Ebell bak

both 1 and 2

new Loud and proud climate change denier hangs it up

By Timothy Cama | 12/12/2023 01:34 PM EST

From helping to block cap and trade to scuttling the Paris Agreement, Myron Ebell has played a starring role in climate politics. As he readies to retire, his adversaries say he can’t exit soon enough.

Myron Ebell in London in 2017. Leon Neal/Getty Images

“A superstar of the Denialosphere” is how former journalist Eric Pooley described Myron Ebell in his 2010 book “The Climate War.”

Business Insider wrote in 2009 that Ebell “may be enemy #1 to the current climate change community.”

“One of the single greatest threats our planet has ever faced,” the Sierra Club opined in 2016. Rolling Stone put him in its list of top six “misleaders.”

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And those are just the labels Ebell has boasted about in his own biography.

Ebell, 70, has been at the forefront of climate change denial for more than two decades — and in fighting against conservationists before that — through his advocacy, commentary and influence with conservatives and Republicans.

He’s played roles in blocking cap-and-trade legislation for carbon dioxide, the unsuccessful 1990s efforts to change the Endangered Species Act and former President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement.

And while he acknowledges that man-made emissions have led to some warming, he dismisses the idea that there is any such thing as a climate crisis, calling the idea “preposterous.”

Now, he’s hanging up his hat. Ebell stepped down as director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment in August. He’s remained with the group as a senior fellow, though he’s retiring fully at the end of January.

“I’ve been here a long time. And we’ve done some things and I brought some energy to the job,” he told E&E News in a recent interview reflecting on his career.

“But … my energy level has gone down,” he said, a change that he says is “partly due to getting older and partly due to side effects from the [Covid-19] vaccines,” effects he declined to detail further but said he continues to recover from.

Health and science authorities, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, say serious adverse side effects from the vaccines are extremely rare.

“So I think it’s time to move aside,” Ebell said.

“His name will surely live on in infamy.”

Michael Mann, climate scientist.

Ebell’s climate policy foes reflected on his career as well, acknowledging his outsize influence.

“Nobody has done more damage to efforts to address the climate crisis before it’s too late than Ebell. He has devoted his career to mortgaging the planet for future generations through his paid promotion of denial, delay and dissembling,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“The damage has already been done, but he can’t retire soon enough. His name will surely live on in infamy,” he said.

Environmentalist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben had something of a backhanded compliment. “Dogged and effective, he can certainly claim credit for some discernible increment of the planet’s increased temperature.”

“I hope he finds a nice piece of property at sea level for his retirement” is how Jeremy Symons, a longtime environmental communications adviser who often tussled with Ebell, put it.

His allies say they’ll remember his work fondly.

“Myron has been the axel around which climate realist pushback has revolved for the last 25 years,” said Steve Milloy, a high-profile climate science denier who worked with Ebell on Trump’s EPA transition team.

“From his leadership of the Cooler Heads Coalition to his leadership of the Trump EPA transition team, Myron has done yeoman’s work on climate over the decades, always with sagacity and a smile on his face.”

CEI President Kent Lassman said he’s “tremendously grateful” for Ebell’s work over his nearly 25 years at the organization.

“As a result, we enjoy an enviable position as a leader on crucial issues to the future of America and the economy,” he said. “Because of Myron’s successes, our rule of law, property rights and free market environmentalism has been protected against tremendous external assaults.”

From failed academic to land rights champion

Ebell grew up in rural eastern Oregon, outside Baker City, a town of about 10,000 near the original route of the Oregon Trail. His family has been ranching in the area since 1869, shortly after a gold rush started there.

He was an “eternal graduate student,” with stints at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University.

“I wasn’t involved in politics,” he said. “I thought it was a waste of time.”

Upon realizing he “wasn’t going to be very good” at academics, Ebell and his wife moved to Washington in the 1980s. There, he started getting involved in conservative politics, including at the National Taxpayers Union.

Ebell eventually settled on federal lands and property rights issues, channeling his and his family’s experiences with the federal government as a neighbor and landlord. He highlighted difficulties with exercising grazing rights, neglect of forests that led to wildfires and restrictions for endangered species, among other issues.

“I decided … that at that time, the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity was the environmental movement.”

Myron Ebell.

In 1989 he was named the Washington representative for the National Inholders Association, which later became the American Land Rights Association. It’s part of the Wise Use movement that advocates for looser restrictions on the use of land and natural resources.

“The reason I got involved is because I decided … that at that time, the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity was the environmental movement,” he said.

“And secondly, that the conservative movement just didn’t pay much attention to it, and that more effort was needed to be put into challenging the efforts of the preservationists and the environmental movement.”

He takes “a tiny amount” of credit for bringing those issues closer to the forefront for conservatives.

His time at the land rights group coincided with House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution. Ebell and his allies thought they could push through big ESA changes to reduce the burdens for industry and landowners under the new majority.

Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) in February 1995. | Greg Gibson/AP

But in a now-famous leaked 1995 memo, Ebell observed that Gingrich’s outspoken love for animals could stand in the way.

“His soft feelings for cuddly little critters is still going to be a big problem,” he wrote.

“I might not have tried so hard at that point if I understood where everyone was on this,” Ebell reflected. “I thought that if the Republicans had a bill that had overwhelming co-sponsorship among Republicans that the leadership would actually bring it up for a vote.”

Climate crisis? ‘Preposterous’

Overall, however, Ebell assesses his work at the American Land Rights Association as successful.

“Back in the ’90s, the preservation movement still believed that the way to end human use and resource production on federal land, to lock it up, was to pass a bill creating a park or wilderness area or something,” he said. “We defeated a lot of bills that were quite popular, creating parks, wild and scenic rivers, wilderness areas.”

Ebell later worked for Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) and then as policy director at Frontiers of Freedom, a conservative think tank launched in 1995 by former Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.). He started to focus there on fighting the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

“My view of things is that you should take on big issues, and you should fight to win. And so if climate was the biggest issue, then that was the one I wanted to be involved in.”

He shifted to CEI in 1999, leading its energy and environment efforts. CEI, a conservative think tank, has gotten funding from various fossil fuel interests, including Exxon Mobil, Marathon Petroleum, Murray Energy, and the political network tied to Charles Koch and his late brother David Koch.

“The reason we haven’t lost a whole lot is because, simply, reality,” he said. “It’s not just the reality of the climate. It’s the reality of energy.”

While many conservatives have argued that the climate isn’t changing and the Earth’s temperatures aren’t in an upward pattern, they have in recent years begun to acknowledge those facts while questioning actions meant to fight them.

Ebell acknowledges there has been man-made warming but isn’t sure how dire a threat it is.

“The idea that it’s an existential threat or even crisis is preposterous. There was simply no evidence for that, there’s no historical evidence for that,” he said. “The rate of warming is a lot less than what has been predicted. The real debate is between the modelers and the data. I’m on the data side.

“Yes, there’s a little bit of warming,” he added. “Yes, human beings are probably causing most of it. But all the indices of the impacts, virtually all of them are made up.”

Scientists studying the issue have long agreed that the planet’s temperature is rising and humans are responsible, via greenhouse gas emissions mainly from burning fossil fuels, for nearly all of the Earth’s warming in recent decades. Furthermore, the emissions and warming are directly linked to impacts such as increasing drought and severe weather.

The planet is on track to smash the all-time record for hottest year ever — the average 2023 temperature has been 1.46 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels.

Ebell helped scuttle cap-and-trade efforts like one from Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). | Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Since he started at CEI, Ebell has worked to torpedo climate change efforts like the moves by some in President George W. Bush’s administration toward regulating carbon dioxide in the power sector and congressional actions toward a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, among other early attempts at climate policy. His group helped push the “cap-and-tax” label.

Ebell said he knew the proposals from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and others would die when “cap-and-tax” started to spread.

“Once we branded it as just a clever name for a tax, I was pretty sure,” he recalled.

Throughout his time at CEI, he has been the chair of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of representatives of conservative organizations that meets monthly to discuss climate and environmental policy.

Ebell describes it as a way to amplify voices opposed to climate policy, which he says face a significant disadvantage in funding and resources compared with those advocating for climate action.

“The first step” of winning the climate debate, he argued, “has to be to keep the conservatives together and pointed in the same direction. So a lot of our effort has been educating in keeping our allies informed and then letting them participate by being members of the Cooler Heads Coalition.”

The coalition, headed since August by Ebell’s CEI successor Daren Bakst, does not allow journalists at its meetings.

‘Odd’ choice for Trump

A high point of Ebell’s career was in 2016 and 2017, when he led Trump’s transition team for EPA.

It brought him mainstream, international attention as a symbol of Trump’s plans to undo large swaths of the nation’s climate change policies, along with other environmental efforts. POLITICO called Ebell Trump’s “attack dog,” while *Time* said he and other transition leaders were “straight from the swamp.”

Ebell recalls his selection for the post as “odd,” saying that he was a “highly unlikely choice” to lead a transition team.

“I’m not a lawyer. I’ve never worked at EPA. I’ve never worked in the federal government. I have no desire to do so,” he said, contrasting himself to other agency team leaders.

But he also said it was a positive experience. Trump’s transition officials worked to implement his campaign promises, which Ebell said differentiated him from past presidents-elect.

“The experience was very positive, because there was an understanding that the EPA team was supposed to go further and deeper than anybody else, and that I would have the back of the guy running,” he said.

Then-President Donald Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence during an appearance at EPA headquarters in Washington. | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Like many partisan activists, Ebell’s influence is strongest when Republicans are in power.

He counts the passage last year, under a Democratic trifecta, of the Inflation Reduction Act as his “biggest defeat.” The sweeping bill dedicated $369 billion to climate and clean energy, the biggest climate effort ever by the federal government.

But Ebell doesn’t look back at the IRA and see mistakes on his side, citing the sudden nature of the bill’s unveiling and passage over the summer of 2022.

“There wasn’t much chance to fight it, because Sen. [Joe] Manchin assured the world that he wasn’t going to do the things that he then suddenly announced that he had agreed to,” he said, referring to the West Virginia Democrat whose support was crucial to advancing the bill.

He’s still hopeful that Republicans can roll it back.

“If we don’t, I don’t see how we can ever get over this energy rationing world that we’re in, because it fully funds the climate industrial complex forever.”

Return to land-use roots

As for Ebell’s next steps, he’s keeping much of it close to the vest, but he’s done with full-time work.

One focus he did reveal is that he became this month the new chair of the American Lands Council, a group launched in 2012 by Utah Republican state lawmaker Ken Ivory. The goal of the group is effecting a wholesale transfer of federal lands to state control. It’s an unpaid position and something of a return to issues that fueled Ebell’s early days in conservative policy and politics.

“The issue has been at a low ebb for a number of years, but now it’s going to become more active,” Ebell said of the drive to transfer federal lands, a concept that faces opposition from Democrats and many Republicans.

“The war on the West is really reviving, not through law, but through administrative actions.”

A portion of the Trans-Alaska pipeline system. | Mario Tama/Getty Images

He cited moves like the Bureau of Land Management’s controversial proposed management plan for its land in southwest Wyoming and the Biden administration’s attempts to stop or limit oil and natural gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

Additionally, Utah officials have made moves in recent years toward a potential lawsuit to try to wrest control of federal land.

Ebell still lives near the nation’s capital in Maryland. But he and his wife recently bought a house in his hometown of Baker City, Oregon (elevation: 3,442 feet), and plan to spend some of their time there.

He has hope for conservative energy advocacy after his retirement. He wants his colleagues to focus on getting the Senate to reject the Paris Agreement, having Congress repeal clean energy subsidies and stopping any public funding for transmission lines to bring renewable electricity to cities.

“If we do that, we can say that we’ve — we haven’t won, but you never win things in politics, right? You win, but you don’t win permanently. … You defeat something, or you pass something, and then the issue gets transformed into something very similar, but not exactly the same. And so there’s no final victory here,” he said.

“But there are victories on the battlefield on the way. I think that we can push off a lot of this anti-energy stuff for a long time.”

This story also appears in* Climatewire.

EBELL0123

ONE

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EBELL 2 on trump

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BAK 1 23 (TXT)

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no lnx

https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/fueling-dissent/

‘A lot like climate’

In June, two peer-reviewed studies trumpeted a conclusion at odds with years of solid science: fine-particle pollution long linked to premature death and chronic illness isn’t as dangerous as health advocates contend. If true, the findings would call into question health benefits claimed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has set ever-tightening air-quality standards.

There was a catch, however. The articles — which were published within a week of one another — appeared in Critical Reviews in Toxicology and Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, two journals favored by industry consultants alleged to promote pay-for-play science. And both studies were funded by API, a trade group that has spent $40 million since 2013 to lobby Congress on topics ranging from taxes to global warming.[twitter]

“Our study is published...air quality does not kill. $600 million of EPA junk science up in smoke,” climate-change skeptic and Donald Trump acolyte Steve Milloy tweeted in June, linking to the Regulatory Toxicology article. During a congressional luncheon a month later, the former coal executive took credit for conceiving the study before turning it over to friend, S. Stanley Young, and two other statisticians, who authored the final article. No mention of Milloy’s involvement is made in the publication.

Read more about how Big Oil is trying to sow skepticism of science among judges ]

Some of the same data were used in the Critical Reviews article published by Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr., which also disputed the link between fine particles and mortality. Cox, a biostatistician from Colorado, started consulting for API in 1988. Cox disclosed that his paper “benefitted from close proofreading and copy-editing suggestions from API” but denied in an interview that his findings were influenced. In November, he was named the next chair of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, drawing criticism from groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The science on particle pollution, much like the science on global warming, is exhaustive and widely accepted, with thousands of studies pointing to serious health implications. The World Health Organization notes that particulate matter “affects more people than any other pollutant,” with effects observed at even “very low concentrations.” The particles — found in automotive and industrial exhaust and smaller than one-fifth of the width of a strand of hair — form a toxic mix with ozone that lodges deep in the lungs. Unlike Cox, most researchers are no longer fixated on whether this form of pollution is fundamentally dangerous; they worry instead about whether it can cause — not just exacerbate — chronic illness.

Attacking the science is one way of undermining the Clean Air Act, said John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which advocates for more protective air-quality standards. The Clean Air Act is routinely hailed as one of the most cost-effective federal laws, even by business groups. In 2015, the EPA estimated that the law will have saved the U.S. economy $2 trillion by 2020 while costing $65 billion to implement. About 85 percent of the act’s benefits come from reducing fine-particle pollution, which raises the risk of early death. Opponents of the law “deny that air pollution is deadly … or even harmful in order to try to pretend that no benefits are delivered,” Walke said.

Steve Milloy

milloy’s July luncheon at the Rayburn House Office Building — billed as a “congressional staff and media briefing” — was little more than a plug for his latest book, “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA,” which condemns the “echo chamber of deceptive science” on ozone and fine particles. The event was hosted by Myron Ebell, who chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, a climate-skeptics’ group that began as an alliance of free-market think tanks. “It’s a lot like climate,” Milloy told the audience. “This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”

“It’s a lot like climate... This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”

Reached for comment, Milloy said the study is not an attack on the Clean Air Act but part of his 20-year effort to expose the EPA’s “garbage-in, garbage-out” air pollution research. He denied having any formal ties to API. “I am very, very disappointed in the American Petroleum Institute and all the oil companies for not defending their products, for leaving the science to people like me,” he said.

Young, who authored the study, stood behind its findings and disputed the idea that industry funding presents ethical conflicts. His study data are publicly available, he said, but the EPA isn’t as transparent. Ebell agreed, accusing the agency of using “junk science” to justify air-quality and greenhouse-gas regulation.

Despite their misgivings about the EPA, all three men have become tethered to the agency. Earlier this year, Ebell oversaw the EPA transition for Trump, leading a group that included Milloy. Young was named to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board in October.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., co-founder of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, complained that such appointments have become all too common.  “These people were fringe fanatics and industry stooges fighting on behalf of the industry a propaganda war against science,” he said.

Milloy and Ebell were listed among the authors of a $2 million plan to amplify uncertainty in climate science — as revealed in a 1998 API memo leaked to The New York Times. Both say the memo grew out of an API brainstorming session that never resulted in concrete action, with Milloy calling it “just a big joke.”

Years before, API had refuted the very concept of global warming under President Charles DiBona, who joined the institute shortly after a stint as energy policy advisor to Richard Nixon in the 1970s. White House communications show that DiBona regularly met with then-API President Frank Ikard, a close friend of Nixon’s, before becoming Ikard’s deputy in 1974....

still on the job, deja vu

 Friday, the White House stunned many after it released a sweeping report concluding that climate change is not only real, but it also poses a major threat to the U.S. and humans are "extremely likely" to be responsible.

The 477-page National Climate Assessment, which was mandated by Congress and reviewed by 13 federal agencies, contracted with President Trump's notorious stance on global warming as a "hoax." It also defied Trump's continued efforts to dismantle environmental regulations on both the national and international scale.

So why did the Trump White House release a report contradicting the president and much of his administration's stance on climate change?

Well, as Bloomberg reports, "don't read much into it":

    Public drafts of the report have circulated for months, making it politically perilous to tinker with the findings. So, with editing a high-risk affair and the report required by Congress, the administration may have just decided to downplay it, said John Holdren, who ran the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama.

    "It would do more harm to block this report than to let it out," Holdren, now a Harvard University environmental policy professor, said in an interview. "They're letting it out on a Friday afternoon, which is pretty much the standard approach for letting out something that you don't want to get a lot of attention."

The other reason? Blame Obama. The report has been in the works since 2015.

"It is unfortunate that the Trump Administration has released these Obama-era climate reports, without attempting to remove the junk science—and the reports are full of junk science," fervent climate change denier and former Trump EPA transition team leader Myron Ebell told Bloomberg.

The White House has also distanced itself from the main conclusion of the special report. In a Friday statement, White House spokesperson Raj Shah used familiar climate-skeptic talking points to dismiss the findings.

"The climate has changed and is always changing. As the Climate Science Special Report states, the magnitude of future climate change depends significantly on 'remaining uncertainty in the sensitivity of Earth's climate to [greenhouse gas] emissions,'" Shah said. "In the United States, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions have been declining, are expected to remain flat through 2040, and will also continue to decline as a share of world emissions."

Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) has removed the phrase "climate change" from its websites and has prohibited its own scientists from speaking about the issue.

Additionally, Common Dreams reported on Saturday that President Trump is looking to use the COP23 climate talks as a platform to sell fossil fuels—and coal in particular—as necessary and beneficial.

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http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/27/climate-science-denialist-myron-ebell-named-trump-adviser

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1st www link by McI (hack from N Am via turkey), then saudi (used at Cop 15) --> USSR server

"smoking gun" ebell --> meme ~ AGW

alo pat michaels "gate-keeper" final nail in coffin)

--> inhohe igloo bs, Palin WaP

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Wait a minute. How could that be? ExxonMobil is funding denier groups, but it's not funding climate science denial?

"We were engaged with funding public policy groups on policy issues, not on science," Alan Jeffers, an ExxonMobil media relations manager, explained to the Post. "We made our position known on some climate policies that made us unpopular with environmental activists, and they tried to position that as us funding climate denial. And that's just not accurate."

Wow. Company lawyers may have told Jeffers to say that to distance ExxonMobil from its denier grantees, but he should know better. He surely must be aware that the dozens of think tanks and advocacy groups his company has been financing constantly disparage and distort mainstream climate science. After all, if enough people think climate science is a fraud -- or at least "far from settled" -- why bother with climate policies?

OK. Let's give Kenneth Cohen and his staff the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they haven't been paying attention to what ExxonMobil grantees have been saying about climate science. They're busy people, right? So, as a public service, here's a sampling of typical statements from some the company's denier groups to illustrate the absurdity of ExxonMobil's latest line of defense.

CEI: Carbon Pollution? "We Call it Life."

A prime example of an ExxonMobil denier group is the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which -- like a number of other fossil fuel industry-funded groups -- cut its teeth fronting for the tobacco industry in the 1990s to stave off tighter government regulation. CEI is the very same think tank that reassured Americans back in 2006 that global warming is nothing to worry about in a TV commercial praising the benefits of carbon dioxide. The spot's unforgettable tag line: "They call it pollution. We call it life."

Myron Ebell, director of CEI's Center for Energy and the Environment, is the organization's chief spokesman on climate. He is not a scientist. No one in his center is a scientist. Neither Ebell nor CEI conduct any scientific research. But that hasn't stopped Ebell from posing as a climate expert.

Between 1998 and 2005, when ExxonMobil gave CEI more than $2 million, Ebell became one of the most prominent denier talking heads, providing reporters with the "other side" of the climate science story. For example, when the Washington Post reported in January 2003 that the U.N. World Meteorological Organization determined that nine of the 10 hottest years on record had occurred since 1990, Ebell was happy to dismiss the finding out of hand. "The climate is always changing," he said. "There's always weird weather somewhere in the world. There are just way too many uncertainties to start attributing these things to greenhouse gases."

Ebell also ridicules computer modeling to try to undermine public confidence in basic climate science methodology. "Modeling is not science," what he told theWashington Post in December 2004, is his usual refrain. Eight years later, he was singing the same song. In March 2012, the New York Times asked him for his take on two peer-reviewed studies that estimated 3.7 million Americans are at risk from coastal flooding due to rising sea levels. "As a society," he said, "we could waste a fair amount of money on preparing for sea level rise if we put our faith in models that have no forecasting ability."

In fact, contrary to Ebell's claims, climate models have proven to be quite accurate. A March 2013 peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, for example, found that the models accurately predicted the rise in global temperatures over the previous 15 years to within a few hundredths of a degree.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxonmobil-denial-about-climate-science-denial

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CEI’s Ebell: Warming Alarmists Still ‘In Denial’ Over Climate Data

Attempts to Spin IPCC Report Amount To ‘Childish Fantasy; Cover-Your-Backside BS’

By Brian McNicoll • September 27, 2013

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27, 2013 – Disappointed in results that show the warming trends of the 1990s seem to have ended, the environmental left has stepped up efforts to whitewash a key document that will become part of the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The spin already has begun, said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (cei.org) in Washington. But the facts don’t change. The world has not warmed in any significant way in the last 16 years, and the threats from ocean levels rising and other alleged problems are supremely overblown, he said.

“The global warming establishment is in denial over the still-widening divergence between the models and reality,” Ebell said. “The modelers dominate the public debate and the IPCC reports, but their predictions in the past 20 years have been disproved by reality.  If they can't even come close to predicting the global mean temperature for 10 or 20 years, how can they possibly predict the gmt for 50 or 100 years? Models tend to diverge from reality the further away from the starting point they go.

“They can't, and now everyone can see that they can't. The IPCC summary is merely further evidence of this denial of reality. They are living in cloud-cuckoo land or, perhaps more accurately, they are remarkably similar to the projectors in Gulliver's third voyage. Most people now understand this. The major groups that don't are, in this country, the bicoastal urban elite, and, in England, what are called London's chattering class.

“On one particular point, the idea that warming would continue for hundreds of years even if the level of greenhouse gases was stabilized at the current level immediately is poppycock. CO2 levels have gone up 12 percent in the past 16 years, but the gmt has remained flat. A higher ghg level has an almost immediate effect.

