Those who support the idea of catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming often accuse those who disagree with them of being sponsored by oil companies. Actually there is little evidence of that as far as I can determine. In fact it is a rather silly assertion since the large domestic oil companies are fundamentally rent-seekers who happily go along with the consensus political positions regardless of what they actually think about any issue. Then, it is clear that oil companies love the idea of restricting drilling since that vastly increases the value of the oil they have in the ground with no investment required on their part. They are smart enough to know that all of their oil will eventually be produced because economical alternative energy approaches will only evolve over scores of years. One thing that has not been widely publicized is who is funding the supporters of the AGW hysteria. Everyone knows Al Gore is involved. But the involvement of the Democratic Party is not widely known. Starting in the late 1980's Maurice Strong helped get the IPCC organization started in the UN, with the charter, not to understand the climate, but to establish that anthropogenic sources were going to harm the climate of the earth. Al Gore was in the Senate at the time and was also involved in the IPCC start-up. The left-wing Public Relations firm Fenton Publications was involved. Environmental Media Services was set up to spread the word of impending doom with reporters who were mostly in the pay of Fenton. EMS was set up by Fenton with money from the Tides Center (the foundation funded by Teresa Heinz-Kerry). Here is a rather long article about a dispute between Gavin Schmidt, a NASA scientist and a proponent of the AGW hypothesis and Noel Sheppard. IN the middle of the article there is a discussion of funding for the AGW hypothesis proponents. Schmidt accuses Sheppard of ad hominem attacks, dodging true scientific denate, etc. Actually, from what I have read, the proponents of the AGW hypothesis are more prone to ad hominem attacks, avoiding scientific debate than those who disagree with them, etc. Al Gore, for example, says that those who disagree with him are believers in the flat earth. I wonder if he actually thinks that Roy Spencer or Freeman Dyson believes the earth is flat? Does he even know who Freeman Dyson is? One thing that people should take note of from the article is that wikipedia is not a reliable source of scientific information because it has a definite left-wing bias. Here is the article:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/07/17/nasa-climate-alarmist-attacks-newsbusters-sheppard