Hillyard, in an article published on January 13, stresses that Trump's "increasingly brazen assertions of executive power" are "running into an unexpected problem: They risk undermining the very goals they were meant to achieve."

"His threats to seize Greenland from NATO ally Denmark are accelerating European discussions about looking for alliances beyond the United States," Hillyard observes. "His public verdict in a fatal shooting by an immigration agent — delivered before a Justice Department investigation — risks further politicizing law enforcement. His administration's attempts to pressure Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to reduce interest rates — culminating in the DOJ's investigating Powell for criminal charges — threatens to make it harder for Trump to appoint Powell's successor. And a week after the mission to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power, the chief executive of ExxonMobil called the country 'uninvestable,' undercutting the economic rationale for the military intervention."

According to historian/author Ruth Ben-Ghiat — a New York University professor known for her expertise on the history of authoritarianism — authoritarians can become increasingly volatile when they are feeling desperate.

Ben-Ghiat told MS NOW: "Trump was recently on a downward path in terms of popularity with his base, and that is when autocrats do unpredictable things to assert their power."

A Pentagon official, interviewed on condition of anonymity, warned that Trump's belligerent foreign policy risks destroying alliances that have served the U.S. well for many years.

The official told MS NOW: "If Greenland goes, so goes the allies in Europe. The one refrain I've been hearing is we don't realize how many equities the U.S. has in Europe and how valuable Australia is, too, and they'll all pull the bridge out from over the moat."

After Good's death, Trump and his allies — including Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — defended the ICE agent who killed her. And according to MS NOW legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance, attacking Good can only hurt law enforcement in Minneapolis.

"If people don't have confidence in DOJ excessive force investigations, communities will spiral down without closure after events like the shooting of Renee Good," Joyce Vance said. "If the president fully breaks it, the consequences will be dire — we could become a country of endless protests with escalating violence from law enforcement on American streets."

*Read Vaughn Hillyard 's full article for MS NOW at this link.

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int'l coop works

https://www.alternet.org/environment/how-science-based-policy-and-international-cooperation-can-protect-marine-ecosystems-and

http://www.alternet.org/environment/move-over-paris-new-global-pact-could-finally-grant-planet-earth-right-survival

Despite any claims in the press, nothing new has progressed in international environmental law for a few decades. Activity has been focused on fine-tuning the existing agreements; but now moves are afoot to finally grant planet Earth a right to survival.}:

Actually, international environmental governance and law haven’t been around for that long. A few treaties pre-date the 1970s, but focused environmental governance began in 1972 with the Stockholm Declaration, when governments recognized that biological diversity is a global asset for present and future generations—that Earth’s biological resources are vital to humanity's economic and social development. Following this foundation declaration came a mushrooming of treaties and agreements in the '70s and '80s, all seeking to address specific areas that threaten Earth's biological heritage.

There are now over 500 international treaties dealing with the environment. Many of these are small, or regionally specific. Most have a distinct focus, like banning the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere, combatting the illegal wildlife trade or reducing the impact of shipping. The last major step was the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992. This treaty was intended as the unifier—the rallying point around which everything else would spin. But CBD blended into the crowd, and since 1992, nothing new has come along to energize the governance arena again.

This is not to suggest no attention has been directed to managing the environmental commons. A regular flurry of diplomatic activity is focused on fine-tuning the existing agreements around specific issues. Even the much-heralded Paris Agreement is progress against a program that was established many decades ago. Meetings are held, small progress steps are made, but there is no vigor in the system. Meanwhile, the threats to species and ecosystems have never been so great. Species extinctions, caused by human activities, continue at an alarming rate.

All of the 500 environmental treaties have been hard won. The detail each contains is important—the world is a complicated place and cannot be managed with simplistic motherhood statements. But governments are not bound by them; they can abide or ignore the treaties as they please. Despite the effort that went into their creation, environmental treaties are often referred to as "soft law" because they don't have any legally binding force.

For the past decade or so governments have complained that the field is now too crowded, complicated and reporting to them all is duplicated effort. To calm the disquiet, the United Nations General Assembly elevated the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), giving it greater impetus through a new United National Environment Assembly. The idea is for UNEA to be a focal point for addressing important issues from different perspectives. For instance, UNEA3taking place in November 2017 will focus on pollution in all its forms.

Elevating UNEP and creating UNEA is still yet another incremental step that just helps to better focus the old issues. But recently, something new was born. Still in its infancy, a new Global Pact for the Environment is proposed to bring soft environmental law into the realm of hard law. If the U.N. General Assembly adopts the pact, hard law teeth will be given to the existing environment treaties. The pact will become a unifying legal document to sit over the complicated detail of the 500 treaties. Suddenly, international environmental law will have coherence because everyone will be paying attention.

