Michael Mann's Koch-Up

While listening to a recent interview of Alex Epstein by Yaron Brook, I got wind of an interesting piece at the Epstein's Energy Talking Points substack.

The interview is, of course, mostly about Fossil Future, which is available today, but at one point, the conversation turned to one of the many tired old ways leftists attack opponents they won't engage (and probably couldn't answer anyway), namely the old Who Paid for That? gotcha.

Not only is that a lousy argument to begin with (as Joakim Book makes clear, but climate catastrophist Michael Mann once baselessly levied it against Epstein.

Epstein's Substack reply is worth quoting here, because this charge will surely emerge from among the din of cancellation attempts and other confessions of envy and intellectual impotence from the left:

The number one form of attack related to my finances is that I am "funded by the Koch Brothers."

For example, climate scientist and activist Michael Mann called me "the Koch Brothers' attack dog" in response to a piece I wrote in Forbes. I asked Mann to substantiate this totally false charge, and his response was to block me on Twitter.

...

The bizarre origin of the claim that my work is driven by "The Koch Brothers" is that the Charles Koch Foundation supposedly gave my former employer, the Ayn Rand Institute $50,000-$100,000 total over a period of many years. Given that ARI's budget was on the order of $10 million a year when I worked there, the idea that this paltry sum moved them, and then me, to take a certain positions on fossil fuels should be absurd on its face.

It is then even more absurd to claim that this paltry contribution to my employer of over a decade ago still drives my work! [emphasis in original]

The interview also notes that ARI is notorious for not doing what donors ask them to do -- as one might expect and hope from Ayn Rand's own example (Search "popular" to find.).

-- CAV