Robert Mercer, Backer of Trump, Breitbart, Bannon and Kellyanne, is a Climate Science Denier

Robert Mercer, Backer of Trump, Breitbart, Bannon and Kellyanne, is a Climate Science Denier

The billionaire co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, Robert Mercer, is a main funder of Trump’s campaign, Koch brothers PAC, and previously Ted Cruz, and Breitbart and its leader Steve Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway’s Promise I Super-PAC. He is the second largest Republican campaign donor.

Update:  on Sept. 2, Trump hired David Bossie to be his deputy campaign manager.  David Bossie brought the Citizens United case that resulted in the ruling allowing SuperPACs as corporations to spend as much on ads for a candidate as they want.  Bossie is also head of PAC Citizens United,  which is funded, again, by Robert Mercer.

The Renaissance Technologies hedge fund was started by James Simon, and was built by hiring young and promising physicists and astronomers. This is another article questioning how such scientifically connected companies’ CEOs, and Trump, who uses physics and engineering in building his towers, can go around pretending that climate science is incorrect, and indeed, fund institutes for climate science denial.

Another aspect of Mercer’s climate science denial is that he graduated from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics. He earned his Ph. D. In computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1972. He worked at IBM on speech recognition.

The founder of Renaissance Technologies was James Harris Simons, a mathematics professor at Stony Brook University. He is famous in particle physics with Shiing-Shen Chern for finding the Chern-Simons form for understanding the non-Abelian field theories that underly all of particle physics. He also worked on the geometry and topology of string theory. He foresaw the usefulness of young physicists and astronomers and their new analytical tools in founding the private hedge fund, which now manages $25 billion of investments. Prof. Simons is now worth $15.5 billion. He has been involved with supporting Democrats.

This is where the scientific brain trust comes from in Mercer’s hedge fund, which he could easily tap to correctly educate him on climate science. He could even donate some spare computer time to climate scientists to run their projections on. In terms of judging whether to invest in his fund, we have pointed out before that not knowing that much of the current fossil fuel reserves must remain underground will give a much rosier picture of fossil fuel companies than reality will. Investing in weather catastrophe insurance funds which do not recognize climate change predictions (hopefully there aren’t any) would be very bad. Investing in Republicans, who prevent the US from taking actions that will lessen climate change, will increase the already enormous costs of damage from environmental catastrophes.

Robert Mercer funds the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.  This is a small anti-government and anti-establishment medical research group, whose members worked on the Petition Project which obtained the signatures of 31,000 American scientists opposed to the hypothesis of “human-caused global warming”.  Mercer also funds the Heartland Institute, a major anti-climate science group, which wants to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sourcing Breitbart on climate change turns up first: “Climate Change: The Greatest-Ever Conspiracy Against the Taxpayer” by James Delingpole. Another one is “1001 Reasons Why Global Warming Is So Totally Over in 2016”, by the same author. He is not a scientist, and does not have a science degree. On Dec. 2, 2015, he had an article “Paris Climate Talks Are Doomed Because China Knows ‘Climate Change’ Is a Hoax”. Maybe Trump misread the title when he claimed that climate change is a Chinese plot.

I am reminded of a comedy movie called “A Day Without a Mexican”, where all Mexican workers in the US disappear one day. A current extension would be what if all 11 million illegal immigrants, only half of whom are from Mexico, would quit for a day. The relevant extension here is to consider all STEM workers who believe in climate change science (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and work for Renaissance, Koch industries, and other companies headed by billionaire climate deniers. What if those workers would take a day off, and spend the day learning about or educating others about climate change? The fact that such climate change denying billionaires, who become rich based on such STEM workers and their successful use of science and mathematics, could use their unfairly garnered company profits to deny science is really the pinnacle of hypocrisy.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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