If it survives to maturity, the pact will do more. It will also establish principles that compel nations and other legal persons to protect the environment, promote sustainable development and intergenerational equity, and ensure the right of access to information and environmental justice.

If the pact is adopted by the United Nations, environmental rights will have legal and binding power. For the first time, humans will have agreed that Earth and all her inhabitants have a right to survival. That is something worth fighting for.

Most people would probably hazard a guess at the U.S., what with its preponderance ofclimate-science-denying think tanks, conservative television and radio hosts, and politicianswho think it’s all a hoax.

But a new study that analyzed identical surveys carried out across 14 industrialized nations has found that when it comes to climate science denial, Australia tops the pile.

Published in the journal Global Environmental Change, the study found that 17 percent of Australians were “climate skeptics.”

Norwegians come in second at 15 percent, followed by New Zealanders at 13 percent and then Americans at 12 percent. The UK tied for fifth with Sweden and Finland, where 10 percent of people were skeptics. The lowest ranked country for climate skepticism was Spain, where only two percent of people were classified as climate skeptics.

“Climate skepticism persists despite overwhelming scientific evidence that anthropogenic climate change is occurring,” say the authors. The study, authored by two scientists at the University of Tasmania, used data from surveys carried out in 14 countries in 2010 and 2011.

While the survey did not directly ask people if they accepted the science linking climate change to human activities, the respondents were asked how dangerous rising temperatures would be for the environment.

People who thought rising temperatures were “not very dangerous” or “not dangerous at all” and who also thought claims about environmental issues were exaggerated were classed as “climate skeptics.” While the authors accept in the paper that their approach was limited, they argue that the method enables them to do a valuable comparison of skepticism across countries.

Generally, the study found that climate skepticism tended to be associated with a lack of trust in governments and “positive attitudes” towards private enterprise. Skeptics also tended to be male and tended to vote conservative.

The researchers also tried to test the idea that climate skeptics tended to also be generally unconcerned about environmental issues, but found those two measures were only modestly linked with each other.

Across all countries, the authors wrote that only three factors—“political orientations (conservative), gender (male) and being unconcerned about environmental issues”—were “relatively consistent predictors” of climate change skepticism.

The findings tend to support other studies that have found that conservative ideologies and support for private enterprise are strong indicators of climate skepticism and denial. The authors of the Global Environmental Change study concluded:

Low levels of trust in ‘the people in government’ is associated with climate skepticism, as is valuing private enterprise to solve economic problems. Rejecting government intervention in the reduction of income inequality also reflects laissez-faire attitudes towards ‘big government’ among climate skeptics.

But the finding that Australians, Norwegians and New Zealanders are more skeptical the Americans is surprising.

Last year, a survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found that only 66 percent of U.S. voters thought that climate change was happening.

Only 51 percent of registered voters thought that global warming was mostly caused by climate change. But like the Global Environmental Change study, the Yale survey also found that conservatives tended to reject the evidence of human-caused climate change. Among the most conservative Republicans, only 22 percent were willing to accept that climate change was mostly caused by human activities.

...Most people would probably hazard a guess at the U.S., what with its preponderance of climate-science-denying think tanks, conservative television and radio hosts, and politicians who think it’s all a hoax.

But a new study that analyzed identical surveys carried out across 14 industrialized nations has found that when it comes to climate science denial, Australia tops the pile.

Published in the journal Global Environmental Change, the study found that 17 percent of Australians were “climate skeptics.”

Low levels of trust in ‘the people in government’ is associated with climate skepticism, as is valuing private enterprise to solve economic problems. Rejecting government intervention in the reduction of income inequality also reflects laissez-faire attitudes towards ‘big government’ among climate skeptics.

But the finding that Australians, Norwegians and New Zealanders are more skeptical the Americans is surprising.

Last year, a survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found that only 66 percent of U.S. voters thought that climate change was happening.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/07/country-most-climate-deniers/

pjt c transnat core:

People from twenty-two nations make up the central financial core of the Transnational Corporate Class. Seventy-three (45 percent) are from the US; twenty-seven (16 percent) Britain; fourteen France; twelve Germany; eleven Switzerland; four Singapore; three each from Austria, Belgium, and India; two each from Australia and South Africa; and one each from Brazil, Vietnam, Hong Kong/China, Qatar, the Netherlands, Zambia, Taiwan, Kuwait, Mexico, and Colombia. They mostly live in or near a number of the world’s great cities: New York, Chicago, London, Paris, and Munich.