“Check higher water vapor levels in Singapore compared to the Sahara – as soon as the sun goes down it gets cooler in the Sahara but not much in Singapore. The warming doesn't hide somewhere, which is what the alarmists are now claiming – for example, in the deep oceans. This is conjecture at the level of childish fantasy. What is the mechanism for hiding the warming in the deep ocean before it appears in the atmosphere or the shallow ocean? No one can explain the occult process that transmits the so-called greenhouse effect to the deep ocean simply because there is no process known to physical science.

“This is cover-your-backside BS concocted by the alarmists, and it is shameful and deeply disturbing that they are not being laughed off the stage and out of paid employment by the informed media and other authorities. To sum up: Nothing the IPCC can claim at this point can change the debate, which is over: Global warming may become a problem at some point in the next 50 or 100  years – although the chances are slim. But it is not now a crisis, and we need to stop acting as if it were.”

bs director bio

Myron Ebell is Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy at CEI and chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, which comprises over two dozen non-profit groups in this country and abroad that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policies.

Ebell has appeared as a guest on numerous television shows, including the ABC Evening News, NBC Nightly News, PBS News Hour, BBC Newsnight, BBC World, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, MSNBC, ITN, Voice of America, Televisa, Sky TV, Al Jazeera, PBS’s NOW, Fox News's Special Report with Bret Baier, O'Reilly Factor, and Hannity and Colmes.

 He has spoken frequently on a variety of BBC radio news shows and on hundreds of radio talk shows.

Ebell's writings have appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Forbes, London’s Guardian, Standpoint Magazine, Riverside Press Enterprise, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Environmental Law Forum.

Ebell holds a B.A. from Colorado College and an M.S. from the London School of Economics. He also did graduate work at the University of California at San Diego and at Peterhouse, Cambridge University.

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did not list:

Myron Ebell on PBS Frontline: "Climate of Doubt"

October 25, 2012

A growing number of Americans doubt the urgency or existence of man-made global warming. On Tuesday, October 23, PBS Frontline took a look at the men and women who have helped shift public opinion---chief among them, CEI's Myron Ebell.   

Myron Ebell responds to Frontline in a CEI LibertyWeek Podcast here. Watch "Climate of Doubt" yourself and tell us what you think on Twitter or Facebook. Was Frontline fair to questioners and dissenters?

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Climate science is apparently so controversial for Republican members of the House of Representatives that they can't approve legislation that would create an honorary position of science laureate for the United States.

A bipartisan group of senators and House members proposed legislation in May to create this position for an expert in his or her field who "would travel around the country to inspire future scientists."

The president would select up to three laureates to serve terms of one to two years from a pool of candidates approved by the National Academy of Sciences. The laureates "would be empowered to speak to Americans on the importance of science broadly and scientific issues of the day."

But as Science reports, what was supposed to be an easy House vote this week to approve the honorary (read: unpaid) position was tabled after a conservative group objected:

    The bill was never discussed in any committee, however, and Larry Hart of the American Conservative Union hit the roof when he saw it on the House calendar for the next day. (The Washington, D.C.-based group calls itself “the oldest and largest grassroots conservative organization in the nation.”) In a letter to other conservative organizations and every House member, Hart said the bill would give President Barack Obama the opportunity to appoint someone “who will share his view that science should serve political ends, on such issues as climate change and regulation of greenhouse gases.” He also called the bill “a needless addition to the long list of presidential appointments.”

House leadership pulled the bill from the schedule. It's now expected to go back to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for a debate.

But Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute told Science that climate-change deniers will object to the measure no matter what happens in committee. “There’s no way to make it work,” Ebell said. “It would still give scientists an opportunity to pontificate, and we’re opposed to it."

==

465$m from exxon 2003 war on sci p 95

2004 $270K cei, $250K to F of F, $170 GMI

CEI sued over nat'l assessment in 2000 p 96, w/ CEI sued clinton admin on nat'l assess [horner?]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Myron_Ebell

Myron Ebell directs the Global Warming and International Environmental Policy project at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Cooler Heads Coalition, which was formed on May 6, 1997, "to dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis."

Ebell formerly worked at the Frontiers of Freedom, on issues including "property rights, the Endangered Species Act, federal-lands policies, and global warming," and as a legislative assistant to Representative John Shadegg. He's also worked for the American Land Rights Association and National Taxpayers Union. [1] Both CEI and Frontiers of Freedom have received funding from ExxonMobil. [2] [3]

"Though he likes to bash scientists for working outside their degreed fields, Ebell, it turns out, isn't a scientist at all," a Vanity Fair article on Ebell stated. "He majored in philosophy at the University of California in San Diego, then studied political theory at the London School of Economics and history at Cambridge." Ebell retorted, "Every interview I do, when I'm asked about scientific issues, I say I'm not a climate scientist. I'm just giving you the informed layman's perspective." [4]

Contents

    1 On global warming

    2 On air pollution

    3 Biography

    4 Quotations

    5 Contact information

    6 Articles and resources

        6.1 Related SourceWatch articles

        6.2 References

        6.3 External resources

        6.4 External articles

On global warming

Ebell is a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) organized by the Heartland Institute think tank. [5]

In September 2003, Greenpeace obtained evidence in the form of a [http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/investigation-of-exxon-front-g memo] to Philip A. Cooney dated March 2002, outlining their strategy for dealing with the problems caused by scientifically-based "Climate Action Report 2002", which the US government had submitted to the UN. The crucial paragraph of this memo reads:

    "As I said, we made the decision this morning to do as much as we could to deflect criticism by blaming the EPA for freelancing. It seems to me that the folks at the EPA are the obvious fall guys, and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible. I have done several interviews and have stressed that the president needs to get everyone rowing in the same direction. Perhaps tomorrow we will call for (Christine Todd Whitman) to be fired. I know that that doesn't sound like much help, but it seems to me that our only leverage to push you in the right direction is to drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think they are serving the president's best interests by publishing this rubbish."

    ----

External resources

    List of Ebell's publications, on the Competitive Enterprise Institute site.

    Myron Ebell factsheet," ExxonSecrets.org.

External articles

    "With the Queen in Germany worrying about climate change, will we see any change in George Bush's attitude over the next four years?", Radio 4, BBC, November 4, 2004. (The relevant section on how Bush's climate change policy is not going to change, and all the climate scientists have it wrong starts at 3:44).

    Joel Achenbach, "The Tempest: As evidence mounts that humans are causing dangerous changes in Earth's climate, a handful of skeptics are providing some serious blowback", The Washington Post Magazine, May 28, 2006.

    Michael Shnayerson, "A Convenient Untruth: For the obligatory 'opposing view' on climate change, the media often turn to Myron Ebell, policy analyst, sound-bite artist, and oil-industry mouthpiece. While mainstream experts see global warming as a major cri...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myron_Ebell

    This article's tone or style may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. (December 2008)

    This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (December 2008)

Myron Ebell (born in Baker County, Oregon[1]) is an American climate change skeptic. He is the Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a non-profit public policy organization founded in 1984 by Fred L. Smith, Jr. Ebell directs and oversees all aspects of energy policy education and advocacy for CEI. He is also the Chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an informal and ad-hoc policy group that works on the economics, science, and risk analysis associated with global warming.

His main job is to provide material to the media in the form of quotes to newspaper reporters and participation in live interviews on the subject of climate change. His positions at various times are: (a) climate change isn't happening, (b) it is happening, but it's not because of human released CO2, (c) it is happening, and may be human induced, but it will be much cheaper to adapt to the change than to ration the use of fossil fuels, (d) it is happening and the consequences will be good for the environment.[2]

He has been described as a presidential advisor to George W. Bush in several media outlets.[citation needed] He was associated with presidential advisor Philip Cooney in an email about plans to take forward litigation against the EPA.

Contents

[hide]

    1 Education and scholarly work

    2 Global Warming

        2.1 Media appearances

        2.2 Writings

        2.3 Litigation

    3 Other writings

    4 Previous work

    5 External links

    6 References

[edit] Education and scholarly work

Ebell graduated from Colorado College with a B.A. and obtained an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. He did some graduate work at the University of California at San Diego and at Peterhouse College, Cambridge University.[1]

[edit] Global Warming

[edit] Media appearances

For a period of years up until 2005, Ebell published a fortnightly "Cooler Heads Project" Newsletter detailing what he claimed were controversies in the climate science field, as well as reports on the political and legislative failures by the environmentalists he opposes.

In his writings up to until August 2004[3] he frequently claimed that a known disparity between the computer climate models and a series of balloon and satellite measurements of the atmosphere cast doubt on the theory. After the errors were corrected, he stopped mentioning them.[4]

Myron Ebell's interview in England on BBC radio Today program on the morning after the US re-election of George W. Bush probably led to the biggest response of any media interview. In it, he asserted that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by the EU and the rest of the world to harm America's economy. He justified the allegation with a quote from European Commissioner Margot Wallström in her response to Bush's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol.[5] Ebell also called the UK's Chief Scientist David King "an alarmist with ridiculous views who knows nothing about climate change", and then added that since all scientists in Europe and in other countries outside the USA were funded by governments, none of them could be seen as independent.[6]

As well as the drawing criticism from many corners, 66 MPs signed an Early Day Motion deploring "in the strongest possible terms [his] unfounded and insulting criticism of Sir David King..."[7] King himself has accused Ebell of posing as an adviser to President Bush, and of appearing at talks solely to ask "a question that wasn't ever really a question," accusing King of bias and of ignoring the work of other scientists.[8]

In a live interview on the same program on 19 May 2005, George Monbiot challenged him to a £5000 bet that the global average temperature over the next ten years would be higher than the global average temperature of the past ten years, but he declined, saying, "I have four children to put through university. I don't take risks."[9]

A year later on 20 September 2006 he appeared on the BBC TV Newsnight program and described how the Competitive Enterprise Institute worked: "We develop our policies, and then we try to find funding for them. Some we find some funding, other's we find very little."[10]

In this same program, Ebell admits to having no scientific training[11].

Ebell has been part of the delegation of observers from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to the annual Congress of Parties negotiating the Kyoto Protocol.

[edit] Writings

Ebell's support work within the Competitive Enterprise Institute is not known. He has written various published op-ed pieces for newspapers, magazines and webpages. In a piece in Forbes Magazine December 2006 he wrote:

“    [R]ising sea levels, if they happen, would be bad for a lot of people. But a warming trend would be good for other people. More people die from blizzards and cold spells than from heat waves. Increased death rates usually persist for weeks after the unusually cold temperatures have passed, which suggests that the cold is killing people who would otherwise live into another season at least... [M]odest climatic improvement would be to have fewer and less severe big winter storms... This promising scenario of milder winters... comes with a catch, however... Given our obvious preference for living in warmer climates as long as we have air-conditioning, I doubt that we're going to go on the energy diet that the global warming doomsters urge us to undertake. [2]    ”

Litigation

In 2000, Ebell was a plaintiff, along with several members of Congress, including Sen. James Inhofe (R, OK), who sued the National Science and Technology Council, President Bill Clinton, and the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs asserted that the National Assessment on Climate Change report—which details likely state-by-state consequences of anthropogenic climate change—violated several federal open-meeting, appropriations and research statutes.

In June 2002 he wrote a memo to Philip Cooney, which Greenpeace later obtained,[12] outlining their strategy for dealing with what Ebell saw as problems caused by the Climate Action Report 2002,[13] which the US government had submitted to the UN. The crucial paragraph of this memo reads:

“    As I said, we made the decision this morning to do as much as we could to deflect criticism by blaming the EPA for freelancing. It seems to me that the folks at the EPA are the obvious fall guys, and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible. I have done several interviews and have stressed that the president needs to get everyone rowing in the same direction. Perhaps tomorrow we will call for [Christine Todd Whitman] to be fired. I know that that doesn't sound like much help, but it seems to me that our only leverage to push you in the right direction is to drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think they are serving the president's best interests by publishing this rubbish.

    ”

When two state attorney generals obtained this email they wrote to John Ashcroft, the US attorney general:

“   

It appears that certain White House officials conspired with an anti-environmental special interest group to cause the lawsuit to be filed against the federal government.

The idea that the Bush Administration may have invited a lawsuit from a special interest group in order to undermine the federal government's own work under an international treaty is very troubling.

We believe an investigation is necessary to determine whether the idea of this lawsuit came from the White House itself, and if so, whether it represents improper conduct by public officials.[14]

    ”

[edit] Other writings

Myron Ebell has written a number of articles for a Human Events, a national conservative weekly since 2003 on issues of oil drilling and of the fight for the re-election of the republican representative Richard Pombo.[15]. For these articles, his list of credentials excludes his work for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is often described in the news as a "non-profit, non-partisan public policy group."[16]

He has been a harsh critic of the Environmental Protection Agency, saying that it unfairly infringes on land owner's property rights, as well as going against the protection of rare species by encouraging land-owners to make their property uninhabitable for such species to escape regulation.[17]

[edit] Previous work

Myron Ebell was an early staff member of Senator Malcolm Wallop's Frontiers of Freedom Institute at least between 1996[18] and 1999 when he took up his post at the CEI.[19]

[edit] External links

    globalwarming.org

    Myron Ebell Climate - a blog tracking everything Myron Ebell does and says

    Myron Ebell Timeline at History Commons

    Official CEI bio

    List of publications

    'Some Like It Hot' Article

    Video clips of key moments on the last session of the Climate Change Conference in Bali, December 2007 and interviews with Hilary Benn and Myron Ebell on Channel4 News: "Bali: a deal of sorts".

[edit] References

    ^ a b http://cei.org/people/myron-ebell

    ^ a b Myron Ebell (25 December 2006). "Love Global Warming". Forbes.com. http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1225/038.html?_requestid=2170. Retrieved 2006-12-08.

    ^ Myron Ebell (4 August 2004). "Vol. VIII, No 16 - CCSP to Look at Satellite/Surface Temperature Disparity". CEI. http://www.cei.org/gencon/014,04155.cfm. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

    ^ "Fairness and accuracy in Myron". The Myron Ebell Climate. 23 March 2006. http://myron-ebell.blogspot.com/2006/03/fairness-and-accuracy-in-myron.html.

    ^ Stephen Castle (19 March 2001). "EU sends strong warning to Bushover greenhouse gas emisssions". The Independent. http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article248106.ece. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

    ^ "With the Queen in Germany worrying about climate change...? (includes listener feedback)" (Realaudio). BBC. 4 November 2004. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/international/climate_20041104.shtml. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

    ^ "1881 US Government and climate change". Hansard. 17 November 2004. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmedm/41117e01.htm.

    ^ "The Science Show with Robyn Williams: Sabotage and climate change". 20 October 2009. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2758663.htm.

    ^ "Has alarmism really replaced science in the global warming debate?" (realaudio). BBC. 19 May 2005. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today3_globalwarming_20050519.ram. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

    ^ "Another proper interview ten years late". The Myron Ebell Climate. 21 September 2006. http://myron-ebell.blogspot.com/2006/09/another-proper-interview-ten-years.html. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

    ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyKUblhXJw8

    ^ "Greenpeace obtains smoking-gun memo: White House/Exxon link". Greenpeace. 9 September 2003. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/investigation-of-exxon-front-g. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

    ^ "Climate Action Report 2002". May 2002. http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/thirdnatcom/default.htm. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

    ^ Maine.gov (11 August 2003). Press release. http://www.maine.gov/ag/press_release_pop_up.php?press_id=167. Retrieved 2007-01-11.

    ^ Myron Ebell (2 November 2006). "Environmentalists Attack Richard Pombo". Human Events. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=17832. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

    ^ Yahoo. "Green Republicans Lead GOP Losses". Press release. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061108/dcw043.html?.v=73. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

    ^ Myron Ebell (April 2005). "An Update on Endangered Species Act Reform" (PDF). American Legislative Exchange Council. http://www.cei.org/pdf/4530.pdf. Retrieved 2007-01-15.

    ^ "Scoop issue 139". The National Center for Public Policy Research. 10 August 1996. http://www.nationalcenter.org/scoop139.htm. Retrieved 2007-01-11.

    ^ "Scientists' Report Documents ExxonMobil’s Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science". Union of Concerned Scientists. 3 January 2007. http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html. Retrieved 2007-01-11.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myron_Ebell"

Categories: Human Events people | Living people | Colorado College alumni | Alumni of the London School of Economics | People from Baker County, Oregon | Environmental skepticism

Hidden categories: Wikipedia articles needing style editing from December 2008 | All articles needing style editing | Articles needing cleanup from December 2008 | All pages needin

Cooler Heads Coalition

From SourceWatch

Jump to: navigation, search

Cooler Heads Coalition and its website, globalwarming.org, were revived by Consumer Alert's National Consumer Coalition in April 2004. The website and group were formed in May 6, 1997, "to dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis." Consumer Alert and National Consumer Coalition are industry friendly groups that oppose regulations on industry and advocate "free market" consumer solutions.

According to its relaunch press release, "The new web site contains a searchable archive of the Cooler Heads Newsletter, dating back to 1996, and offers users the chance to subscribe to the newsletter. This bi-weekly publication analyzes climate change news and events through scientific, economic and political perspectives." [1]

Its website states: "The risks of global warming are speculative; the risks of global warming policies are all too real." [2]

Orginally the group was closely tied to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and still features many of its industry-friendly analyses of ecological issues. Former CEI director Marlo Lewis chaired the Cooler Heads Coaltion. Myron Ebell, CEI's Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy, directed it. In March 2001, the nonprofit Clean Air Trust named Ebell its "clean air villain of the month," citing his "ferocious lobbying charge to persuade President Bush to reverse his campaign pledge to control electric utility emissions of carbon dioxide."

Members

    60 Plus Association

    Alexis de Tocqueville Institution

    American Conservative Union

    American Highway Users Alliance

    American Legislative Exchange Council

    American Policy Center

    Americans for Sovereignty

    Americans for the Preservation of Liberty

    Americans for Tax Reform

    Association of Concerned Taxpayers

    Center for Science and Public Policy of Frontiers of Freedom

    Center for Security Policy

    Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise

    Christian Coalition of America

    Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy (New Mexico)

    Citizens for a Sound Economy

    Coalitions for America

    Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

    Competitive Enterprise Institute

    Consumer Alert

    Council for America

    Defenders of Property Rights

    English First

    FreedomWorks

    Frontiers of Freedom

    George C. Marshall Institute

    Heritage Foundation

    Maine Heritage Policy Center

    Maryland Taxpayers Association, Inc.

    National Center for Policy Analysis

    National Center for Public Policy Research

    National Taxpayers Union

    Pacific Research Institute

    Population Research Institute

    Rhode Island Wise use

    Rio Grande Foundation (New Mexico)

    Seniors Coalition

    Small Business Survival Committee

    The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition

    The Independent Institute

    Tradition, Family, Property, Inc.

pooley cw;

sect 5 Ebell

cooler heads coalition, FoF  --> CEI, worked with cooney, singer, milloy 46

API action plan doubt

B2 had to suppress clinton era Nat Asses Clim Impact 47  ebell said policy was to make it vanish cf Pilz Vanity fair CEI filed suit

to do it

Ebell helped cooney muzzle, which got cooney fired --> exxon 2 weeks later  48

ebell such a scam, he got own debunk website in 04

Ebell knows the science is against him, but knows he can win on doubt 123

myron-ebell

Myron Ebell

Myron Ebell and the Competitive Enterprise Institute

Ebell is the "director of energy and global warming policy" for the a DC-based think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

The CEI is well-known for its public efforts to aggressively counter the scientific evidence for human-induced climate change, including an infamous set of television ads with the tag line "C02, We Call it Life."

Since 1998, the CEI has received over $2 million in funding from oil-giant ExxonMobil.

In January 2007, ExxonMobil announced that it would no longer be funding the CEI.[same times as snowe and jay rockefeller)] but still gave $ later?]]

Other organizations that have contributed to the CEI include tobacco giant Philip Morris, which has provided $370,000 since 1991 to the CEI for assistance in "regulatory issues."

A 1996 Brown and Williamson memo lists the CEI as a funded organization providing research and developing public policy positions.

Ebell is also listed as the "director" of Freedom Action, a "grassroots movement" founded in 2009 by the CEI. Freedom Action believes in "individual rights," "free markets," "and limited governments." Links to three of Ebell's articles appear on the site including one that describes Al Gore as "the leader of the forces of darkness." All three of the articles were published by Fox News.

Myron Ebell and Frontiers of Freedom

Ebell was previously employed as the policy director for Frontiers of Freedom. In this role he worked on issues including property rights, the Endangered Species Act, federal-land policies and global warming.[ // wise use?]

According to ExxonSecrets, Frontiers of Freedom has received over $1,270,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.  Frontiers of Freedom is also supported by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds Tobacco.

Myron Ebell and the Cooler Heads Coalition

According to Ebell's bio, he currently serves as the chair of the "Cooler Heads Coalition."

Cooler Heads is a project of the National Consumers Coalition, a coalition of 23 freemarket think tanks, many of them with ties to the oil-industry, including the Heartland Institute, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, the Pacific Research Institute and the George C. Marshall Institute.

According to their website, the mission of Cooler Heads is to "[dispel] the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis.

The Cooler Heads project is headed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Myron Ebell on ExxonMobil Funding

In an October 2006 BBC interview, Ebell points out that ExxonMobil  would probably not fund the CEI if it changed its stance on global warming.

Transcript:

BBC: Myron Ebell why do you imagine that Exxon gives you money?

Ebbel: You know, I think that the attempt here to claim that only the purest of the pure can engage in the public policy debate...

BBC: Please answer the question Mr. Ebell, why do you imagine they give you money?

Ebell: Because we send them letters asking them to support our general programs which... our general program is simply this: we believe in free markets and we support policies that promote less regulation of people's daily lives.

BBC: And they would presumably not be giving you that money if they felt you for taking a different view on, say for example climate change.

Ebell: I suppose that's right. We develop our policies and then we try to find funding.

Ebell Censured by British House of Commons

In 2004 The British House of Comons censured Ebell "in the strongest possible terms" for his "unfounded and insulting criticism of Sir David King, The Government's Chief Scientist." King has notably argued that "climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today."

http://www.desmogblog.com/myron-ebell

GP

Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy, CEI

Chairman, Cooler Heads Coalition. Former National Policy Director, Frontiers of Freedom. Former Staff, American Land Rights Association.

Ebell was previously the National Policy Director at Frontiers of Freedom, where he worked on a variey of environment-related issues. Prior to his work at FoF he was senior legislative assistant to Rep. John Shadegg and also worked for the American Land Rights Association, and active "wise use" organization based in Washington State.

Under the auspices of the Competitve Enterprise Institute, Ebell spoke at the 2001 Alliance for American "Fly In for Freedom," an annual rally of "wise use" leadership.

"A native of Baker City, Oregon, Mr. Ebell holds a BA from Colorado College and an MSc from the London School of Economics. He also did graduate work at the University of California at San Diego and at Peterhouse, Cambridge University." (from CEI website)

KEY DEEDS

3 June, 2002

Ebell collaborated with Phil Cooney, chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, to cover up the findings of an EPA report on climate change. President Bush's staff insisted on several major alterations to the report.

