Hijacking the Environmental Movement with Green (Backs, That Is)
In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed. writes Johann Hari, in the March edition of The Nation.
Hari is talking about the fact that many recognized and highly respected environmental organizations appear to have been bought and paid for, beginning as early as the 1980s, with donations from Big Business, notably oil and gas companies.
Case in point; the National Wildlife Federation, which under the leadership of Jay Hair allegedly switched its allegiance from environmental defense to corporate profit-taking, and its funding sources from the traditional wealthy but conscious-ridden elites (some of them members) to energy companies, most of whom are engaged in lucrative but highly pollutive coal, oil and gas extraction.
The proof of this, says Hari, is that the NWF (and The Nature Conservancy, or TNC) started giving these companies awards which recognized them as environmental stewards par excellence. This, in exchange for the energy companies financial support.
With companies like Shell and BP using such awards to polish their images during periods when the negative press generated by their environmental rape hit hardest, and the NWF able to spread its financially enhanced (albeit tarnished) wings over a bigger segment of the environmental landscape, the ethical conundrum of using oil funds to finance environmental defense was resolved, says Hari, and other environmental groups quickly jumped on the bottomless bank account bandwagon.
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