Are the Cato Institute and Other Right Wing "Think Tanks" Criminal?

The Weekly World News has been around for a while. Started simply as a way to use the old black and white press tossed aside when the National Enquirer went full color 36 years ago, the former supermarket tabloid (the publication is now online) has introduced us to celebrities walking the earth long after their deaths, relics found and proven to be from the Garden of Eden or Noah’s Ark, and the best of the best of tabloid entertainment, Bat Boy, the half-human/half-bat wunderkind.

 

Bat Boy, The Alfred E. Newman of The Weekly World New

Bat Boy and insane religious relics aside, the publication proudly proclaims itself as “The World’s Only Reliable News.” Still, and despite the publication of an occasional story that is based in reality, since 2004 the publication has printed the wink and a nod disclaimer that “the reader should suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment.”

            For most folks leafing through Weekly World News is a pleasure similar to reading The Onion. There are a few individuals who wind up believing what they read in the paper, but these folks would probably fall for some other far-fetched story of alien abduction or that President Obama has issued an executive order to have his likeness carved into Mount Rushmore. Overall the general consensus would be that The Weekly World News is idiotic but harmless.

 

From The Weekly World News: Obama to join Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore

The fictions that The Weekly World News publishes are harmless, but in other cases we recognize that publishing stories or claims that are false is wrong and sometimes criminal. The Federal Trade Commission enforces “Truth in Advertising” laws, protecting consumers from false claims in ads. If you tell folks that your doggie waste bags are compostable and they aren’t, the FTC is going to do something about it. You also can’t publish untrue things that can damage a person’s reputation. That is libel, and it is a serious crime.

            So what about organizations like the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who have taken money from companies like Exxon and other oil companies so that they can spread lies and misinformation about global warming? Climate change can affect the lives of millions whose food supply is threatened by drought or whose homes and cities are inundated by rising seas. Lying about climate change, is that not as serious as when the National Enquirer was forced to pay $1.6 million to Carol Burnett because they said that the comedienne was seen drunk in public? Is that not as serious as a company having to pay out $45 million to consumers who were hoodwinked into believing that their more expensive brand of yogurt was more nutritious when it actually was not?

            Exxon knowing of the hazards of global warming while paying groups to deny or obfuscate those harsh realities could prove to be a crime. So far, from what I’ve read in the LA Times and Inside Climate News, it was certainly unethical. So what about Exxon’s enablers? If Exxon committed a crime, aren’t Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and a lot of other organizations that took money from oil giants and other big polluters just as culpable?

Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Corporate Lies?

Big Surprise: Academic Investigation Finds a Large, Well-Financed Movement to Deny Climate Change

This is one of those academic papers that shows scientific proof that water flows downhill or that the sky is indeed blue that leaves you thinking, “Well, duh, who didn’t know that?”

Published in the journal Climate Change, Robert J. Brulle has given us a glimpse of the huge and sophisticated industry that has grown up to deny the existence of global warming. Using IRS data, his paper Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations uncovers close to a billion dollars a year that organizations and businesses such as the Koch Affiliated Foundation and Exxon Mobile give to “think tanks” such as the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute to deny and obfuscate the issue of climate change. Not only is the money involved in this enterprise of denial astounding, but the magnitude of the enterprise is huge as well. Brulle found more than 130 institutions that fund what he calls the climate change counter-movement (CCCM). And besides the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, there are 19 other organizations that receive funding to spread the word that the planet is not warming and the seas are not rising. He has also found a trend of some of the larger organizations and businesses of concealing their donations to the “think tanks” by funneling the contributions through donor directed philanthropies.

            Let me stop myself there for a moment. A common strategy of these “think tanks” has been to deny the science and evidence of global warming. In light of the ever-growing evidence of climate change, the strategy of denying or denigrating the science of global warming has changed for some of these organizations. Some of them are not denying global warming, but they are still throwing cold water on the idea of doing anything about it. So Brulle’s identification of all this money financing “think tanks” as a counter-movement, rather than simply a denial movement, is apt.

            Brulle may actually underestimate the power and extent of the CCCM. Left out of his analysis are the politicians who hold sway and influence the thinking of their constituencies and who hold bogus hearings that are in tune with the CCCM. Larger still in influence are the talk radio, whose millions of listeners hear hours and hours of CCCM talk.

