Climate Cover-Up. James Hoggan

policy. The University auditors also found that the uses to which the bulk of the money had been put “were not legitimate scientific research and education and were funded by anonymous donors to promote special interests.”²

      As punishment for all of this, Barry Cooper—fishing buddy of Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper—has paid no price whatsoever. He maintains his position. He still writes a weekly column, often on climate change politics, in the local “newspaper of record,” the Calgary Herald, which has neither reported the Friends of Science story nor ever advised its readers of Cooper’s extracurricular activities.

      Nevertheless, the Friends seem to be damaged goods generally, and though the Web site was still operating in early 2009 and the organization continues an annual luncheon, most of its activities have ground to a halt. But Tim Ball never missed a beat. Working with a former APCO public relations executive named Tom Harris, Ball reemerged in 2006 as the “chief science advisor” of a new organization called the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP), which, as a first order of business, promised to launch “A proactive grassroots campaign to counter the Kyoto Protocol and other greenhouse gas reduction schemes while promoting sensible climate change policy” (emphasis mine). Harris, who once had organized the public launch of the Friends of Science, stood in as executive director and, along with Ball, populated the list of other “science experts” with most of the scientists who had appeared on the Friends of Science honor roll.³