Weak "Policy Terrorism" At Warming Skeptics Conference

We were loathe to write anything earlier this week when the Heartland Institute-- a group of climate change "skeptics" propelled by industry-based funding that is quite similar to the pattern we've documented for anti-regulatory judicial junkets (including the tobacco industry patterns and connections)-- convened a big confab in New York. Simply put, there wasn't anything new or noteworthy about this gathering, despite the clearly evolving rhetoric masking the same old agenda. There's been some great reporting that we've thoroughly enjoyed, and there just wasn't anything to add.

Until, that is, we read this gleeful first-person account from the American Thinker, which reveals that even as Heartland spins for mainstream legitimacy, its attendees still feel rather passionately about undermining Supreme Court orders and attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

[At Tuesday morning's final political forum], CEI senior fellow Marlo Lewis painted a harrowing picture of an America in which CO2 had been declared a pollutant by the EPA...He then coined the phrase "policy terrorism" to describe potential EPA extortion -- accept cap and trade or we'll blow up your economy. Nice.

We're quite familiar with Lewis' other attempts at legal analysis of Mass. v. EPA and its implications (it basically amounts to an ill-informed rant about "activist judges"), but this one obviously takes the cake. It was also amusing to read that both the article's author and Marc Morano, the communications director for Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), are under the impression-- previously advanced by S. Fred Singer, another Heartland speaker-- that if only the Justices had heard the more recent pronouncements of their fellow "skeptics," it "might have swayed the court's majority opinion in another direction." Seeing as even the dissenting Justices didn't stoop to citing this crowd's scientific arguments (their argument focused on flawed takes on standing doctrine, the Clean Air Act, and the level of disecretion afforded to EPA), we truly wish them the best of luck with that one...

So why does any of this matter, other than the obvious disgust at Lewis' overheated analogy, if they've got no real case to make in the legal or policy realm?  Simply put, because Heartland's attendees and their funders ARE having their voices and hyperbolic concerns heard in the decision making process, namely EPA head Stephen Johnson's perpetual postponement of the CO2 endangerment finding discussed here. The American Thinker piece captures Morano happily conveying that the Bush administration will probably not act on the Supreme Court's remand, though a future administration likely will.

The only people comforted by (and in some cases, taking credit for) the EPA's stonewalling are those who honestly believe, even if they would probably use less patently disgusting language, that attempts to thwart global warming emissions amount to economic warfare. That's kind of telling.

Comments

[Shannon]

Correction on Morano's last name spelling.

He's obsessive, by the way- he must go a google search for his own name every day, because every time I mention it, my statcounter picks up a google search from his IP address looking for himself.

It would be fun to have a post directed to him, since he would definitely read it.

[Greg]

Just so you know, The Heartland Institute receives about 16% of its total income from corporations, the rest comes from individuals and foundations. No one corporation has EVER contributed more than 5% of Heartland’s annual budget. All energy companies COMBINED in 2007 gave less than 5% of the organization’s total budget. ExxonMobil hasn’t contributed since 2006. If funding determines a think tank’s perspective, then you might expect Heartland to be 95% in favor of global warming alarmism!

[Tim Dowling]

Here's the context for Greg's comment (from the Grist link in the post):

"Where does all the money come from? While the Heartland Institute no longer discloses its funders, ExxonSecrets.org reports data linking $7.5 million in Exxon funding from 1998-2006 to the Heartland Institute and many of the event's cosponsors. Sourcewatch also reports Heartland receives major funding from the tobacco industry, receiving $240,000 from Philip Morris (a.k.a. Altria) from 1993-1998 alone.

DeSmogBlog reports the global warming denier-tobacco connections don't stop there. Click through their exhaustive research on the conference's speakers and you'll find plenty of tobacco ties. Tobacco campaigns paid off doctors and scientists, successfully confusing the public for decades. Now the energy industry is following in the tobacco industry's footsteps, trying to muddy the waters on global warming.

But the more I've listened to these speakers, the more I've realized that for most of them, it's not about the science. Panels don't go five minutes without attacking Al Gore or comparing climate activists to socialists who want to destroy capitalism. Deniers are part of a political culture that frames the world in terms of left and right, so they've absorbed global warming into that broader paradigm of partisan politics."