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3 BS studies:

Danish journalists have confirmed that The Institute for Energy Research commissioned and paid for the anti-wind energy study released last year by a Danish think tank that claimed Denmark exaggerates the amount of wind energy it produces (it doesn’t), questioned whether wind energy reduces carbon emissions (it does), and asserted that the U.S. should choose coal over wind because it’s cheaper (it’s not when you count the true costs of coal).

The Copenhagen Post reports:

“A controversial report critical of the wind energy industry from conservative think tank CEPOS was commissioned and paid for by an American think tank with close ties to the coal and oil industries.”

That American think tank is the Institute for Energy Research, which has received $307,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998 and unknown additional sums from other oil and coal industry sources. The Guardian reported last year that the Institute for Energy Research has received recent funding from KBR and trusts set up by Koch Industries, which has multiple ties to IER and its sister organization American Energy Alliance.

IER’s President Thomas J. Pyle previously worked as a lobbyist for Koch Industries, while IER’s CEO Robert L. Bradley was formerly Director of Public Relations Policy at Enron, where he served as speechwriter for Enron CEO Kenneth Lay.

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Global Warming Law Shifts Responsibility from Polluters to Poor Communities

Validated Independent News Apr 12, 2012

Communities in California and Mexico have organized to oppose a cap-and-trade plan that could shift the burden from polluters to poor communities.

California leads the United States in energy efficiency and is often hailed as a global beacon of environmental protection; at the same time, it is the 12th largest emitter of carbon dioxide worldwide, making the state a significant driver of climate change. In 2006 California passed The Global Warming Solutions Act, AB32. It mandated that the greenhouse emissions be reduced to the levels of what they were in 1990, by 2020. Up to 20 percent of the state’s total mandated emissions reductions would be achieved through carbon trading with other countries, rather than through actual cuts in industrial pollution in California. This means that industries would be permitted to delay efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

As one of his last acts in office, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed agreements with the states of Chiapas, Mexico and Acre, Brazil for a state-to-state cap-and-trade agreement as part of AB32. This part of the bill has surprising implications for the remote area of southeastern Mexico. The former California governor set in motion a process that will not only fail to reduce industrial contamination in California, but has now lead to forced displacement of poor communities in Chiapas. The emerging mechanism known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) has been implemented as the world’s first sub national cap and trade agreement. REDD aims to make forests more valuable standing than they would be cut down, by creating a financial value for the carbon stored in trees.

As part of this agreement some communities in Chiapas have been forcibly removed from their lands, while others have signed agreements to go willingly. During the negotiation-process, the federal and state governments promised them new land that would be have everything a sustainable community needs. What they received in most cases has been far from this. In consequence,indigenous peasant farmers in the remote jungle of southeastern Mexico have partnered with two California-based organizations, Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment and Communities for a Better Environment to oppose the cap-and-trade plan.

Cap-and-trade is a great example of a market-based policy that patently fails to look at its non-economic impacts. The government has turned land, life, and livelihoods into market commodities for the benefit of global elites.

“Global Warming Law Shifts Responsibility from Polluters to Communities”, Jeff Conant, Alternet, (article and slideshow) April 21, 2011, http://www.alternet.org/story/150687/global_warming_law_shifts_responsibility_from_polluters_to_communities_%5Bcontains_photo_slideshow%5D

“Outsourcing Global Warming Solutions”, Jeff Conant, Global Justice Ecology Project, June 23, 2011, http://globaljusticeecology.org/publications.php?ID=568

“Chiapas: Road-Blocks and Denunciations of Relocated Community of Nuevo Montes Azules”, SIPAZ Blog, March 25, 2011, http://sipazen.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/chiapas-road-blocks-and-denunciations-of-relocated-community-of-nuevo-montes-azules

Student Researcher: Elizabeth Marinovich, San Francisco State University

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows, San Francisco State University

Climate Change Skepticism Is Highest In Japan, Britain and U.S., Poll Finds

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/climate-change-skepticism-poll_n_1939846.html?ref=topbar

but declining in US?

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w/o borders

http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/climate-deniers-atlas-foundation

Climate Change Deniers Without Borders

How American oil money is pumping up climate change skeptics abroad—and how they could derail any progress made inCopenhagen.

—By Josh Harkinson

| Tue Dec. 22, 2009 3:59 AM PST

Flickr / yomanimus; Atlas Foundation

Writing two weeks ago inPoland's most popular tabloid, the Super Express, an economic analyst named Tomasz Teluk claimed that a potential climate agreement in Copenhagen might double Poles' electricity bills, hobble his coal-dependent country, and even lead to one-world government. Fortunately, he wrote, the "'global warming' scare" has been hugely overblown: "As each of us learned in elementary school, carbon dioxide is a gas essential to the development of life, not a poison, so you do not have to eliminate it at any price."

