Exposed: world's top 50 anti-climate oligarchs

The world's top fifty wealthiest individuals who benefit from climate change by being involved in fossil fuel industries, and who use their wealth and influence to block climate-friendly legislation, are exposed in a new report today.

Coincidently, the latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) report, also released today, reveals a decline in public concern for climate change.

Taken together, it seems that the oligarchs' influence is having some effect on public attitudes, along with the recession.

Billionaires benefiting from climate chaos

The top 50 'Who's-Who' list of businesspeople who make money from financing climate change includes oligarchs from Brazil, Mexico, India and China; new elites who are recasting the global corporate power balance.

This is happening as heavy industry is accelerating its presence in developing countries, whose carbon footprints are correspondingly increasing; the so-called 'BASIC' countries who are this week resisting pressure for a global legally binding agreement on climate change at the UN talks in Durban.

"They are exposed in the IFG report for their get-rich-quick gambles to grab more land and resources, which, in turn, concentrates even more political power in fewer hands,” says the report's co-author and IFG board member from India, Dr. Vandana Shiva.

The International Forum on Globalization (IFG)'s report, Outing the Oligarchy: Billionaires Who Benefit From Today’s Climate Crisis is compiled from a great deal of often obscure research.

It profiles individuals chosen for their ranking on Forbes' list of the World's Billionaires, their investments and holdings in fossil fuels, and influence networks that block the transition from fossil fuels to more sustainable alternatives.

Among them are the already well-known Koch Brothers and the world's richest man known as “Uncle Slim".

The top three

1. Carlos Slim Helú and his family, from Mexico, worth $63.3 billion. President of Carso Infraestructura y Construcción, his company installs pipelines, erects chemical and petroleum facilities (through its subsidiary Swecomex), undertakes infrastructure and civil construction contracts, as well as owning his own media, including the New York Times, Rand Corporation and newspapers in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Northern Ireland and South Africa.

2. David and Charles Koch, from USA, worth $50 billion. Their political contributions to defeat climate legislation are believed to have exceeded those of the American Petroleum Institute (Big Oil’s own lobbying group) and Exxon (the country's largest oil company).

3. Eike Batista, from Brazil, worth $30 billion. He made his money from mining gold in the Amazon and now owns OGX and EBX Group which is involved in oil and natural gas, coal mining, electricity production and shipbuilding. Batista was an ally and large campaign donor to Brazil’s ex-President Lula. Batista current enjoys a similar relationship with Brazil’s new leader, President Dilma Roussef. Both leaders vigorously pursue industrial growth policies that make Brazil one of the world’s biggest emitters.

47 more industrialists are listed in the report.

Its authors say that climate negotiations will not have "meaningful progress until we address today’s extreme concentrations of wealth and power that have corrupted any prospect of democratic decision-making.

"Climate negotiators know that they are not calling the shots; rather, they are all restrained by political pressure from the very people who profit most from polluting our planet," says the introduction.

Sceptical, belt-tightening Britons

In this context, the new results from the annual BSA study of the British public’s attitudes and values would probably provide encouraging reading for these wealthy individuals.

The report, from the National Centre for Social Research and widely reported in today's media, also finds that many Britons believe unemployment benefits are too high and that people should stand on their own two feet rather than rely on the state.

It pinpoints economic hardship and climate change scepticism as key factors contributing to the decline in Britain’s collective environmental conscience.

Since 2000 the number of people prepared to pay higher prices to safeguard the environment has fallen, from 43 to 26%.

So too has the proportion willing to pay much higher taxes to protect the environment: from 31% to 22%.

Alison Park, lead editor of the report at NatCen Social Research, said that “if government wants to do more to promote green behaviour, it needs to tackle scepticism about the causes of climate change and convince people that it represents a real threat”.

Support for the environment has fallen among all income groups. Just over a third (36%) of those in the highest earning households (defined as those with household income of over ￡44,000 in 2010) would be willing to pay higher prices to protect the environment, down from 52% in 2000.

The report also finds that people are slightly more sceptical about the credibility of scientific research on global warming, with 43% now considering rising temperatures caused by climate change to be very dangerous for the environment, 50% down from 2000.

There are some encouraging signs however. Recycling now appears to be mainstream, with 86% of people saying they ‘always’ or ‘often’ make the effort to recycle.

In addition, 39% say that they take steps to reduce their home energy use and 32% choose to save or reuse water.

Activities which require more of a lifestyle change, such as cutting personal car use, have yet to reach comparable levels; despite higher fuel prices, only 19% of respondents said they have reduced the amount of driving they do.

