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. 

The Competitive Enterprise Institute Wants You to Think That They Care About People LOL

I’ve been meaning to get around to writing this post for a while, ever since September of this year, when I blogged about the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring. In the googling I did to research for that blog post, I ran across the site Rachel Was Wrong. Go ahead, click around the site if you like.

This site claims that, in pointing out the environmental and health consequences from the overuse of many pesticides, particularly DDT, Carson and Silent Spring “generated a culture of fear, resulting in policies have (sic) deprived many people access to life-saving chemicals. In particular, many nations curbed the use of the pesticide DDT for malaria control because Carson created unfounded fears about the chemical.”

The site suggests that millions of deaths from malaria might be avoided had the US not banned DDT and the rest of the world restricted its use. Malaria is a serious health concern. Each year, worldwide, more than 200 million people contact malaria, and more than half a million people die each year from the mosquito borne disease, with more than 90 percent of these cases and deaths occurring in Africa. That Africa suffers the most from malaria is reflected in the logo of Rachel Was Wrong, a mosquito biting into the African continent.

DDT or other pesticides are not necessary for malaria eradication. As has been shown with the U.S. construction of the Panama Canal and the eradication of malaria from the South through the U.S. Public Health Service and the Tennessee Valley Authority, malaria is best fought through organized government efforts, efforts that sometimes span decades. DDT is still used in many parts of the world for malarial control. Its use is complicated, with demonstrated health consequences for humans and environmental damage, while it can be successful in stemming the occurrence of malaria or can serve as a part of a program for the disease’s eradication.[i]

Rachel Was Wrong is a website placed upon the Internet by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). CEI has been around since 1984. That they would attack Rachel Carson and her work is unsurprising. This organization has a track record of anti-environmentalism. In 2003 the institute worked to quash a report on global warming that had been published in 2000. In 2005 they supported a bill that would have severely weakened the Endangered Species Act. They are loath to credit environmental regulation with any success. In May of 1998, during a fairly upbeat time when more than 20 imperiled plants and animals had recovered so well that they were about to be delisted as endangered, Brian Seashole, a CEI spokesman, said that the eagle, peregrine, and other species, “have recovered despite the ESA, not because of it.”[ii]

On the Rachel Was Wrong website photographs of children, all of them African, give the impression that CEI is a compassionate organization, trying to right the wrongs of misguided environmentalists. But this organization’s positions have not been ones to enhance health or well-being. They have supported the tobacco industry, on one occasion trying to obfuscate the findings of a 1994 study that found that as many as 3000 American lives are shortened each year from the passive inhalation of tobacco smoke.

Just this year CEI published an op-ed in USA Today opposing increased inspection of slaughterhouses and farms and the adoption of risk prevention controls in food production to stem the incidence of food borne diseases. A 1997 study found that hundreds of thousands of premature deaths could be prevented each year by curbing the emission of greenhouse gasses and particulate matter into the atmosphere. CEI dismissed the findings, saying, “effect of particulates on health is controversial.”[iii]

So is CEI helping Africa? The cigarette companies that they support are opening markets in Africa, with some health organizations predicting a "tobacco epidemic" on the horizon there. The oil companies that back the CEI are causing great environmental damage in Africa, with corresponding human suffering and loss of life.

Like the beggars in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, who are shown to be faking their lameness and blindness to gain the alms of their fellow Parisians, Rachel Was Wrong is a similar dishonest ruse, giving us the impression that CEI cares about suffering children, when they don’t care in the slightest.

---

[i] Bouwman, Hindrik, Henk van den Berg, and Henrik Kylin. "DDT And Malaria Prevention: Addressing The Paradox." Environmental Health Perspectives 119.6 (2011): 744-747. Environment Complete. Web. 25 Dec. 2012.

[ii] Hebert, Josef. “Bald eagle, peregrine, and others leaving endangered list.” Ludington Daily News May 6, 1998 page 6 print

[iii] “Study: Emission curbs would save lives” The Tuscaloosa News November 7, 1997 page 8A print

---

[i] Bouwman, Hindrik, Henk van den Berg, and Henrik Kylin. "DDT And Malaria Prevention: Addressing The Paradox." Environmental Health Perspectives 119.6 (2011): 744-747. Environment Complete. Web. 25 Dec. 2012.

[ii] Hebert, Josef. “Bald eagle, peregrine, and others leaving endangered list.” Ludington Daily News May 6, 1998 page 6 print

Michael Mann Sues the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and That's a Good Thing

Among the scientists most besieged by the global warming denial industry is Michael Mann. Mann is a faculty member in the Meteorology and Earth Sciences departments at Penn State University, where he is also the director of the Earth System Science Center. He was the lead author of the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter for the IPCC’s Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001. One the graphs that resulted from his work on climate showed a great increase in recent times and nicknamed the “hockey stick” graph. That might be how you’re familiar with him. He is also coauthor of Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming and the author of Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines, which gives his account of the forces behind the global warming denial industry.

            Industry, their allies in Congress, and their sponsored “think tanks” have attacked Mann and his work for the last ten years. That is why I’m glad to see that he is fighting back and fighting back against one of the most prominent players in this misinformation industry, the Competitive Enterprise Institute. A post on the institute’s blog referred to the scientist as “the other scandal” at Penn State and accused Mann of “molesting data” in his research, obviously comparing him to Jerry Sandusky, the convicted serial child molester.

            Mann now has a lawsuit suing the Competitive Enterprise Institute for defamation, as well a right wing magazine, National Review, that reposted the institute’s blog. The 37-page complaint also accuses the institute and National Review of recycling “false and defamatory statements” about the scientist’s research.

            Good luck to Michael Mann. He’s done good science. I don’t know much about how well the legal system will treat his case. The Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review are guaranteed to employ some high-power lawyers, so he might have an uphill battle. It is nonetheless a good thing to see a scientist fighting back against the industries that try to cover up and distract us from a global problem.