Posted inClimate Disaster / Global Warming / Politics / ToMl

Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute is an organization that’s been based in Chicago and has been in operation for about 25 years. And they’re an extreme, ultra-conservative, libertarian think tank. And over the last number of years, they made it among their missions to discredit the science of climate change, in many ways, and they sort of set themselves up to be a hub for people who didn’t believe that climate change was man-made. They began having annual conferences. They put forward a bunch of so-called “experts” who claim to be scientists, who did not believe with mainstream science that the climate was changing and that human activity, specifically industrial activity, was having a part in it. And so, what they were doing, on a broader scale—where they fit in is that their mission really was to create doubt about the fact that climate change was occurring. And when there’s doubt, then it’s very hard to put policy in place. So, they were one of a number of groups doing this, but they were among the most prominent, and they had previously had links to ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers, as well as a number of mainstream corporations.

Now, in February last year, the water—February this year, excuse me, the water scientist Peter Gleick obtained—through deception, he basically pretended to be a member of the board of Heartland, and he obtained a number of confidential documents that were prepared for a board meeting. And these documents really shone more of a light on the inner workings of Heartland. They were important for two reasons. One, they contained a donors list, so we got to know who exactly was giving money to this organization. That was something they had never disclosed. And there were some surprises in that list, because there were some mainstream corporations there like General Motors Foundation, which has a corporate policy of believing in climate change and of having sustainable business practices. The second thing it revealed that I think was interesting was their project to discredit climate change was really laid bare. And among those activities that they were engaged in was a project they wanted to set up that would specifically target children, schoolchildren from kindergarten age, and basically indoctrinate these children so that they did not believe in the science they were being taught in schools. And those were the two most striking things that came out of that exposé.

basically the organization is imploding. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s been a lot of backlash against Peter Gleick. People have questioned whether that was an appropriate thing for a scientist to be doing. But, really, Heartland has been done a lot of damage. Once exposed, a lot of their mainstream donors decided they didn’t want to fund that organization anymore. And Heartland actually compounded the damage, because they adopted a very combative approach. They took out a billboard comparing people who believe in climate change to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and that just started a whole new flight of other donors. So, really, they’ve put themselves beyond the pale. They’ve made themselves seem a very extreme right-wing organization, where before they had adopted this posture of being sort of skeptical, probing the science, trying to get the most rational policy. All that posture is just gone now. They’ve been exposed for being an extremely conservative organization.

— source democracynow.org By Suzanne Goldenberg

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *