Danish journalists have confirmed that The Institute for Energy Research commissioned and paid for the anti-wind energy study released last year by a Danish think tank that claimed Denmark exaggerates the amount of wind energy it produces (it doesn’t), questioned whether wind energy reduces carbon emissions (it does), and asserted that the U.S. should choose coal over wind because it’s cheaper (it’s not when you count the true costs of coal).
The Copenhagen Post reports:
“A controversial report critical of the wind energy industry from conservative think tank CEPOS was commissioned and paid for by an American think tank with close ties to the coal and oil industries.”
That American think tank is the Institute for Energy Research, which has received $307,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998 and unknown additional sums from other oil and coal industry sources. The Guardian reported last year that the Institute for Energy Research has received recent funding from KBR and trusts set up by Koch Industries, which has multiple ties to IER and its sister organization American Energy Alliance.
IER’s President Thomas J. Pyle previously worked as a lobbyist for Koch Industries, while IER’s CEO Robert L. Bradley was formerly Director of Public Relations Policy at Enron, where he served as speechwriter for Enron CEO Kenneth Lay.
Pyle, Bradley and IER have direct and indirect ties to a laundry list of dirty energy industry front groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, TASSC, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Bradley and the IER have argued that supplies of fossil fuels are virtually limitless, and that American dependence on oil imports from Middle Eastern dictatorships “pose no threat to national security.”
IER has railed against green jobs, arguing that oil and gas are better job creators, despite the fact that investment in clean energy technology creates four times as many jobs as investment in oil and gas. IER continues its campaign against wind energy as well, asserting recently that the Obama administration had been “caught red-handed working with Big Wind energy lobbyists.”
Yes, those scary “Big Wind energy lobbyists” pose a real threat to America. You can’t make this stuff up folks. Unless, of course, you work at the oil-and-coal-funded Institute for Energy Research.