Source: "Bush covers up climate research," The observer, 9/21/03

KEY EVENTS

NCPA Earth Day Briefing on Global Warming: 'What Do We Really Know vs. What We Are Told'

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=123-04202004

The relationship of Myron Ebell to the event: Speaker

EVENTS

Kyoto Through the Back Door? A Debate on the Lieberman – McCain Climate Stewardship Act

http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev102703a.cfm

The relationship of Myron Ebell to the event: Speaker

ORGANIZATIONS

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Source: CEI website, 3/04

Heartland Institute

Source: Heartland 2010 Climate Conference Speaker List

Frontiers of Freedom Institute and Foundation

Source: Frontiers of Freedom website 5-06

Cooler Heads Coalition

Source: CEI website, 3/04

American Conservative Union Foundation

Source: "Serious about Gas Price" by Myron Ebell in Conservative Battleline

Heartland Institute

Source: Heartland Institute - HeartlandGlobalWarming.org

SOURCES

CEI website, 3/04

http://www.cei.org

"Bush covers up climate research," The observer, 9/21/03

Subheader: White House officials play down its own scientists' evidence of global warming By Paul Harris

"Serious about Gas Price" by Myron Ebell in Conservative Battleline

http://acuf.org/issues/issue59/060507news.asp

Frontiers of Freedom website 5-06

http://www.ff.org

Heartland Institute - HeartlandGlobalWarming.org

http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/

Heartland 2010 Climate Conference Speaker List

More than 70 speakers will make keynote presentations or participate in panel discussions at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, May 16-18, 2010 in Chicago.

http://www.heartland.org/events/2010Chicago/speakers.html

Mashey

Ebell, Myron

CEI and CHC, was at FF.

cei.org/people/myron-ebell

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Myron_Ebell

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myron_Ebell

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=6359&Method=Full&PageCall=

&Title=Vanity%20Fair%27s%20Long%20Look%20at%20Myron%20Ebell%20&Cache=False

Activities: GCSCT, US.CONG, GMI2003, GMI2005, GMI2005a, A.HOCKX, A.Hockey, Heart#1,

Heart#2, HeartExp#1, A.GATE

Organizations: API, FF (early, ~1996), CEI, CHC, FreeWork, Heartland

People: many

He was a key person in promoting McKitrick, Essex&McKitrick, and then McIntyre to Washington, DC.

Wikipedia says:

―In 2000, Ebell was a plaintiff, a long with several members of Congress, including Sen. James Inhofe (R, OK),

who sued the National Science and Technology Council, President Bill Clinton, and the director of the White

House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs asserted that the National

Crescendo to ClimateGate Cacophony V1.0 03/15/10

121

Assessment on Climate Change report—which details likely state-by-state consequences of anthropogenic climate change—violated several federal open-meeting, appropriations and research statutes

.‖

I don‟t yet have a reference for that.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4693855.stm BBC news, 07/18/05 wrote:

―Myron Ebell, of the Competitiveness Enterprise Institute and a prominent global warming sceptic, told BBC

News: "We've always wanted to get the science on trial", and "we would like to figure out a way to get this

into a court of law", adding "this could work".‖ (emboldening mine)

See A.9.6 sequence of emails, showing relationships with Perhach and likely McGinley (Barton).

5.3 2005-2006 Wegman Report: Illusion and later Reality

2005.01.04 Peiser started the year with an attack on Naomi Oreskes‘ 2004 essay in Science about the

consensus among climate scientists. Although long-refuted as totally incompetent and even withdrawn by

Peiser, it is still quoted. Monckton mounted a similar attack in 2007, but using his endocrinologist

Klaus-Martin Schulte, who turned out not to understand climate research very well [MAS2008], but E&E

eventually published it anyway.

2005.01.27 The National Post ran a front-page study featuring M&M, and the MM05 paper to be

published 2 weeks later in the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), a credible ―Letters‖ journa l. As noted

in [DEE2010d], this was well-promoted in Canada and the USA, via National Post and the WSJ.

2005.02.10 In the GMI2005 Roundtable, Inhofe discussed planning to give speeches attacking the ―4

pillars‖, of which ―Mann‘s discredited report‖ was one. He had met M&M in (November) 2003.

Who else was at that Roundtable?

2005.02.12 M&M finally got the ―MM05‖ paper into the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), a credible

―Letters‖ journa l.

2005.02.14 Regalado‘s unusual article [REG2005] appeared front page left-hand column of the WSJ, a

precious spot, not usually occupied by science stories, especially like this.

2005.02.18 A WSJ Editorial appeared: "Hockey Stick on Ice: Politicizing the science of global warming"

Was this all coincidence? Had GMI and its allies ever proved to have good access to the WSJ?

Was it more valuable to have an article in the GRL, or on the front page of the WSJ?

2005.05.11 At GMI2005a Roundtable, Kueter and Ebell introduced M&M, whose talk was:

―The Hockey Stick Debate: Lessons in Disclosure and Due Diligence.‖

In the introduction M&M‘s ―expert‖ status at GMI and McKitrick‘s Senior Fellow status at Fraser were

unmentioned. McKitrick emphasized how the hockey stick graph‘s importance to the IPCC TAR, as

though it was the one piece of evidence that mattered. The talk and discussion seem like a blueprint for the

later attacks and to some extent the WR, as the social network issue was even suggested. McIntyre talked

about auditing. McKitrick said their GRL article was peer-reviewed (and in this case, it was), but again,

peer-review does not prove correctness or importance. McIntyre said ―I am not trying to say what did or

didn‘t happen, but as the public , we are entitled to full, true, pla in disc losure.‖ He talked about a (positive)

consensus about Enron and the collapse of that consensus. This meeting is filled with memes to be seen

later. The post-meeting discussion was likely interesting, and follow-on plans are not visible, but disclosure

would indeed be good. But then:

2005.06.08 The Bush Administration‘s Phil Cooney, assisted by Ebell not long before, was exposed by

Andrew Revkin in a New York Times article, as having edited science reports to change their meanings,

generating serious negative publicity. He resigned days later, to join ExxonMobil. As context, the 2005

Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act (called ―McLieberman‖ by Ebell in A.9.7) was soon to be voted

upon: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Stewardship_Acts

At this point I can only speculate in connecting dots:

Did Perhach CEQ (in same group as Cooney) ask Ebell for help? Did Ebell have an idea? Did someone else

come up with an idea to combat the bad publicity?

The {GMI, CEI, Singer, Inhofe} grouping had cooperated for years, and specifically on M&M

development, but the effort seemed to shift to Barton/Whitfield . Had Inhofe had been too outspoken

about climate change to be credible? We only know names of a few attendees at the various meetings.

Had any of Barton‟s staff attended any of them? Would email logs of 05/11/05-06/24/05 be interesting?

Crescendo to ClimateGate Cacophony V1.0 03/15/10

24

2005.06.21 CHC/FreeWork (including Ebell and Fred.Smith) sent letter to Senate. See CHC.

2005.06.23 Barton/Whitfield signed letters to 5 recipients, faxed that day or the next. Barton staffer

Peter Spencer (P.Spencer hereafter) was labeled as the contact, and turned out to be a central participant,

although that did not become evident until 2010.

2005.06.24 McGinley created 5 PDF files from 4:11PM to 4:15PM, and presumably placed them on the

House website about that time or a little later (A.9.6). But Perhach received a combined copy from Ebell

around 5:47PM, about 90 minutes later, impressive work for late Friday afternoon, unless Ebell had gotten

text files even earlier. The email‘s blind copy (BCC) format strongly hints that it was sent to other people

as well. This was efficient electronic execution, especially compared to faxing letters to people who might

well be away on travel.

How did Ebell know? Why were the letters in Ebell’s hands before recipients were guaranteed to have

seen them? Does this sound like a legitimate request, or a PR tactic to put these letters in “friendly” hands

before the recipients could possibly take action on them?

In hunting for this email, I encountered a few others, excerpted in A.9. Several showed Ebell’s

relationships with Cooney and Perhach. Others touted the McKitrick and Essex talk. Ebell used BCC:

but Sills and Gorman exposed long recipient lists. They included an interesting mix of Senate and House

staffers, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, Singer, Ferguson, and at least some lobbyists. Every new

connection generated more, and I did not have time to chase them.

Would any email logs be of interest? There might be a tight social network there, and one might wonder if

any of these people knew anything about the Barton/Whitfield effort. At least some of the email senders

clearly liked to inform others of relatively minor events. Is it plausible that Ebell considered the

Barton/Whitfield letter a real coup, and was eager to inform people about it?

The Barton/Whitfield letter cited the 02/14/05 Regalado WSJ article has having raised concerns,

basically by M&M. This is curious in several ways. Did they or their staffers suddenly notice this, 4

months later? Or had Barton had it on his desk immediately? Inhofe had been on an anti-hockey-stick

campaign no later than the 02/10/05 meeting. Would Barton not have known about that, given that he and

Inhofe share petroleum interests and funding, as well as chairing related House and Senate committees?

How often do they talk?

Conjecture: this seems like classic meme-laundering, in which people used well-established WSJ contacts

to promote the M&M work they had cultivated since 2001, thus allowing Barton/Whitfield to later point at

WSJ, rather than a relatively obscure GRL paper.

The scientific community pushed back, and for brevity I omit all the back-and-forth. Of course, for some

(like Singer) being able to say ―Federal Investigation‖ is worth much. But [DEE2010e] reminds us:

2005.07.15 NAS President Ralph Ciccerone wrote Barton:

www.geo.umass.edu/climate/cicerone-letter.pdf

―A Congressional investigation, based on the authority of the House Commerce Committee is probably not the

best way to resolve a scientific issue, and a focus on individual scientists can be intimidating.‖

―…National Academy of Sciences would be willing to create an independent expert panel (according to our

standard rigorous study process) to assess the state of scientific knowledge in this area, or perhaps one of the

professional scientific societies could take on this task for you.‖

This of course is a standard way for

vanity fair

may 2007

A Convenient Untruth

For the obligatory “opposing view” on climate change, the media often turn to Myron Ebell, policy analyst, sound-bite artist, and oil-industry mouthpiece. While mainstream experts see global warming as a major crisis, the hotter it gets, the better Ebell likes it

Al Gore says global-warming skeptics are a group diminishing almost as rapidly as the mountain glaciers.

Myron Ebell begs to differ.

Hurricanes, heat waves, flooding, and droughts—sure, they've stirred some fears. And some corporate allies that used to mock global warming—such as Detroit's Big Three automakers and oil giant Texaco—have, like the glaciers, melted away from the fight. But, for the hardest of the hard core, these are glorious days.

Like holdouts in the Alamo, the last of the skeptics plug away at the thousands of mainstream scientists now arrayed against them. They take potshots at the scores of studies that say global warming is here, aiming for small incongruities. And they bridle when asked if they take money, as nearly all do, from ExxonMobil.

Many of the skeptics are curmudgeons: old, bald, and bitter. But not Myron Ebell. Tall, slim, and youthful at 53, his blond hair swept back from a handsome face set off by serious glasses, Ebell is one of that rare breed, an elegant nerd. On television, facing interrogation by moderators who clearly feel he should be tarred and feathered for his views, he stays cool and fires back with withering zingers. In the recent surprise hit movie Thank You for Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley's novel, actor Aaron Eckhardt played a tobacco lobbyist who jokes about being a merchant of death and gleefully outdebates all comers. Ebell could easily star in the sequel, Thank You for Warming.

Ebell is a public-policy wonk—not, he hastens to clarify, a lobbyist for the energy industry, as many of his fellow skeptics are, or a scientist whose research is underwritten by the energy industry, or a politician who takes contributions from the energy industry. He lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., where he and his wife are raising four children, ranging in age from an 11-year-old son to a 21-year-old daughter, all of whom, Ebell says proudly, take a skeptical view of global warming. He goes to work at a think tank on Connecticut Avenue called the Competitive Enterprise Institute (C.E.I.), where his office is modest, but not his influence.

Every day, journalists around the world call C.E.I. for its take on the latest global-warming studies, and Ebell, or one of his colleagues who also deal with the press—Marlo Lewis, Iain Murray, and Christopher Horner—happily obliges. The journalists like to air all views—"on the one hand, on the other"—so they plug in Ebell's latest retorts, giving them equal weight with new scientific findings. Gore is right in one sense: almost no scientist doubts that global warming is here, that man-made greenhouse gases are to blame, or that if we don't cut back on those gases fairly soon we'll be in a heap of trouble. But as the "other hand" in all those news stories, Ebell and his quotable cohorts sustain the impression that a scientific debate is still raging. The more studies that confirm global warming, the more ink Ebell gets. Journalist Ross Gelbspan, a longtime skeptic-tracker, says that's how the skeptics operate. With those doubts neatly planted in the press, the public shrugs, politicians push the problem off to another day, and ExxonMobil parries new fossil-fuel regulations, earning more windfall profits in exchange for a pittance to the skeptics and their work.

Like its ideological soulmates, C.E.I. has taken money—a considerable amount—from ExxonMobil. Ebell says that's irrelevant. "We're not beholden to our donors, because we don't say, 'If you give us this money, we'll do this project,'" he explains, tilting back nonchalantly in a C.E.I. conference-room chair. "I can't even quite tell you who supports us on global warming." In fact, Ebell could go to the ExxonMobil Web site and see that in 2005 the oil giant gave C.E.I. $270,000, a not inconsiderable portion of the institute's $3.7 million budget, and that between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil gave it more than $2 million. He could also ask one of his colleagues and learn that C.E.I. gets money from the American Petroleum Institute, various pharmaceutical companies (Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly), and William A. Dunn of Dunn Capital Management. But he says he's never done that. Since its founding, 23 years ago, by free marketer Fred Smith as an all-purpose bullhorn against government regulations, C.E.I. has simply tinkered with issues it chooses—from higher mileage standards in cars (bad) to the Endangered Species Act (worse)—trying to affect public policy and hoping donors come along for the ride.

That may be how C.E.I. sees it. To ExxonMobil, though, C.E.I. has been one of the brightest stars in its constellation of climate skeptics. Other oil companies fund global-warming-skeptic think tanks through the American Petroleum Institute, and various coal interests weigh in, too. But, for the skeptics, ExxonMobil is Big Daddy.

From 1998 to 2005, ExxonMobil spent a reported $16 million funding climate studies at some three dozen institutes. The recipients range from the well-known right-wing clearinghouse American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ($240,000 from ExxonMobil in 2005) to the obscure Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($90,000 in 2005), bookends to a Who's Who of skeptics. None of these groups has any standing in mainstream climate science. Their fellows and scholars crank out policy papers that purport to disprove the latest findings about global warming and only rarely publish studies in peer-reviewed technical scientific journals. Instead, the institutes publish the papers themselves or get sympathetic newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times to run them as op-ed pieces. From there, the papers are taken up by a handful of lawmakers—such as Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe and Texas Republican congressman Joe Barton, who deride global warming as an alarmist hoax—and get disseminated on the Internet like viral advertising. It's an all too effective approach.

The stars, as in any constellation, are an eclectic bunch. They include fringe scientists such as David Legates and Patrick Michaels, of the George C. Marshall Institute ($115,000 from ExxonMobil in 2005), a Washington-based public-policy think tank; economists like Kyoto Protocol–basher Margo Thorning, of the American Council for Capital Formation ($360,000 from ExxonMobil in 2005); and historical-climate theorists such as the Battling Idsos—father Sherwood, sons Craig and Keith—of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change ($25,000 from ExxonMobil in 2005), who say high levels of CO2 in the prehistoric era led to lush plant life and better times for all. The skeptics appear on one another's panels, defend one another's work, and give the public the sense that mainstream scientists are nothing more than so many Chicken Littles. The case for global warming has grown all but irrefutable, yet the skeptics have enjoyed enormous influence, for the audience that matters most to them occupies the White House. Eagerly, their papers have been snatched up by the Bush administration as rationales for all manner of public policy, from striking down the Kyoto Protocol to blocking any cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

C.E.I. has become the best known of these global-warming skeptics not just because Ebell is as quotable as he is. Like the hero of Thank You for Smoking, he courts notoriety. He first made the news a few years ago when a Bush White House senior official named Phil Cooney was caught watering down language on global warming in a U.S. government report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell, as an e-mail later showed, advised the once and future oil-industry flack on how to spin the embarrassment. Not long after, Ebell stirred the wrath of the British Parliament by declaring in a BBC radio interview that the U.K.'s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, had made a "ridiculous claim" on global warming despite knowing "nothing about climate science." The House of Commons proposed a motion to censure Ebell. (The motion never passed, Ebell says wistfully.) Last year, C.E.I. ran a public-service commercial on television about carbon dioxide so cheeky it verged on parody. "They call it pollution," ran the tagline about CO2. "We call it life." Ebell was delighted at the howls it provoked.

There is, however, one key difference between Ebell and his doppelgänger in Chris Buckley's novel. The tobacco lobbyist of the novel and upcoming TV series is a cynic: he knows he's blowing smoke. Ebell actually seems to believe what he's saying. Which is remarkable, really, because every one of his arguments, put to scrutiny by a murderer's row of the country's top climate scientists, seems to fall apart.

Like any effective debater, Ebell tends to start by ceding a point or two. It disarms the opposition. "Everyone knows CO2 is a greenhouse gas," he says blithely. "All things being equal, if you add CO2 to the atmosphere, you'll get a little warming."

Actually, that's a revision of what Ebell's fellow contrarians believed in the early 1990s. They used to say that all the CO2 and other greenhouse gases put into the air by man since the start of the industrial age had caused no warming at all. They said this because that was what satellite readings suggested if you read them a certain way and if you decided the satellites were right and all temperature readings taken on the surface of the earth were wrong. Unfortunately for the skeptics, it was the satellite readings that turned out to be wrong. So the skeptics retreated to a view that Ebell still holds. "There has been a little bit of warming," as he puts it, "but it's been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it's caused by human beings or not, it's nothing to worry about."

This view, too, needs revision, though Ebell isn't surrendering that ground quite yet. Precisely to test the "range for natural variability," climatologist Michael Mann and colleagues charted temperatures going back 1,000 years. They did this by studying the natural records of climate in tree rings, ice cores from glaciers, and coral reefs. The temperature, they found, made modest zigs and zags until the late 19th century—a range of natural variability just as the skeptics claimed. But once the industrial age got under way there was a dramatic rise in global temperatures not seen in the past 1,000 years, concurrent with CO2 concentrations rising from their pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million to their current level of 380 parts per million. Now the climbing lines of the graph shot up like a hockey stick laid on its side. Hence the hockey-stick debate.

Ebell and his fellow skeptics have poured no end of bile on Mann and his hockey stick—because if Mann's findings are true, the skeptics have no case. The graph is global warming proved. The skeptics say the evidence is shaky for the earliest centuries of Mann's 1,000-year period. So the hockey stick, they declare, is wrong.

To settle the debate, the National Academy of Sciences reviewed Mann's hockey-stick data and methodology last year, along with similar studies. The N.A.S. concluded that Mann's evidence for the years from 1600 to the present was very solid indeed. It said the evidence for the years from 1000 to 1600 was necessarily less solid—fewer tree rings and ice cores to go by—but, overall, Mann's evidence did suggest that the 20th century was warmer than any of those six centuries, too.

"Which is exactly what we said in our original report," observes Mann, now a professor at Pennsylvania State University. The headline in Mann's report had noted the "limitations and caveats" of the evidence, given how far back it went. "The principle of caution is what scientists go by," Mann says. Ebell and the skeptics had pounced on those caveats to conclude that Mann didn't know what he was talking about. "It's not surprising coming from C.E.I.," Mann adds. "I've never seen any evidence that they have any interest in being intellectually honest."

"The complaint about the hockey stick has been that the people who did the research didn't know what they were doing," Ebell maintains. "The methodology they used was not adequate to properly evaluate the data that they had." (The n.a.s. specifically rejected that charge in their report.)

In the documentary-film version of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore stands beside an elongated hockey stick—a graph that goes back not just 1,000 years but 650,000 years. The story it tells is the same. Ebell says the Gore chart is not just inaccurate but misleading in a profound way because it implies that CO2 levels have never been higher than they are now. "Everybody knows it's been higher than that," Ebell says of CO2 in the past, "just more than 650,000 years ago, which is when Gore started counting."

It's a canny point. If earth survived prehistoric periods of higher CO2, when man and industry had nothing to do with it, why are we worrying about CO2 now?

"Yeah, CO2 was higher in the early Cretaceous period," Mann explains. "It probably exceeded 1,000 parts per million. And, yes, temperatures were almost certainly higher then, too. But nature produced these changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations—from volcanic activity and plate tectonics that released gases trapped in the solid earth—on timescales of tens of millions of years! Eco-systems and species were thus able to adapt," Mann says. "Now we're talking about dramatic changes in the period of a century or so. There's no evidence that nature knows how to adapt so quickly."

Ebell is unfazed by such seemingly authoritative talk. O.K., he says: if CO2 levels have indeed gone up a third in the last hundred years, as Gore's hockey-stick chart indicates, and global temperature is supposed to follow, why haven't we seen a commensurate rise in temperature?

"That's pure nonsense," Mann says. "As we increase CO2 levels, we are changing the boundary conditions, if you will, too rapidly for the climate to be in equilibrium while we do this. So the climate is always trying to catch up to what we've done." The correlation between CO2 and temperature, he says, has been studied very well in physics and chemistry. "Our best estimates indicate that the increase in CO2 from pre-industrial levels to the present has already produced roughly 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming in global temperatures."

Ebell is ready for that. What if the earth has actually embarked on a natural cooling phase—a new Little Ice Age—and the CO2 we're putting out there is offsetting it? After all, says Ebell, "we just came out of a Little Ice Age in the middle of the 19th century. And the Little Ice Age was a time of great trial for human civilization."

"Another specious argument," Mann says. First, he says, the so-called Little Ice Age wasn't a major event in terms of impact on global temperature: "While Europe cooled, the tropical Pacific was in an unusually warm state. So you can't just broad-brush the global temperature changes in this way. Models and paleoclimate data both suggest that the global cooling during the Little Ice Age was modest, much smaller than the global warming of the past century." The skeptics say that natural changes, such as a slight reduction in solar intensity, made the Little Ice Age happen. Ebell's suggestion is that that could be happening again. Mann observes that there's no evidence of this. Even if solar variations have had some modest effect on climate today, he adds, they would be more than offset by greenhouse-gas warming. Given the huge and growing volume of gases mankind is generating, says Mann, such natural factors would be dwarfed.

As indeed they are. Every year now, with no discernible slowing from "natural variations" such as solar intensity and volcanic activity, global mean temperatures rise. Twenty-one of the 22 hottest years on record have occurred in the last 25 years. The only reason temperatures rise, agrees virtually every climate scientist not funded by ExxonMobil, is the increasing prevalence of man-made greenhouse gases.

As these hot years accumulate, a skeptic of less determination might throw in the towel—after mopping his brow with it—but not Ebell. He says that one of the three official records of those surface temperatures—the one kept by nasa—is "cooked," because the agency's weather stations are often set too close to "urban heat islands," which read disproportionately high, and that other stations fail to cover large rural areas. The other two records show that 2005 wasn't as warm as 1998. That, Ebell says, is more evidence we're at the start of a cooling period.

