Fox News provided American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Jonah Goldberg a platform to attack climate scientists as profiteers who are “financially incentivized” to advocate climate change action, without disclosing AEI's own financial incentive to undercut action on climate change. AEI has taken over $3 million from ExxonMobil, and once offered money to scientists to write articles criticizing a UN climate change report. 

On the November 18 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Goldberg argued that climate scientists have a conflict of interest reporting on climate change because they are “deeply invested in the whole industry of global warming” for their university programs. Goldberg also called climate scientists and advocates “people who are financially incentivized to go one way.”

Though host Neil Cavuto did disclose that Goldberg is a fellow at AEI, he did not mention AEI's ties to the oil industry or its history of offering money to climate scientists to write articles undermining a climate change report. In 2013, The Union of Concerned Scientists reported that AEI received $3.04 million from ExxonMobil between 2001 and 2011. According to ExxonMobil's website, in 2012 the company also donated $260,000 to AEI.

In 2007, The Guardian reported that AEI offered scientists and economists $10,000 to write articles that “emphasise the shortcomings” of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which found a 90 percent chance that human activity was causing global temperature increases.

The failure of Fox News and Goldberg to disclose ExxonMobil's contributions to AEI, or its previous attempt to pay scientists to criticize a U.N. climate change report, shows that conservative media will stop at nothing to undercut the settled science on climate change, even in the face of their own hypocrisy.