A $3.5-million Alberta government public inquiry into alleged foreign-funded anti-energy campaigns has posted commissioned studies that experts say are based on junk climate-denial science, bizarre conspiracy theories and oil-industry propaganda.
"If you read any of this stuff, it really strays into Marxism and conspiracy theory and George Soros and Bill Gates," said Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta.
"It is astounding to me."
Recently, the Public Inquiry Into Funding of Anti-Alberta Campaigns posted on its website that it had invited 47 people or organizations to apply for standing as a "participant for commentary" in the inquiry.
The 11 who applied and were granted standing received a package of materials to review, including several reports commissioned at the request of inquiry commissioner Steve Allan, a Calgary forensic accountant with close ties to the government of Premier Jason Kenney.
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Another commissioned report, by historian Tammy Nemeth, claims that a "transnational progressive movement" is attempting to overthrow the "modern western industrial capitalist society" by infiltrating institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank, as well as university departments and corporations.
"The foot soldiers, the shock troops, of the larger movement," Nemeth wrote, are environmental non-government organizations, "or watermelons, as James Delingpole has coined — green on the outside, red (socialist) on the inside."
Nemeth recycled a number of old arguments that natural cycles are responsible for rising CO2 levels and increased global temperatures — claims that have been debunked in multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies.
Allan paid Nemeth, a home-school teacher in England, nearly $28,000 for the report.
Energy In Depth, an offshoot campaign of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, was paid $50,000 US for a third commissioned report, titled "Foreign Funding Targeting Canada's Energy Sector."
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Critics denounce 'climate-change denialism' reports commissioned by Alberta inquiry