Teluk, the founder of the Globalization Institute, a libertarian think tank, is Poland's most prominent climate change skeptic. He has become a hero to Polish conservatives, who have convinced their government to resist strong emissions cuts and block the European Union from giving climate change assistance to developing nations. A leading Polish financial newspaper recently named his institute the country's best think tank. But Teluk is hardly a homegrown climate skeptic. Much of his rhetoric, such as his claim that CO2 is good for you, echoes the well-worn claims of American skeptics. And much of Teluk's newfound visibility can be traced back to his long-standing ties with conservative patrons and energy interests in the United States.

Americans have provided Teluk with jobs, fellowships, professional contacts, and money. This year, the Globalization Institute won a $10,000 grant from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a Washington, DC-based think-tank incubator that's funded by ExxonMobil. Teluk isn't alone. The Globalization Institute is part of a loose network of some 500 similar organizations in dozens of countries that are often bankrolled by American foundations that are, in turn, backed by carbon-spewing American industries. The foreign groups' finances are opaque, yet an Atlas Foundation spokesman acknowledges that some of them wouldn't exist without dollars being pumped in. In the coming months, these groups will lead the fight in their own countries to derail the shaky deal made in Copenhagen—which will likely prompt American skeptics to cite widespread international opposition to taking action on climate change.

MotherJones.com

With US-backed overseas think tanks parroting denier talking points in dozens of languages, the echo chamber is already up and running. "The correct policy approach to [the] non-problem [of climate change] is to have the courage to do nothing," writes British skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton in an article summarized in Chinese on the website of the Beijing-based Cathay Institute for Public Affairs. As the United States stonewalled sub-Saharan African countries' demands for more climate-related foreign aid in Copenhagen, the IMANI Center for Policy and Education in Ghana and three other African think tanks backed by American interests signed on to a letter blaming poor nations for invoking "the climate change scapegoat to explain hunger, sickness, and climate vulnerability."

This September, after President Obama repeatedly cited Spain's success creating green jobs, congressional Republicans flew in Gabriel Calzada, president of Spain's Instituto Juan de Mariana, to present a study claiming that each green job created in his country destroyed another 2.2 jobs. "Europe's experience actually suggests that this is precisely the wrong approach," he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. (The study was debunked by the Spanish government.)

At the center of this feedback loop is the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which has supported more than 30 other foreign think tanks that espouse climate change skepticism. Atlas has given the Instituto de Juan Mariana more than $100,000. In 2008, it gave the IMANI Center for Policy & Education a $100,000 grant. It has also funded skeptic groups in the four nations whose governments just inked a controversial, last-minute climate deal with the United States in Copenhagen: the Cathay Institute in China, the Liberty Institute in India, the Free Market Foundation in South Africa, and the Instituto Liberdade in Brazil.

Founded in 1981 and named afterAyn Rand's free-market amorality tale, Atlas Shrugged, the Atlas Foundation has spent more than $20 million seeding some 200 libertarian think tanks across the globe as part of its Atlas Network. Much of its money has come from Phillip Morris; foundations tied to the Koch family, oil magnates who are leading funders of denier groups; and the Earhart Foundation, which was created from the profits of the now-defunct White Star Oil Company. Since 1998, ExxonMobil and its foundations have given Atlas nearly $1 million. Between 2002 and 2008, the last year for which tax records are available, Atlas' budget more than tripled, nearly hitting $7 million, with the largest single portion going to grants for "think tanks in different regions of the world."

The Atlas Network overlaps with other international networks that share its climate change skepticism and fossil fuel funders. Foundations linked to ExxonMobil, the Koch family, and other conservative interests have donated more than $1 million to Canada's Fraser Institute, which in turn supports a network of think tanks in 71 countries that promote "economic freedom." Exxon, the Kochs, and other foundations tied to American oil money have also helped bankroll the British-based International Policy Network. In 2007, IPN created the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, a group of 59 "independent civil society organizations" from 40 countries, "as a response to the many biased and alarmist claims about human-induced climate change."

Next Page: "CO2 is a gas of life, not a poison."

