Follow the money. The morality of green funding

the commentator ^ | April 6, 2012 | Jonathan Bracey-Gibbon

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Following the recent hysteria over political party funding, Tory donor Michael Hintze was briefly brought into the public eye via The Guardian, and the Daily Mail.

An Australian-born fund manager with a rags to riches tale, it wasn't so much the fact that Hintze fitted the ‘fat-cat fund manager’ template that condemned him, but more that he funds a UK-based think-tank that challenges much of the sacred wisdom of The Guardian. The think tank in question is Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation.

On the day the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Princeton's leading physics professor questioning the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the incompetence of climate science modelling and the very nature of the threat, Hintze was vilified more for funding anthropogenic global warming-scepticism than the ‘evil Tories’.

Of course this ‘revelation’ was echoed across the global warming/ anti-growth community, the implication being that funding anything other than project run by the WWF or Greenpeace is in some way criminal, and indicative of immoral turpitude on the part of the donor.

Now I don't know why Mr. Hintze wishes to fund The Global Warming Policy Foundation's thoroughly justifiable desire to question some of the hysteria around global warming, but then I have no idea why a renowned financial seer like Jeremy Grantham should throw millions at our finest universities to host his foundation to underpin that very hysteria. Grantham is a Boston-based Brit who is the chairman and co-founder of GMO, a $140 billion global investment management company based in Boston with offices in London, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney and Zurich.

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