Wait a sec’ … who’s biasing science around here?

The climate-change denial camp argues that “alarmist” scientists, industrialists and politicians are grotesquely biasing the debate because they stand to make so much money from legislation to limit greenhouse gases.

Well, if you stand to make money on something, and if you have the means to influence the debate, it stands to reason that you’d spend a lot to make a lot more on down the road. How else could you bias things?

Surprise. Surprise. The interests that stand to gain from doing nothing  about climate change (or close to nothing) are spending five to 10 times as much as the interests that want the country to take aggressive action. At least, that’s the case when it comes to lobbying expenditures.

The New York Times reported last week, for example, that the oil and gas industry alsone spent $44.5 million on lobbying in the first quarter — nearly a 40 percent uptick from last year’s rate. Exxon Mobil, that stalwart of unbiased science, led the way among individual companies with $9.3 million. The entire alternative energy field, meanwhile, spent $7.2 million.

Absurd as it sounds, the claim that some hazily defined group is biasing the science so Al Gore and his buddies can make a buck has become a centerpiece of the denial argument. The conspiracy theory wouldn’t be important if one entire political party wasn’t mouthing — and apparently believing — the same claptrap to justify voting virtually en masse against the still-too-tepid Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.

Virtually no Republican support means advocates started the climate change debate in the House at a deficit and will be in at least as difficult position in the Senate. As a result, they are being forced to trade away the bill’s effectiveness to cobble together majorities out of the geographically diverse Democratic caucus.

OK, then, does that centerpiece of the denial argument hold up? Who is spending money to make money on climate legislation — or on the status quo?

According to the Center for Repsonsive Politics, which keeps a database of federal lobbyists’ expenditure reports, there’s that $44.5 million from oil and gas companies, which generally oppose Waxman-Markey. Then, there’s $35.1 from electric utilities — some of which now support a weak climate change bill with taxpayer subsides for them in the form of big offsets, others of which oppose the bill. And coal mining companies spent $2.9 milion.

It’s difficult, also, to separate out what’s being spent to weaken or defeat the legislation by sectors like agribusiness ($15.4 million), farming ($8.1 million) and forestry ($3.3 million), which have multiple interests before Congress. All told, that’s around $100 million being spent by just those benefit-from-the-status-quo industries, although it’s difficult to say how much wasn’t spent on trying to spin Waxman-Markey.

On the other side, alternative energy companies spend $7.2 million. The highest rolling enviro group was the Nature Conservancy, which spent $850,000 (all environmental groups spent $4.7 million, but much of that was spent by groups whose main focus isn’t the climate bill). So we’re talking $11.9 from the core groups that want to see climate change action, although again a lot of that money wasn’t spent on Waxman-Markey.

Ah, but conspiracy-minded deniers will tell you that investment banks are the ones who are really pulling the strings behind the climate “alarmism.” (Yeah, right. You mean the investment banks that are licking their chops at financing all those new “clean coal” plants?) Even if that were true, investment banks and funds spent $19.7 million in lobbying in first quarter of 2009 — of which you gotta figure that 95 percent had to do with bailout issues.,.

No matter how you cut it, industries that gains from the status quo outspend the folks who want to take substantive action on global warming by somewhere beteen 5-to-1 and 10-to-1.

While lobbying expenditures aren’t the whole package when it comes influencing the public debate (witness all those “clean coal” ads on the Sunday talkshows or the donations that oil companies give to anti-environmental think tanks), they’re about the hardest evidence you can come up with, because the law requires lobbyists to disclose their expenditures.

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