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Some US companies and climate denial groups have taken a more targeted approach to funding their foreign allies. In 2004, ExxonMobil gave $80,000 to the Centre for the New Europe-USAfor its "global climate change education efforts." In 2007, the Chicago-basedHeartland Institute, which has received money from Exxon, granted $135,000 to four skeptic think tanks in Canada and New Zealand, followed by $182,000 to foreign groups in 2008, according to tax filings (it didn't say which groups received the money). The Washington, DC-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow supports a German affiliate, CFACT-Europe, which put on a conference for climate change skeptics in Berlin earlier this year and protested the climate talks last week. "We want to get rid of this whole climate topic to focus on environmental problems again," CFACT-Europe director Holger Thuss said before marching with about 30 other demonstrators through downtown Copenhagen.

Thuss is reluctant to admit his ties to American donors. "We are not funded by the same people [as CFACT-US]," he said, though CFACT's president told Mother Jones that he gives the European group "a little bit of support when we can." Other leaders of foreign think tanks are similarly dodgy. Emmanuel Martin, who edits the French-language website Un Monde Libre and frequently disputes climate science on his blog for the newspaper Le Monde, at first told me that "Atlas has not given me any orders or any financing on anything to do with the subject" of climate change. When told that an Atlas employee in Washington had described him to me as "our editor" and said that "he gets a lot of support from Atlas," Martin clarified that "Atlas effectively finances a good part of our events" but maintained that his writings are entirely his own.

Yet Martin's Un Monde Libre website is part of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity, a program that operates websites in 14 languages. (Atlas inherited the program from the libertarian Cato Institute in January.) Martin and other local "intellectual entrepreneurs," as Atlas calls them, translate and syndicate Atlas-generated content, such as a recent interview about Climategate with Cato's resident global warming skeptic. "We provide the literature and ideas," says Global Initiative general director Tom Palmer in a recent video promoting the program. "We go and find the entrepreneurs, and then we can slot them right into all of the flagship programs that have made Atlas so successful."

"There are some [think tanks] that wouldn't be able to survive without us," says Austin Petersen, Atlas' new media program manager. "But they get grants from all kinds of different places, not just from Atlas. There is no way we'd be able to support the whole network by ourselves."

In an email, Teluk of Poland's Globalization Institute writes that direct financial support from American funders "was not crucial" to launching his group. Yet he's clearly benefitted from their support in other ways. Teluk says he was first exposed to free-market think tanks at a conference in Rome hosted by the International Society for Individual Liberty, a libertarian group based in Arizona. He later won a scholarship at George Mason University's Institute for Humane Studies, a haven for climate change deniers that receives funding from the Koch family foundations. In 2003, while working toward his doctorate in philosophy in Krakow, Teluk got a job with TCS Daily, an online opinion journal published by the DCI Group, a PR firm known for its corporate Astroturf campaigns. TCS received $95,000 for "climate change support" from ExxonMobil that year. "Quite frankly, someone that doesn't have their PhD, they aren't a noted academic yet," says Todd Kruse, who hired Teluk while serving as a vice president at DCI, "and getting published on a journal like that gets them noticed and helps them branch out."

Recounting his professional history on the Atlas website this summer, Teluk thanked Kruse for helping to launch his career. He also mentioned current DCI vice president Henrik Rasmussen and TCS founder James K. Glassman, a former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy in the previous administration who now leads the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University. (Neither responded to requests for comment.) Teluk wrote that "it would have been impossible to create" his own organization without them.

In 2005, Teluk founded the Globalization Institute in Gliwice, a small city near the Czech border. Shortly before international climate negotiators gathered in Poland for a final round of pre-Copenhagen negotiations in late 2008, the Globalization Institute published a book in Polish titled The Mythology of the Greenhouse Effect. The book spawned more than a dozen articles in leading Polish media outlets; several were op-eds penned by Teluk under headlines such as "Environmentalists Cause the Greenhouse Effect." More recently, the Globalization Institute and its allies circulated an open letter to the Copenhagen negotiators demanding "Free trade, no climate taxes!" and calling climate change "nothing more than a scientific hypothesis." The institute's science advisory board includes Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation staffers.

Teluk is confident that he's helping keep Poland out of a global suicide pact. "We are one of the most recognized groups opposing 'global warming' hysteria," he writes in an email. "We are present in all mainstream media, dailies, TV, radio and Internet. Decision-makers read our reports, books and comments." He adds: "There is no scientific evidence that current global warming is caused by humans. CO2 is a gas of life, not a poison. We believe that a movement that calls a gas of life 'a poison' is a movement against human life."

Next Page: A list of foreign think tanks funded by the Atlas Foundatio

The Atlas Economic Research Foundation has supported more than 30 foreign think tanksthat espouse skepticism about the science of climate change. Groups in this list promote climate change skepticism or are members of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, which was organized "as a response to the many biased and alarmist claims about human-induced climate change."