Unfortunately for this novel theory, 2006 has just been declared the hottest year on record in the United States. "The United States is not the world," Ebell says. "It's a very small part of the world."

A lot of very strange weather appears to be occurring as a result of those rising temperatures. Global warming, scientists say, evaporates moisture from wet land, leading to more precipitation. It sucks up what little moisture resides in dry land, producing more droughts. As global warming accelerates, they say, the climates of both kinds of terrain will grow more extreme.

Ebell says no. "This is crazy," he declares. "Who could possibly believe that? You can't predict regional climate change." He claims that the federally funded U.S. National Assessment of Climate Change proved this. "They had two climate models for the precipitation impact of global warming in the Midwest. One showed the Midwest becoming a desert and the other one showed Kansas becoming as lush as Indiana."

"Those studies are dated and irrelevant," says Kevin Trenberth, one of the country's foremost climate experts. Trenberth heads the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (ncar), in Boulder, Colorado. "They were done in about 1995," he says of the studies. "The state of climate modeling was immature.… As many as 23 models since then have superseded them. These models can now simulate the last hundred years quite well, and thus are useful for broadscale predictions of the future."

Those models, says Trenberth, prove that the global mean temperature has gone up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in that time, most of that since the 1970s. "Warmer air holds more water," Trenberth explains. "So in the U.S. the overall precipitation since 1900 has gone up, mostly in the last 35 years, by 7 percent. Heavy rainfall has gone up l4 percent, and the heaviest rainfall—the top 1 percent—has gone up by 20 percent. It rains more, and when it rains, it rains harder than it used to, and that certainly applies to the Midwest." Dry areas of the U.S., mainly the Southwest, do become drier as warm air pulls up what little moisture there is in the soil, Trenberth says, and so one sees more droughts. "There's simply no rational reason to doubt that those trends will not continue if global temperatures rise, as they seem set to do."

Mainstream scientists say that, along with a warming atmosphere, our oceans are heating up, too. "I think that's made up," Ebell says. "I understand that the oceans are primarily heated by direct solar radiation. I do not understand how—beyond just the surface—they are heated by the warming up of the atmosphere. It seems to me that the atmosphere would have to warm up significantly above the previous level before that radiation could actually heat up the ocean."

"That's the most preposterous bullshit I've ever heard," exclaims Tom Wigley, another senior scientist at ncar and co-author of a new study on ocean warming. "Perhaps that would be the case if the oceans didn't move. But the ocean is continually moving, horizontally and vertically, and continually mixing heat down to the depths. The top 100 meters has warmed about the same amount as the atmosphere—about one and a half degrees Fahrenheit. The deeper ocean warms much more slowly, but each degree increase in atmospheric temperature does propagate down.… In fact, the amount of warming agrees exceptionally well with what computer models say should have happened." Wigley says the models suggest that the rate of ocean warming in the 21st century will probably be four times greater than in the 20th century.

Ebell has a phrase for such predictions. Computer models for predicting climate, he says, "don't even pass the laugh test."

Wigley is astonished: "Does he think modeling is a hoax? Has he ever tried to talk to people about this?, I wonder. Or is he just having a guess?" Wigley observes that scientists have charted actual weather data from the 20th century, then programmed computer models to see how well the models predict the weather that actually occurred. "There are hundreds of papers," says Wigley, "showing that models do a fantastically good job."

Warming oceans already appear to have stirred tropical hurricanes of greater intensity and duration than in the past, though scientists are wary of suggesting that any particular storm—Katrina, for example—is the direct result of warming. What they do say, Wigley observes, is that, if warming trends continue, ocean storms will definitely grow stronger.

Ebell has a cheerier forecast. "Everybody involved in this debate who knows anything about storms knows that a warmer world will be a more stable planet with less big storms," he says. "There may be more hurricanes … but most of the big storms that kill a lot of people are in the winter, right? Cold kills a lot more people than warmth."

Scientists who do believe the ocean is warming—which is to say, nearly all of them—can already measure the cost to sea life. Researchers at the Sir Alistair Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, in Plymouth, England, have found that, as a result of warming, the entire eco-system of the North Sea is in a state of "ecological meltdown."

Ebell disputes that. "If the oceans are warming, or the acidity is changing, that will benefit some species more than others," he says. "Some will take over, others will die out or move on somewhere else. The oceans are changing all the time."

For oceanographers, one worrisome sign lies right offshore: in tropical oceans all over the world, coral reefs are bleaching and dying as the acidity caused by warming, apparently, kills the plankton that sustain them.

Ebell is unconcerned. "My impression of corals," he says, "is that they have successfully adapted in the past to warmer temperatures and to cooler temperatures, and there is a good deal of evidence that they can adapt—that they actually changed their composition based on the temperature and the chemistry of the waters surrounding them over time."

"He is, of course, right and, of course, wrong," replies Dr. Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. "Corals and their relatives have lived on earth for hundreds of millions of years. They've been more and less abundant, if you take the long view. On the other hand, there have been cataclysmic changes that have happened five previous times in the earth's history. The last was 65 million years ago when a celestial body the size of Mt. Everest hit the earth and caused the extinction of dinosaurs and many other species. It was not a nice time to be around, as I'm sure Mr. Ebell would have found in the minutes before he died."

Actually, warming has already affected countless species on land—or so say experts such as James Hansen, the nasa scientist who first sounded the alarm about global warming, two decades ago. Warming temperatures, he says, are forcing animals to migrate north out of their habitats. As they do, they disrupt the chain of life in their eco-systems, putting themselves and other species at risk. They may also run into man-made barriers that kill them, leading ultimately to their extinction.

"I've never seen a good study on that," Ebell counters. "What you see are studies that show that animals are living at higher elevations than they used to, or higher latitudes. Like you find robins now all over Canada."

Most immediately threatened, says Hansen, are animals of the polar climates: they have nowhere colder to go. As their world warms, the icebergs on which many of them live are melting, dooming them to drown. "Polar bears, in effect, will be pushed off the planet," Hansen has written.

"James Hansen was not trained as a climate scientist," Ebell says. "He was trained as an astronomer. He's a physicist. His dissertation was on the atmosphere of Venus, and he has applied what he's learned in physics and in astronomy to become a climate scientist, but you know from him talking about species' going north, he knows nothing about biology. Have you seen Legates's study?"

David Legates is another hard-core skeptic, director of the University of Delaware's Center for Climatic Research, who recently issued a paper declaring that only 2 of the world's 20 polar-bear populations are decreasing. Most of the others are stable; two are growing. What Ebell neglects to mention is that Legates's paper was published by another think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis—whose global- warming-denial research was partially funded in 2005 with a $75,000 contribution from ExxonMobil—not in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

The polar-bear study that was peer-reviewed—predicting that polar bears are moving toward extinction—was the work of more than 300 scientists and experts around the world in a consortium called the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. Even the U.S. Department of the Interior has now proposed that polar bears be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because polar sea ice is melting—an extraordinary admission for an administration philosophically aligned with the skeptics. But Ebell is unwilling to concede that polar bears are in any trouble at all.

The assessment team also concluded that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world—with some parts of Alaska warming as much as 10 times as fast. As a consequence, over the past 30 years, areas of ocean that are at least 15 percent ice have decreased annually by nearly 390,000 square miles, an area larger than Norway, Sweden, and Denmark combined. "We're facing unprecedented changes," says Dr. Robert Corell, senior policy fellow at the American Meteorological Society, who chaired the study.

"Corell is not a climate scientist," Ebell says. "He's not an Arctic expert. He's not a glaciologist. He's not any of those things. He is an oceanographer and an engineer."

The whole Arctic assessment, he declares, is cooked data. "If you look at the temperature graph … they show a strong warming trend in the last 34 years.… They cut the data off at 1950. There's a well-known Arctic temperature record that goes back to the early years of the 20th century. The reason they cut it off at 1950 is it was warmer in the Arctic in the 30s and 40s than it is today." The truth, Ebell says, is that "the Arctic warms and cools according to a period of natural cycles of several decades. And we're now in the warm phase; in the 50s and 60s and 70s we were in the cool phase. This is how you cook the data, and this is what these people are all about."

"That's baloney," Corell says. "We did go back further; we have historical records that go back 400,000 years. Parts of the Arctic were probably a little warmer in the 1930s than they are today, but the whole Arctic is warmer today certainly than it's been in the last thousand years—and probably a lot longer than that."

As for his background, Corell notes that, after studying engineering and oceanography, he made his first trip to the Arctic in 1968 and has been in and out of it ever since, taking sediment cores and writing papers, all while heading up the National Science Foundation's climate-study program. "I have never met Ebell," he adds. "He's never contacted me or sent anyone in the assessment any questions."

Corell's team feels that if warming continues at current rates the Arctic polar ice cap will soon start melting completely every summer. Ebell says so what. "The period in which the ice might disappear is a fairly limited one," he says. Besides, he points out, the Arctic polar cap is ice that's floating on water. "So that doesn't have any effect on sea levels at all—just like the ice cubes in your drink, when they melt, they don't change the level."

The same can't be said for the ice sheets over much of Greenland and all of Antarctica: they sit on land. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore explains how the melting of either the Greenland ice sheet or the western arm of the Antarctica ice sheet would increase the level of the world's oceans by as much as 20 feet, inundating low-lying coastal areas from the Maldives to Manhattan. Ebell says that all this is exaggerated or plain wrong. The new alarm about Greenland, he points out, was based on a study of three years of melting. "It's melting slightly faster than it was four years ago, and we get worldwide consternation."

Though he likes to bash scientists for working outside their degreed fields, Ebell, it turns out, isn't a scientist at all. He majored in philosophy at the University of California in San Diego, then studied political theory at the London School of Economics and history at Cambridge. He was, he readily admits, a misfit growing up in rural Oregon on his father's 2,000-acre cattle ranch: a "pointy-headed intellectual" who "loathed the counterculture." He was a misfit in England, too, he discovered: not smart enough to get a fellowship at Cambridge, as Ebell modestly puts it, and not English enough to make do with the modest pay of an English academic. So he returned—with his Albuquerque-born wife, whom he'd met in England—to the U.S., working a succession of public-policy jobs in Washington, carving out conservative positions on property rights, federal lands, and endangered species. In none of those realms did he have any more than his curiosity and convictions.

"I'm not claiming to be a climate authority—the way Jim Hansen is, or Robert Corell," says Ebell. "Every interview I do, when I'm asked about scientific issues, I say I'm not a climate scientist. I'm just giving you the informed layman's perspective.… If science is going to be discussed in the public arena, then shouldn't people other than scientists be allowed to participate? Isn't that what a representative democracy is?"

With evidence of global warming piling ever higher, even the best of the skeptics has a harder time making his case. So Ebell and his colleagues have hit on a new theme. Maybe warming will occur at more than modest rates in the future, he acknowledges.

Some people think that's not so bad.

"People prefer warmer climates," Ebell declares. "They do better in them. People do better in Phoenix than they do in Buffalo. They feel better, they're happier, they're more productive. They live longer."

All predictions of global warming, Ebell observes, suggest that the tropics will stay about the same. The real effects of warming will be in the upper latitudes. "Northern cities like Saskatoon will be more like Calgary, and Bismarck, North Dakota, will be more like Kansas City, and Kansas City will be more like Oklahoma City. Now, is this really bad?"

Yes, it is, says Dr. Paul R. Epstein, of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. "It's not just the warming," he says. Or the storms and other weather extremes. Or the stress put on visible creatures of sea and land. "It's the pests and diseases!"

Epstein has studied the spread of malarial mosquitoes to ever higher mountain altitudes in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. "In the very places where glaciers are retreating and plant communities are migrating upward and temperatures are warming, mosquitoes are circulating." The pattern is consistent from one continent's mountains to the next. "That," Epstein notes, "creates conditions conducive to disease transmission at high altitudes."

Wrong again, says Ebell. "What Paul Epstein publishes is total rubbish," he exclaims. "Temperature is one of the least important factors in the spread of tropical diseases. Malaria didn't used to be called a tropical disease, because it was endemic throughout the world. It's tropical now because it's the rich countries that were able to eradicate it." Actually, that's not true. Malaria was originally called ague or marsh fever because it emanated from warm-weather swamps. Mosquitoes are warm-weather carriers, and the pioneering work done more than a century ago to identify them as carriers, before rich countries had any inkling they were to blame, was done in Algeria, Cuba, and India—all tropical or subtropical climes.

Epstein has another example: bark beetles. Not long ago, vigilant forestry had drastically reduced their prevalence in the U.S. Now because of warmer winters, he says, they've spread back north as far as Alaska. Frost used to kill them off, but now they "overwinter" and produce more generations each year as they go. "They kill the trees, laying eggs inside the bark," Epstein explains. "So we see vast stands of dead trees, and more forest fires."

Ebell says he grew up with bark beetles on his family's ranch. Their recent spread, he says, is simply due to poor forest management, not global warming. "Epstein is a medical doctor, not a scientist," he says. "He's a mountebank."

"What does that even mean?" Epstein says wonderingly. Though the Harvard doctor does know who Ebell is: "He works for that group funded by ExxonMobil, doesn't he?"

Every five to seven years now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), a United Nations–backed consortium of more than 2,500 experts from around the world, issues a voluminous report on global climate—the largest exercise in scientific research ever undertaken. Drafts of the latest report—the fourth—began appearing in February. Its conclusions are devastating. Casting aside the scientific caution of the first three reports, it says global warming is "unequivocal" and largely man-made. It predicts with greater than 90 percent confidence that if carbon dioxide levels rise to double what they were in pre-industrial times, which they'll likely do by the end of the century if fossil-fuel emissions aren't drastically cut, they will push global mean temperatures up between 3.5 and 8 degrees. That would warm the earth to a level not seen in 125,000 years. (That last rise was, of course, a very gradual one, allowing nature to adjust, not a flip-switch jolt in the blink of 350 years.) Already, the warming that's occurred seems likely to increase sea levels 7 to 23 inches by 2100. That's without taking into account the consequences of polar-ice-cap melting, the factor that Al Gore, James Hansen, and others say might cause sea levels to rise by 20 feet or more. The I.P.C.C. scientists say they can't predict the rate of ice-cap melting, and are forbidden, by their United Nations charter, to include speculation. So they just leave that part out. A second part, issued in March, predicts tens of millions of environmental refugees each year from flooding, the rampant spread of tropical diseases (including malaria), and widespread starvation by 2080.

Ebell says the I.P.C.C.'s verdicts are highly misleading. Most of those 2,500 experts work on small, specific bits of one of three 1,000-page reports. Their work isn't alarmist. Only the summaries are. "Who writes the summary for policymakers?," Ebell asks. "The member governments that belong to the I.P.C.C., not the scientists who work on the three 1,000-page case reports."

"Mr. Ebell doesn't understand how the I.P.C.C. works if he claims that the summaries are only the products of the governments," replies Richard H. Moss, senior climate director at the United Nations Foundation, who's a leading member of the I.P.C.C. as well as a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland. "All lead authors do have input into the summary documents, not just to the underlying chapters or specific portions of the summaries related to their expertise. Almost all concur that the evidence is mounting that we have a serious problem on our hands that we must begin to address."

For Ebell, being a contrarian has proved to be a pointy-headed misfit's idea of good fun. Still, with new studies appearing almost weekly confirming global warming, why not come out for doing something—anything—to help slow its onset in the bizarre event that it's as real as thousands of scientists say it is?

Ah, says Ebell with the grin of a debater who's saved his best points for last, because of the risk. "It's a risk-risk analysis," he says. "What is the risk of some of the consequences of global warming happening and having to deal with them compared to the risks of putting the world on an energy-rationing diet?"

The Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations agreement ratified by, as of February 2007, 170 countries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions but shunned by President Bush, has proved his point already, Ebell says. Many European nations will miss their 2010 targets for reducing fossil-fuel emissions. They're making huge sacrifices—in industry and capital growth—for tiny or nonexistent energy savings. President Bush was right to avoid it, Ebell says: it would cost the U.S. between $100 billion and $400 billion a year by 2050 to offset global warming by seven-hundredths of a degree Celsius. Not by chance was Kyoto's approach voted down 95–0 by the U.S. Senate in 1997—it is a dead end, Ebell says.

"Ever since Kyoto was negotiated," Ebell says, "there's no way I could lose. I hate to say that, because it sounds arrogant." But there it is. "It has nothing to do with us. It has to do with the reality. Al Gore and others … said we think that in order to solve this problem we'll have to reduce emissions by 60 to 80 percent by 2050." Meanwhile, Ebell observes, the U.S. Department of Energy and the International Energy Agency have each gauged the world's future energy needs. "Between now and 2030—not 2050—world energy use is going to go up by 60 percent!" (The International Energy Agency predicts the world will be using the same percentage of energy from fossil fuels that is used today, around 80 percent.) "This is a vision coming up against reality," Ebell says. "It's a train wreck, and I know which side will win. Reality will win."

As governments fail one by one to curb their greenhouse gases, Ebell suggests, a new generation of leaders will see the Kyoto Protocol for what it is: a loser. "They will want to distance themselves from it because it is a train wreck, and the scientific community will go, 'Oh, well, uh, maybe it wasn't as big a problem as we thought it was!'"

"Ebell may be proved right about Kyoto," says longtime New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin. "And because global warming isn't a catastrophe in the traditional definition of the word, its full impact won't be felt tomorrow, or next year, or perhaps even for decades. That makes it easy for Ebell to target some scientists as alarmists. This can perpetuate a false sense of intellectual deadlock. And that masks what is clearly established—that more carbon dioxide will raise temperatures and seas for centuries to come."

The best way to deal with warming, Ebell says, is to do exactly what President Bush is doing: encourage the energy industry to burn more gas, more oil, and more coal. The more energy we burn, the more prosperous the energy industry becomes. The more prosperous it is, the more quickly it replaces its fossil-fuel plants, using new technology that does a better job of trapping greenhouse gases. In 50 years, Ebell says, if global warming has really become the problem alarmists say it will be, the technology to deal with it then will be 50 years better than it is now. So let's wait until then, and tackle it more intelligently, more efficiently—more cheaply—than we can today.

To Harvard's Paul Epstein, that's the skeptics' most reprehensible claim. "Not only have the skeptics and the administration been misleading us about the science but about the economic consequences of trying to deal with this problem," he says. "They've maintained this big lie that we're going to lose if we deal with this now. In truth, Detroit is losing heavily because we're not dealing with this now. We're losing by not moving toward green buildings and hybrid cars and co-generation. Companies that are doing this are saving money."

As nearly every week brings a new alarm about global warming, Ebell stays proudly resolute—rather like George W. Bush rationalizing each new setback in Iraq. Only, with global warming, even the Bush administration is now embracing the latest I.P.C.C. report, in principle at least, and trying to make a case that Bush is now a convert to the reality of the threat. With warming, as with Iraq, alarm is growing among U.S. lawmakers. Recently, West Virginia Democratic senator John D. Rockefeller IV, who has championed the coal industry in his state for 30 years, teamed up with Maine Republican senator Olympia Snowe to write a quietly impassioned letter to ExxonMobil's new chairman and C.E.O., Rex W. Tillerson. The senators asked Tillerson to have ExxonMobil cease and desist from its global-warming-denial campaign. They are, they wrote, "persuaded that the climate change denial strategy carried out by and for ExxonMobil has helped foster the perception that the United States is insensitive to a matter of great urgency for all of mankind, and has thus damaged the stature of our nation internationally." In particular, they wrote, "We fervently hope that reports that ExxonMobil intends to end its funding of the climate change denial campaign of the Competitive Enterprise Institute are true.

Myron Ebell is shocked—shocked—and, of course, delighted. To be singled out among the three dozen ExxonMobil front groups is quite an honor. "Obviously it helps us with our media and general visibility," he acknowledges. In fact, ExxonMobil stopped funding C.E.I. last year. The company has also indicated to the Royal Society, Britain's prestigious academy of science, that it is reviewing the funding of all outside groups, but insists this is an annual process.

The scope of that edict may not be clear until early 2008, when the company publishes its 2007 Worldwide Giving Report. Already, though, Ebell is portraying C.E.I. as "a little flyspeck" up against the awesome clout of the competition. "The major environmental groups in this country have budgets of collectively over $1 billion a year," he says. "Our budget is $3.7 million a year, of which only about a quarter goes to global warming. Add up the other [global-warming denier] groups and maybe you can get to $10 million."

By late January, an eerily warm autumn has given way to an even stranger season. Europe is swept by 100-m.p.h. winds, while the Alps experience their warmest winter in 1,250 years. New Yorkers wear T-shirts and shorts on a 70-degree-Fahrenheit day. A month later, arctic weather descends, and Oswego County, New York, gets 11 feet of snow in a week, as bizarre and record-breaking a stretch of weather as the warm days of the month before. Ebell is unconcerned—still. "I remember a Christmas in the 1980s in Washington, D.C.—it was 78 degrees and I got sunburned," he reminisces. "Records are set all the time."

Michael Shnayerson is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

    TWO BAK

new node 10/16 in honor of trump gig:

html unlikely

bak 1 23

1 23 CAP open ltr ~ kevin has no affiliation?!

cli wire  https://www.eenews.net/articles/conservatives-urge-mccarthy-to-disband-climate-committee...conservative groups are pushing to end the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis if Republicans take control of the House next year.

In a letter to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), 18 conservative organizations said there is “no need for a select committee on climate change.”

“With no ability to advance legislation to the House floor, the Select Committee historically serves as a soap box for tax and spend politicians to intimidate American energy companies, energize climate activists and stump for big-government policies that raise energy prices for consumers and weaken American energy independence,” they wrote The group includes Americans For Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Energy Alliance President Tom Pyle and Heartland Institute President James Taylor....The letter reflects an ongoing split in the party that could echo into next year in the likely event that McCarthy becomes speaker after Tuesday’s midterms.

While Pyle, Ebell and others have spent years advocating against climate policy and disputing mainstream climate science, elected Republicans have taken on a softer tone on the issue in recent years.

If Republicans do choose to revive the panel, it could serve as a platform for the party to discuss Biden administration energy policies and for Select Committee ranking member Garret Graves (R-La.) to amplify the party’s messaging. Graves has declined to say publicly whether the committee would return.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) created a predecessor to the panel when Democrats took the House in 2008, then formed the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis in 2019 after they came back to power. It has no legislative authority but has at times caused friction with other committee chairs.

The conservative groups argued the issue would be better served being addressed by the standing committees.

“We urge you to disband the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis and let the committees with appropriate jurisdiction and legislative ability take up the topic of climate change,” they wrote.

https://twitter.com/Mike_Palicz/status/1588610503978668032/photo/1

FURIES

no lnx

https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/fueling-dissent/

‘A lot like climate’

In June, two peer-reviewed studies trumpeted a conclusion at odds with years of solid science: fine-particle pollution long linked to premature death and chronic illness isn’t as dangerous as health advocates contend. If true, the findings would call into question health benefits claimed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has set ever-tightening air-quality standards.

