Renewable Revolution

This Man   Kick-Started the First Fossil Fuel-Funded Campaigns to Attack Climate Science

Harvard University Professor Naomi Oreskes, an expert on the history of organized climate science denial and co-author of the book Merchants of Doubt, said the ICE campaign was a key moment in the movement's history.

"ICE was very important because it was one of the first attempts to question and challenge the science, for political reasons, and to try to block policy action," she told DeSmog.

"It shows how this network functions: do research to find out how best to undermine public confidence in the science as a means to undermine public support for policy action. Then create a front group with an attractive name -- Informed Citizens for the Environment -- that makes it seem like a grassroots movement. But in fact ICE was wholly-funded by the coal industry."

Palmer's next venture, the Greening Earth Society, produced videos and materials that looked to propagandize the science linking fossil fuel burning to dangerous climate change on two fronts.

The coal-funded group told the public that adding CO2 would only be beneficial to trees and food crops and, in any case, the computer models that they claimed drove climate science (but don't) could not be trusted.

One Western Fuels Association "greening earth" video ended with this wonderfully vague assertion: "It is not inconceivable that the vitality of our entire biosphere could rise by a full order of magnitude over the next few centuries."

Many of the talking points that were developed and polished in those early campaigns, as well as the contrarian scientists and fake experts that endorsed them, are still around today.

Palmer joined coal giant Peabody Energy in 2001 as its head of government relations and, later, a special advisor to the company's leadership.

In June 2016, it emerged that Peabody had been funding an entire network of climate science denial groups -- funding which those groups had kept secret.