Argentina: La Fundación Atlas 1853

Australia: Institute of Public Affairs; Centre for Independent Studies

Brazil: Instituto Liberdade

Bulgaria: Institute for Market Economics

Burkina Faso: Le Centre des Affaires Humaines

Canada: Frontier Centre for Public Policy

China: Cathay Institute for Public Affairs

Chile: Libertad y Desarrollo

Costa Rica: Asociación de Consumidores Libres

Czech Republic: Liberální Institut

Denmark: Center for Political Studies

Ecuador: Instituto Ecuatoriano de Economía Política

Georgia: New Economic School

Ghana: IMANI Center for Policy and Education

Honduras: Instituto Veritas

Hong Kong: Lion Rock Institute

India: Liberty Institute

Israel: Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies

Italy: Instituto Bruno Leoni

Lithuania: Lithuanian Free Market Institute

Nigeria: Initiative for Public Policy Analysis

Pakistan: Alternate Solutions Institute

Paraguay: Centro Paraguayo Para la Promoción de la Libertad Económica y la Justicia Social

Peru: Instituto de Libre Empresa

Poland: Globalization Institute

Slovakia: Institute of Economic and Social Studies

South Africa: Free Market Foundation

Switzerland: Liberales Institut

Turkey: Association for Liberal Thinking

Venezuela: Centro de Divulgación de Conocimiento Económico Para la Libertad

Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard contributed reporting to this story.

Climate Change Deniers Without Borders

How American oil money is pumping up climate change skeptics abroad—and how they could derail any progress made in Copenhagen.

—By Josh Harkinson

| Tue Dec. 22, 2009 3:59 AM PST

Flickr / yomanimus; Atlas Foundation

Writing two weeks ago in Poland's most popular tabloid, the Super Express, an economic analyst named Tomasz Teluk claimed that a potential climate agreement in Copenhagen might double Poles' electricity bills, hobble his coal-dependent country, and even lead to one-world government. Fortunately, he wrote, the "'global warming' scare" has been hugely overblown: "As each of us learned in elementary school, carbon dioxide is a gas essential to the development of life, not a poison, so you do not have to eliminate it at any price."

Advertise on MotherJones.com

With US-backed overseas think tanks parroting denier talking points in dozens of languages, the echo chamber is already up and running. "The correct policy approach to [the] non-problem [of climate change] is to have the courage to do nothing," writes British skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton in an article summarized in Chinese on the website of the Beijing-based Cathay Institute for Public Affairs. As the United States stonewalled sub-Saharan African countries' demands for more climate-related foreign aid in Copenhagen, the IMANI Center for Policy and Education in Ghana and three other African think tanks backed by American interests signed on to a letter blaming poor nations for invoking "the climate change scapegoat to explain hunger, sickness, and climate vulnerability."

Founded in 1981 and named after Ayn Rand's free-market amorality tale, Atlas Shrugged, the Atlas Foundation has spent more than $20 million seeding some 200 libertarian think tanks across the globe as part of its Atlas Network. Much of its money has come from Phillip Morris; foundations tied to the Koch family, oil magnates who are leading funders of denier groups; and the Earhart Foundation, which was created from the profits of the now-defunct White Star Oil Company. Since 1998, ExxonMobil and its foundations have given Atlas nearly $1 million. Between 2002 and 2008, the last year for which tax records are available, Atlas' budget more than tripled, nearly hitting $7 million, with the largest single portion going to grants for "think tanks in different regions of the world."

Next Page: "CO2 is a gas of life, not a poison."

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Some US companies and climate denial groups have taken a more targeted approach to funding their foreign allies. In 2004, ExxonMobil gave $80,000 to the Centre for the New Europe-USA for its "global climate change education efforts." In 2007, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which has received money from Exxon, granted $135,000 to four skeptic think tanks in Canada and New Zealand, followed by $182,000 to foreign groups in 2008, according to tax filings (it didn't say which groups received the money). The Washington, DC-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow supports a German affiliate, CFACT-Europe, which put on a conference for climate change skeptics in Berlin earlier this year and protested the climate talks last week. "We want to get rid of this whole climate topic to focus on environmental problems again," CFACT-Europe director Holger Thuss said before marching with about 30 other demonstrators through downtown Copenhagen.

Next Page: A list of foreign think tanks funded by the Atlas Foundatio

The Atlas Economic Research Foundation has supported more than 30 foreign think tanks that espouse skepticism about the science of climate change. Groups in this list promote climate change skepticism or are members of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, which was organized "as a response to the many biased and alarmist claims about human-induced climate change."

