UPDATE (5/10 3:15 pm): Heartland Institute de-listed Roger Pielke Jr. as a ”Heartland Expert” today after Pielke asked them to make clear he has no affiliation with them in any way. Yet as recently as last night, in a response to this post, he asserted, “If they chose to highlight me as an expert, that is their business.” #FAIL. The other amazing thing is that Pielke knew about the listing as far back as May 4! Anyway, we’re now seeing an “exodus” of “Heartland experts,” since Benny Peiser also got de-listed after my post. Pielke’s original page is cached here. The delisted page is here.

On day 6 of Heartland-gate, we visit their distinguished list of “Experts.”

As you know, the Heartland Institute is still unapologetic for its ad comparing the Unabomber to those who accept climate science or report on it. And they still insist on their website that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”

Their website also lists as “Heartland Experts” many of the most prominent advocates of climate science denial: John Christy, Joseph D’Aleo, Myron Ebell, Richard Lindzen, Bjorn Lomborg, Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney, Patrick Michaels, Steve Milloy, Lord Christopher Monckton, Marc Morano, Benny Peiser, Ian Plimer, Harrison Schmitt, Fred Singer, Fred Smith, Roy Spencer, Anthony Watts, and, last but not least, Roger Pielke.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking, well, of course, Foreign Policy’s “Guide to Climate Skeptics” included Roger Pielke, Jr., but surely he isn’t an official “Heartland Expert.” And I say to you, stop calling me Shirley!

UPDATE: On his blog, Roger states he has “absolutely no relationship with Heartland — never have, never will. Period.” That’s great. Then he falsely claims that I said he is “official expert for Heartland” when I merely asked the obvious question. He amazingly asserts in the comments that he “looked at the webpage and there is nothing there that says that I am in anyway associated with them.” Anyone can look at the web page above and see that Heartland lists him as a “Heartland expert” — with his bio and photo. How anyone could have guessed this wasn’t official is, well, Pielke-esque. Glad to know it isn’t.

Even more amazingly, however, Pielke then goes on to say:

If they chose to highlight me as an expert, that is their business.

So he is apparently fine with how he appears on their website. I guess that makes him an unofficial Heartland Expert. Hope that clears things up.

UPDATE: Pielke claimed in a tweet to Prof. Scott Mandia that he “Learned of it on my blog ~48 hrs before Romm’s post.” But Mandia points out in a response that Pielke knew on May 4 (!). #FAIL

The point is that Pielke has known that Heartland listed him as a “Heartland expert” for a number of days now and had no problem with it whatsoever. Interestingly, the long-debunked, hard-core denier Benny Peiser appears to have gotten Heartland to remove him from the list within 12 hours of my post. Go figure!

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Conservation Hawks: “We condemn the intellectually bankrupt and morally bereft Heartland Institute.”

It is the fifth day of the Heartland Institute’s online offensive comparing people who accept climate science with serial killers and mass murderers. The billboard is down, but the radical climate deniers of Heartland have explicitly refused to apologize for the ad. Worse, they’ve kept the more offensive hate speech on their website.

Unsurprisingly, corporate sponsors have started to flee, senior staff have left, partnerships have started to crumble, and all but the most extreme anti-science deniers have condemned Heartland. But as we’ll see, the origins of this smear go back many years for both Heartland and its long-time partner, Anthony Watts of the blog WattsUpWithThat.

First, Heartland has been quietly dropped from two significant coalitions with top environmental organizations, Climate Progress has learned. Under pressure from Forecast the Facts and Greenpeace, insurers who funded Heartland’s Washington DC vice president, Eli Lehrer, ceased their support and helped to convince Lehrer to leave the organization. With Lehrer’s departure, the Heartland Institute has been excised from the websites of two green coalitions:

The Smarter Safer Coalition, an effort to reform the National Flood Insurance Program by top insurers, environmental organizations including American Rivers, the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, Defenders of Wildlife, Ceres, and the Nature Conservancy, alongside conservative groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Conservative Union, and Americans for Tax Reform

The Green Scissors Campaign, an initiative to reduce anti-environmental government spending with Friends of the Earth and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

According to leaked documents, Lehrer brought about $700,000 a year into the Heartland Institute for his Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, including the majority of Heartland’s corporate funding. The insurers who announced their departure from Heartland include the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers, XL Group, Renaissance Re, Allied World Assurance, and State Farm Insurance.