There was a catch, however. The articles — which were published within a week of one another — appeared in Critical Reviews in Toxicology and Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, two journals favored by industry consultants alleged to promote pay-for-play science. And both studies were funded by API, a trade group that has spent $40 million since 2013 to lobby Congress on topics ranging from taxes to global warming.[twitter]

“Our study is published...air quality does not kill. $600 million of EPA junk science up in smoke,” climate-change skeptic and Donald Trump acolyte Steve Milloy tweeted in June, linking to the Regulatory Toxicology article. During a congressional luncheon a month later, the former coal executive took credit for conceiving the study before turning it over to friend, S. Stanley Young, and two other statisticians, who authored the final article. No mention of Milloy’s involvement is made in the publication.

Read more about how Big Oil is trying to sow skepticism of science among judges ]

Some of the same data were used in the Critical Reviews article published by Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr., which also disputed the link between fine particles and mortality. Cox, a biostatistician from Colorado, started consulting for API in 1988. Cox disclosed that his paper “benefitted from close proofreading and copy-editing suggestions from API” but denied in an interview that his findings were influenced. In November, he was named the next chair of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, drawing criticism from groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The science on particle pollution, much like the science on global warming, is exhaustive and widely accepted, with thousands of studies pointing to serious health implications. The World Health Organization notes that particulate matter “affects more people than any other pollutant,” with effects observed at even “very low concentrations.” The particles — found in automotive and industrial exhaust and smaller than one-fifth of the width of a strand of hair — form a toxic mix with ozone that lodges deep in the lungs. Unlike Cox, most researchers are no longer fixated on whether this form of pollution is fundamentally dangerous; they worry instead about whether it can cause — not just exacerbate — chronic illness.

Attacking the science is one way of undermining the Clean Air Act, said John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which advocates for more protective air-quality standards. The Clean Air Act is routinely hailed as one of the most cost-effective federal laws, even by business groups. In 2015, the EPA estimated that the law will have saved the U.S. economy $2 trillion by 2020 while costing $65 billion to implement. About 85 percent of the act’s benefits come from reducing fine-particle pollution, which raises the risk of early death. Opponents of the law “deny that air pollution is deadly … or even harmful in order to try to pretend that no benefits are delivered,” Walke said.

Steve Milloy

milloy’s July luncheon at the Rayburn House Office Building — billed as a “congressional staff and media briefing” — was little more than a plug for his latest book, “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA,” which condemns the “echo chamber of deceptive science” on ozone and fine particles. The event was hosted by Myron Ebell, who chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, a climate-skeptics’ group that began as an alliance of free-market think tanks. “It’s a lot like climate,” Milloy told the audience. “This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”

“It’s a lot like climate... This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”

Reached for comment, Milloy said the study is not an attack on the Clean Air Act but part of his 20-year effort to expose the EPA’s “garbage-in, garbage-out” air pollution research. He denied having any formal ties to API. “I am very, very disappointed in the American Petroleum Institute and all the oil companies for not defending their products, for leaving the science to people like me,” he said.

Young, who authored the study, stood behind its findings and disputed the idea that industry funding presents ethical conflicts. His study data are publicly available, he said, but the EPA isn’t as transparent. Ebell agreed, accusing the agency of using “junk science” to justify air-quality and greenhouse-gas regulation.

Despite their misgivings about the EPA, all three men have become tethered to the agency. Earlier this year, Ebell oversaw the EPA transition for Trump, leading a group that included Milloy. Young was named to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board in October.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., co-founder of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, complained that such appointments have become all too common.  “These people were fringe fanatics and industry stooges fighting on behalf of the industry a propaganda war against science,” he said.

Milloy and Ebell were listed among the authors of a $2 million plan to amplify uncertainty in climate science — as revealed in a 1998 API memo leaked to The New York Times. Both say the memo grew out of an API brainstorming session that never resulted in concrete action, with Milloy calling it “just a big joke.”

Years before, API had refuted the very concept of global warming under President Charles DiBona, who joined the institute shortly after a stint as energy policy advisor to Richard Nixon in the 1970s. White House communications show that DiBona regularly met with then-API President Frank Ikard, a close friend of Nixon’s, before becoming Ikard’s deputy in 1974....

duck 1 23

fossil fuels likely not going anywhere, despite fusion 'breakthrough' touted by Biden officials

justthenews|23 days ago

Fusion technology is promising but years away from usefulness, according to experts, who added that investments in wind, solar, and electric vehicles aren't helping with the climate issue.

Biden Taps Oil From Communist Dictatorship After Rejecting Cleaner Fuel From US Ally

MSN|36 days ago

meaning that they have not actually done anything to reduce global emissions," Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's center for energy and environment, told the DCNF.

Trump's Win Could Position China as the New Climate Change Leader

Inverse|20 days ago

In September, Trump appointed Myron Ebell, a notable climate change denier, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the transition to Trump's administration. Under Obama ...

Pollution Won't Kill You, Says Climate Skeptic Conference

Inverse|6 years ago

This year's schedule is jam-packed with pseudoscience; the speaker list boasts the likes of Myron Ebell, who will receive an award for "speaking truth to power." The conference features a ...

Electric vehicles are exploding from water damage after Hurricane Ian, Florida official warns

FOX 10 Phoenix|91 days ago

"[The EV push] is really kind of a con job," Myron Ebell, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment, told FOX Business in July. "It may be a good ...

Pruitt's EPA Will Give Automakers What They Want: Fewer Emissions Rules

Futurism|5 years ago

"The proposed rollback is going to be quite a significant number," Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute ...

==

ebell  and jt enforcers

wait, what?

https://www.eenews.net/articles/gop-criticizes-its-own-on-climate

ref climatewire 5/19

https://www.eenews.net/articles/gop-criticizes-its-own-on-climate/?ref=drilled

rep. Matt Gaetz (center), a Florida Republican who accepts that man-made climate change is occurring, is being criticized by conservatives for offering legislation to address global warming. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom

As some Republicans inch toward climate policy for the first time in years, those in the party who reject climate science are getting nervous that a more permanent shift is coming.

And they’re going on the attack against their former allies.

A group called Energy & Environment Action Team recently sent a 16-page pamphlet to every member of Congress encouraging lawmakers to reject all climate policy and connecting concern about global warming to political losses.  In bold letters across the top, the pamphlet stated, "The Plan is … No Plan! Why the GOP shouldn’t do anything on climate."

"There is absolutely no reason for any Republican to offer a plan to ‘combat climate change,’" the pamphlet continued. "Such a plan, if enacted would accomplish nothing good for America or the climate."

A growing number of Republican lawmakers, including some who have disputed climate science for years, are not only now acknowledging global warming but also putting forward climate policies. But some worry that their colleagues are simply shifting to climate action because they have been spooked by the popularity of the Green New Deal.

"If you are planning on running against the Green New Deal, it seems sort of odd to play footsie with key elements of the Green New Deal," said Republican energy lobbyist Mike McKenna, who was on President Trump’s Energy Department transition team.

In March, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) proposed a "Green Real Deal" resolution that acknowledges the reality of climate change and the threat it poses to national security, and seeks to use innovation to combat global warming. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) called for a bipartisan "New Manhattan Project for Clean Energy" that would increase the share of renewables on the energy grid, boost nuclear power and encourage electric car production.

"Congressman Gaetz and others are going to do what they think is best, but the idea that Republicans are going to outcompete with Democrats with respect to who can have the best government-based solution to anything is ridiculous and profoundly unserious," McKenna said.

While modest in comparison with the ideas put forward by Democrats — none of the Republican proposals would restrict fossil fuel use, for example — such plans have angered groups allied with the GOP for years.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute and other groups opposed to regulations want to increase political pressure on Republicans who are proposing climate action to "educate them and thereby bring them back into line," said Myron Ebell, director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment and head of the Trump EPA transition team.

Ebell said he is particularly concerned that there seems to be a push among House leadership to craft climate policy. He accused House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) of misleading others in the party and said some lawmakers, including Reps. Garret Graves (R-La.) and Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), have been misinformed by advocates on the value of clean energy.

"It’s when conservatives have decided to offer alternatives, they have gotten beat, because in the public’s mind it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between the left’s plan and the right’s plan and then pretty soon they’re compromising it, they’re coming to some sort of middle ground and pretty soon we’ve lost the whole issue," he said.

Ebell added: "It’s pretty clear to anybody who looks at it, there is no middle ground."

A spokesman for Gaetz said the congressman has discussed "the reality of climate change" with Republican lawmakers as well as with Trump. Gaetz, who once proposed eliminating EPA, is optimistic that more Republicans will eventually form their own plans to address climate change, spokesman Luke Ball said. Gaetz doesn’t view those in the party who reject science as a lost cause because the scientific evidence is now so overwhelming that it will push others to act, his spokesman said.

"Gaetz is concerned at the lack of support he has received from members of his own party who continue to deny the science of climate change," Ball said. "He believes history will judge harshly those who refuse to acknowledge this issue or take actionable steps to address it."

Other GOP lawmakers criticized from the right for climate policy were more reluctant to call out their colleagues.

Graves is one of the most visible congressional Republicans when it comes to the issue of global warming. Not only does he serve as the top GOP lawmaker on a new House climate change committee, but Graves has a history of acknowledging the risks of a warmer planet (Climatewire, March 11).

In a brief Capitol Hill interview, he said he hasn’t encountered noticeable pushback from climate deniers or climate contrarians. But he said he’s still cognizant of the way he must broach the issue with other Republicans.

"What you have to do is to meet people where they are and sort of use verbiage or words that translate to people the right way," Graves said.

"You may not be able to go into some Republican circles and say that, ‘Hey, I’ve got this plan on how we’re going to reduce greenhouse gases in the United States and we’re going to convert everything to renewable energy,’" he said.

But Graves added that the audience could be more receptive "if you come in and start talking about strategies on how we can reduce energy costs by improving efficiency and conservation [or] by bringing new technologies to the table."

Nonetheless, conservatives who oppose climate policy plan to escalate their attacks if members of the party don’t back down.

The recent 16-page brochure attacked a few lawmakers for being concerned about climate change, labeling Gaetz as "one Republican to fall for the climate-baiting guilt-trip." The pamphlet, which misrepresents and distorts climate science, portrays Republicans as politically victorious when they reject climate policy. It blamed the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s loss in the 2008 presidential election on his climate policy.

Steve Milloy, editor of JunkScience.com and the author of the pamphlet, said it’s a signal to Republicans not to get out of line on climate policy. Democrats have united on the other side, he said, and the GOP should also do the same. He blamed Republican actions on climate change on young staffers who don’t yet understand the party’s position. Milloy said he plans to make sure other lawmakers don’t "drift" and warned he would extend his advocacy beyond pamphlets.

"People say all kinds of shit, and if they stop saying it, then OK, but if they persist, well, tougher action will be required," he said. "Then it’s going to be ugly."

The differences between Gaetz’s plan and the Green New Deal backed by progressive Democrats are mere "window-dressing," wrote James Taylor, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, which aims to muddy climate science.

Taylor has said that Republicans risk alienating their base if they craft climate policy. He said that "weak-minded congressional Republicans" who try to respond to the Green New Deal take away the chance to run against it in the 2020 elections.

He has written critically of Gaetz in particular and even referred to him as "Matt Gore" in reference to Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president and environmental activist.

"Gaetz, Alexander, and their small cadre of Republican climate alarmists are seeking to undermine the conservative Republican voter base and Trump on one of his most important policy principles," he wrote. "Their betrayal of Trump and the conservative Republican base will almost certainly and justly come back to haunt them."

The fight on the right over climate change isn’t a new one for Alex Flint, who leads the Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative group that supports carbon taxes.

Earlier this year, Flint criticized climate contrarians for their views and argued that denialism is anathema to conservatism because it ignores the risks of global warming. And "being irresponsible disqualifies anyone from being a true conservative," he wrote at the time (Climatewire, April 15).

In an interview Thursday, Flint made the case that the rejection of climate science is losing ground with Republicans.

"But we won’t know until after the 2020 elections how rapidly it’s occurring," he said.

lcv aug 2022 who hooked him up? ebell?

Washington, D.C. – In response to Blake Masters winning the Republican Primary for U.S. Senate in Arizona, LCV Victory Fund issued the following statements:

“Blake Masters has tied himself to big oil and MAGA radicals who want to upend our democracy,” said LCVVF Regional Campaigns Director Eva Estrada. “He continues to question climate science and has repeatedly pushed the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Thankfully Arizonans have a proven climate leader who has taken on big oil and fought time and again to protect our democracy. LCV Victory Fund has made this race a top priority and will fight like hell to keep Captain Mark Kelly in the Senate.”

“We feel the impacts of climate change everyday. Record breaking heat and worsening droughts are affecting millions across our state, especially those who can least afford it.” said Chispa Arizona State Co-Director Vianey Olivarria. “It is frightening to see Blake Masters, a known climate denier and white supremacists, as the GOP nominee. “He does not reflect our values. Climate and the future of our communities is top of mind for Arizonans, and we deserve leaders in Congress who will stand up for us. We know Arizonans will elect a reasonable leader to the Senate again – Senator Mark Kelly.”

Blake Masters has shown time and again he is a radical candidate, questioning science and threatening our democracy:

    He has repeatedly questioned the science of climate change in interviews, claiming, “we have to figure out if the earth is warming and why….”

    Blake Masters was Peter Thiel’s Deputy on the Trump transition team when they attempted to appoint William Happer, a known climate change denier, to be Trump’s science adviser.

    He has continuously repeated the big lie, pushing the false claim that President Trump won the 2020 election. Trump’s endorsement of Masters said ‘Blake knows that the ‘Crime of the Century’ took place, he will expose it and also, never let it happen again.’

     Super PAC funded by Masters’ old boss Peter Thiel blasted his opponent for not believing that the election was stolen from President Trump. ‘Mark Brnovich says President Trump is wrong on voter fraud. Really? Brnovich failed to convene a grand jury, certifying Biden as president. Now he’s nowhere to be found, making excuses … instead of standing with our president.”

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/739889/redacted-groundswell-notes-and-action-items-from.pdf

ginni groundswell working group: jan 2013

12. NEED WORKING GROUPS for division of labor for 30 front war (Ginni to seek out/discuss); seek volunteer leaders or team-players on various

fronts. Expectation: Teams should connect once a week before Groundswell meeting.

1. Guns: Michael James Barton, Gayle Trotter, Rick Manning
2. Messaging: Dan Bongino, Cherylyn Harley LeBon, Alex Cortes, Anita MonCrief
3. Groundgame: Peter List
4. Getting on Offense: Anita MonCrief
5. Alternative to Rove: Sandy Rios
6. National Security lane - Frank Gaffney
7. Energy and Environment lane – Myron Ebell
8. UN lane - Austin Ruse

9. Shadow Govt teams: Tom Fitton, Mike Farris, Heritage?

10. Benghazi – Boykin, Thomas, Fitton
11. Others needed: Immigration,

aha wow omg:

cfg big lobbyist on climate vs CoC? enforcer drives polarization, RINO hunters

Climate science skeptics grasp for power in changing GOP

Nick Sobczyk, E&E News reporter

Published: Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Skeptics of mainstream climate science and hard-line conservatives think they still have a hold on the GOP, despite a recent rhetorical evolution among congressional Republicans.

Climate science skeptics grasp for power in changing GOP

MARCH 10, 2020

As originally published in E&E News.

By: Nick Sobczyk

March 10, 2020

Skeptics of mainstream climate science and hard-line conservatives think they still have a hold on the GOP, despite a recent rhetorical evolution among congressional Republicans.

It’s part of a battle for the soul of the party between hard-right organizations, such as the Club for Growth, and the newfangled and well-funded ecosystem of conservative clean energy groups, led most prominently by ClearPath and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions.

There are abundant signs on Capitol Hill that people who question climate science are losing clout with Republicans. But they are insistent that not much has changed, particularly with President Trump still in the White House.

“I don’t think we’re losing much ground,” said Myron Ebell, a prominent energy advocate with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a longtime opponent of the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are warming the planet. Ebell helped lead Trump’s EPA transition team.

“I do think that there’s been more hand waving,” he added, “but I don’t think Republican voters have been influenced very much by the hand waving and the shouting.”

Party leadership on Capitol Hill would beg to differ. And even some Trump-loyal Republicans are happy to distance themselves from the climate science denial movement, even if they’re not willing to offer the kind of policies many experts say will be necessary to reduce the use of fossil fuels — the primary driver of climate change.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and his top energy deputies rolled out a package of small-ball climate change bills last month, pointing to polls that show younger voters increasingly worried about the issue.

None would reduce fossil fuel use, but they would aim to reduce emissions through carbon capture and sequestration (Greenwire, Feb. 12).

Meanwhile, Republicans on powerful committees such as Energy and Commerce have largely dropped outright climate denial for the kind of “energy innovation” talking points favored by CRES and ClearPath.

“Both sides now recognize climate is changing, temperature is increasing we need to do something about it,” said Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Greg Walden (R-Ore.). “We’re just speaking out and making our own views known better, and there is more evidence.”

Policywise, what they’re doing is phenomenal and unbelievable and beyond anything we could have hoped. It truly is.

Marc Morano, director of communications at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow]

The fact remains, however, that the Republican president frequently denies climate change and for a time employed a man — William Happer — tasked with performing a critical review of federal climate science.

For skeptics and libertarian ideologues alike who want to see the federal regulatory regime torn down, that’s an important audience.

“Policywise, what Andrew Wheeler is doing is phenomenal. Policywise, what Donald Trump is doing is phenomenal,” said Marc Morano, director of communications at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, who has questioned climate science for years.

“Policywise, what they’re doing is phenomenal and unbelievable and beyond anything we could have hoped,” he said. “It truly is.”

Fighting over the details

There’s no meaningful debate among climate scientists about whether temperatures are rising because of man’s industrial activity.

A host of peer-reviewed studies warn of potentially catastrophic economic and environmental effects, many of which are readily apparent today, without dramatic changes to global greenhouse gas emissions. Most objections to the science have virtually zero credibility in the world’s scientific community.

Still, politically, Ebell doesn’t think it’s useful for conservatives to cede the debate because he said McCarthy’s efforts won’t convince voters who want the federal government to address climate change to vote Republican.

“If local environmental groups or local media in their districts start looking into these bills and start giving them publicity in the local media, they’re going to have a hard time explaining themselves because we’ve conceded that global warming’s a problem, and we’ve got a plan which will do nothing to address it,” Ebell said.

“So I think it’s not a well-thought-out way to proceed on this issue, and I doubt that they’re going to get very much positive spin out of it with voters,” he said.

Prominent conservative organizations, meanwhile, are making similar arguments with more subtle references to the science of climate change.

After McCarthy, Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves and other Republicans came out with their package of bills last month, the Club for Growth promptly blasted it, threatening to withhold endorsements from supporters.

“When you give an inch on principle, you concede a negotiating posture that has also led to devastating bipartisan agreements on bailouts, spending and regulation,” Scott Parkinson, vice president of government affairs for the Club for Growth, wrote in a subsequent letter to the editor in The Washington Post last month.

“Club for Growth will continue to work with principled conservatives who reject climate alarmism and fight for energy and environmental policies based on sound economic principles,” he wrote.

Despite those disagreements, the Republican efforts on climate aren’t actually all that new, and they’re generally more focused on repackaging GOP-backed policies through a climate change lens.

One of the bills they rolled out last month, for instance, would make permanent the 45Q tax break for carbon capture and sequestration, which a Republican-led Congress expanded in 2018.

Graves, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis’ ranking member, is also leading a letter to National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, to be sent in the coming weeks, urging the White House to promote fossil fuel exports as a way to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

Top Republicans, including Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, are expected to sign.

The Trump administration, of course, is already gung-ho about exporting fossil fuels, but Republicans argue that it can help the fight against climate change because U.S. exports have lower life-cycle emissions than sources in the developing world.

The current backdrop, however, is that U.S. emissions are increasing, undermining Republicans who point to emissions reductions during the last 15 years. EPA’s most recent numbers found that greenhouse gas emissions rose 3.1% in 2018 — during Trump’s second year in office — despite the continued decline of coal (Climatewire, Feb. 13).

Meanwhile, the party as a whole still roundly rejects carbon pricing and regulations, tools that most climate experts say will be necessary to deploy clean energy technology to the market and reduce emissions fast enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

“Looking back over the last several years there have been policies that are entirely consistent with Republican ideology that we can continue doing that achieve multiple goals,” Graves said. “My whole thing is let’s not sit here and fight over the details of the science.”

Constituent services?

Ebell and other skeptics dismiss conservative clean energy groups as empty vessels with money but no loyal supporters, but they’re having an impact.

CRES alone spent nearly $500,000 lobbying on various energy issues in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to disclosure forms, including with several outside lobbying firms.

Much of the lobbying effort went toward getting clean energy priorities into the tax extenders package at the end of last year, according to CRES Executive Director Heather Reams, but CRES and ClearPath were enthusiastic about Republicans adopting their rhetoric in early 2020.

Still, Reams said she doesn’t see her group’s efforts as in direct conflict with those who question climate science. Rather, she believes she offers Republicans who want to talk about climate change a supportive landing pad.

“They’re responding to voters,” Reams said. “So I think it’s a very unfair position that some groups are putting Republican members in. These are complex problems and deserve complex solutions, and keeping your head in the sand is not a solution.”

And in a sign that the climate skeptic wing’s influence could be petering out, the Heartland Institute — a conservative think tank that has long dispersed debunked theories about climate change — laid off some of its staff last week amid reported financial woes (Greenwire, March 9).

Efforts to promote carbon taxes as a conservative solution to climate change have been less successful so far, however, showing the limits of the Republican transformation. Currently, the policy has only a small constituency.

Read the rest of the article here....e&e

A biography submitted when Ebell testified before Congress celebrates his reputation with environmental groups, noting he and three of his CEI colleagues were included in “A Field Guide to Climate Criminals” distributed at the UN climate meeting in Montreal in December 2005. Ebell was also listed as one of the six top “Misleaders” by Rolling Stone magazine in a 2005 issue. [68]

off bs bio he sends for testimony; note how he boasts about attackers (// horner on greenpeace gos thru trash regularly)

Myron Ebell

Director of Freedom Action

and

Director, Center for Energy and Environment

Competitive Enterprise Institute

1899 L Street, N. W., 12th floor

Washington, DC 20036

Tel: (202) 331-2256

Mobile: (202) 320-6685

Myron Ebell is director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and

Environment, which is one of the world’s largest and most effective Free Market

Environmentalism programs. He also serves as director of Freedom Action, a web-based

grassroots activist organization dedicated to putting freedom on the offensive, and chairs the

Cooler Heads Coalition, which comprises over two dozen non-profit groups in this country and

abroad that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policies. CEI and

the Cooler Heads Coalition led the successful decade-long fight to defeat cap-and-trade

legislation.

Climate of Doubt, a PBS Frontline documentary aired in October 2012, featured long

interviews with Mr. Ebell. In March 2010, the Financial Times called Mr. Ebell “one of

America’s most prominent climate-change skeptics.” In July 2009, the Business Insider’s Green

Sheet named him third in its list of the Ten Most-Respected Global Warming Skeptics, after

Professor Freeman Dyson and Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, and commented, “Myron Ebell may be

enemy #1 to the current climate change community.”

