Modern government-funded universities churn out so many false, pro-government “studies” that it is impossible to keep up with them all.
A few years back a pro-government extremist professor named Robert Brulle published an alleged scientific paper proclaiming that criticism of the government’s catastrophic-global-warming-by-CO2 theory are secretly funded by the fossil fuel industry.
There is nothing novel about this notion, of course. The claim has been part of the government’s climate doomsday hysteria messaging (and campaign finance “reform”) for years. But the claim evaporates on scrutiny. The major fossil fuel companies never spent more than a few dollars on skeptical climate research, and have actually spent millions more on pro-government climate messaging. The New York Attorney General spent 4 years and many millions of dollars pursuing Exxon-Mobil in a Brulle-inspired civil prosecution which ended in a finding of no liability in 2019.
Brulle’s research thesis sought to expand the “Exxon Knew”-type claim by suggesting that every dollar spent by wealthy oil or coal retirees or independent investors on libertarian thinktanks constituted a dollar from ‘the industry’ spent on “climate change denial.” Thus, donations to the Cato Institute or the Competitive Enterprise Institute were designated as funding for “denial.” And a new theme of this ‘research’ is that much of it is anonymous “dark money” (which generally means money the government doesn’t like).
Brulle’s research methods wouldn’t pass muster in a junior-high-school term paper; but in the pro-government-extremist atmosphere of modern higher education, they catapulted Brulle from a low-tier university (Drexel U.) into the Ivy League. Now a Visiting Professor of Environment and Society at Brown University, Brulle has ‘updated’ his ‘research’ in a new paper published in Climatic Change.
