Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is quick to claim science expertise that is unsupported by his education in classics or his diploma in journalism. He is less eager to acknowledge his role as a spokesperson for an unfolding series of think tanks, all of which have direct connections or a history of accepting money from the oil industry.
Monckton is currently in Copenhagen, shouting “Nazi” and “Hitler youth” at the youth delegates who have had the courage and temerity to challenge his poorly informed views on climate science. (See next post.)
He is here as a representative of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) one of several groups that have been unsuccessful in covering up their oil funding.
Another such group is the Friends of Science (FOS), one of the sponsors of a recent Monckton tour of Canada. FOS wound up the subject of a messy funding scandal after Professor Barry Cooper used his privileges at the University of Calgary to create an “education fund” designed to hide the oil-and-gas industry source of FOS funding. (In his defence, Cooper later told the Globe and Mail, “[The money’s] not exclusively from the oil and gas industry,
The co-sponsor of the Canadian tour was the Fraser Institute, which also has been identified as a recipient of oil funding, notwithstanding that it has a policy of keeping its funders secret.
Monckton is also “Chief Policy Advisor” to the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPInstitute.org). The SPPInstitute is a project of Robert Ferguson, whose oil connections were clear enough when he started an earlier such organization, the Center for Science and Public Policy, with a large bolus of cash from Exxon Mobil.
