Christian Science Monitor CSM
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CSM
By Stephanie Pappas LiveScience Senior Writer
Feb. 15, 2012
Leaked documents from the free-market conservative organization The Heartland Institute reveal a plan to create school educational materials that contradict the established science on climate change.
The documents, leaked by an anonymous donor and released on DeSmogBlog, include the organization's 2012 fundraising plan. It lists Heartland Institute donors, from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation (established by Koch Industries billionaire Charles G. Koch), to Philip Morris parent company Altria, to software giant Microsoft and pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.
The climate change education project is funded so far by an anonymous donor who has given $13 million to the Institute over the past five years. Proposed by policy analyst David Wojick, who holds a doctorate in epistemology and has worked for coal and electricity generation companies, the project would create education "modules" written to meet curriculum guidelines for every grade level.
"Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn't alarmist or overtly political," the report reads. "Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success."
Funding skepticism
Heartland focuses on free-market issues across the board, including promoting charter schools, lobbying for business-friendly finance, insurance and real estate rules and promoting prescription drug availability before full Food and Drug Administration testing.
In the area of climate change, the leaked documents revealed that the group funds vocal climate skeptics, including Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change founder Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), physicist Fred Singer ($5,000 plus expenses per month), and New Zealand geologist Robert Carter ($1,667 per month). They've also pledged $90,000 to skeptical meteorologist Anthony Watts, who blogs at WattsUpWithThat.com.
The documents also reveal a communications strategy aimed at "keep[ing] opposing voices out" of publications such as Forbes Magazine, where the audience is "reliably anti-climate."
On the education front, Wojick would be paid $5,000 per module, or $25,000 per quarter, according to the report's tentative estimates, to produce the Heartland climate curricula. The Institute's anonymous donor has pledged $100,000 to the project, which the Institute hopes to match from other donors.
Each module would inject skepticism into the scientific consensus on climate change. Example statements in the report include: "Whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy;" "Models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial;" and "Whether CO2 [carbon dioxide] is a pollutant is controversial." The modules would also teach that the idea of carbon dioxide as a pollutant is "controversial," arguing that carbon dioxide is crucial to life on Earth and that natural emissions are 20 times those of human emissions.
Creating controversy
In fact, while some of these statements may be politically controversial, they are not particularly scientifically controversial. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, which synthesizes global scientific findings about climate change, states: "Since the start of the industrial era (about 1750), the overall effect of human activities on climate has been a warming influence. The human impact on climate during this era greatly exceeds that due to known changes in natural processes, such as solar changes and volcanic eruptions."
Likewise, while models cannot represent the climate system perfectly (thus the uncertainly in how much the Earth will warm for a given amount of emissions), climate simulations are checked and re-checked against real-world observations and are an established tool in understanding the atmosphere.
And while carbon dioxide is crucial for plant life, the carbon balance on Earth is a delicate cycle, with oceans and land able to absorb only so much CO2. Humans do emit only a fraction of the 750 gigatons of CO2 that move through the atmosphere each year, but small changes in the total amount can overwhelm so-called carbon "sinks" such as the ocean, resulting in important, and cumulative, changes in the atmosphere. [10 Ways the Weather Changed History]
"These documents are breathtaking, and they reveal what many of us have long suspected: That there is a campaign afoot by groups directly funded by the fossil fuel industry and right-wing foundations such as Koch Industries to mislead the public about climate change," Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann wrote in an email to LiveScience.
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no lnx
Rep] Darrel Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee, has led the now 16-month old investigation into who knew what, and when, about an ill-advised gun interdiction scheme on the border called Fast and Furious.
The effort, says Mr. Issa, is to get answers for the family of Brian Terry, the Border Patrol agent shot and killed in a high desert shootout where guns belonging to the Fast and Furious gun-walking program were found.
But as Congress moves now to cite the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder, for contempt, the situation has quickly become more intense, fueling a central and long-running conspiracy theory about Fast and Furious.