Eric Pooley devotes a chapter of his recent

book, The Climate War, to Mr. Ebell and calls him “a superstar of the denialosphere.”

Among numerous other recognitions, Vanity Fair magazine published a long, highly

critical profile of Mr. Ebell in their May 2007 “second annual Green Issue.”

Greenpeace

featured Mr. Ebell and three of his CEI colleagues in “A Field Guide to Climate Criminals”

distributed at the UN climate meeting in Montreal in December 2005.

Rolling Stone magazine in

its November 17, 2005 issue named Mr. Ebell one of the six top “Misleaders” on global warming

in a special feature, along with President George W. Bush, Senator James M. Inhofe, and the late

Michael Crichton.

As a result of a BBC Radio interview in November 2004, seven members of

the British House of Commons from all three major parties introduced a motion to censure Mr.

Ebell “in the strongest possible terms.”

The Clean Air Trust in March 2001 named Mr. Ebell its

"Villain of the Month" for his role in convincing the Bush Administration not to regulate carbon

dioxide emissions.

Prior to coming to CEI, Mr. Ebell was policy director at Frontiers of Freedom, a public policy advocacy organization founded by the late former US Senator Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.).

While at Frontiers of Freedom, he worked on property rights, the Endangered Species Act,

federal-lands policies, and global warming. He previously served as senior legislative assistant to

Rep. John Shadegg (R-Az.), where he helped develop landmark legislation that would transform

the Endangered Species Act into a program that respects property rights and actually protects

endangered wildlife habitat, and before that as Washington representative of the American Land

Rights Association and as assistant to the chairman of the National Taxpayers Union. He was

one of the founders of the Grassroots ESA Coalition and served several years on its board and as

its unpaid co-ordinator.

Mr. Ebell has appeared as a guest on numerous television shows, including the ABC

Evening News, NBC Nightly News, PBS News Hour, BBC Newsnight, BBC World, CNBC,

CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, MSNBC, ITN, Voice of America, Televisa, Sky TV, Al

Jazeera, PBS’s NOW, Fox News's Special Report, O'Reilly Factor, and Hannity and Colmes, and

on national television networks in Australia, Canada, China, Russia, France, Belgium, Greece,

Switzerland, and Germany. He has spoken frequently on a variety of BBC radio news shows and

on hundreds of radio talk shows, including G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, Lars Larson,

Dennis Miller, Jim Bohannon, Blanquita Cullum, Janet Parshall, Neal Boortz, Thom Hartmann,

Jane Chastain, Alan Colmes, Alan Nathan, Air America, and National Public Radio's Diane

Rehm, Talk of the Nation, To the Point, Living on Earth, Morning Edition, and All Things

Considered.

Mr. Ebell has appeared in a number of documentary films, including most recently Greedy Lying

Bastards, Dirty Business, and Cool It! In 2004 and 2009, he was featured in BBC Radio

documentaries and in 2005 participated in a BBC World Television debate on the Kyoto

Protocol. Mr. Ebell's writings have appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York

Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Human Events, Forbes, London’s

Guardian, London’s Standpoint Magazine, Orange County Register, Newark Star Ledger,

Riverside Press Enterprise, Philadelphia Inquirer, Manchester Union Leader, Washington Times,

Charleston Daily Mail, Anchorage Daily News, and Environmental Law Forum.

Mr. Ebell has testified before eight House and Senate committees. On radio and

television and in person, he has debated then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, then-EPA

Administrator Carol Browner, then-CEQ Chairman Katie McGinty, then-Acting CEQ Chairman

George Frampton, then-British Environment Minister Michael Meacher, former British

Environment Minister John Selwyn Gummer, then-Dutch Environment Minister Jan Pronk,

European Environment Agency Executive Director Jacqueline McGlade, several Senators and

Representatives, and the heads of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, League of Conservation

Voters, Wilderness Society, Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth UK, National Environmental

Trust, Public Citizen, and Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy. In May 2005, the Oxford

Union invited Mr. Ebell to speak in a debate on global warming. He also spoke on the opening

plenary panel of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual meeting in 2004, along with

Teresa Heinz Kerry, Ted Danson, and Franco Harris.

The Weather Channel named CEI one of

the ten most influential groups or individuals in the global warming debate; notably, no other

non-profit groups, including environmental pressure groups, were named to the list.

A native of Baker County, Oregon, where he grew up on a cattle ranch, Mr. Ebell holds a

B.A. from Colorado College (cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) and an M.Sc. from the London

School of Economics, where he was a pupil of the notable political philosopher, Michael

Oakeshott. He was also a postgraduate research student at the University of California at San

Diego (where he was a Board of Regents’ Fellow) and at Peterhouse, Cambridge University.

==

2017 2x? yup kooky

https://www.alternet.org/amp/how-trump-ally-myron-ebell-spread-misinformation-big-tobacco-and-big-oil-2647312735

guk ctt 1019

The director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) Center for Energy and Environment, Myron Ebell, for example, told the Guardian: “CEI believes strongly that the policies being proposed by climate alarmists to deal with global warming pose much greater threats to human flourishing than do the effects of global warming. Abundant, affordable energy is a necessary condition of human wellbeing but the global energy-rationing policies being pursued, like those in the Paris climate treaty, threaten to consign billions of people around the world to energy poverty and perpetual economic stagnation.”

 ==

3x?

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16112016/myron-ebell-climate-denier-epa-donald-trump

no lnx

Myron Ebell, the Climate Contrarian Now Plotting the EPA's Precarious Future

Donald Trump's choice to lead the EPA transition team has a long history of pushing climate denial, assailing environmental protections and trumpeting fossil fuels.

John H. Cushman Jr.

BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.

NOV 16, 2016

[Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute

Myron Ebell's profile on the Competitive Enterprise Institute's website includes links to his work casting doubt on climate change and urging resistance to climate action. Photo illustration by Paul Horn/InsideClimate News]

Myron Ebell, chosen by Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, traces a long history as a determined conservative firebrand.

He rose through the ranks of the "wise-use" movement to land at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, pushing an ideology of private property and free markets reigning supreme. He led activists calling themselves the Cooler Heads Coalition, pushing a brand of no-holds-barred climate denial, putting himself at the center of divisive advocacy wars over fossil fuels and the environment.

For decades, he has pushed the radical insistence that the environmental left has it all wrong: the science, the ideology, the economics and the politics of climate change.

The same views apply across the landscape of environmental policy, from land and water conservation to energy production.

During an earlier transition from one administration to another, as the Bush-Cheney Republicans arrived to displace the Clinton-Gore Democrats in 2001, he shared his views in an online chat sponsored by the Washington Post. He said Gail Norton, a Reagan-era private-property-rights champion nominated for Interior Secretary, and Spencer Abraham, a founder of the Federalist Society who had voted to abolish the Energy Department but now would run it, were "superb choices." But he reckoned that Christine Todd Whitman, a moderate from New Jersey who was to head the EPA, "may turn out to be a good choice or may not."

It was a savvy move to damn Whitman with such vanishingly faint praise. It would not be long before she was a victim of intense maneuvering against forceful action on climate change during the opening Bush-Cheney years. Ebell thought Whitman should only be retained if her EPA would "stop claiming regulatory authorities far beyond its legal authority."

It's just like his view today, except that there are new Obama-era targets, like the Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States rule.

Through all that ensued since 2001—the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol and the rise of the Paris Agreement; the Supreme Court decree that the EPA must control carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels; and the ensuing fight over regulations to do just that—Ebell has never wavered in his views.

So his ascendancy in the Trump camp alarms and exasperates people like Eric Schaeffer, former head of enforcement at EPA and now executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit watchdog group.

They know him as the author of a famous denialist alt-science memo in the 1990s, as an advocate who helped scuttle the Kyoto Protocol in the 2000s. He is also known as a happy warrior at CEI, funded generously by Exxon and by dark-money donors, that never concedes the field. They know that CEI remains engaged in a furious fight with state attorneys general over its own role in Exxon's record on climate change. They can only imagine how far he and the Trump team might go in de-funding and de-fanging the EPA.

"It tells me they are not approaching this analytically, logically, or even as economists," Schaeffer said. "They are approaching it as ideologues. And that's pretty dangerous. It used to be, even to some extent under 'W,' you talked in code or at least made some kind of showing of your interest in the environment and clean air and water, and having a credible EPA. They've completely thrown that overboard."

Already, CEI is getting very specific about the kinds of actions the Trump administration should take. This week it listed three executive orders exemplifying those that should be deep-sixed. (They involve energy conservation by the federal government, international development aid and protection of infrastructure from climate impacts.)

If the Clean Power Plan meets its demise, and particularly if the Paris Agreement goes down the same drain, the defeat for 21st century environmentalism would exceed the undoing of the Kyoto Protocol or the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate bill early in the Obama years.

At its heart, it would be a victory for denial. And it would vindicate the long game plan of fossil fuel forces that recognized that financing the machinery of ideology was just as important as financing political campaigns—because Big Oil and Big Coal contributed relatively little this year to the Trump campaign, even as the fossil fuel camp scripted his thinly-embellished policy declarations.

One irony, said Jeremy Symons, associate vice president for climate policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, "is that Trump said he would 'drain the swamp,' but Ebell is a creature of the swamp. He has been taking money from years from industry to slow and stop climate change."

Robert Brulle, a sociologist who has extensively documented the industry's support of climate denial, said CEI's biggest funder, pouring in $9.1 million between 2002 and 2013, was the Florida-based Dunn's Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking. Run by futures trader William Dunn, the foundation is a major donor to free market think tanks and advocacy groups like the Reason Foundation and the Cato Institute.

The second largest funder, with $5 million since 2004, is Donors Trust, which has been called the "dark money ATM of the conservative movement." Its donors include the libertarian Koch brothers and other free enterprise philanthropists. Exxon also is among CEI's largest funders with $2 million between 2000 and 2005, but the big oil company hasn't given to CEI directly since 2006, when it began scaling back its funding of groups that deny climate science.

As far back as 1998, Ebell was among a group organized by the American Petroleum Institute and its allies proposing a denialist project to ''maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media and other key audiences,'' according to a memo they wrote.

During and after the election of 2000 and the transition from the Clinton-Gore administration to the Bush-Cheney regime, CEI fought to influence Washington's formal climate science assessments. Its lawyers sued to make sure that one major document, the National Climate Assessment, would not carry any policy weight.

In 2002, Ebell offered CEI's help to Philip Cooney, chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, to "clean up the mess." That was in the wake of the State Department filing a U.S. Climate Action Report that included the United Nations finding that global warming posed a significant risk and was caused by fossil fuel emissions.

Cooney, who joined the Bush administration after a decade as a lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute, had edited government reports to emphasize doubt about climate change. That was documented in 2005 by whistleblower Rick Piltz, a former senior official in the government's climate change science program. (Piltz resigned from the government and founded Climate Science Watch in 2005. He died in 2014. Cooney resigned from the Bush administration after Piltz's disclosures and took a job at Exxon.)

"Thanks for calling and asking for our help," Ebell said in an email to Cooney in 2002.

But true to form, his email had a badgering, even threatening tone, criticizing the Bush administration's handling of climate change reports and warning that CEI would fight any policies it viewed as errant. Ebell promised in the email "to do as much as we could to deflect criticism by blaming the EPA for freelancing."

Ebell said it was imperative to "drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think that they are serving the president's interests by publishing this rubbish."

Whitman, he said, should go.

"It seems to me that the folks at EPA are the obvious fall guys, and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible," Ebell wrote.

Whitman, who now runs her own strategic planning and consulting group, said in an interview that she never had any personal dealings with Ebell. While at EPA, the pressures that concerned her the most came mainly from Cheney and his staff. "I suspect he had a little more pull than Myron," Whitman said. As for Ebell: "There's always going to be those kind of people out there. You just can't worry about it."

The incident prompted two state attorneys general to request a Justice Department investigation into any improper collusion, but that went nowhere

Several Democratic attorneys general referenced possible collusion between Exxon and groups like CEI when they announced investigations of Exxon for potential climate fraud. That came after InsideClimate News and others published histories of Exxon's own climate research and its subsequent support for campaigns to undermine the scientific consensus.

The attorney general of the Virgin Islands went so far as to subpoena CEI's records from the Bush-Cheney transition era, but CEI fought back hard—as did Exxon and several Republican state attorneys general and Republicans on a House committee—and deflected the inquiry.

At a meeting of Republican state attorneys general this summer, Ebell lashed out at Exxon foes, saying the Democratic attorneys general and environmental organizations were colluding to "silence and defund the opponents of global warming alarmism."

An audio recording of the session "Climate Change Debate: How Speech is Being Stifled" was obtained and released by the Center for Media and Democracy.

Ebell set the tone by disparaging those who embrace the overwhelming scientific evidence that the Earth is warming.

"Why is the left so intent on trying to win the debate by silencing and de-funding their opponents? Well, they have a little problem, we've got reality on our side," Ebell said.

"So when you expose all of these arguments as phony, what is left but trying to win by silencing and defunding your opponents?" he said.

As CEI has done in legal filings and in newspaper advertising, he called it a matter of constitutionally protected free speech.

Months before Trump emerged victorious, and before Ebell was named to play a big role in the new administration's agenda-setting, he declared confidently that "right now the climate inquisition is in retreat," he said. "It's in retreat because of what ExxonMobil has done. What CEI has done."

Now that Ebell is on the inside of an administration, though, his influence is likely to multiply. "That's what worries me," said Whitman. "Of all the promises Trump made during the campaign that now seem to be a little less certain, EPA is probably the one he'll stick with, because it is so universally thought of as being the source of all evil. And that is very troubling."

Neela Banerjee, Marianne Lavelle and David Hasemyer contributed reporting for this story.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

POLITICS REGULATION

DONALD TRUMP EPA CLIMATE CHANGE CLIMATE DENIAL

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060713373

The proposed White House panel that would conduct an "adversarial" review of climate science is dead for now, as President Trump grapples with negative perceptions of his environmental record at the outset of his reelection campaign.

The monthslong push from within the National Security Council to review established science on climate change divided White House advisers and generated sharp opposition from researchers across the country. The effort, led by a physicist overseeing technology issues at the NSC, William Happer, stalled indefinitely amid internal disagreements within the White House, according to two sources.

"It's been totally stymied by the forces of darkness within the administration, but also by the looming election campaign," said Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute who led the EPA transition team under Trump.

Happer has consulted conservative groups that attack climate science in an attempt to recruit members for the proposed panel. He's spoken with policy analysts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and CO2 Coalition, a group Happer founded and that claims that the world would be better off with higher levels of carbon dioxide emissions. The theories promoted by those groups are rejected by NASA, NOAA and the world's top science academies.

Happer initially wanted Trump to issue an executive order to create the "Presidential Committee on Climate Security." He wanted the panel to review assertions within the National Climate Assessment related to risks from climate change on national security. Happer briefed Trump on climate science at least twice (Climatewire, June 24).

The idea to create the panel has caused strife within the White House. Among its critics are deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell; Kevin Hassett, the outgoing chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council; and Kelvin Droegemeier, the president's science adviser. Thosesupporting the plan include Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and Brooke Rollins, assistant to Trump in the Office of American Innovation.

An official at NSC disputed the characterization that the panel was dead, even while confirming that it had been indefinitely delayed. The plan has suffered several downgrades over the months. It was initially proposed as a rapid response team of climate science critics who would challenge government publications on human-caused warming. Recent discussions have centered on the idea of forcing government climate scientists to participate in a debate with critics of their work who deny that humans are causing widespread changes on Earth (Climatewire, June 6). Most recently, the plan was diminished to creating dueling white papers that would elevate climate denialism to the level of consensus science.

Those in talks to participate as critics of mainstream science include John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Judith Curry, former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. A potential leader of the exercise was Paul Robinson, a former Department of Energy official who oversaw talks about nuclear weapons tests with the Soviet Union, but who is not trained in climate science.

Trump supporters who want the administration to be more aggressive in its rejection of climate science were frustrated that the climate review panel had been sidelined. Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute sees it as a sign that the Trump campaign is sensitive to Democratic attacks on climate change.

"The reelect campaign has been completely taken over by the usual cast of Republican establishment consultants who are primarily concerned with making very large amounts of money on the campaign," Ebell said.

nb guk links

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-america-environmental-leader-2639096425.html

Despite cutting more than 80 environmental regulations, appointing a climate change denier to the National Security Council and giving senior administration roles to people who worked for the fossil fuel industry, President Donald Trump will deliver a speech Monday that a White House spokesman said will "recognize his administration's environmental leadership and America's role in leading the world," as the Guardian was the first to report.

Trump intends to tout the country's clean air and water. Although, he often boasts that the U.S. has the cleanest air in the world, statistics show otherwise. The nonprofit Health Effects Institute's State of Global Air 2019 report ranked the United States 37th dirtiest out of 195 countries for ozone, also known as smog.

Furthermore, a report published last month showed that the U.S. had more days with unhealthy air during the first two years of Trump's term than in the previous four years, as the Associated Press reported.

Many of his policies and rollbacks will threaten the air, land and water in the U.S. for years to come, experts say. In boasting about his environmental record, Trump could discuss marine debris cleanup efforts or he could discuss funds earmarked to restore the Florida Everglades, but he has little else to go on, according to the Guardian.

Yet, in an off-the-record conference call on Wednesday, the White House asked key supporting groups to spread the message that the U.S. under Trump continues to be an environmental leader.

Trump's environment officials, including U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler, interior Sec. David Bernhardt and council on environmental quality Chief Mary Neumayr will be at the White House on Monday for the event titled Presidential Remarks on America's Environmental Leadership, according to the Guardian.

Jonathan Watts, who did not report the story but is the global environment editor for the Guardian, wrote on Twitter that Trump's speech is "straight out of Orwell."

While the president has denied that the climate crisis exists and even wrote on Twitter that the concept was created by the Chinese to make American manufacturing non-competitive, some Republicans want him to acknowledge the problem while others want him to continue to deny its reality.

The Guardian reported on how several conservative groups would like Tump to address the environment. Sarah Hunt, of the cross-partisan Rainey Center, said Trump should use the opportunity to endorse America's emissions cuts so far.

"American energy innovation allows our nation to lead the world in greenhouse gas emissions reductions – we've cut our emissions over 10 percent since 2005," Hunt said to the Guardian. "The president should be proud that American natural gas, wind and solar energy are creating jobs and fighting climate change. I would love to see him announce an initiative that will help our great American clean energy companies export their zero-carbon energy technology to the rest of the world."

Trump could also make the case that cheap energy will lift up the poor, even if that energy is fueled by coal, oil and gas.

Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to the Guardian he wants to hear the president say, "the alternative to the Green New Deal is not carbon taxes and making people poorer. It's the Trump energy agenda, which makes people wealthier. Wealthier is healthier, the wealthier we are, the higher our environmental quality."

Analysis from academics, medical experts like the American Lung Association, and environmental experts suggests otherwise. Trump's policies, delivered at the behest of the fossil fuel industry will threaten the health of Americans, could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions, and lead to thousands of deaths from hazardous air quality, according to the New York Times.

 ==

omfg coherent climate sci supp start nyt 619

...Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka made a well-publicized effort to talk him out of leaving the Paris accord in 2017. But after being vanquished by officials including Mr. Bannon, Mr. Pruitt, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, there is little evidence she has resisted his approach since then.

The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.DISASTER CAP'LISM?!

“That is one of the most crude messages one could deliver,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as the NATO ambassador under George W. Bush.

Image

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the Arctic as a land of “opportunity and abundance” as a consequence of global warming.CreditMandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]

At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.

Mr. Reilly, the head of the Geological Survey, who does not have a background in climate change science, characterized the changes as an attempt to prepare more careful, accurate reports. “We’re looking for answers with our partners and to get statistical significance from what we understand,” he said.

Yet scientists said that by eliminating the projected effects of increased carbon dioxide pollution after 2040, the Geological Survey reports would present an incomplete and falsely optimistic picture of the impact of continuing to burn unlimited amounts of coal, oil and gasoline.

“The scenarios in these reports that show different outcomes are like going to the doctor, who tells you, ‘If you don’t change your bad eating habits, and you don’t start to exercise, you’ll need a quadruple bypass, but if you do change your lifestyle, you’ll have a different outcome,’” said Katharine Hayhoe, the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and an author of the National Climate Assessment.

Not all government science agencies are planning such changes. A spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, asked if its scientists would limit the use of climate models, wrote in an email, “No changes are being considered at this time.”

The push to alter the results of at least some climate science reports, several officials said, came after November’s release of the second volume of the National Climate Assessment.

While the Trump administration did not try to rewrite the scientific conclusions of the report, officials sought to play it down — releasing it the day after Thanksgiving — and discredit it, with a White House statement calling it “largely based on the most extreme scenario.”

Image

This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to finalize the legal rollback of two of President Barack Obama’s most consequential policies: regulations to curb planet-warming pollution from vehicles and power plants.CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times]

Still, the report could create legal problems for Mr. Trump’s agenda of abolishing regulations. This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to finalize the legal rollback of two of President Barack Obama’s most consequential policies: federal regulations to curb planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks.

Opponents say that when they challenge the moves in court, they intend to point to the climate assessment, asking how the government can justify the reversals when its own agencies have concluded that the pollution will be so harmful.

That is why officials are now discussing how to influence the conclusions of the next National Climate Assessment.

“They’ve started talking about how they can produce a report that doesn’t lead to some silly alarmist predictions about the future,” said Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded research organization, and who led the administration’s transition at the E.P.A.

A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.

Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”

Outside the United States, climate scientists had long given up on the White House being anything but on outlier in policy. But they worry about the loss of the government as a source for reliable climate research.

“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Climate Fight, Trump Will Put Science on Trial

ebell works w/ CEQ to kill McCain-Lieberman bill:

Kert Davies, originally published on ClimateInvestigations.org

InsideClimate News’  Marianne Lavelle published a long piece this weekend, chronicling Senator John McCain’s rise and fall as a climate leader.  The story highlights a campaign I worked on in 2000, where we asked all the presidential candidates the simple and still pertinent question, “What’s Your Plan?” on global warming.McCain was one of the only candidates that took it on. He went back to Washington in the middle of 2000, having been defeated by George W. Bush in the primaries, and immediately started holding hearings on climate change science.

As always, there is more to the story.  When McCain emerged as “Captain Climate” in the early 2000s, and introduced the first serious bipartisan legislation to cut emissions, he became the target of a multifaceted attack by anti-regulatory free market organizations.  It turns out, many of these organizations and front groups were quietly being funded by ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers.

This pressure may partly explain why McCain later abandoned climate change when he ran for President in 2008 and attacked his colleagues’ efforts during the 2009 push for climate legislation.  By that point McCain had succumbed to the now standard Republican talking points on climate.  Oh, and lest we forget, he also picked Sarah Palin as a running mate and starting down the “Drill, Baby, Drill” path (the opposite of sane climate policy) and the rest is history. 