Argentina: La Fundación Atlas 1853

Australia: Institute of Public Affairs; Centre for Independent Studies

Brazil: Instituto Liberdade

Bulgaria: Institute for Market Economics

Burkina Faso: Le Centre des Affaires Humaines

Canada: Frontier Centre for Public Policy

China: Cathay Institute for Public Affairs

Chile: Libertad y Desarrollo

Costa Rica: Asociación de Consumidores Libres

Czech Republic: Liberální Institut

Denmark: Center for Political Studies

Ecuador: Instituto Ecuatoriano de Economía Política

Georgia: New Economic School

Ghana: IMANI Center for Policy and Education

Honduras: Instituto Veritas

Hong Kong: Lion Rock Institute

India: Liberty Institute

Israel: Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies

Italy: Instituto Bruno Leoni

Lithuania: Lithuanian Free Market Institute

Nigeria: Initiative for Public Policy Analysis

Pakistan: Alternate Solutions Institute

Paraguay: Centro Paraguayo Para la Promoción de la Libertad Económica y la Justicia Social

Peru: Instituto de Libre Empresa

Poland: Globalization Institute

Slovakia: Institute of Economic and Social Studies

South Africa: Free Market Foundation

Switzerland: Liberales Institut

Turkey: Association for Liberal Thinking

Venezuela: Centro de Divulgación de Conocimiento Económico Para la Libertad

Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard contributed reporting to this story.

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inhofe morano 2007 minority rept

Brief highlights of the report featuring over 400

international scientists:

Israel: Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical

Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has authored almost 70 peerreviewed

studies and won several awards. "First, temperature changes, as well as rates of

temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by

IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial revolution (about 0.8C in 150 years or even

0.4C in the last 35 years) have occurred in Earth's climatic history. There's nothing special

about the recent rise!"

Russia: Russian scientist Dr. Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the

Russian Academy of Sciences has authored more than 300 studies, nine books, and a

2006 paper titled "The Evolution and the Prediction of Global Climate Changes on

Earth." "Even if the concentration of ‘greenhouse gases' double man would not perceive

the temperature impact," Sorochtin wrote. (Note: Name also sometimes translated to spell

Sorokhtin)

Spain: Anton Uriarte, a professor of Physical Geography at the University of the

Basque Country in Spain and author of a book on the paleoclimate, rejected man-made

climate fears in 2007. "There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate

change], but there's no need to be worried," Uriate wrote.

Netherlands: Atmospheric scientist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the

development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The

Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, and an internationally

recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes, "I find the Doomsday

picture Al Gore is painting - a six-meter sea level rise, fifteen times the IPCC number -

entirely without merit," Tennekes wrote. "I protest vigorously the idea that the climate

reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial,

and the desired temperature will soon be reached."

Brazil: Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather

Center in Sao Leopoldo - Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil declared himself a skeptic. "The

media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and

many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the

climate system as the cause of the recent global warming," Hackbart wrote on May 30,

2007.

France: Climatologist Dr. Marcel Leroux, former professor at Université Jean Moulin

and director of the Laboratory of Climatology, Risks, and Environment in Lyon, is a

climate skeptic. Leroux wrote a 2005 book titled Global Warming - Myth or Reality? -

The Erring Ways of Climatology. "Day after day, the same mantra - that ‘the Earth is

warming up' - is churned out in all its forms. As ‘the ice melts' and ‘sea level rises,' the

Apocalypse looms ever nearer! Without realizing it, or perhaps without wishing to, the

average citizen in bamboozled, lobotomized, lulled into mindless acceptance. ... Nonbelievers

in the greenhouse scenario are in the position of those long ago who doubted the

existence of God ... fortunately for them, the Inquisition is no longer with us!"

Norway: Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, a professor and head of the

Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with

the UN IPCC: "It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2

lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible

amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction."

Finland: Dr. Boris Winterhalter, retired Senior Marine Researcher of the Geological

Survey of Finland and former professor of marine geology at University of Helsinki,

criticized the media for what he considered its alarming climate coverage. "The effect of

solar winds on cosmic radiation has just recently been established and, furthermore, there

seems to be a good correlation between cloudiness and variations in the intensity of cosmic

radiation. Here we have a mechanism which is a far better explanation to variations in

global climate than the attempts by IPCC to blame it all on anthropogenic input of

greenhouse gases," Winterhalter said.

Germany: Paleoclimate expert Augusto Mangini of the University of Heidelberg in

Germany, criticized the UN IPCC summary. "I consider the part of the IPCC report, which

I can really judge as an expert, i.e. the reconstruction of the paleoclimate, wrong," Mangini

noted in an April 5, 2007 article. He added: "The earth will not die."