Along with conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Issa suggested as late as April that Fast and Furious may have been part of a policy by the White House to flood the Mexican market with guns to foment violence, which would then put political pressure back on the US to curb its wide-open border gun bazaar and weaken Second Amendment rights.
That contention, liberals say, is on its face absurd. Comedy Central satiristStephen Colbert summed up the extent of the alleged conspiracy on Friday, concluding Fast and Furious-spawned border violence was intended “to panic Americans in order to gin up support for a Draconian gun control measure Obama has never introduced. Complicated? Yes. The fevered ramblings of a syphilitic brain? Perhaps.”
But the “worse than Watergate” internet rumblings aside, last week’s Oversight Committee vote – which fell along partisan lines – to recommend Holder for a House vote on contempt and President Obama’s decision on the same day to invoke executive privilege to keep related documents secret did enliven debate about what’s really at stake with the investigation. To wit, whether the documents Congress wants and that the Administration won’t release may be able to confirm or put to rest suspicions that not just Holder, but Obama, had a policy hand in Fast and Furious.
In opening the contempt hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Issa contended that, “[The contempt hearing] is not about this investigation, it’s about a narrow subset of documents that this committee must ultimately receive.”
But in April, Issa gave an interview at the National Rifle Association convention in St. Louis, in which he gave credence to suspicions held by many conservatives and gun owners about the program’s true intent.
“Could it be that what they really were thinking of was in fact to use this walking of guns in order to promote an assault weapons ban?” Rep. Issa said. “Many think so. And [the administration] hasn’t come up with an explanation that would cause any of us not to agree.”
Loosely based on two similar operations that took place during the Bush administration, Fast and Furious began in 2009, shortly after administration officials, including Obama, several times cited in public a contested estimate that 90 percent of guns used in Mexican violence came from the US, a situation they said was wreaking havoc in Mexico and injuring relations between the two continental powers.
Around that time, the administration says, ATF agents in Phoenix, under pressure to stem the flow, began allowing straw purchasers to “walk” assault weapons into Mexico, in order to track the guns and build criminal cases against not just low-level drug operators, but cartel bosses.
But in the process, ATF lost track of 1,400 guns,some of which have been recovered at murder scenes in Mexico and two of which were found at the scene in Arizona where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down by suspected drug smugglers.
To be sure, Holder, who has testified nine times about the program, has made some slips, including the fact that he told Congress he didn’t know about the program until after the death of Agent Terry, though it now seems clear that some of his direct reports may have had rudimentary knowledge of the program 10 months earlier.
Another event that piqued Republican interest came last year when Holder had to retract a letter sent to Congress on Feb. 4, 2011, which stated flatly that the ATF wasn’t allowing guns to walk. DOJ said it was relying on inaccurate field reports when it wrote that letter, and filled Congress in six months later when they could confirm and nail down the truth.
In the aftermath, both Holder and the President have acknowledged the gambit was a terrible idea, shouldn’t have happened, and won’t happen again. Though he contends he was never directly involved, Holder, as Obama’s top cop, has taken responsibility and apologized to the family of Agent Terry for his death. Meanwhile, half a dozen involved agents and officials have lost their jobs or been reassigned.
While tens of thousands of documents are in play, Congress say it wants to look specifically at a set of 1,300 documents, mostly emails, that investigators hope will shed light on who at Justice and the White House were directly involved. Holder has maintained that releasing some of the documents Congress wants could put cases and field agents in jeopardy.
At the least, the contents of the documents could fall short of conspiracy but still yield politically embarrassing information about how the administration crafted its response to the scandal, giving rise to charges that Republicans are on an irrational “fishing expedition” for political dirt.
“Though it’s not clear exactly what these documents may involve, it seems likely they consist of the Department of Justice’s reaction to the backlash against Fast and Furious,” writes Matthew DeLuca of the Daily Beast.