Corporate sponsors of the Heartland Institute who have resisted calls to end their financial support include Microsoft, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Comcast, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Heartland’s seventh climate-denier conference will take place in Chicago in two weeks.  To add your voice to the petition calling on corporations to end support for the Heartland Institute, click here.

I don’t know what is more amazing, truly, that the Heartland organization collectively ever thought this major messaging campaign was a good idea — or that they refuse to apologize or take down any of the absurd attacks on climate scientists and reporters from their website.

Every day, new groups condemn Heartland. Conservation Hawks, Inc., “a group of hunters and anglers working to defend America’s sporting heritage,” released a powerful statement condemning Heartland, which concluded:

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To add your voice to the petition calling on corporations to end support for the Heartland Institute, click here.

by Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Forecast the Facts

The Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers (ABIR) and member company XL Group have announced that they will discontinue their support for the Heartland Institute, adding more companies to the list of those rejecting Heartland’s climate change denial. The decision comes in response to Heartland’s short-lived ad campaign that compared people who believe in global warming with serial killers and mass murderers. Association President Bradley Kading communicated the decision to Heartland President Joseph Bast in a letter:

On behalf of the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers, we write to disavow any future relationship with your organization. Recent revelations of the Heartland Institute’s radical position on climate change as portrayed on the new billboard featuring Ted Kaczynski made our association with other parts of your organization untenable.

“The letter represents the position of our members,” Kading told Forecast the Facts. ABIR’s membership includes 22 of the world’s largest insurance and reinsurance companies, including erstwhile Heartland funder XL Group. Edward Heffernan, XL Group’s Senior Vice President for International Govermental Relations, confirmed to Forecast the Facts that his company has ceased all support.

According to leaked documents, ABIR and XL Group had provided $160,000 in the past two years to Heartland’s work on insurance issues. Climatewire reports that other insurers are working to end their ties to the Heartland Institute, encouraging Heartland’s insurance expert Eli Lehrer to leave the extremist organization. Lehrer has worked with the insurance industry and environmental organizations including Friends of the Earth, National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club in the Smarter Safer Coalition to reform national flood insurance and the Green Scissors initiative to cut anti-environmental government subsidies.

Forecast the Facts has mobilized more than 20,000 people to call on corporations to pull their support from Heartland. General Motors was the first to respond, ending their twenty-year relationship with Heartland on March 28. They have been followed by AT&T, ABIR, and beverage maker Diageo, whose products include Jose Cuervo, Guinness, and Captain Morgan. In the coming weeks, Forecast the Facts will continue to mobilize its members to push all of Heartland’s corporate donors to immediately pull their support.

“We applaud ABIR and the XL Group for recognizing that supporting Heartland is totally unacceptable for any company that takes climate change seriously,” said Daniel Souweine, Campaign Director for Forecast The Facts, which has launched a petition to ask all corporations to end their support. “Now it’s time for Heartland’s other corporate donors, like State Farm and Microsoft, to come to the same realization.”

 

The right-wing Heartland Institute launched an “experiment” Friday, comparing believers in climate change to infamous figures such as Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Charles Manson, and Osama bin Laden. After 24 hours, the group pulled down its Chicago billboard but made no attempt to apologize for or retract its stunt.

Even worse, the image of the billboard is still on their website along with some of the most extremist hate-speech ever seen from a global warming denial group — including this absurd assertion, “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”

Now, Heartland is seeing the fall-out: After the latest outcry, the leading drink company Diageo, which owns brands like Smirnoff, Guinness, and Johnnie Walker, told The Guardian it will end its ties to Heartland:

DIAGEO SPOKESPERSON: “Diageo vigorously opposes climate scepticism and our actions are proof of this. Diageo’s only association with the Heartland Institute was limited to a small contribution made two years ago specifically related to an excise tax issue. Diageo has no plans to work with the Heartland Institute in the future.“

A few months ago, ThinkProgress reported on Heartland’s corporate-funded plan to teach climate denialism in schools. At the time, Diageo said it “vigorously” opposed climate skepticism and it would “be reviewing any further association with this organization.” Diageo contributed $10,000 to Heartland in 2010. Diageo joins corporations including General Motors and AT&T that have recently ended its funding to Heartland’s radical agenda.

