Why February?

Why do the Global Warming fanatics always pick the dead of winter to make an issue of global warming? It is 6 degrees outside this early Sunday morning. I for one would not mind a little warming trend.

Dafydd over at Big Lizards has a couple of interesting and entertaining posts up on what he calls globaloney. This is just a small part of it:

Before dealing with the true risibility of the Guardian's charge -- its blind spot about its own side -- let's first get the silly elements out of the way:
The long arm of ExxonMobile

The American Enterprise Institute is "an ExxonMobil-funded [lobby group] with close links to the Bush administration;" thus, one presumes, the AEI simply does the bidding of its evil, corporate, Capitalist masters, without regard to the suffering people of the world (Haliburton!)

The Guardian backs up this attack with a single pair of statistics:

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration.

What they don't mention is that the AEI has an operating budget of more than $30 million, all of which comes from grants by private corporations, private foundations, groups, and individuals, mostly by conservative foundations (J.M Olin, JM Foundation), rich conservatives like Richard Melon Scaife, and companies like Coors (run by the right-wing Coors family), though they also get significant funding from Microsoft (run by left-liberal Bill Gates). The AEI is a free-market think tank; who do you expect funds it?

Who funds Brookings? Liberals (duh). Their major contributers are the MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and Carnegie. (Unlike the AEI, Brookings does get much of its funding from governments: Japan, the U.K., and the United States.)

That's the way think tanks work: conservative ones are funded by conservatives; liberals ones by liberals. This should not be a shock, not even to the Guardian. But their charge was more specific: they clearly want readers to believe that the AEI is a wholly owned subsidiary of ExxonMobile, and the AEI is simply Big Oil's puppet.

What the Guardian fails to mention is that grants from ExxonMobile account for only 5% of the AEI's annual budget. If they had mentioned that, readers would likely be scratching their heads over why this is supposed to be determinative. Besides, more than likely, ExxonMobile gives grants to the AEI because the AEI is free-market on energy issues -- not the other way around. The AEI has been around, with the same philosophy, since 1943.

ExxonMobile did not even exist until 1999, when Exxon merged with Mobile. Exxon did not exist until 1973, when it changed its name from Esso. Esso did not exist until 1941, just two years before the AEI was founded (probably not with any money from Esso); Esso was a brand name for gasoline sold by Standard Oil of New Jersey, one of the "baby Standards" created when Standard Oil was busted up by imperial decree in 1911. ExxonMobile (or even Exxon) would thus have begun funding the American Enterprise Institute long after the latter was in existence and promoting free-market economics.

Ever notice how the left has no sense of history? Read it all.