Have you ever wondered who funds environmental activist groups and how much money they raise and spend each year? A new Web site called The Green Tracking Library, http://www.undueinfluence.com, provides many of the answers.
The Web site’s purpose is to make the money, power, politics, and undue influence of the environmental movement transparent. The site includes each group’s history, funding, and often-embarrassing inner dealings.
The site was conceived by Ron Arnold, author of numerous environmental books. Living up to its call for transparency in funding, the site identifies its own financial sponsor and provides a link to information about the sponsor’s funding, board of directors, and other such information.
As an example of how the site works, conducting a search of “Environmental Defense Inc.” shows the group’s contact information, a self description, and a brief history. The group has a $69 million budget and received $968,927 in government grants in 2006.
The Green Tracking Library listing also notes Environmental Defense was founded in 1967 by a group of lawyers and scientists as a single-purpose organization working to ban the insecticide DDT. It was the first environmental group established exclusively to “defend the environment in the nation’s courts,” the listing notes. The group’s founding motto was, “Sue the bastards!”
Founder Denounces Today’s ED
The Environmental Defense search also produces an open letter to journalists from Victor Yannacone, a Long Island attorney and one of the organization’s founders, denouncing today’s Environmental Defense as a perversion of its original purpose.
In particular, the letter denounces the media coverage and the science behind global warming, stating the real climate change “deniers” are those who refuse to acknowledge the correlation of Earth’s temperature with solar activity and that there is no science correlating carbon dioxide levels with the Earth’s temperature.
Yannacone also states Russian scientists are forecasting 60 years of global cooling and acknowledges there may be science to back it up using the 1935-2000 Gleissberg solar cycle.
For more eye-opening information, conduct a Sierra Club search on the Green Tracking Library Web site, and follow that up with a search on Carol Browner. A whole universe of embarrassing information awaits.
Penny Rodriguez ([email protected]) writes from Parrish, Florida.
