Ken writes:

> In fact, The Science & Environmental Policy Project has never been
> funded by the Unification Church.

That isn't true. SEPP may not be currently accepting funding from the 
Unification Church, but SEPP was originally founded by the Church through its 
"Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy" front organization. 
Indeed, SEPP was originally housed in a Church-owned office building.

I've included snippets of two university articles describing this connection, 
the first from a Canadian university and the second from an Australian, below:

=======================================

The article next targets the magazine Ozone Action for its article attacking 
S. Fred Singer, a leading opponent of global warming theory.

Ozone Action, asserts the article, asserts that Singer has connections with 
the Moonies, a religious organization. "That is the most laughable charge," 
asserts the article, which while admitting that Singer once worked in an 
office owned by the Moonies, disavows any other connection with the group.

But the connection is fairly clearly documented. Singer is the president of 
SEPP, the The Science and Environmental Policy Project. SEPP was founded in 
1990 as an affiliate of the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, 
a Moon-funded think tank that provided SEPP with free office space. See the 
Unification Church's account of the Washington Institute here. The connection 
is also document in the Washington Post.

So perhaps the connection ascribed isn't so "laughable". It is certainly a 
far cry from "lies and distortions".

     ----http://www.atl.ualberta.ca/downes/threads/column000512.htm

========================================

The Australian university web page writes:

========================================

Fred Singer is executive director of the think tank, the Science and 
Environmental Policy Project (SEPP). This project was originally set up in 
1990 with the help of the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy 
(funded by the Rev Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church) which provided it 
with free office space. (SEPP is no longer affiliated with Moon and receives 
its funding from various foundations.)[30]

SEPP argues that global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain are not real 
but rather are scare tactics used by environmentalists. Singer, speaks and 
writes prolifically on these subjects and is in demand by anti-environment 
groups.[31] He is on the advisory board of TASSC. Two of the leading 
Australian conservative think tanks have sponsored him to tour Australia, 
putting his views on global warming. Most recently he toured Austria in 
November 1997, prior to the Kyoto conference, and presented a speech to the 
Austrian parliament. He has worked for companies such as Exxon, Shell, and 
Arco.[32] According to the Environmental Research Foundation:

For years, Singer was a professor at the University of Virginia where he was 
funded by energy companies to pump out glossy pamphlets pooh-poohing climate 
change. Singer hasn't published original research on climate change in 20 
years and is now an `independent' consultant, who spends his time writing 
letters to the editor, and testifying before Congress, claiming that 
ozone-depletion and global warming aren't real problems.[33]

The recently uncovered API documents reveal a new plan to "Identify, recruit 
and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media 
outreach... this team will consist of new faces who will add their voices to 
those recognized scientists who are already vocal."[34]

Think Tanks

The SEPP is just one of the many conservative think tanks in various parts of 
the world that seek to undermine the case for global warming preventative 
measures. Think tanks are generally private, tax-exempt, research institutes 
that present themselves as providing impartial disinterested expertise. 
However think tanks generally tailor their studies to suit their clients or 
donors. Writing in the National Catholic Reporter, Thomas Blackburn describes 
think tanks as "home to nonteaching professors and shadow cabinet ministers 
hired to spread a patina of academese and expertise over the views of their 
sponsors."[35]

Corporate funded think tanks have played a key role in providing credible 
`experts' who dispute scientific claims of existing or impending 
environmental degradation and therefore provide enough doubts to ensure 
governments `lack motivation' to act. These dissident scientists, usually not 
atmospheric scientists, argue there is "widespread disagreement within the 
scientific community" about global warming. For example, most conservative 
think tanks have argued that global warming is not happening and that any 
possible future warming will be slight and may have beneficial effects.

The Heritage Foundation is one of the largest and wealthiest think tanks in 
the US. It gets massive media coverage in the US and is very influential in 
politics, particularly amongst the Republicans who dominate the US Congress. 
In October it published a backgrounder entitled. "The Road to Kyoto: How the 
Global Climate Treaty Fosters Economic Impoverishment and Endangers US 
Security." It began "Chicken Little is back and the sky is falling. Or so 
suggests the Clinton Administration..." and went on "By championing the 
global warming treaty, the Administration seeks to pacify a vociferous lobby 
which frequently has made unsubstantiated predictions of environmental doom". 
The Heritage Foundation prefers unsubstantiated predictions of economic 
gloom: "Ultimately, the treaty's restrictions will force Americans to 
sacrifice their personal and economic freedom to the whims of a new 
international bureaucracy."[36]

     ---http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/sbeder/ecologist.html

========================================

...and the Union of Concerned Scientists write the following:

========================================

Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) [ http://www.sepp.org ]

Founded in 1990 by widely publicized climate skeptic S. Fred Singer, SEPP’s 
stated purpose is to "document the relationship between scientific data and 
the development of federal environmental policy." SEPP has mounted a sizeable 
media campaign -- publishing articles, letters to the editor, and a large 
number of press releases -- to discredit the issues of global warming, ozone 
depletion, and acid rain. 

Spin: Moreover, climate change won’t be bad for us anyway. Action on climate 
change is not warranted because of shaky science and flawed policy approaches.

