The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett provides a new edition of fake news in his opinion “that even if the science motivating the Paris Climate Agreement weren’t suspicious, the treaty itself is a costly farce” (Tribune News Service). This should come as no surprise to anyone who understands that the Institute has long been an advocate of climate change denial. This is the same, avowedly “nonpartisan, nonprofit research center” that worked with Philip Morris in the 1990s to deny the health risks of secondhand smoke and to lobby against smoking bans.
The Internal Revenue Code applies substantiation requirements for donors, and disclosure requirements for charitable organizations in connection with charitable contributions. Donor information is necessary to determine whether a charity is violating the law by engaging in self-dealing or other unfair business practices. However, the Institute’s website states, “the Heartland Institute does not reveal to the public the identities of its donors or the amount of their gifts. This confidentiality,” the website asserts, “is allowed under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.”
The real reason the Institute no longer discloses funding sources is because it complains that its donors experienced “organized harassment.” This “harassment” is similar to that which conservative senators and representatives experienced when they appeared back home in public and then hid behind charges of harassment rather than acknowledging public protest.
With respect to “unfair business practices,” one might question Heartland’s “business practices” as a member of the America Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and as a member of ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force.
ALEC is well known as a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. They also pay for a seat on ALEC’s various task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps provide state legislators with “model bills” to benefit their bottom line via ALEC.
In February 2012, an anonymous donor released documents of the Heartland Institute’s budget, fundraising plan and climate strategy for 2012. The leaked information included the fact that the 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy reported that the Institute got $200,000 in 2011 from the Charles G. Koch Foundation and nearly a million from an “anonymous” donor.
Two of many “Climate Strategy” goals included:
• Working with well-known and vocal climate change “skeptic” David E.Wojick (with strong links to the coal industry) on “[K-12 school] curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science”; and
• funding climate change deniers Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 a month), James Taylor who has written a lot about Climategate through his Forbes blog, and Anthony Watts ($90,000 for 2012) to challenge ‘warmist science essays that counter our own,’ including funding “external networks such as WUWT (Watts Up With That?) and other groups capable of rapidly mobilizing responses to new scientific findings, news stories, or unfavorable blog posts).”
The Institute later confirmed the authenticity of some of the released documents, but maintained in a Feb. 15, 2012 press release that the Climate Strategy was “a forgery apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute.”
As a part of its 2013 agenda, ALEC partnered with the Heartland Institute to roll back the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), state-levellegislation that requires utility companies to produce a certain amount of their total energy from renewable sources. The Institute created a “model bill,” dubbed the Electricity Freedom Act and directed to ALEC’s “attention” in May 2012. While ALEC publicly expressed its high hopes for the legislation, the bill had little success in state houses during the 2013 legislative session, failing to pass every legislature in which it was introduced.
The Heartland Institute has been supported by the Koch brothers and their network of right-wing donors. In the past, the Institute has accepted $40,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation and $62,578 from the Charles G.Koch Foundation. Both organizations are members of the Koch Family Foundations. This was before the Institute decided to no longer report the source of its funders to the IRS because of donor “harassment.”
In July of 2016, nineteen U.S. Senators delivered a series of speeches denouncing climate change denial from 32 organizations with links to fossil-fuel interests, including the Heartland Institute. Sen. Whitehouse (RI-D), who led the effort to expose “the web of denial” included in his remarks on the floor that the purpose was to, “shine a little light on the web of climate denial and spotlight the bad actors in the web, who are polluting our American discourse with phony climate denial. This web of denial, formed over decades, has been built and provisioned by the deep-pocketed Koch brothers, by Exxon Mobil, by Peabody Coal, and by other fossil fuel interests.”
In his screed debunking climate change, Mr. Burnett does get one thing right; that “Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary proof.” The ultimate proof which Mr. Burnett and other climate change deniers choose to ignore is that physical reality doesn’t bend to denial, alternative facts or fake news.
John Bos lives in Shelburne Falls and writes frequently about climate change. He invites discussion at john01370@gmail.com.