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Business-Managed Democracy »Environment » Global Warming » Denial Scientists » Robert Balling |
Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. He is a contributing editor for the denial journal, World Climate Report, originally funded by Western Fuels Association and now published by Patrick Michael's firm New Hope Environmental Services.
Balling's books include:
Balling admits that human emitted carbon dioxide can have a warming effect but claims that this is not a problem. In 2004 Balling told Business Week that he believed that in the future people would be able to engineer whatever climate they wanted. In 2006 in an article 'Give a Hoot, Don't (Call It) "Pollute"', he argued that carbon dioxide was not a polllutant:
There is no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and holding everything else constant, elevated CO2 will act to warm the Earth. But as we see in the CO2 story, the levels of this gas have fluctuated enormously over the history of the Earth, and the ecosystems of the planet have evolved to cope with these variations. To suddenly label CO2 as a "pollutant" is a disservice to a gas that has played an enormous role in the development and sustainability of all life on this wonderful Earth.
Balling has been an advisor for a number of corporate-funded think tanks and front groups such as the Greening Earth Society and the Information Council on the Environment (see table below and diagram). He is also a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute, a think tank "committed to expanding free enterprise and liberty", based in Arizona.
| Affiliation With ExxonMobil-Funded Organizations | Title/Role |
|---|---|
| Cato Institute | Book Author |
| Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow | Scientific Advisory Board Member |
| Competitive Enterprise Institute | Report Author |
| George C. Marshall Institute | Roundtable Speaker |
| Heartland Institute | Global Warming Expert |
| Heritage Foundation | Policy Expert |
| Hoover Institution | Robert Wesson Endowment Fund Fellow (1993-4) |
| Tech Central Station | Science Round Table Member |
;
'Roundtable Speakers', George C. Marshall Institute, 2010;
Global Warming Experts', Heartland Institute, 2010.
Balling has been heavily funded by fossil fuel interests. In the 1990s he was reported in The Arizona Republic as saying that he had “received more like $700,000 over the past five years” from coal and oil interests in Great Britain, Germany and the US in the previous six years.
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