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. 

Global Temperatures Increase, Concern Wanes

A recent worldwide survey by GlobeScan Radar, a public opinion research consultant company, found that concern about global warming and other environmental issues has hit a 20-year low. The survey covered 22 countries, including the United States

            Despite even more conclusive evidence of a warming world, only 49 percent of respondents considered global warming a serious problem. Fewer people also considered polluted waters, species going extinct, and other environmental concerns as being “very serious.” This is probably good news to coal companies, oil companies and other polluters, but it is probably bad news for the rest of us, whether we are among the concerned or unconcerned crowd.

            What has happened? It could be several things. Journalism is undergoing a grand transformation, and perhaps this affects the public’s ability to follow environmental stories that usually have a long narrative arcs and can contain concepts that can be difficult to understand. Industry propagandists, such as the Heartland Institute and Heritage Foundation, may have become more successful with their messages.

            People also tire and “tune out” longstanding news stories, and we may be at a point when hearing about increased droughts and melting icecaps has fatigued us to where we are no longer listening. The chairman of GlobeScan, Doug Miller, says, “Evidence of environmental damage is stronger than ever, but our data shows that economic crisis and lack of political leadership means that the public are starting to tune out.”

I Found a Merchant of Doubt

I guess this is an example of what my last blog was about. In that blog I talked about Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, an exposé on the efforts of industries such as tobacco and oil to obfuscate information on the dangers and consequences of their products: in the case of tobacco, cancer, in that of oil, global warming.

Nicolas Loris of the Heritage Foundation

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2011/11/New-EPA-Inspector-General-Report-One-More-Reason-to-Reject-Climate-Change-Regulation#_edn12

If you click the above link, you’ll find a piece by Nicolas Loris on the Heritage Foundation web site in which he tries to cast doubt on the work of the EPA and the science of global warming. Giving some context to this link, the Supreme Court, in their ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA found that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are pollutants and as such the authority and the responsibility to regulate such pollutants fell to the EPA under its mandate under the Clean Air Act.

            In response to the ruling, the EPA produced a Technical Support Document (TSD), a report on the science of increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the consequences that has for global warming, rising sea levels, and the acidification of the oceans.

            Loris’ critique of the TSD centers on a procedural review of the TSD from the EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG). In doing the procedural review, the OIG reclassified the TSD from an Influential Scientific Assessment to a Highly Influential Scientific Assessment. These two kinds of assessments have differing processing procedures. The OIG found that the procedures for the TSD had not fully followed those of a Highly Influential Scientific Assessment under its reclassification.

            Please bear with me a while longer. I know this is complicated. It is meant to be. And that is part of the problem.

            The reason this process is so complicated is because big business and industry lobbyists back in the beginning of the George W. Bush administration were able to attach a rider on a spending bill that imposed burdensome regulations and red tape on the EPA and other government agencies that rely on science for their work. This rider, The Data Quality Act, is intended to generate reports upon reports, like the review by the OIG, and lead to analysis paralysis.

Loris says that the procedural review “should bring to light the problems with the EPA’s approach to greenhouse gas regulation: The EPA refuses to seriously consider broad dissenting science on the causes of climate change.” The procedural review found that certain procedures for a certain type of assessment were not fully followed. The procedural review did not find anything wrong with the science used in the TSD, nor did it find that the TSD lacked the requirements for rulemaking. By performing a mental bait and switch, changing the topic from procedures to science, Loris would have you believe otherwise.

            At another point he claims that the people at the EPA “bypass the legislative process” in regulating greenhouse gasses. In Massachusetts v. EPA the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had to regulate greenhouse gasses under the authority granted the agency under the Clean Air Act, a law passed by Congress. No legislative process bypassed here.

            Loris would lead you to believe that the EPA is remiss in its responsibilities by heading one section of his critique EPA: Ignoring Dissenting Science. Yet, reading the substance of the section you find that a couple of the “dissenters” don’t disagree with the scientific conclusion that CO2 is warming our planet. They merely disagree as to the extent of the warming that will take place. Most importantly, Loris offers no science that has been performed that shows that the plant is warming for other reasons besides the increased presence of CO2 in our atmosphere. That’s right. No dissenting science. Zero. Zip. Nada.

            I can see how this writing of Loris could, at first glance, sway some folks. But a good look at it, and understanding the context in which a procedural review was generated for an Environmental Protection Agency TSD, reveals it to be laughable.

Ref:

Technical Support Document for Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act  December 7, 2009: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment/downloads/Endangerment%20TSD.pdf

Procedural Review of EPA’s Greenhouse Gases Endangerment Finding Data Quality Processes Report No: 11-P-0702 September 26, 2011: http://www.epa.gov/oig/reports/2011/20110926-11-P-0702.pdf