How cynical are those super-rich people opposing action to deal with Climate Change?

     Tomorrow is the big Climate March.  There truly is No Planet B.  Yet those now in power in our federal government are hell-bent on ignoring the overwhelming scientific consensus that we are fouling our own nest to a degree that seriously threatens our futures.

Conservative donor Rebekah Mercer attended the 12th International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by The Heartland Institute in Washington. (Oliver Contreras for The Washington Post)

     As reported last month in The Washington Post in an article understatedly headlined The Mercers, Trump mega-donors, back group that casts doubt on climate science  (see here), Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer, the super-rich hedge fund family which funded Steve Bannon and then the Trump Campaign, have been pushing Climate Change denial for years and continue to do so.  They are a threat to the planet.  Yet, they also contribute money to a group that has concluded that Climate Change is real and is driven by human activity.  Here is the relevant part of this March 2017 Washington Post article

     “During the same two-year period, the Mercer foundation contributed $500,000 to Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research organization whose founder, Richard Muller, is a physicist and onetime climate change skeptic who declared in 2012 that his research shows that humans are indeed driving global warming.

     “Berkeley Earth set out in 2010 to reanalyze the highly influential surface temperature data kept by scientific institutions such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — data that document considerable global warming and have come under fire from climate change doubters. The ultimate Berkeley Earth analysis, however, largely vindicated the original temperature records, reporting that concerns raised by doubters ‘did not unduly bias the record.’                                                                    

      “In an interview Friday, Muller said that Robert Mercer contacted him after Muller gave a speech about big data and climate science at Renaissance Technologies, Mercer’s hedge fund.

      “’He has been very supportive of our work and never once did he indicate to us that he had a hope for outcomes in what we did,’ Muller said. He added that Berkeley Earth continues to receive funding from Mercer, whom he described as ‘very open.’”

     So what kind of game is the Mercer family playing?  Are they trying to kill off political opposition to the poisoning of the planet for short-term financial gain, while quietly planning for the results of that set of policies in order to make even more money?  Could anyone really be that cynical? Sounds like a bad movie -- but so do a lot of things these days.