Canada: IPCC 2007 Expert Reviewer Madhav Khandekar, a Ph.D meteorologist, a

scientist with the Natural Resources Stewardship Project who has over 45 years

experience in climatology, meteorology and oceanography, and who has published

nearly 100 papers, reports, book reviews and a book on Ocean Wave Analysis and

Modeling: "To my dismay, IPCC authors ignored all my comments and suggestions for

major changes in the FOD (First Order Draft) and sent me the SOD (Second Order Draft)

with essentially the same text as the FOD. None of the authors of the chapter bothered to

directly communicate with me (or with other expert reviewers with whom I communicate

on a regular basis) on many issues that were raised in my review. This is not an acceptable

scientific review process."

Czech Republic: Czech-born U.S. climatologist Dr. George Kukla, a research scientist

with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, expressed

climate skepticism in 2007. "The only thing to worry about is the damage that can be done

by worrying. Why are some scientists worried? Perhaps because they feel that to stop

worrying may mean to stop being paid," Kukla told Gelf Magazine on April 24, 2007.

India: One of India's leading geologists, B.P. Radhakrishna, President of the

Geological Society of India, expressed climate skepticism in 2007. "We appear to be

overplaying this global warming issue as global warming is nothing new. It has happened

in the past, not once but several times, giving rise to glacial-interglacial cycles."

USA: Climatologist Robert Durrenberger, past president of the American Association

of State Climatologists, and one of the climatologists who gathered at Woods Hole to

review the National Climate Program Plan in July, 1979: "Al Gore brought me back to

the battle and prompted me to do renewed research in the field of climatology. And

because of all the misinformation that Gore and his army have been spreading about

climate change I have decided that ‘real' climatologists should try to help the public

understand the nature of the problem."

Italy: Internationally renowned scientist Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World

Federation of Scientists and a retired Professor of Advanced Physics at the University

of Bologna in Italy, who has published over 800 scientific papers: "Significant new

peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous humancaused

global warming."

New Zealand: IPCC reviewer and climate researcher and scientist Dr. Vincent Gray,

an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990 and

author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001: "The

[IPCC] ‘Summary for Policymakers' might get a few readers, but the main purpose of the

report is to provide a spurious scientific backup for the absurd claims of the worldwide

environmentalist lobby that it has been established scientifically that increases in carbon

dioxide are harmful to the climate. It just does not matter that this ain't so."

South Africa: Dr. Kelvin Kemm, formerly a scientist at South Africa's Atomic Energy

Corporation who holds degrees in nuclear physics and mathematics: "The globalwarming

mania continues with more and more hype and less and less thinking. With

religious zeal, people look for issues or events to blame on global warming."

Poland: Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Central Laboratory for

the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in

Warsaw: "We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made

global warming-with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for

politics and the global economy-is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of

the atmospheric CO2 levels."

Australia: Prize-wining Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer, a professor of Earth and

Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia: "There is new work

emerging even in the last few weeks that shows we can have a very close correlation

between the temperatures of the Earth and supernova and solar radiation."

Britain: Dr. Richard Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate

and atmospheric science consultant: "To date, no convincing evidence for AGW

(anthropogenic global warming) has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior

is not consistent with AGW model predictions."

China: Chinese Scientists Say C02 Impact on Warming May Be ‘Excessively

Exaggerated' - Scientists Lin Zhen-Shan's and Sun Xian's 2007 study published in the

peer-reviewed journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics: "Although the CO2

greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively

exaggerated." Their study asserted that "it is high time to reconsider the trend of global

climate change."

Denmark: Space physicist Dr. Eigil Friis-Christensen is the director of the Danish

National Space Centre, a member of the space research advisory committee of the

Swedish National Space Board, a member of a NASA working group, and a member

of the European Space Agency who has authored or co-authored around 100 peerreviewed

papers and chairs the Institute of Space Physics: "The sun is the source of the

energy that causes the motion of the atmosphere and thereby controls weather and climate.

Any change in the energy from the sun received at the Earth's surface will therefore affect

climate."

Sweden: Geologist Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, professor emeritus of the Department of

Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology at Stockholm University, critiqued the

Associated Press for hyping promoting climate fears in 2007. "Another of these hysterical

views of our climate. Newspapers should think about the damage they are doing to many

persons, particularly young kids, by spreading the exaggerated views of a human impact on

climate."

USA: Dr. David Wojickis a UN IPCC expert reviewer, who earned his PhD in

Philosophy of Science and co-founded the Department of Engineering and Public

Policy at Carnegie-Mellon University: "In point of fact, the hypothesis that solar

variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the

puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The

GHG (greenhouse gas) hypothesis does not do this." Wojick added: "The public is not well

served by this constant

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