However, of those who think climate change is dangerous for the environmentally-friendly behaviour is more common with 52% saying that they make an effort to reduce their energy use at home, double the rate (21%) found among those who do not share this conviction.

The survey also found that 54% believed unemployment benefits were too high, up from 35% in 1983 when the annual study was first carried out.

‘Climategate’ review clears scientists and replicates their results

The long-awaited third review of the co-called 'Climategate' affair chaired by Sir Muir Russell has cleared the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) of any wrong-doing.

The scientists at the heart of the matter, particularly Professor Phil Jones, have been cleared of any attempt to mislead or manipulate data or display bias. The report concludes, "we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt."

The review team also tried to replicate the CRU's results using publicly available data which critics had said was not possible. This confirmed the conclusions of the IPCC and CRU that average global temperatures are increasing.

Background

In November 2009, approximately 1000 e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit

(CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) were hacked into by climate sceptics and published on blogs.

CRU is a small research unit which over the last 30 years has played an important role in the development of climate science, in particular in their work on developing global temperature trends.

The leak happened in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate talks last November and were partly responsible for a rise in perceived scepticism of the reality of global warming. The results of those climate talks are widely held to have been disappointing.

It's therefore vitally important that the science behind the IPCC's verdicts on climate change is held up to rigorous scrutiny and perceived to be robust.

But scientists have been their own enemy too often in this respect. So besides urging the to be more open, the Review urges them to learn to communicate and defend themselves better.

The 'blogosphere' has been the principle arena for attacking their work. The

Review team therefore "simply urges all scientists to learn to communicate their work in ways that the public can access and understand."

But also "scientists should be supported to explain their position, and ... a public space can be created where these debates can be conducted on appropriate terms, where what is and is not uncertain can be recognised".

The Russell Report's conclusions

In a nutshell, the report says:

• there's no evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments

• CRU was not in a position to withhold access to land station temperature data or tamper with it

• no evidence of bias in the selection of stations for evidence

• no evidence to support that implication that CRU s work in this area shouldn't be trusted

• there was no subversion of the peer process

• the phenomenon of “divergence” in expressing the uncertainty associated

with reconstruction is not hidden and that the subject is openly and extensively discussed in the literature, including CRU papers

• the way that data derived from tree rings is described and presented in Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 is not misleading

• the references in a specific e-mail to a "trick" and to "hide the decline" in respect of a 1999 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report figure show evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture, we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC Third Assessment Report), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading.

However on the negative side:

• CRU should have made available an unambiguous list of the stations used in each of the versions of the Climatic Research Unit Land Temperature Record

(CRUTEM).

• CRU’s responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive

• Ruusell urges CRU to follow "the conventional scientific method of checking and seeking to falsify conclusions or offering alternative hypotheses for peer review and publication".

The question of replication

A chief criticism of CRU was that it did not make available the raw data collected from the weather-monitoring land stations, which it used to produce its report. Nor did it make available the computer code used to crunch these numbers.

To test this, the Review team tried to replicate the process adopted by CRU themselves.

They found three sources of data that are publicly available and would be known to scientists working in the field. They were able, using a competent programmer, to write their own code in just two days to process this data.

They then ran the data through the process and compared it to the results obtained by CRU and to the results published in the IPCC’s 4th report.

What is significant is that all four lines - shown below - more or less tally.

In other words, the data is publicly available, easily processed, and produces graphs showing temperature increases that corroborate each other.

They note that it doesn't even matter that some of the land stations are urban and may be influenced by the 'heat island' effect – another criticism of CRU by sceptics like Benny Peizer. The overall trend of temperature change is still upwards, rising with the same degree of statistical variation.

The need for openness

However the Review does say that CRU should have been more open - a view expressed also by the House of Commons science and technology select committee in their report on 31 March. That report concluded that "Professor Jones has in many ways been scapegoated as a result of what really was a frustration on his part that people were asking for information purely to undermine his research."

But the Russell Review says "Without such openness, the credibility of their

work will suffer because it will always be at risk of allegations of concealment

and hence mal-practice."

Frustrating as it is, it is part of his job to deal with such enquiries, or at least that of the UEA who should have responded to the freedom of information requests, not CRU, as the Select Committee observed.

Lord Oxburgh's subsequent "international panel" review examined "the integrity" of CRU's research and that also cleared the unit.

"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the CRU and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it," the review concluded. "Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups, their internal procedures were rather informal."

Given the global importance of this work it’s clear that groups such as this must be better resourced and supported to carry it out thoroughly.