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"Michaels admitted on CNN that an estimated 40% of his funding came from 
petroleum industry sources"

Kelly Rigg  Executive Director, GCCA
January 26, 2011 12:56 PM
Skepticgate: Revealing Climate Denialists for What They Are
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-rigg/skepticgate-revealing-cli_b_814013.html
   Greenpeace USA's lead researcher Kert Davies just broke the story about a 
congressional investigation requested by Rep. Waxman that may finally put the 
climate denial machine under the microscope.
   This by all reckoning is a real "climategate" - a genuinely scandalous 
story in which a scientist who testified before Congress hid the fact that he 
was funded largely by corporate interests. But will it get the same airplay 
that the now debunked "climategate" story enjoyed?
   Maybe timing is everything. The hackers who broke into the computers of 
the University of East Anglia did so just weeks before the Copenhagen Climate 
Summit in December 2009. So when the denial machine went into overdrive the 
press fell for it hook, line and sinker. Despite several independent reviews 
exonerating the fundamental science, a number of newspaper retractions and 
various public apologies to people whose names were dragged through the mud, 
many people were left wondering whether climate change was really as much of 
a threat as it had been made out to be.
   Compare that to the dog days of last summer. When much of the northern 
hemisphere was on vacation and concerns about climate tended more towards the 
cost of running an air conditioner, this far more explosive story barely 
escaped the blogosphere. Prominent climate skeptic Pat Michaels admitted on 
CNN that an estimated 40% of his funding came from petroleum industry sources:
   In and of itself, this was hardly news. Desmogblog has revealed that since 
1998 ExxonMobil has contributed $25 million to 35 anti-science nonprofits 
while oil giant Koch Industries has doled out more than $48 million to 
efforts that attack climate science.
   Dr. Michaels, according to Rep. Waxman may have knowingly misled Congress 
into believing that only around 3% of his income came from the energy sector 
when he appeared before a congressional subcommittee hearing on the climate 
crisis the previous year. Waxman is now calling to have Michaels brought 
before the committee to clarify the sources of his funding.
   In his letter to the new Republican Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Waxman 
points out that "Among the scientists who testified before this Committee on 
the issue of climate change in the last Congress, Dr. Michaels was the only 
one to dismiss the need to act on climate change."