BIG MONEY BEHIND A BIG DENIAL

We've known for a while that the Koch brothers fund groups that deny there is man-made global warming and now a sociologist at Drexel University has lifted the curtains a little higher.

Not just the Koch brothers: New study reveals funders behind the climate change denial effort
Dec 20, 2013
PHYS.ORG

A new study conducted by Drexel University's environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle, PhD, exposes the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the powerful climate change countermovement.

...Brulle found that, while the largest and most consistent funders behind the countermovement are a number of well-known conservative foundations, the majority of donations are "dark money," or concealed funding.

Coinciding with the decline in traceable funding, the amount of funding given to countermovement organizations through third party pass-through foundations like Donors Trust and Donors Capital, whose funders cannot be traced, has risen dramatically.

Key findings include:

- Conservative foundations have bank-rolled denial. The largest and most consistent funders of organizations orchestrating climate change denial are a number of well-known conservative foundations, such as the Searle Freedom Trust, the John William Pope Foundation, the Howard Charitable Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. These foundations promote ultra-free-market ideas in many realms.

- Despite extensive data compilation and analyses, only a fraction of the hundreds of millions in contributions to climate change denying organizations can be specifically accounted for from public records. Approximately 75% of the income of these organizations comes from unidentifiable sources.

You can get a PDF version of the paper here and this is the main chart:

UPDATE: I just noticed I left out the label for the bottom blueish grey slice - it represents 118 other sources.