Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by Richard Littlemore James Hoggan Page A

there to be a more than 90 percent chance that our spacecraft is headed for trouble, the American Enterprise and Fraser institutes, and the “scientists” who were prepared to take their money, recommended that we embrace that less than 10 percent “unavoidable element of uncertainty” and continue apace.
    After we released the report five days early, we also contacted friends in London, England, where Ken Green and company had scheduled a press conference for the following Monday. (This itself was curious. The IPCC report was released in Paris. The Fraser Institute is based in Vancouver, B.C., and the American Enterprise Institute is in Washington, D.C. We wondered if they thought the London media wouldn’t have heard about the origin of the report.) When the event finally occurred, our London contacts distributed background information on the participants, and the few reporters who turned up seemed unmoved by the Fraser Institute’s analysis. If Exxon got any news coverage for this particular investment, we couldn’t find it.
    This seemed like an excellent example, however, of some of the activities of a large group of “think tanks” that have come under public scrutiny for accepting funding from major industrial sources such as ExxonMobil and then challenging the science of climate change. I put the term “think tank” in quotes because it is so difficult to even define these organizations accurately, much less understand what they do. The original think tanks were founded as policy-development hothouses. They were organizations such as the Brookings Institution (founded 1916) in the U.S. or the C.D. Howe Institute (founded 1958) in Canada, where participants undertook research on issues of public interest and then served up the results for political and sometimes public consideration. The actual term “think tank” is thought to have emerged in the 1950s in reference to military intelligence organizations like the R AND Corporation (R AND is an acronym for “Research and Development”), which were established to try to advise government on how to keep the Cold War from going nuclear.
    By the 1970s and ’80s think tanks were popping up like spring crocuses and seemed increasingly dedicated not to conceiving new policies, but rather to advocating for the kinds of policies that would advance the interests of their funders. We wound up with organizations like the Heartland Institute (founded in the Orwellian year 1984), which used its funding from Philip Morris not to consider whether smoking was a good thing, but to convince the public and, especially, the nation’s legislators that regulating against smoking was a bad thing. Even today (at least as of April 2009), Heartland maintains a pro-tobacco “Smokers’ Lounge” on its Web site, though it now refuses to acknowledge where the funding for this feature comes from. In short, for at least some of these institutions the emphasis has shifted from “think” to “tank.” What were once centers of academic excellence have become heavy-duty weapons in the battle for public opinion and political support.
    This was fairly clear in the pro-tobacco performance of the Heartland Institute, but it was more difficult to establish on the climate change file. Greenpeace research director Kert Davies said in an interview with Richard Littlemore in February 2009 that his organization was becoming increasingly frustrated by the non-response from mainstream media to what Green-peace felt was an obvious, think tank-driven manipulation of the public conversation. Greenpeace had found and publicized the American Petroleum Institute’s “Global Climate Science Communications Plan,” which showed that four of the most prominent climate change-denying think tanks (the Heartland Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Frontiers of Freedom Institute) were involved in conceiving that plan. But whenever Davies or his colleagues