At Common Dreams, Bill McKibben offers this staggering statistic:
The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers. That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.
I can not find a source for the 94% claim. And what does it mean anyway? That the 94% of the candidates that received money from the Chamber of Commerce were “deniers” of climate change? How would the number look like with regards to abortion? Or less taxes for the big corps? Or more spending on military? This quote makes it look like the CC specifically choose climate change deniers, but I guess they simply choose candidates that are friendly to them and their clientele. I think it is misleading to present it like it were the main driver of politics, when the main driver is to give more to those who have – because this behaviour with all the negative impact on the populations will continue, even if we “fix” the climate.
Tony, I “googled” the phrase “94% of Chamber of Commerce political donations went to climate change deniers” and came up with 1,575,000 results in 0.41 seconds.
So, an organization called “350.org” did a study of the issue which was cited by Greenpeace, Mother Jones and The Nation among other outlets. You might look at the website and examine the methodology and see if the reported fact is accurate. Please, let me know your result.
Try actually looking for information and real sources before making any statements like “I can not find a source for…” Such a lede usually tells me that you didn’t do diddly squat to look for anything and just want to mouth off some uniformed propaganda. I expect better from DI posters. Oh, and I’ve taken my own hit for mis-speaking here, many times deservedly so. I thank you all again for keeping me honest and well sourced.
OK, so I broke down and went to the documents for the source material. Greenpeace cites the study and the source in a footnote to its statement about the 94% as follows:
“The climate campaign organisation 350.org estimates that 94%
of US Chamber of Commerce contributions went to
climate denier candidates.”9
9 350.org (2011). ‘The US Chamber Doesn’t Speak for Me’.
http://chamber.350.org/poster/ Accessed 17 September 2011
That took 5 minutes. I read really fast so maybe some might have taken longer. I’m not looking up the 350.org study. I have work to do.