UPDATE: ClimateWire (subs. req’d) reports this morning:

The Heartland Institute’s failed billboard campaign attacking the existence of climate change is driving a surge of corporate donors to abandon the group and prompting a mutiny among its Washington-based staff, which is decamping for less volatile surroundings, according to sources.

At the center of the retreat is a contingent of insurance companies and trade groups that donated more than $1 million over the last two years to the libertarian group’s Center on Finance, Insurance and Real Estate in Washington, D.C., for programs related to federal insurance reform….

“It was disgusting. It was revolting,” Brad Kading, president of the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers, said of the ad in an interview over the weekend. “It was a terrible mistake.”

Insurers express ‘disgust and shock’

His group, which donated $125,000 to Heartland over the last two years, told the libertarian president of Heartland, Joe Bast, that their relationship is “untenable” in a letter Friday evening.

Other insurers are also cutting ties in a major upheaval that coincides, sources say, with the departure of Eli Lehrer from Heartland’s Washington-based center, known by its acronym, FIRE. Lehrer and his staff were shocked by the billboard campaign, which they learned about in an emailed press release from Heartland headquarters Thursday, said Ray Lehmann, deputy director of the center….

“All of the insurers and reinsurers that funded Eli are either in the process of withdrawing funding from Heartland or are considering doing so,” said the source, who asked not be identified. “I think everybody’s reaction [to the billboard] was one of disgust and shock. It was the last straw for everybody.”

How radioactive has Heartland become? Consider one invited speaker to their forthcoming conference, Donna Laframboise, a Canadian climate denier who has spent the last several months launching an absurd attack on the IPCC [see Fox Scraping the Barrel for Attacks on UN Climate Panel (or, You Have Got To Be F*!$*%@&! Kidding Me)]. She just published a piece, “Why I Won’t Be Speaking at the Heartland Conference,” writing:

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It was announced yesterday that PepsiCo, a corporate leader in the fight against manmade climate change, has ceased its funding of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing climate-denial organization.

PepsiCo has now also admitted to being a past funder of the climate-denial think tank Heartland Institute. In a statement to ThinkProgress Green, the $57-billion food and beverages giant indicated that its funding was for Heartland’s efforts against soda and junk food taxes, not for its promotion that climate change is a “myth.” A PepsiCo spokeswoman explained that the company “is currently not a member of the Heartland Institute”:

PepsiCo was a member of the Heartland Institute specifically related to taxes on the consumption of food and beverage products. PepsiCo is currently not a member of the Heartland Institute nor did we engage with them on climate issues while a member.

The Heartland Institute has argued that “sin taxes” on soda, liquor, or cigarettes “lead to smuggling across state lines” and “gang activity.” An article attacking state-level soda taxes questioned “how bad the obesity problem is.” Instead of improving public health with taxes on products that degrade children’s health, Heartland argues, we should be “privatizing non-core functions of government.” The institute even railed against governmental “obesity police” for proposing voluntary children’s advertising guidelines for the junk-food industry.

An internal document leaked from the anti-science group showed that PepsiCo gave at least $5000 in tax-deductible contributions in 2010 for Heartland’s Budget and Tax News Initiative. It is unknown whether PepsiCo gave earlier contributions. PepsiCo’s public page listing its charitable contributions in 2010 does not list the Heartland Institute as a recipient. PepsiCo has spent nearly $20 million on Washington DC lobbying since 2009.

PepsiCo’s support for Heartland’s attacks on public-health-driven policy is not an isolated incident. In an article at the City University of New York Law Review, public health lawyer Michele Simon argues that PepsiCo is “coopting the scientific conversation around public health and diet.” As a member of the industry front groups Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative and the Sensible Food Policy Coalition, PepsiCo has opposed even voluntary regulation of the junk food that drives PepsiCo’s profits and America’s obesity epidemic.

Simon argues that PepsiCo’s hiring of internationally renowned public health experts like Derek Yach and Dr. George Mensah is an attempt to subvert public-health science rather than to make their business healthier.

PepsiCo’s past willingness to support the Heartland Institute — which even argues against the health threat of cigarette smoking — does raise questions about the earnestness of PepsiCo’s pledge to improve the public-health impact of their products.

However, PepsiCo has one of the strongest public stances on the threat of man-made global warming in corporate America:

It is clear that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have an adverse impact on global temperatures, weather patterns and the frequency and severity of extreme weather and natural disasters. Because these changes could have an impact on the availability or pricing of certain commodities that are necessary for our products, we are continuously working to address climate change, from scaling up the company’s use of renewable fuel sources to reducing energy consumption.

