It's not big secret who is behind all of this, look no further than Steyer and Bloomberg for starters.
How Billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg Corrupted Climate Science
Roger Pielke
I research and write about science and technology in policy, politics and in sport
This is a story of American democracy. In one sense, it’s a noble story. People with shared values have come together to petition the government and the public on their political aims, just as envisioned by James Madison in Federalist 10.
In another sense it’s a story of privilege and conceit – the privilege in American democracy that accompanies being mindbogglingly wealthy and the conceit that climate politics could be best pursued by corrupting the scientific literature on climate change.
Before proceeding, let’s make a few things absolutely clear. There is no doubt that climate change is real, and is significantly influenced by our activities, particularly through the emissions of carbon dioxide. I have long advocated for aggressive action on carbon dioxide emissions as well as to improve adaptation to climate variability and change. At the same time, I have also long argued that maintaining scientific integrity should go hand-in-hand with effective climate action.
At the center of the corruption of climate science discussed here a highly technical scenario of the future (called Representation Concentration Pathway 8.5 or RCP8.5). Over the past decade this particular scenario has moved from an extreme outlier to the center of climate policy discussions. You can read more about how that happened and its consequences in my previous columns here and here.
Today, I will add further details to this incredible story by explaining the important roles played by Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, both billionaires and current Democratic presidential candidates. (Disclosure: I have endorsed publicly one of their Democratic opponents, Amy Klobuchar, but I will vote for whomever the Democrats select this November, including Steyer or Bloomberg.)
According to the New York Times, in November 2012, one month after stepping down from the hedge fund he led, Steyer gathered environmental leaders and Democratic party leaders around the kitchen table at his ranch in Pescadero, California. Among those in attendance were Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, and John Podesta, who had founded the Center for American Progress (CAP) in 2003 to promote progressive causes. (Another disclosure: In 2014, Steyer funded a successful campaign by CAP to have me removed as a writer for 538, as revealed in the Wikileaks Podesta emails.)
At the kitchen table meeting, Steyer was focused on the question: “How do you make climate change feel real and immediate for people?” He was convinced by attendees that the best way to answer this question was through people’s pocketbooks, through economics.
Following this meeting, Steyer invited two collaborators and co-funders to join him, to give the appearance of being non-partisan. One was Michael Bloomberg, then a political independent who was completing 12 years as the mayor of New York. The other was Hank Paulson, a Republican who was a former CEO of Goldman Sachs and who had also served as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush.
Each of Steyer, Bloomberg and Paulson contributed $500,000 to the initial project, which was focused on “making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world.” The initial aim was to produce a series of reports, drawing on several young academics and the expertise of external consultants at the Rhodium Group and Risk Management Solutions.
The first report was published in June, 2014 and was titled “Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States.” The Risky Business approach was a smart if flawed way to place economics at the center of climate policy. The approach focused on characterizing the extreme RCP8.5 scenario as “the closest to a business-as-usual trajectory” and centered its economic analysis on that scenario: “we focus on RCP 8.5 as the pathway closest to a future without concerted action to reduce future warming.” In this way they guaranteed that the economic impacts would be eye-poppingly large.
But in generating large economic impacts, the approach of the Risky Business report made two significant methodological mistakes. First, they improperly characterized the extreme RCP 8.5 scenario as “business as usual” reflecting a world without future climate policy. Second, they improperly presented the scenarios of the IPCC as representing different policy outcomes, suggesting that we could “move” from one scenario to another: “Moving from RCP 8.5 to RCP 2.6 (as well as RCP 4.5 and RCP 6.0) will come at a cost.”
Both of these methodological choices were contrary to the appropriate use of the scenarios, according the modeling experts who created them: “RCP8.5 cannot be used as a no-climate-policy reference scenario.
Read more:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerp...rg-corrupted-climate-science/?sh=1ee4d638702c