Given that most Americans “hold Congress in contempt,” as Duke University political scientist Michael Munger says, the President has portrayed the constitutional showdown as part of a running battle with obstinate Republicans, a situation he certainly elevated by stepping in to block the Congressional subpoena with executive privilege.
"The Republicans are succeeding in a strategy that they laid out for all of you at the beginning of last year," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Friday. "They vowed to use their investigative powers to score political points against the administration and to further obstruct the President's legislative agenda."
Democrats on the Oversight Committee on Saturday filed a “minority view” to be included in next week’s scheduled contempt vote, noting specifically that, “The Committee’s investigation of ATF gunwalking operations has been characterized by a series of unfortunate and unsubstantiated allegations against the Obama Administration that turned out to be inaccurate.”
But while the political lines around Fast and Furious are thus clearly drawn, allusions to Watergate-sized conspiracy theories do, at the very least, also help bolster Issa’s central point: If only to quell such theories, Americans deserve to know whether it was really a hapless bureaucratic blunder or whether administration officials lied about the extent of their involvement in what became a deadly scandal.
Related stories
DECODER 'Fast and Furious' probe: Obama's Watergate, or a waste of time?
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Obama invokes executive privilege to protect Eric Holder: Can he do that?
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Jun 23, 2012What 'conspiracy' lies behind Eric Holder and 'Fast and Furious'? ... desert shootout where guns belonging to the Fast and Furious gun-walking program were found. ... Mr. Issa contended that ...
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....In our review of news coverage, most mainstream media reports omitted any mention of the relationship
between the organizations we identified in this analysis and their financial ties to fossil fuel
interests. In fact, our review showed that the media described the link to fossil fuel interests only
six percent (6%) of the time. Several outlets mentioned these organizations repeatedly during the
five-year period, yet never communicated to readers the groups’ financial ties to fossil fuels. Of the
60 publications surveyed, the Houston Chronicle had the highest percentage (15%) of descriptions
informing its readers of the financial ties between the 10 organizations and their fossil fuel funders....
[graf?]
...The frequency of coverage that these organizations received is notable not only for quantity, but also
for the quality of their placement. :{Nearly one third (31%) of the 1,010 mentions came from six national
outlets: Associated Press, Politico, The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Christian
Science Monitor.}: The average rate of media coverage for the respective organizations ranged one
every other month to more than once a month between 2007-2011. Table 13 shows that a large majority
of appearances in major national publications included no mention of the organizations’ ties to
fossil fuel interests....
FINDING 7: Despite being labeled as “free market” or “libertarian,”
these organizations focus their criticism almost exclusively on
clean energy policy investments. They make few – if any – references
to government support for fossil fuels.
The appellations “conservative,” “libertarian” and “small government” are terms used both by these
organizations themselves, as well as by media outlets, to define the organizations’ motivations. Specifically,
they are used to define the organizations’ rationale for opposing policy investments for clean
energy, legislation to fight climate change and anti-pollution standards.
However, a review of the 1,010 stories surveyed illustrates that these groups’ criticisms almost completely
omit references to far-higher levels of taxpayer support for mature, highly profitable fossil fuel
industries that least need taxpayer money.
Of 75 stories we reviewed that mentioned “subsidies” or “taxes,” more than half (51%) opposed clean
energy policies, 12% opposed all subsidies, 4% opposed all energy subsidies, 5% opposed fossil fuel
subsidies and 1% supported fossil fuel subsidies and clean energy subsidies.
These results stand in contrast to what is actually spent by taxpayers on different energy sources. For
example, a study by the Environmental Law Institute16 found that thefossil fuel industry received
six times more subsidies than clean energy. Earth Track, which has done the most comprehensive
study to date, found that fossil fuels receive up to 20 times more taxpayer money than clean energy.17
Despite the large disparity in fossil fuel support versus clean energy support, these “limited-government”
organizations almost exclusively...