A U.S. journalist who has exposed Exxon Mobil Corporation’s funding of various thinks tanks, including the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, is coming to UBC to discuss media coverage of global warming. In his 2004 book, Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Have Fueled the Climate Crisis–and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster (Basic Books), Ross Gelbspan reported that ExxonMobil was giving away more than US$1 million per year to various right-wing groups that opposed taking action on climate change.

Gelbspan will appear at UBC Robson Square on March 6 for a panel discussion with other journalists and climate-change experts called “The State of the Media on Climate Change”.

In a 2005 article in Mother Jones magazine, Gelbspan accused hundreds of editors and thousands of reporters of “betraying” their profession with their indifference to the issue, claiming it was “threatening to become the shame of the American press”.

In the same issue, Mother Jones provided a list of some of the recipients of ExxonMobil’s US$8 million in funding to various groups. The list included a US$60,000 grant to the Fraser Institute, which, according to the magazine, questions the “still-speculative risk of global warming”.

On December 20, the Fraser Institute announced that it had hired NPA park-board commissioner Heather Holden as its new director of risk, regulation, and environmental research. Holden earned a PhD from the University of Waterloo after writing a thesis about the features of coral reefs in Fiji and Indonesia.

Mark Mullins, executive director of the Fraser Institute, told the Straight late last year that his organization will publish “a lot more on regulation as it concerns the environment”, noting that there is a “public hunger” for information in this area.

“We’ve got something on the horizon looking at the whole issue of urban development and some of the regulatory issues around that,” Mullins said. “Climate change is one obvious area to be concentrating on.”

Mullins, like his predecessor Michael Walker, would not reveal who funds the Fraser Institute, saying it’s up to donors to decide if they want to “self-identify”.

One of Holden’s predecessors was Laura Jones, who later became a small-business lobbyist. Prior to that, the Fraser Institute’s director of regulatory studies was her spouse, Fazil Mihlar, now the editorial-page editor of the Vancouver Sun.