Government monopsony distorts climate science, says SPPI

The Science and Public Policy Institute announces the publication of Climate Money, a study by Joanne Nova revealing that the federal Government has a near-monopsony on climate science funding. This distorts the science towards self-serving alarmism. Key findings:

Ø The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary.

Ø Despite the billions wasted, audits of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of “global warming” theory and to compete with a lavishly-funded, highly-organized climate monopsony. Major errors have been exposed again and again.

Way way back machine: when I was in college, a very large part of the research being done by graduate students and professors was visibly subsidized by companies like IBM, AT&T, Dupont, Hooker, Cargill, NYSEG, and such. There was a presence of the federal government, too, but it was not even close to dominant. Somewhere in the 60s/70s, disincentives came into being that has pretty much driven a large chunk of those research dollars away from university. In fact, it drove companies away from investing in most research that was not simply “apply existing technology”.

I have ranted and raved to people about this for many years, but only President Reagan and Mr.Newt seem to ever have addressed the need to recover that quaint idea that companies can do ground breaking basic research, and that if the tax codes (and possibly patent codes,etc) were to encourage that possibility, we would find companies jumping on a band wagon to accelerate the sciences in more productive directions.

It is very difficult for companies to collaborate, for example, on large research projects such as fusion due to their losing proprietary rights, or to to get appropriate recognition to the results of that research, as well as fearing running afoul of monopoly laws. It is even difficult for them to subsidize small researchers in the current legal and tax environment.

However, such a focused approach by entities who would be profit from such research is almost certain to be more productive in the future (as it was in the past) than the “scatter funding equally to any scatterbrained professor who can dream up a project” that the current culture of federal funding of research now implements. Though this supposedly allows more companies access to lower-cost technology patents, I believe that the worth of much of the research is of lower quality and applicability than it could be with a more profit-oriented approach.

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