            As I said above, Who didn’t know that? Who didn’t know that there was a well-financed program to delay efforts at controlling global warming? But Brulle’s paper is necessary. If there is an effort to deny climate change, there is also an effort to deny the denial. We need his investigation of the CCCM. 

Dear Cato: Climate Action Delayed Is Climate Action Denied

It might be easy to imagine that the folks at the Cato Institute aren’t as bad as some other “think tanks” that work at the denial of the science that reveals and explains the phenomenon of global warming. After all, right up front, on their web page on global warming, they clearly say, “Global warming is indeed real, and human activity has been a contributor since 1975.”

OK, before we go any further, the part about 1975 is a little weird. Does the Cato Institute demarcate the start of our warming of the globe to when “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting” hit the airwaves? Or do they want to pin it on the start of Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign? The Cato Institute has never liked Jimmy Carter.  Just to be clear, we’ve been warming the world since we started burning fossil fuels, more like 1750 instead of 1975. But I’m not going to ding them for being off by about 225 years.

            The rest of the sentence is something that seems incredibly reasonable coming from a “think tank” that was started in part by Charles Koch and whose purpose is to support oil industries and an economy based on the extraction and use of fossil fuels. They acknowledge that global warming is real and we’re part of the problem. Wow! How reasonable. These folks sound like they’ve done their homework and are willing to follow through and do their part to reduce carbon emissions.

            That’s the way it seems until you read the rest of what Cato has to say:

But global warming is also a very complicated and difficult issue that can provoke very unwise policy in response to political pressure. Although there are many different legislative proposals for substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, there is no operational or tested suite of technologies that can accomplish the goals of such legislation.

Fortunately, and contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding climate change, there is ample time to develop such technologies, which will require substantial capital investment by individuals.

Where do I start with this? Global warming is “very complicated.” OK, I guess it is. What does that have to do with reducing carbon emissions? In some cases it might be complicated, and in others it might be quite simple. The other red flag here is the use of the word “provoke,” which can simply mean to stir to action, but also carries the connotation of inciting anger and rashness, and here in this case insinuates that climate policy may not be well thought out or poorly designed.

And while the phrase about “no operational or tested suite of technologies” that can accomplish the goals of climate change legislation has a germ of truth to it—we are, after all, on untested territory here with global warming. We have never tossed up tons and tons of carbon in the air and substantially warmed the entire earth—that does not mean that we should not work to remedy the tight spot that we’ve put ourselves in. I could cite a hundred examples of the past, from Columbus to Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, to illustrate that although we sometimes find ourselves in uncharted territory, we can still be successful in our efforts.

And renewable energy, hybrid cars, and other technologies that are to help us reduce or mitigate climate change are only part of the solution. A lot of economists will tell you that the easiest way to bring about reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is a carbon tax. A carbon tax can be simple, designed to be fair to the poor and lower classes, and be quite effective in making all of our carbon footprints smaller and smaller.

As the Cato Institute wraps things up, they swerve into outright falsehood when they say that there is plenty of time to develop the technologies to stave off global warming. This is risible. We have pushed the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere up to 400 ppm, the planet is sufficiently warmed, and we are seeing some of the consequences of the forcing caused by all this new carbon dioxide in the air. Glaciers melt, the oceans rise, and our weather patterns are changing.

The Cato Institute tries to come off as being responsible and reasonable, acknowledging our contributions to climate change. But they are as bad as any of the organizations or industry hired guns who deny the link between our carbon emissions and a warmer world. They remind me of the “responsible voices” who claimed that they themselves were not racists yet were quick to caution Martin Luther King that he was asking for too much too quickly.

In his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King clarified what was at the core of this delaying tactic. In the letter he wrote, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

And so it is with Cato. Their “ample time” is the same as the racist “Wait.” Saying that we should take our time to work on climate change means that they don’t ever want to work on climate change. Their “ample time” rings in the ears of Alaskan natives loosing their towns and homes; it rings in the ears of Filipinos whose homes and villages were ravaged by Haiyan; it rings in the ears of all of us whose food, water, and safety is jeopardized by global warming with piercing familiarity.