This is an interesting piece on how climate change denial is funded and how much is spent distorting the science. From between 2003 and 2010 $558 million was spent to deceive people about the fundamental risk climate change presents.
http://phys.org/news/2013-12-koch-brothers-reveals-funders-climate.html
To uncover how the countermovement was built and maintained, Brulle developed a listing of 118 important climate denial organizations in the U.S. He then coded data on philanthropic funding for each organization, combining information from the Foundation Center with financial data submitted by organizations to the Internal Revenue Service. The final sample for analysis consisted of 140 foundations making 5,299 grants totaling $558 million to 91 organizations from 2003 to 2010.
Prominent supporters of climate change denial like the Kochs and ExxonMobil have also taken steps to conceal their funding of the deceptive campaign through bodies like Donors Trust.
Conservative foundations have bank-rolled denial. The largest and most consistent funders of organizations orchestrating climate change denial are a number of well-known conservative foundations, such as the Searle Freedom Trust, the John William Pope Foundation, the Howard Charitable Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. These foundations promote ultra-free-market ideas in many realms.
Koch and ExxonMobil have recently pulled back from publicly visible funding. From 2003 to 2007, the Koch Affiliated Foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation were heavily involved in funding climate-change denial organizations. But since 2008, they are no longer making publicly traceable contributions.
Funding has shifted to pass through untraceable sources. Coinciding with the decline in traceable funding, the amount of funding given to denial organizations by the Donors Trust has risen dramatically. Donors Trust is a donor-directed foundation whose funders cannot be traced. This one foundation now provides about 25% of all traceable foundation funding used by organizations engaged in promoting systematic denial of climate change.
Most funding for denial efforts is untraceable. Despite extensive data compilation and analyses, only a fraction of the hundreds of millions in contributions to climate change denying organizations can be specifically accounted for from public records. Approximately 75% of the income of these organizations comes from unidentifiable sources.
Most funding for denier groups comes from conservatives--hard line capitalists who don't want any interference in their capitalistic ventures or anything that cuts into their profits. Any laws that come down on their business interests are, according to them, a left-wing plot to create a socialist government. Any law that interferes with their exploitation of land, the environment or people for their profits is suspect to them. That is what is behind their habit of demonizing of people who see danger in human caused climate change. The capitalists and wannabe capitalists (who are legion) will deny anything that has even a whiff of what they see as socialism in it.