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?

Exxon Trashes Planet and the Press Yawns

It has been almost a month since Inside Climate News and a partnership of the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism began publishing their findings that, while Exxon’s scientists had determined decades ago that the burning fossil fuels caused global warming, the large company funded groups like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute who dealt in the business of casting doubt on the science of climate change.

This is possibly one of the greatest scandals of our time; so it is maddening to observe the lack of press coverage of this story. A Proquest search of Donald Trump, only one of the GOP presidential candidates, for the month of October brings up 2043 newspaper stories. A Proquest search of Exxon and climate change brought up 84 results.[1] That is Donald Trump receiving 2,332% more coverage than one of the world’s largest corporations knowing that they are propelling the whole planet into a climate crisis and covering it up. If you like pie charts, here’s a pie chart of the respective press coverage.

You say, OK, but that’s Donald Trump, a headline magnet. A similar search on Carly Fiorina brought up 185 results, still way more than Exxon and their cover-up. Why is there such silence from the press on this? Tell me what you think.

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[1] For the Donald Trump search, I searched on the term “Trump” and restricted the search to headlines in the last 30 days. For the Exxon search, I searched for both the term “Exxon” and “climate change” occurring anywhere in the news story.

Exxon: The World Is Filled With Hillbillies

For me, I remain hopeful. I’m still inspired by the pope’s encyclical of this year, in which he encourages Catholics, actually encourages everybody, to care for the place we live and encourages us to steer away from practices that make the earth a warmer world.

And at the same time it is maddening, as I’ve been mulling over the news that came out this month of Exxon’s duplicity. While employing its own scientists, who informed the multinational company as far back as the 1970s that the effects of man-made global warming were going to affect the company’s operations in the arctic, Exxon was paying front groups and organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute to run their PR campaigns to encourage people to doubt the science of global warming.

Paying scientists to investigate global warming and paying lawyers and PR executives to deny the existence of global warming. The mind is boggled.

The news investigation of Exxon is solid, coming from a yearlong collaboration between the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Los Angeles Times. Their work includes interviews with dozens of experts, including former Exxon employees, and reviewing Exxon related documents, many of them internal memoranda of Exxon, archived at the University of Texas and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta. A similar investigation by Inside Climate News reached the same conclusions.

Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben in an op-ed for The Guardian used the words “treachery” and “sheer, profound, unparalleled evil” to describe Exxon’s decision. He said, “[T]his company had the singular capacity to change the course of world history for the better and instead it changed that course for the infinitely worse. In its greed Exxon helped—more than any other institution—to kill our planet.”

I cannot disagree at all with what McKibben has said.

Democrats in the House (no GOP folks) have called on the Department of Justice to investigate the actions of Exxon as to whether the actions of Exxon are illegal. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has called for the same.

There are also the usual folks you might expect who defend Exxon or who try to obfuscate the truth of the matter. There is this from Forbes, written by James Taylor, who has been employed by the Heartland Institute, as he repeats the trope of uncertainty of climate change. Reading this piece, the most glaring questions that Taylor, a lawyer and not a scientist, never addresses are: If Exxon had been truly skeptical about the research of global warming, why did they continue to fund it? If Exxon had that much doubt about their own scientists conclusions about global warming, why did they plan for its eventuality?

A subject repeated again and again in this blog is the absolute disregard that the coal companies have for the land and people of Appalachia Mountaintop removal has spread poverty, disease, and ecological destruction all across Appalachia. They do not care about the people who live in those hills. And the folks there have put up with the abuse, raising little protest when it comes to the ways of King Coal

And so here we have Exxon treating the whole world as though it were some impoverished holler in West Virginia. In the course of their pursuit of profit Exxon has said that it does not care about the coastal cities infringed upon by rising seas. They don’t care about greater storms bringing floods and destruction. They do not care about the water shortages exacerbated by longer and drier droughts. They do not care about the coral reefs dying from the oceans being 30 percent more acidic than they were 100 years ago. Exxon cared about dollars and the whole rest of the world is filled with ignorant hillbillies.

So far we have proven Exxon right. Except for Sanders and a few others, I hear no outcry. I don’t sense that folks are upset. I’ve heard of no boycotts. Maybe the whole world is a bunch of hillbillies.

ALEC Denies That We're Causing Global Warming, But They Don't Want Folks To Know That They Deny Global Warming

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been around since the eighties. They draft and support business friendly legislation. As part of their mission, they have received money from oil companies, such as Exxon, to deny the existence of climate change.[1]

            They have been a big part of the global warming denialist industry, but suddenly they don’t want folks to know that they are in the denialist industry. ALEC lawyers have sent letters to Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters telling them to immediately “cease making false statements” and “remove all false or misleading material” that may suggest that the conservative organization has any doubt about climate change.

            Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters certainly do call out ALEC for its global warming rhetoric. You can check out instances of where the do so here (League of Conservation Voters) and here (Common Cause).

            And ALEC really does, at least in a gobbledygook sort of way deny that we humans are causing global warming. The following is from ALEC’s Position Statement on Renewables and Climate Change:

Climate change is a historical phenomenon and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions. ALEC will continue to monitor the issue and support the use of sound science to guide policy, but ALEC will also incorporate economic and political realism. Unilateral efforts by the United States or regions within the United States will not significantly decrease carbon emissions globally, and international efforts to decrease emissions have proven politically infeasible and unenforceable. Policymakers in most cases are not willing to inflict economic harm on their citizens with no real benefit. ALEC discourages impractical visionary goals that ignore economic reality, and that will not be met without serious consequences for worldwide standard of living.

OK, nowhere in this statement do they come out and deny that we are making a very warm world with our power plants and automobiles, and I guess that ALEC’s lawyers could stand up in a court and expect to convince a judge or jury that this statement does not deny that climate change is real. But to me it’s obvious that such statements as “the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions,” reveal their intention to keep their obfuscation going.

If all of ALEC’s money came from the fossil fuel industry, they could brush aside the organizations that point out their denialism, but other companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have left ALEC because of its stance on global warming. Even British Petroleum left ALEC because of its denialist position.

So ALEC wants to have it both ways. They want to serve their supporters who want them to deny that global warming is happening. And they want to bring back Google and Yahoo into their tent as well. So they are left in the very awkward position of denying their denial.

The world keeps getting warmer and my head keeps spinning.

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[1] Lee, J. S. (2003, May 28). Exxon backs groups that question global warming. New York Times