No one has really explained how this turn away from climate leadership really happened. Most commentators attribute it to political choices McCain himself made, without really analyzing the outside pressure that closed in on McCain from 2000 to 2008. 

InsideClimate News notes briefly that there was a coordinated effort to oppose McCain’s efforts run by corporate-funded entities.  Climate Investigations Center went back and looked at our records for documentation of the campaign to the kill the McCain-Lieberman climate legislation as it gained momentum. First introduced in 2001 by the two Senators, The Climate Stewardship Act (S.139) was the first national, bipartisan legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas pollution. This bill eventually became the ground-zero target for climate deniers and corporate interests.

Unfortunately, a month after the first McCain-Lieberman bill was introduced, the attacks on September 11th changed everything. McCain and Lieberman, a neo-con Democrat at the time, were among the first to lead the charge to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, well ahead of the Bush Administration according to many accounts from that time.

By 2003, McCain and Lieberman got back to thinking about climate change together and leveraged the first full Senate vote on their bill by forcing Majority Leader Bill Frist’s hand on an energy bill he was trying to pass.

The McCain-Lieberman bill garnered surprising support but lost 43-55, well short of the 60 votes needed to avoid an override under Senate rule.  Corporations saw this as a close call and began a concerted effort to kill the momentum in 2004 (see below). In 2005, the bill was renamed The Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, and in McCain style, stubbornly brought up for another vote where it lost by a bigger margin, 38 Yea to 60 Nay votes.

I know for a fact that they got blindsided on this.  They thought they had paved the way for success. In a meeting with a McCain staffer after the second vote, I showed them an ExxonSecrets map (similar to the one below) of the organizations and individuals that worked to kill the bill.  The staffer knew there were various organizations and companies lobbying against the bill, but had no idea the level of coordination, nor the ExxonMobil funding channels.

[secrets chart]

Was the Exxon Denial Machine built to fight Sen. McCain?

It has always been interesting that our database of ExxonMobil climate denial funding shows a dramatic increase in spending after 2000, which coincides with McCain emerging as a climate champion.

The graph above shows the yearly totals of ExxonMobil’s grants to climate denying non-profit organizations and breaks out the total grants specifically earmarked for climate change between the years of 1997-2006.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that corporate polluters thought they were off the hook with the Bush-Cheney victory over Gore-Lieberman.  Yet ExxonMobil’s funding of climate denial organizations ballooned to its highest levels between 2000 and 2005 as the McCain-Lieberman legislation gained momentum. Between 2003-2005, Exxon wrote grants totaling more than $3.3 million dollars each year to climate-denying organizations.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the leader of the Cooler Heads Coalition (CHC) and recipient of over $2 million dollars total from ExxonMobil between 1997-2005, aggressively fought Sen. McCain’s climate leadership in the early 2000s. A leaked 2003 email from Myron Ebell, Director of Global Warming Policy at CEI, lays out a target list for lobbying against the “McLieberman” bill. FOIAed documents show communications in 2003 between Myron Ebell and the Bush White HouseCouncil on Environmental Quality, where Ebell details the campaign against McCain.  CEI also put out press releases against the legislation, held events to debate it, and used the CHC network of climate deniers to wage their campaign.

The Exxon-funded groups were also being funded by the Koch brothers and their foundations.  In January 2003, CEI co-authored a letter with the Koch-funded Citizen’s for Sound Economy to the Bush Whitehouse decrying the McCain-Lieberman legislation.  ExxonMobil gave CEI $465,000 that year according to Exxon documents, the largest Exxon haul by CEI in any year.  An unredacted CEI IRS 990 for 2003 lists a $100,000 donation from David Koch himself and only $180,000 from ExxonMobil (probably an accounting anomaly).

United 4 Jobs, DCI Group and Exxon cash

...

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/07/12/bradley-foundation-funds-web-climate-change-deniers/

Armiak

Bradley Foundation internal documents reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reveal a concerted effort by the organization to delegitimize climate science, while promoting fossil fuel energy development in the United States.

An analysis of Bradley’s climate-related activities shows that the foundation has made significant grants to support energy policy think tanks, attack-dog groups that target environmentalists, and efforts to discredit climate science.

A 2013 internal foundation document details how Bradley “instructed staff to explore options…to make more energy-related grants.” The document also notes that the Board gave a “terminal grant” of $263,591 to the Sand County Foundation (SCF), which previously administered the Bradley Fund for the Environment.

The documents do not reveal Bradley’s motivation in splitting from SCF, but they do outline a serious effort to promote fossil fuel industry interests at the expense of the environment.

CENTERS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL AND FOSSIL FUEL DEVELOPMENT

As part of its push to support studies and public relations to cast doubt on mounting scientific evidence on climate change, Bradley has focused its resources on “Energy Policy Centers,” many of which are housed in “Bradley-supported” State Policy Network (SPN) “think tanks.” SPN is a web of 156 right-wing groups in 49 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Canada, and the UK that receives funding from the billionaire Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation, and the Roe Foundation, as well as many multi-national corporations.

The examined documents show that the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment (CEPE) at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MIPR), a member of SPN, received a total of $500,000 for its Center, with another $200,000 distributed in 2016. (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research GPR, February 23, 2016) CEPE works to promote fossil fuel development despite the devastating effects of climate change. A background document on CEPE states its goal clearly: “The Center’s research and public education activity aims at demonstrating that the United States is poised to reap substantial economic benefits in the form of job creation, lower gasoline and electricity prices, and increased productivity provided public policies allow companies to access valuable energy resources and distribute them at home and abroad.”

A recommendation by Bradley staff on the Manhattan Institute’s 2016 grant proposal specifically states that CEPE is worth funding because, “They have succeeded in identifying and publicizing so many of the falsehoods that surround energy and the environment.” (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research GPR, February 23, 2016) Anexample of this “success” can be found in the work of CEPE senior fellow Mark Mills, who is recognized as originating the idea that North America can surpass the Middle East as the largest energy supplier in the world. (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research GPR, November 12, 2013)

The Energy Policy Center (EPC) at another SPN “think tank”, the Independence Institute, received $195,000 from the Bradley Foundation between 2012 and 2016.

Bradley documents examined show that EPC’s purpose is to “consciously counter-balance former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s environmental think tank” at Colorado State University, which promotes a “New Energy Economy.”

Bradley considers EPC to be highly successful in fighting local and federal environmental initiatives. The Bradley documents note that EPC was a “key coalition partner” in preempting local bans on fracking in Colorado, and that it “has developed a toolkit for policymakers, attorneys general, and other conservative state think tanks to help them push back against U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.” (Independence Institute GPR, June 2, 2015)

In addition to these two centers, Bradley has funded the Center for Energy and Environment (CEE) at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), an “associate member” of SPN, and the Center for Energy Innovation and Independence at Consumers’ Research.

CEE is led by the prominent climate change denier Myron Ebell, who steered Trump’s EPA transition team. Ebell also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, which brings together right-wing activists and scholars for monthly meetings. The coalition was established on May 6, 1997, “to dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis.”

CEI was long tied to tobacco disinformation campaigns, but is now a leading organization in the movement to discredit climate science.

Bradley does not mention how much of its funding to CEI was designated for CEE operations. Between 1986 and 2015, Bradley Foundation gave $2.2 million to CEI, the majority of which was “to support general operations.” (Competitive Enterprise Institute GPR, June 2, 2015).

The Center for Energy Innovation and Independence received $250,000 from Bradley in 2013 to get the new group off the ground. According to a background document, the group “will closely monitor federal environmental regulations and potentially lay the foundation for multi-state litigation against them, similar to those actions in the Obamacare and Dodd-Frank lawsuits, of which aggressive (Scott) Pruitt was and is a part.” Pruitt is the former AG of Oklahoma and recently resigned as the EPA Administrator under Trump.

SMEAR CAMPAIGNS AND FUNDING EFFORTS TO DISCREDIT CLIMATE SCIENCE

At the same time Bradley rolled out funding for “Energy Policy Centers,” it was doling out cash to discredit environmental organizations and climate change science.

A grant proposal record for the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a front group created by the close Bradley ally Rick Berman, details an organized effort to weaken the credibility of well-respected, national environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, and Food and Water Watch. (The Center for Consumer Freedom GPR, November 12, 2013) Berman also founded Berman and Company, a notorious Washington, D.C.-based corporate lobbying and PR company known for creating numerous corporate “front groups” and astroturf propaganda campaigns.

Berman’s anti-environmental project at CCF was called Big Green Radicals and was seeded with a $150,000 “public education” grant from Bradley in 2013.

According to Bradley’s background document, the Big Green Radicals project would include the following components:

    [N]ew, updated research profiles for NRDC, Food and Water Watch, and Sierra Club; standalone websites for all three organizations; a Facebook group seeded with several thousand fans to provide a base for the message; the production of two online videos to explain the real agenda of the environmental left; and Google keyword advertising for members of the media and the public searching for information about one of the targeted groups.

In addition to providing the start-up funding for Big Green Radicals, Bradley gave $85,000 to the Capital Research Center (CRC), a group led by former Berman and Company employee Scott Walter. The grant was designated for “general operations,” but it may have been used to support the publication Green Watch. A background document on CRC states that, “Green Watch tracks the money flow to environmental nonprofits and critiques their positions, and those of their allies, including their policymaking ones.” (Capital Research Center GPR, August 19, 2014)

Since 2014, the Bradley Foundation has distributed numerous grants to discredit the vast amount of scientific research demonstrating the harmful effects of climate change. In 2014, it gave $65,000 to the George C. Marshall Institute (GMI), a right-wing front group largely funded by oil and gas interests. Newsweek called GMI “a central cog in the denial machine” in 2007.

GMI folded in late 2015, so Bradley recommended $50,000 in “seed funding” the following year for its “successor organization,” the CO2 Coalition. The coalition is led by a Dr. William Happer, a well-known climate change denier. “We’re doing our best to try and counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. It’s not a pollutant at all,” Happer said at a Heritage Foundation event on energy and climate.

Another $10,000 Bradley grant in 2014 for the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (CSCDGC) went to support its Science & Public Policy Institute (SPPI). A staff recommendation notes that SPPI “has helped demonstrate that no real-world data confirms that floods, draughts [sic], or hurricanes are becoming more frequent or severe, as global-warming alarmists allege. Neither is there any real-world data that sea levels are about to rise precipitously, inundating the world’s coasted [sic] lowlands, as is also often alleged.” (Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change GPR, June 17, 2014)

ENERGY ROUNDTABLES

Documents show that, beginning in 2013, Bradley provided funding to the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, also an SPN member, to host and organize two “energy roundtables” a year — one before the Heritage Foundation’s annual Resource Bank meeting, and the other before SPN’s annual fall meeting. (Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy GPR, November 10, 2015)

The $50,000-per-year grant from Bradley for the meetings was matched “by staff arrangement” by the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), a front group for the energy industry that promotes fossil fuel development and opposes efforts to regulate its activities.

“Planned and put on in close cooperation with the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), the roundtables allow state think tanks to better promote free-market energy and environmental policies,” one document states. (Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy GPR, November 12, 2013)

Attendance has been high at the roundtables, with as many as “67 SPN leaders” attending the event in Denver in September 2014. The agenda for that meeting details presentations from a number of fossil fuel lovers including: Artic Power, Consumer Energy Alliance, Vital for Colorado, Devon Energy, GOPAC (a political action committee that backs and trains Republican candidates), and Freedom Partners. Freedom Partners, a funding conduit for the billionaire Koch brothers, delivered a talk on “Messaging and State Action.” (Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy GPR, November 11, 2014)

BRADLEY GRANTEES WORKED TOGETHER TO DEFEAT LOCAL REGULATIONS ON FRACKING IN COLORADO

In 2014, the Independence Institute and Berman’s Big Green Radicals worked in lockstep in Colorado to defeat local fracking bans, such as the one that passed by ballot measure in Longmont in November of 2013. A 2015 Bradley backgrounder on the Independence Institute praises the anti-fracking work of Independence Institute’s Energy Policy Center, saying, “It has also been a key coalition partner in the movement to stop local and statewide bans on hydraulic fracturing. Last year, current Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper crafted a delicately balanced compromise on local control of oil and gas drilling that removed all initiatives on the issue from the state ballot.”

Berman’s Big Green Radicals rolled out an attack campaign to discredit anti-fracking efforts in the state in May of 2014. Big Green Radicals assertedthat “extreme groups, mostly based far from Colorado in San Francisco, New York, or Washington D.C., are spending millions and spreading their anti-science message to scare voters into approving ballot measures in November to send the oil and gas industry (and the jobs and affordable energy it provides) packing from the Centennial State.”

The efforts by these two groups were successful in overturning local fracking bans. Bradley agreed and decreased its funding recommendation for EPC to $25,000 in 2016, saying, “it is unlikely that there will be any significant developments for EPC in the upcoming months, and therefore staff believes this reduced award is important.”

It is uncertain where the next battleground for energy development will be for Bradley, but the documents demonstrate that they have the funds to bankroll infrastructure in place to discredit climate science and smear the opposition.

OTHER NOTABLE BRADLEY GRANTS

Other significant Bradley grants to support fossil fuel development or dispute climate science in recent years include:

    $150,000 to Opportunity Ohio for “program activities.” (2016)

    $100,000 to Energy and Environment Legal Institute for “transparency practice general.” (2016) HORNER SCHNARE

    $20,000 to Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment for “general operations.” (2016)

    $200,000 to Competitive Enterprise Institute for “general operations” and “litigation.” (2013, 2015)

    $100,000 to The Sand County Foundation for “energy resource development.” (2014)

    $100,000 to National Center for Policy Analysis for “general operations.” (2014)

    $20,000 to Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment for “general operations.” (2014)

==

2 recent open letters:

CEI freakout on foia by virgin islands for 10 years, see fed overreach

pretty much same pl orgs on Paris treaty pullout. ebell 1st name

RAGA talk:

Attorney General Luther Strange 01:39

Well as you all know by now, this past February, we, Republican AGs historic victory in the Supreme Court with our decision stopping Obama’s Clean Power Plan . You might say in response to that, maybe they just decided to do it on their own, a group of Democratic attorneys general calling themselves AGs United for Clean Power, I’ve heard them called the “Green 20,” I don’t know exactly what they would call themselves and their allies are taking steps at I believe threatens the First Amendment and we’ve written a lot about that the idea of criminalizing public policy differences very publicly. And that’s what we’re here to talk about today.

Attorney General Luther Strange 02:33

Just this morning, Congressman Ted Lieu and Sheldon, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, announced plans to introduce a resolution accusing fossil fuel companies of using a sophisticated campaign to deceive the public of climate change. However you feel about climate change, I think we can all agree there should be a vigorous debate on the issue, what to do about it, and without criminalizing people who may have a different opinion. So we have two good panelists. I’m going to do a quick introduction, I’m going to turn it over to our first panelist and we’ll go from there.

Attorney General Luther Strange 03:09 Myron Ebell is director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute Center for Energy and Environment. This is one of the most effective advocates for free market environmentalism. He also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, the ad-hoc coalition of 28 non-profit groups that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policies. He’s got a very strong background in government and he worked for several people including someone I really admire, Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. A native born and grew up in California. Graduated from Colorado College, school of economics. So we’re going to hear from Myron first.

Attorney General Luther Strange 03:45

We’ll also hear Chet Thompson, the President of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association. Chet has nothing but so I’m not going to belabor him but Chet has a very diverse, very impressive background in advising policy makers and industry on energy issues. His association is one of the leading in that regard so he’ll come second. I want to ask Myron to start off our discussion today, give us his perspective and I will fill and then we’ll allow plenty of time to hear from you in the audience to give us your perspective. Myron come on up .

Myron Ebell, CEI 04:40

Thank you Attorney General Strange. And thank you all for having me. It’s a, I’m very pleased that you invited me and it’s a great honor to be here. Of course as he mentioned, I was an undergraduate for four years here in Colorado Springs, Colorado College. It’s always great to get out of Washington. But of course, one of the reasons it’s so great to get out of Washington is to get away from all the lawyers. But I just want to say you’re the right kind of lawyers. And one thing you may not know about the Competitive Enterprise Institute, even if you’ve heard of us before, is that we do a lot of litigation and we have been co-litigants in a lot of cases. For example, Dodd-Frank litigation and currently the costly Clean Power Plan litigation.

Myron Ebell, CEI 05:38

Let me just say first about CEI, we’re a small free market policy institute. The reason a lot of people haven’t heard of us is because we’re small and secondly because– and underfunded I might point out–the other reason, of course, is that we don’t do taxes and spending. We do regulations, which is a much harder and a less rewarding thing to be in than fighting higher taxes.

Myron Ebell, CEI 06:03

So let me just say, I want to point out that these subpoenas issued by Attorney General Schneiderman in New York, by the Attorney General in the Virgin Islands Claude Walker and by the Attorney General of Massachusetts Maura Healey and I think by Kamala Harris in California. These are not by any means the start of the story of trying to silence and defund the opponents of global warming alarmism in energy integration and policies. Nor should this be taken out of the context of what the left is doing to try and silence and defund all types of groups on all sorts of issues. Let me just give you one example of the background because it involves CEI.

In 2006, ExxonMobil was first targeted. ExxonMobil posts all of their contributions to nonprofit groups on their website. So in 2006 after Lee Raymond retired and was replaced by Rex Tillerson, the environmental left pounced, first the Royal Society in London, they don’t have legal authority but they have a huge amount of intellectual authority. At first, they demanded that ExxonMobil stop funding CEI. And when ExxonMobil announced they would agree to do that, they then said, well now they have to stop funding all the other groups they fund. The same thing happened later that year with Senators Olympia Snowe, a Republican, and a Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat, said, well we’re glad you stopped funding CEI, if that is indeed true, but now you have to stop funding all the other groups. [logic just flipped?]  Now, Exxon’s annual total was about 2.5 million dollars. 2.5 million dollars to 20 some groups. CEI is the leader of the opposition, it was the largest recipient but there were many smaller groups and bigger groups that got funding. 2.5 million dollars was something that the left thought was worth fighting over.

Myron Ebell, CEI 08:30

As it turned out in 2009 and 10 when the Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, it was a very close sort of thing, whether the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill would be passed or not. It is a very close sort of thing. And the fact that we had lost those resources made it much harder. And people say, well there was a lot of corporate resources. Yeah, but most of the corporate resources were in favor of Waxman-Markey. So we’ve been through this before. Now what’s, I’d just like to show you what 2.5 million dollars, should make you laugh. If you look at just 10 environmental groups, their annual budget is just over 900 million dollars. If you add up the next 20 environmental groups, you’ll get another 8 or 900 million dollars. If you add up the next 50 or 100 you’ll get another 8 or 900 million dollars.

So the free market environmental community in Washington, D.C. consists of fewer than 50 people. And people say, “well you have corporate allies.” Well, in fighting cap-and-trade, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership was much, much better funded than the opponents of cap-and-trade. Carbon tax. Who supports a carbon tax? ExxonMobil, Shell, BP. So this is a David versus Goliath battle. I pointed out, it’s nice to remember that David won.

Myron Ebell, CEI 10:08

So, so why is the left so intent on trying to win the debate by silencing and de-funding their opponents? Well they have a little problem, we’ve got reality on our side. Let me just point out, here’s, here’s the famous John Christy graph that shows the model results versus the actual beta. The model results predict a lot of warming. The data doesn’t show much warming. And the, the circles and the squares on the bottom, those are two separate data sets. One is weather balloons and the other is satellite data. They’re in pretty close agreement. They’re not in agreement with the model projections. So what does the other side do? Well the first thing they try to do is try to change reality. They try to change the facts. So they reinterpret the data so the United States climate temperature data, as reinterpreted by the federal government, they make the 1930’s and 40’s much cooler and that makes it look like there’s been a significant warming but in fact there has not.

Myron Ebell, CEI 11:25

So the next thing they try to do is exaggerate the impacts. And I have about 50 slides I could show you on the impacts of climate change. This is just tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes. Do you see a trend? The next thing they do is try to claim that replacing, turning world’s energy economy upside down, which is currently 80 percent fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) is really easy. And it’s really cheap. And it will create huge economic growth around the world. Well they make claim of this, going back to the 1970’s, these two have lines from the Wall Street Journal show. 1978 solar power 20 percent of needs by 2000 that is more subsidies, more solar. 2006, renewable fuels may provide 25 percent of U.S. energy by 2025. They make the same claims today. And that reality is just as far from being accomplished as it was in the 1970’s. So, so when you expose all of these arguments as phony and what is left but trying to win by silencing and defunding your opponents?

Myron Ebell, CEI 12:49

Now in Exxon’s case, they have already silenced them. They have already stopped funding the opponents of energy rationing and what is left to shake down Exxon and the industry. [RICO?] That’s why you continually hear this is just like big tobacco. Big oil is just like big tobacco. So this did not start last summer when Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senator from Rhode Island, published an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which he said, “it’s time to investigate big oil and their allies, just like we went after big tobacco.” This didn’t start then. It started in 2012 when there was a conference at the in La Jolla, California, according to , where I was privileged at one point to be a graduate student. Notice the subhead, “lessons from tobacco control.” You may not be able to read these but these are just little tidbits from the report that was published and I’m not going to spend much time on it because I’m already running out of time. But notice some of the organizers: Naomi Oreskes, Peter Frumhoff, also notice the name Matt Pawa, and Sharon Eubanks, and Mary Christina Wood, she’s the one who’s got the children’s lawsuit against climate change.

Myron Ebell, CEI 14:12

So on the 29th of March, the AGs United for Clean Power had a big pow wow in New York City. They had a press conference that ended with Al Gore and six AGs. Any of these AGs expressed an interest in being part of the litigation against Exxon and the idea is Exxon is the first. We move from Exxon to oil and their allies and then we move to the other fossil fuels.

So Peter Frumhoff was one of the private speakers at this conference. Before the press conference, Peter Frumhoff briefed them. Then Matt Pawa from the Pawa law firm. So this has been going on since 2012. Here are his helpers. And I won’t go through the list but I would just mention that Tom Steyer is also involved. He is a separate track from the Rockefellers, he’s working on his own. His lawyer Ted White in Denver is the key guy.

Tom Steyer is not as important in the AGs United for Clean Power, but he is the key guy in arranging the governor’s court, the governor’s court for a clean energy future, which is the parallel organization. He’s, they’ve got not 17, they’ve got 23 governors. Four republicans. Rick Snyder of Michigan, Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Terry Branstad of Iowa and Charles Baker of Massachusetts. And they tried to get more. They tried to get Hogan in Maryland, for example, McCrory in North Carolina and so on. So right now the climate inquisition is in retreat.

 It’s in retreat because of what ExxonMobil has done. What CEI has done. And what a number of the attorneys general here today have done, in supporting our rights to free speech and freedom of association. So I want to thank Attorney General Strange for writing and getting the signers on that letter, I’m not going to go through everyone who signed it but we are very grateful and I think it had a big impact and I will talk about that later on where we go from here. But this query is far from over. Okay. Claude Walker, the Virgin Islands AG has been pushed back. Maura Healey has been somewhat pushed back. Kamala Harris is running for governor[he means senate? he think ca ppl like exxon?] and she has gone quiet at least for the moment. But Eric Schneiderman in New York has the Martin Act, which is much more powerful.