Funding: Conservative foundations including Bradley, Smith Richardson, and 
Forbes. SEPP has also been directly tied to ultra right-wing mogul Reverend 
Sung Myung Moon’s Unification Church, including receipt of a year’s free 
office space from a Moon-funded group and the participation of SEPP’s 
director in church-sponsored conferences and on the board of a Moon-funded 
magazine.

Affiliated Individuals:S. Fred Singer,Frederick Seitz

     ---http://www.ucsusa.org/environment/gw.skeptorgs.html

======================================

Finally, Ken writes regarding the connection between OISM and the Moon 
organization:

> Searching on Google doesn't reveal this link.

That may be true, but it's relatively well known otherwise. A few years ago, 
the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine tried to pull a scam over all of 
the scientists in the United States. If nothing else, you have give them 
credit for their chutzpah. At the center of scam was Frederick Seitz, who 
once served as president of the National Academy of Sciences, the most 
prestigous scientific organization in the US, but who in his latter years has 
also become intimately associated with both SEPP and OISM.

The following op-ed piece appeared in the NY Times in 1998 (similar articles 
written by others appeared in Science, Nature, and every other major 
scientific publication as well):

=======================================

Scientists and Their Political Passions

      By ROBERT L. PARK

     WASHINGTON -- I received a note a few weeks ago, urging me to sign
     a petition card opposing the global climate change accord. So, it
     seems, did just about every scientist in the United States. The
     note was signed by Frederick Seitz, a physicist who once served as
     president of the National Academy of Sciences.

     An accompanying article that looked like a reprint from the
     academy's journal explained what we can all do to make this a
     better world: burn more hydrocarbons.

     This was a new concept for me. Maybe I should crank up the
     thermostat and trade my fuel-efficient car for a sports-utility gas
     guzzler? I wanted to learn more, but there was no letterhead, and
     the only return address was a post office box in La Jolla, Calif.

     The National Academy of Sciences disavowed any connection with the
     petition. The article had not been published in the academy's
     journal -- or anywhere else. Moreover, a study conducted by the
     academy had reached the opposite conclusion.

     If scientists all have access to the same data, why, you might
     wonder, is there such passionate disagreement? What separates the
     two sides may not be so much an argument over the scientific facts,
     scientific laws or even the scientific method, but profoundly
     different political and religious views.

     Most climatologists agree that as a result of increased burning of
     fossil fuels, the temperature of the earth has gone up perhaps 0.7
     degrees Fahrenheit since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
     Climatologists warn that if the buildup continues, low-lying land
     masses, including many of the world's great cities, may be flooded
     in the next century by rising sea levels as the polar caps melt.

     Drastic changes in rainfall patterns could wreak havoc on food
     production.

     "Nonsense!" insists a highly vocal minority. The increase in carbon
     dioxide is actually "a wonderful and unexpected gift from the
     Industrial Revolution," to quote an opinion article published a few
     months ago in The Wall Street Journal. These optimists say that
     carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth, making the world more lush
     and productive, and that our unrationed burning of hydrocarbons
     allows the world to support a larger population -- fulfilling the
     biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply."

     The great war over global warming, then, is more about values than
     it is about science. It sounds like a scientific debate, with
     numbers and equations tossed back and forth. The antagonists
     themselves may even believe they are engaged in such a debate. But
     the average scientist is exposed to religious and political views
     at his mother's knee, long before he is exposed to science.

     Such views have a way of occupying whatever gaps are present in
     scientific understanding. And there are gaps aplenty in the climate
     debate. There are holes in the data and uncertainties in the
     computer models, and small changes in the assumptions could result
     in very different projections. Both sides acknowledge these
     limitations. But to allow unlimited growth in greenhouse emissions
     is a reckless acceleration of a global experiment the
     industrialized world is already engaged in -- the consequences of
     which are potentially catastrophic. Until the numbers are in,
     however, it's easy to be misled.

     That brings us back to the petition. The source turned out to be
     the tiny Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, based in Cave
     Junction. I don't know how many petition cards were sent out, but I
     can guess who paid for the mailing. There is a well-financed
     campaign by the petroleum industry to recruit scientists who are
     skeptical about global warming to help convert journalists,
     politicians and the public to their views. Few of the scientists
     who received the petition are climate experts -- and there aren't
     any in Cave Junction either.

     But when uncertainty abounds, scientific judgment has a way of
     conforming to the religious and political views of the scientist.
     As for me, global warming or not, my mother taught me to keep the
     thermostat down.

     Robert L. Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland,
     is author of the forthcoming "Voodoo Science."

======================================

To confound this gross misrepresentation, the Unification Church also funds 
"environmental institutes" such as the National Wilderness Institute and 
provided the seed money for the "Wise Use" movement of a few years ago -- 
until funding was assumed by other various corporate interests.

An old (1981) but nonetheless interesting list of Moon front organizations is 
available at:

     http://www.freedomofmind.com/groups/moonies/MoonGroups.doc

The list goes on for 43 pages. Misdirection, misinformation, deceit and 
propaganda crusades are simply part and parcel of the Unification Church's 
modus operandi, with the Washington Times being a primary venue for that 
deceit.

Wirt Atmar

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *