Professor Timmons Roberts has been working to understand the network of groups that he said have successfully created doubt about climate change.
He found that groups resisting action on climate change spend four times as much money on political contributions and almost 10 times more on lobbying than environmental organizations.
Roberts said this needs to change if environmentalists want more-aggressive climate action at the federal level.
“We don’t get to live in the perfect democracy, we get to live in this democracy, and the American democracy is highly influenced by campaign contributions and lobbying, and if you’re not playing the game, you’re losing the game,” Roberts said.
However, Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the the right-leaning non-profit Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and chair of the Cooler Heads Coalition, called the research “ill-informed.”
“The idea that the debate has been skewed by money, if it’s true, it’s been skewed by left-wing money supporting an agenda to raise energy prices and impoverish people,” Ebell said.
Ebell said the top fifty environmental groups have a combined annual budget of more than $3 billion, compared to CEI’s budget of $7 million.