In 2009, PepsiCo joined the Ceres company network, pledging its “executive-level commitment to improve environmental and social performance” and “public reporting on sustainability strategy, commitments and performance.” As a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, PepsiCo lobbied in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, comprehensive climate legislation that would have dramatically advanced the future of global public health.

The PepsiCo spokesperson contacted by ThinkProgress Green did not made any public commitments about future funding for the climate-denial think tank.

NOTE: One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the “2012 Climate Strategy” document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

According to leaked documents, telecommunications giant AT&T gave at least $100,000 to the Heartland Institute — a tax-exempt organization which promotes conspiracy theories about climate scientists, distorts climate science, and attacks regulation of air and water pollution. In a statement to ThinkProgress Green, AT&T says its contributions are now “past.”

AT&T’s support for the science-denying Heartland Institute contradicts the image the company projects as a leader on environmental sustainability and climate change:

AT&T: Climate change is a fact, and the scientific evidence so far seems to implicate greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, as the cause of climate change. [AT&T whitepaper]

Heartland: On the most important issue, the IPCC‘s claim that ―most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid- twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations [emphasis in the original], we once again reach the opposite conclusion, that natural causes are very likely to be dominant. [NIPPC summary]

AT&T’s website boasts of several environmental awards it has received, including being listed as the top company in its category for its answers to the Carbon Disclosure Project’s “survey on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well as risks and opportunities associated with climate change.” The company makes public its annual greenhouse gas emissions and claim they use the data to help their “improvement efforts.”

The telecom giant also funds the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing organization that provides Republican state legislators with model legislation, including bills to block climate science in the classroom and deny the threat of carbon pollution.

In a statement to ThinkProgress Green, Beth Gautier Alm, director of public relations at AT&T, defended its past contributions to the Heartland Institute:

We are not currently contributing to the Heartland Institute. Our past contributions were earmarked for their technology and telecom efforts. Heartland keeps its specific project areas completely separate, in terms of staff, publications, events and budgets, so our contributions were strictly limited to supporting their work in the technology and telecom area.

AT&T’s $100,000 contribution was earmarked for Heartland’s “information technology & telecom news” project (ITTN). On those issues too Heartland opposes government regulations of business. The think tank’s website says it believes “rules for the Internet and electronic commerce should result from private collective action, not government regulation.”

The company spokesperson did not address whether it would give future contributions now that the Heartland Institute has acknowledged its plan to develop a classroom curriculum denying climate science. She also did not address whether AT&T has any disagreement with Heartland’s climate denial.

In contrast, General Motors recently announced it would no longer fund the Heartland Institute, because “we’ll continue to run our business as if climate change is real and believe we have a role to play in developing new cars, trucks and technologies that can make a difference.”

NOTE: One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the “2012 Climate Strategy” document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

People who live in glass houses heat up faster than the rest of us

Last month, ThinkProgress Green reported that the corporate-funded Heartland Institute was creating a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.” With support from an anonymous donor, Heartland will pay $100,000 a year to David Wojick, a coal-industry consultant who believes “CO2 is not pollution,” to produce materials disrupting education of the facts of man-made climate change. Wojick’s work would counter efforts like the “Climate Literacy” guide developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Science Foundation.

In an interview with the subscription-only Climatewire, Wojick said that teaching the facts of climate change is “wrong” because that’s just “one side of the debate”:

Wojick believes climate materials developed for teachers in 2009 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program portray a one-sided description of the man-made impacts that he says do not exist. Although thousands of scientists and educators contributed to the development of the materials, called “Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science,” Wojick described them as part of the “dangerous AGW school of thought.” He was referring to anthropogenic global warming.

“That stuff is wrong,” Wojick said yesterday. “I mean, that’s teaching one side of the debate. In fact, if you look through the Climate Literacy stuff, there’s no indication of a debate. The concept of a debate is not raised. So you obviously can’t use that stuff to teach the debate.”

The notion that accepted scientific facts must be presented as only “one side of the debate” is a scary one indeed. Perhaps in Wojick’s world, science teachers should have to spend equal time explaining that gravity might not exist, the moon might be made of green cheese, and that the Earth might be flat.

One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the “2012 Climate Strategy” document as it determines the document’s authenticity.