In addition to clichés about climate change itself, there are some important repeated claims about the debate that don’t stand up well to scrutiny. Including the famous jibe about “peer reviewed” work versus amateur rubbish of the sort engaged in by clods like Galileo, Darwin and Einstein. And the one about the massive funding from Charles Koch and Exxon to “deniers”. But in the extensive “deck” of noteworthy slides just posted at environmentalprogress.org by Michael Shellenberger, whose apostasies we continue to examine below, there’s one a long way down we’d like to emphasize because it compares the annual revenue of two major American alarmist entities, the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Resources Defense Council, and two of these lavishly funded skeptical outfits, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute. And guess what? The alarmists outspend the skeptics 33:1.

Now just as money cannot buy you friends, money cannot buy you truth. Which side has more money ought to be considered as irrelevant to which is right as Galileo’s bank balance was to the dynamics of the solar system. But there is a widespread if dirty claim that skeptics are paid liars. And given these numbers, with the two alarmist outfits pulling in about $200 million a year each and the skeptics around $6 million (the actual slide, be warned, has a mistaken label on the Y axis), it must be said that if they are venal the deniers must also be fools because the money’s on the other side.

The comparison doesn’t end there, since there are many more equally rich organizations on the alarmist side whereas the skeptic list doesn’t extend much beyond the two shown by Shellenberger. And there are quite literally tens of billions of dollars in government research money available globally for those who say climate change is a crisis requiring that governments be given more money and power. (For instance, in the argument whether last year’s Australian bushfires require the militarization of the fire service and a huge influx of resources, and those who say the fires resulted from lousy government forest management, guess who the government wants to fund.)

In short, there’s a lot of money sloshing around in the climate debate. And it’s concentrated in the pockets of those trying to shut down any debate, who also claim to be scandalized at outside money influencing the debate, except when the money is 33:1 on their side.