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‘made in the usa’ – a short history of carbon trading 41‘contain’ scientists’ talk. Even Robert T. Watson, the World Bankscientist-bureaucrat who as head of the IPCC had often worked hardto accommodate scientific findings to US and World Bank sensibilities,28 attracted the wrath of ExxonMobil and was voted out of hisposition in 2002. 29But didn’t US corporate interests have ways of infl uencing climate science otherthan through the IPCC?Of course. US companies and their political supporters would neverhave dreamed of relying on only one set of institutions to contain thedomestic political threats implied by climate change.Corporate or corporate-backed groups such as the Business Roundtable,the Global Climate Information Project, the Coalition for VehicleChoice, the National Centre for Public Policy Research, the Advancementof Sound Science Coalition and the Information Councilfor the Environment spent millions of dollars on experts, conferences,books and advertisements associating climate action with economicharm to the US, including higher petrol prices. 30 The US ElectricPower Research Institute, which is funded by electric utilities, financiallysupported ‘seven of the major authors of integrated assessmentstudies’ as well as co-sponsoring a special issue of The Energy Journalon the costs of the Kyoto Protocol, provoking the editors of the academicjournal Climatic Change to protest that the ‘nature of fundingof most leading economic models’ of climate change was ‘a source ofconcern’. 31 Non-government organisations such as the Pew Centre forClimate Change and establishment think-tanks such as the Councilon Foreign Relations, aided by the faculties of many North Americanand British economics departments, also helped carry the message tonews media that Kyoto targets were ‘unrealistic’. 32Aligned with a somewhat different set of corporate interests, the GlobalClimate Coalition meanwhile aimed a multimillion-dollar disinformationcampaign at US audiences attacking the whole idea that the climatewas changing, including a usd 13 million pre-Kyoto Protocol advertisingblitz in 1997 alone. 33 Business coalitions and corporate-fundedthink-tanks have also sought out and supported climate-sceptic scientistsin order to disseminate their views in an attempt to ensure that theidea of human-caused climate change remains ‘controversial’. 34These are the famous climate change ‘deniers’ we always hear about?Yes.