Myron Ebell, CEI 16:55

So his big deal is to, he gave a speech in which he lashed out at First Amendment opportunists. Speaking out on behalf, against global warming alarmism and against energy rationing policies. His First Amendment opportunists. He’s clearly rattled by, especially the letter from AGs. He’s clearly rattled by that. So we need to keep pushing that. We need to keep saying this is a matter of constitutional rights. And the second thing is don’t believe that the other side is going to give up.

This is not about winning a court case. This is a shake down of one of the biggest industries in the world. Tobacco, the tobacco settlement, it’s 10 billion dollars a year in protection money going to 46 states that litigated. 10 billion dollars a year. Think how much bigger the oil industry is, and the tobacco industry, and you get an idea of what their goals is. They see trillions of dollars in protection money and they are not going to give up. So, so they play a long game. Let me just conclude. Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, has said that the Justice Department is looking at it. And the Democratic platform advocates, it hasn’t been finally , the current Democratic party platform for this year says that they should be investigated for misleading shareholders and the public about the risks of climate change. So I’ll leave it right there and thank you very much.

Chet Thompson, AFPM 18:50

Thank you General Strange I appreciate it. Myron,

==

gen'l http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/meet-myron-ebell-the-climate-contrarian-leading-trumps-epa-transition/

http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-trump-ally-myron-ebell-spread-misinformation-big-tobacco-and-big-oil

"Frontiers will [change] the debate from one about teenage smoking and industry practices to one about massive tax increases, bigger government and loss of individual freedom.” —Frontiers of Freedom funding proposal to Philip Morris

When Phillip Morris didn’t like new FDA regulations that targeted cigarette sales to children and teens, Myron Ebell—who recently served as the head of President Trump's EPA transition team—was there to "change the debate" to fit the tobacco giant's agenda.

The FDA's proposed regulations included prohibiting outdoor advertising of any tobacco products near schools or playgrounds, strictly regulating labeling and prohibiting tobacco company sponsorships of public events. To fight the new restrictions, tobacco industry-funded Frontiers for Freedom started a campaign to cast doubt on the validity of the new regulations.

Frontiers, a conservative "educational foundation," hired Ebell as policy director to help run the campaign, even using his name to raise money for the project. In a fundraising letter to Philip Morris in 1998, Frontiers highlighted Ebell as an example of why more funding was needed to run an organized push to make regulating the tobacco industry "politically unpalatable."

The Frontiers campaign was pure spin. The tobacco companies' First Amendment rights were being trampled on, it claimed—more big government overreach. From pushing the dubious claim that rules infringed on smokers' and tobacco companies' rights to blaming smokers themselves, Ebell oversaw Frontier's tobacco-industry-funded drive to fight regulation. It took a 14-year battle for Congress to pass the regulations and make them stick. In the end, the tobacco advertising regulations made significant progress in curbing teen smoking, no thanks to Ebell and Frontiers for Freedom.

In April 1998, Ebell and a handful of other marketing experts sat around a table with some of the largest U.S. fossil fuel companies to discuss a plan for a similar attack on climate science. Representatives from Exxon, Chevron, utility giant Southern Company and the American Petroleum Institute worked with operatives from established conservative think tanks and public relations wonks to draft a program designed to attack public and political perceptions about climate change. They dubbed it the "Global Climate Science Communications Plan."

The plan's strategy was similar to Frontier's anti-regulation tobacco campaign. This time the goal was to make climate change-related regulation politically unpalatable. The foundation of the plan was to sow doubt about the scientific validity of action on climate change, even though in 1998 the science was already solid. Of the 96 papers published on global warming that year, just one disagreed about human activities driving warming. That truth about the state of the science was replaced with a push to convince "a majority of the American public" that "significant uncertainties exist in climate science.”

The seven-page directive boldly stated that "victory will be achieved" when the uncertainties about climate science are part of "common knowledge," when media recognizes and covers those uncertainties and when those promoting action on climate science appear out of touch.

Strategies and tactics of the plan included:

    Recruit and train a team of scientists for media outreach

    Produce a steady stream of op-eds written by these scientists

    Organize and teach conservative grassroots groups

    Become a one-stop-shop for members of Congress, state leaders and teachers looking for information about climate change

    Distribute materials directly to schools and convince a national TV journalist to produce a TV program outlining the supposed uncertainties

It worked. In 2007, television journalist John Stossel did a bang-up job promoting climate confusion with his special, "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity," for a special edition of "20/20." By 2016, a Pew poll found only 9 percent of conservative Republicans believed that climate research reflects the best available evidence, while 57 percent of that same group felt that climate research is influenced not by valid science, but by scientists' desire to advance their careers.

In 1999, Ebell moved to Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank funded by many of the same oil companies he'd sat around the table with the year before to hatch the plan to misinform the American public. From 1998 to 2005, ExxonMobil provided CEI with over $2 million of funding. As director of CEI's Center for Energy and Environment, Ebell put the plan to work.

Impacting the voice of elected officials was another key aspect of "victory” named in the 1998 disinformation plan. By that measure success was swift in coming. Just two years after the plan was hatched, CEI joined with conservative Senator James Inhofe as co-plaintiff in a lawsuit over the National Assessment, a federal report on climate change's impacts on the United State.

The lawsuit was designed to suppress publication and distribution of recent climate science findings. In 2003, CEI sued the U.S. government directly, demanding the National Assessment not be disseminated. In 2005, Senator Inhofe joined with Ebell and other climate science deniers on a speaker's panel for a CEI panel to discuss the Future of International and U.S. Climate Policy. By 2012, Ebell was bragging on his blog about Inhofe's legislation to block EPA regulations. It was a victory: Climate-change-related regulation had become politically unpalatable.

Opposition to the validity of climate science skyrocketed among conservative politicians after 1998. Fighting all government action on global warming is now a bullet point on the GOP’s purity test. Over that same period, oil industry financial support for political campaigns and lobbying efforts have overwhelmingly gone to Republicans.

The election of Donald Trump was icing on the climate science denial cake. Ebell was tapped to head Trump's EPA transition team. Eighteen years of work deceiving the public finally paid off for Ebell. His dream of drastically reducing the power of the EPA is being realized. Ebell headed Trump's EPA transition team. He oversaw the writing of a policy paper—not available to the public—that will steer fellow climate science denier and EPA antagonist-turned-EPA head Scott Pruitt. Under Pruitt's leadership, climate change-related regulations will be rolled back and the EPA's budget will be cut by 24 percent.

Ebell has no background in science. He studied philosophy and has a master’s degree in political theory. His understanding of modern climate science sounds like this:

    The models say that much of the warming will occur in the upper latitudes and in the winter. At the risk of further ridicule in kooky blogs in England, where global warming alarmism is now a religion, that sounds pretty good to me. Fewer people will die from the cold.

Fossil fuel industries got what they wanted. Conservative politicians got what they wanted. CEI got what it wanted. Ebell got what he wanted. All at the expense of the environment, public health and the stability of future generations.

Watch a reporter shred Myron Ebell:

==

A former top aide to Donald Trump says the president will "definitely" pull out of the Paris climate deal. Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s transition efforts for the Environmental Protection Agency, also said Monday that climate and environmental activists are "the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world."

==

guard uk

.com/environment/2017/jan/30/green-movement-greatest-threat-freedom-says-trump-adviser-myron-ebell

no link

 The environmental movement is “the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world”, according to an adviser to the US president Donald Trump’s administration.

Myron Ebell, who has denied the dangers of climate change for many years and led Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) until the president’s recent inauguration, also said he fully expected Trump to keep his promise to withdraw the US from the global agreement to fight global warming.

Ebell said US voters had rejected what he dubbed the “expertariat” and said there was no doubt that Trump thinks that climate change is not a crisis and does not require urgent action.

Trump has already replaced the climate change page on the White House website with a fossil-fuel-based energy policy, resurrected two controversial oil pipelines and attempted to gag the EPA, the Agriculture Department and the National Parks Service.

Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and “bullshit”, has packed his administration with climate-change deniers but appeared to soften his stance after his election win, saying there is “some connectivity” between human activity and climate change. However, he also claimed action to cut carbon emissions was making US companies uncompetitive.

Ebell, who has returned to his role at the anti-regulation thinktank the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said on Monday: “The environmental movement is, in my view, the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world.”

The CEI does not disclose its funders but has in the past received money from the oil giant ExxonMobil. “Our special interest is, I would say, freedom,” Ebell said.

During the US presidential campaign, Trump pledged to withdraw from the climate change deal agreed by 196 nations in Paris in 2015, making the US the only country considering doing so. “I expect President Trump to be very assiduous in keeping his promises,” Ebell said.

 Rex Tillerson is big oil personified. The damage he can do is immense

Bill McKibben

Trump’s pick for secretary of state, the former ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson, appeared to contradict the president about leaving the climate agreement at his confirmation hearing, saying the US should keep “its seat at the table”.

“Who is going to win that debate? I don’t know but the president was elected and Tillerson was appointed by the president, so would guess the president will be the odds-on favourite,” said Ebell. “The people who elected him don’t want a seat at the table.”

[meme alert]

“The people of America have rejected the expertariat, and I think with good reason because I think the expertariat have been wrong about one thing after another, including climate policy,” he said. “The expert class, it seems to me, is full of arrogance or hubris.”

“I don’t think there is any doubt that [Trump] thinks that global warming is not a crisis and does not require drastic and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. The deal agreed by the world’s nations in Paris aims to hold the global temperature rise to well below 2C, a target that requires dramatic cuts in carbon emissions. Without this, the world’s climate experts concluded there will be “severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts” on people and the natural world.

Ebell, speaking in London, claimed that the motivation for climate action was protecting a special interest: “The climate-industrial complex is a gigantic special interest that involves everyone from the producers of higher priced energy to the academics that benefit from advancement in their careers and larger government grants.” The IMF has calculated that fossil fuels receive $10m every minute in subsidies, while the fossil fuel industry spends at least $100m a year on lobbying.

Scott Pruitt confirmation hearing for Environmental Protection Agency: the key points

 Read more

China’s president, Xi Jinping, recently reaffirmed his nation’s commitment to tackling climate change and said the nation’s green investments were already “paying off”. China pledged earlier in January to invest $360bn in renewable energy by 2020.

In an echo of Trump’s claim that climate change was a hoax invented by China, Ebell said: “China is making big investments in producing more solar panels and windmills, which they sell to gullible consumers in the western world, so that power and electricity prices will become higher and the Chinese economy will become more competitive.”

Many experts say that the best way to “make America great again” would be to invest in the fast expanding, trillion-dollar market for clean technologies and that failing to tackle climate change will destroy economic growth.

Sam Hall of Bright Blue, a liberal conservative thinktank in the UK, said: “Despite the attempt by fringe elements to import ‘alternative facts’ from the US, mainstream conservatives in the UK support tackling climate change cost-effectively. Only last week, Theresa May’s Conservative government set out how she wants Britain to take advantage of the economic opportunities of new low carbon industries, such as battery storage and electric vehicles.”

Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US EPA, is a climate change sceptic and has sued the agency he is now set to lead 14 times over the EPA’s smog, mercury and other pollution regulations. His confirmation vote in the Senate is expected on Wednesday.

...

==

http://www.ecowatch.com/trump-ebell-epa-advisor-2097121562.html

ref no link img

By Alex Formuzis and Sonya Lunder

Myron Ebell, head of President-elect Donald Trump's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team, is a notorious denier of global warming whose biography unashamedly notes that he's considered a "climate criminal" by activists and "a superstar of the denialosphere" by The Climate War author Eric Pooley. But he's also director of environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which touts "the life-enhancing value of chemicals"—chemicals like arsenic, DDT and PCBs.

One of the the Competitive Enterprise Institute's projects is SafeChemicalPolicy.org. The site is bursting with articles and reports that cast doubt on the dangers of toxic chemicals and pesticides in food, water and consumer products, and disparage the work of public health advocates, with Environmental Working Group (EWG) one of the site's favorite targets

Here are just a few examples:

SafeChemicalsPolicy.org downplays the risks of arsenic in drinking water and toxic pesticides found on foods young children love to eat.

An article on the site says it's wrong for schools to notify parents before pesticides are sprayed inside and around schools.

It disparages public health advocates' concerns over fetuses being exposed to endocrine disruptors in the womb, including Monsanto's notorious PCBs and the now-banned pesticide DDT.

It actually makes the claim that glyphosate—the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, which the World Health Organization considers probably carcinogenic to humans—has "liberated" children from having to work in corn fields, pulling weeds.

There's much more: Anti-BPA Packaging Laws Jeopardize Public Health, Silent Spring Was Wrong and Erin Brockovich's Toxic Fearmongering.

"The simple reality," says the site, "is that modern living means living with chemicals." We couldn't agree more. The problem is that too many of those chemicals are hazardous to our health. The EPA is supposed to protect us from dangerous chemicals, not defend them, as Ebell would almost certainly do if he ran the agency.

As it turns out, EWG is a popular target among Trump's other top advisers. Steve Bannon, the former campaign CEO and incoming chief White House strategist attacked us when he was running the alt-right website Breitbart News.

We're used to it. In fact, when science deniers like Ebell and Bannon regularly get worked up over something you've said or done, it usually means you've said or done something right.

==

In various interviews on Thursday, former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition chief Myron Ebell confirmed the Trump team would probably seek significant cuts to the agency's workforce and budget, but would not provide details of specific policy recommendations he made to the president.

http://www.ecowatch.com/ebell-epa-purge-2218823381.html

In various interviews on Thursday, former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition chief Myron Ebell confirmed the Trump team would probably seek significant cuts to the agency's workforce and budget, but would not provide details of specific policy recommendations he made to the president.

Ebell, who told the AP that the federal government has "been staffed with scientists who believe the global-warming alarmist agenda," floated the idea of downsizing EPA from 15,000 to 5,000 employees as an "aspirational goal" but acknowledged that getting cuts that significant past Congress would be a challenge for the administration.

On the Hill, Sen Tom Harper, D-DE, blasted EPA Administrator nominee Scott Pruitt for giving answers "shockingly devoid of substance" to senators' written follow-up questions, as Oklahoman environmental lawyers lobbied lawmakers Wednesday to highlight Pruitt's cozy relationship with industry during his time as Oklahoma attorney general.

For a deeper dive:

Ebell: AP, Washington Post, Greenwire, Politico Pro

Pruitt: The Hill, InsideClimate News

Commentary: Washington Post explainer

desmog cooler heads:

Actions

December, 2015

The Cooler Heads Coalition worked with a number of think tanks and advocacy groups including the Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, CFACT, Competitive Enterprise Institute and Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) to battle against a binding agreement at the COP-21 climate conference in Paris. [19]

As part of the effort, members of CHC from the US, Canada, and Europe attended a press conference on December 7 at a Heartland event titled “Day of Examining the Data.” The complete video from the event (over 6 hours) is below. [19]

img vid?

According to a CFACT Press Release, “CFACT is teaming up with the Heartland Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition to analyze the UN discussions, inject facts, and make available leading scientific and policy experts who offer much-needed balance to the climate debate. They will conduct a series of scientific briefings, press conferences and displays.” [22]

August 7, 2015

Myron Ebell, Chair of the Cooler Heads Coalition, spoke with H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute on the “extreme costs and minimal benefits [of] President Obama’s clean power plan.” [7]

June 19, 2015

Myron Ebell, Cooler Heads Coalition Chair, denounced Pope Francis's Encyclical on the Environment as “scientifically ill-informed, economically illiterate, intellectually incoherent, and morally obtuse.” [8]

According to Ebell,  “It is also theologically suspect, and large parts of it are leftist drivel, albeit couched in the vocabulary of Catholic social teaching” and a “”diatribe against modern industrial civilization.” [8]

March 4, 2015

The Cooler Heads Coalition's GlobalWarming.org showcased two charts that reported to “[expose] the unsustainability of the European Union’s proposal” to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions. [9], [10]

According to Marlo Lewis, “millions of people could still get hurt along the way before the wretched thing falls apart.”

June, 2009

Cooler Heads Coalition members lobbied against the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” also known as the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill. [11], [12]

May 3, 2004

CHC held a congressional and media briefing entitled “Impacts of Global Warming: Why the Alarmist View is Wrong” on Capitol Hill.

Speakers included well known global warming deniers such as Madhav L. Khandekar, Nils-Axel Morner, Paul Reiter, and Patrick Michaels. They presented arguments against claims that global warming will cause increases in extreme weather events, sea level rise, vector-borne diseases, and species extinction. [14]

May 16, 2003

The Cooler Heads Coalition and the George C. Marshall Institute co-sponsored a media briefing by noted climate change denier Willie Soon, in an event titled “Was the 20th- Century Climate Unusual? Exploring the Lessons and Limits of Climate History.” [23]

May 14, 2002

CHC held a briefing at the National Press Club, in conjunction with Frontiers of Freedom and the Science and Environmental Policy Project, entitled “Experts Discuss Why U.S. Should Withdraw From Kyoto Treaty.” [13]

Publications

The Cooler Heads Coalition publishes a regular “digest” that regularly includes commentary and articles from leading climate change deniers. Samples below:

==

ref cei BS

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to “cancel immediately” all of President Obama’s “illegal and overreaching executive orders,” and he strongly opposes Obama’s climate agenda. Will Obama’s climate policy executive orders be among the first on Trump’s chopping block?

Here are three prime targets for repeal, beginning with the most recent.

    Planning for Federal Sustainability in the Next Decade (March 19, 2015). This order requires federal buildings to obtain at least 30 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030. All new federal buildings constructed in that year must be “energy net-zero,” meaning their energy consumption must be “balanced by onsite renewable energy.” Also in 2030, 50 percent of all new passenger vehicles in agency fleets must be zero-emission and plug-in hybrid vehicles. To carry out those and many other requirements, agencies must establish “chief sustainability officers” to implement “green supply chain management” under the tutelage of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In addition to using our tax dollars to expand the federal trough for green special interests, the order is a consciousness-raising exercise. If kept in place, it will help perpetuate climate-centric groupthink in federal agencies.

    Climate Resilient International Development (September 23, 2014). “This order requires the integration of climate-resilience considerations into all United States international development work to the extent permitted by law.” The main problem here is that development is the best strategy for making poor countries more resilient, and affordable energy is critical to development. Elevating “climate-resilience considerations” too easily becomes an excuse to deny poor countries access to affordable energy, ignore the real causes of poverty (corruption, lack of strong property rights), and legitimize phony grievances against the fossil energy-rich United States.

    Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change (November 1, 2013). This order requires federal agencies to promote “engaged and strong partnerships and information sharing at all levels of government” to help “safeguard our economy, infrastructure, environment, and natural resources” from climate change impacts. Agencies are to “support and encourage smarter, more climate-resilient investments by States, local communities, and tribes, including by providing incentives through agency guidance, grants, technical assistance, performance measures, safety considerations, and other programs, including in the context of infrastructure development.” In other words, the order directs agencies to recruit, indoctrinate, bankroll, and coordinate climate activists at all levels of government. Perhaps a better title for the order is “Mobilizing the Long March through the Institutions.”

==

transition energy:

icn:

Myron Ebell, chosen by Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, traces a long history as a determined conservative firebrand.

He rose through the ranks of the "wise-use" movement to land at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, pushing an ideology of private property and free markets reigning supreme. He led activists calling themselves the Cooler Heads Coalition, pushing a brand of no-holds-barred climate denial, putting himself at the center of divisive advocacy wars over fossil fuels and the environment.

For decades, he has pushed the radical insistence that the environmental left has it all wrong: the science, the ideology, the economics and the politics of climate change.

The same views apply across the landscape of environmental policy, from land and water conservation to energy production.

During an earlier transition from one administration to another, as the Bush-Cheney Republicans arrived to displace the Clinton-Gore Democrats in 2001, he shared his views in an online chat sponsored by the Washington Post. He said Gail Norton, a Reagan-era private-property-rights champion nominated for Interior Secretary, and Spencer Abraham, a founder of the Federalist Society who had voted to abolish the Energy Department but now would run it, were "superb choices." But he reckoned that Christine Todd Whitman, a moderate from New Jersey who was to head the EPA, "may turn out to be a good choice or may not."

It was a savvy move to damn Whitman with such vanishingly faint praise. It would not be long before she was a victim of intense maneuvering against forceful action on climate change during the opening Bush-Cheney years. Ebell thought Whitman should only be retained if her EPA would "stop claiming regulatory authorities far beyond its legal authority."

It's just like his view today, except that there are new Obama-era targets, like the Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States rule.

Through all that ensued since 2001—the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol and the rise of the Paris Agreement; the Supreme Court decree that the EPA must control carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels; and the ensuing fight over regulations to do just that—Ebell has never wavered in his views.

So his ascendancy in the Trump camp alarms and exasperates people like Eric Schaeffer, former head of enforcement at EPA and now executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit watchdog group.

They know him as the author of a famous denialist alt-science memo in the 1990s, as an advocate who helped scuttle the Kyoto Protocol in the 2000s. He is also known as a happy warrior at CEI, funded generously by Exxon and by dark-money donors, that never concedes the field. They know that CEI remains engaged in a furious fight with state attorneys general over its own role in Exxon's record on climate change. They can only imagine how far he and the Trump team might go in de-funding and de-fanging the EPA.

"It tells me they are not approaching this analytically, logically, or even as economists," Schaeffer said. "They are approaching it as ideologues. And that's pretty dangerous. It used to be, even to some extent under 'W,' you talked in code or at least made some kind of showing of your interest in the environment and clean air and water, and having a credible EPA. They've completely thrown that overboard."

Already, CEI is getting very specific about the kinds of actions the Trump administration should take. This week it listed three executive orders exemplifying those that should be deep-sixed. (They involve energy conservation by the federal government, international development aid and protection of infrastructure from climate impacts.)

If the Clean Power Plan meets its demise, and particularly if the Paris Agreement goes down the same drain, the defeat for 21st century environmentalism would exceed the undoing of the Kyoto Protocol or the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate bill early in the Obama years.

At its heart, it would be a victory for denial. And it would vindicate the long game plan of fossil fuel forces that recognized that financing the machinery of ideology was just as important as financing political campaigns—because Big Oil and Big Coal contributed relatively little this year to the Trump campaign, even as the fossil fuel camp scripted his thinly-embellished policy declarations.

One irony, said Jeremy Symons, associate vice president for climate policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, "is that Trump said he would 'drain the swamp,' but Ebell is a creature of the swamp. He has been taking money from years from industry to slow and stop climate change."

Robert Brulle, a sociologist who has extensively documented the industry's support of climate denial, said CEI's biggest funder, pouring in $9.1 million between 2002 and 2013, was the Florida-based Dunn's Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking. Run by futures trader William Dunn, the foundation is a major donor to free market think tanks and advocacy groups like the Reason Foundation and the Cato Institute.

The second largest funder, with $5 million since 2004, is Donors Trust, which has been called the "dark money ATM of the conservative movement." Its donors include the libertarian Koch brothers and other free enterprise philanthropists. Exxon also is among CEI's largest funders with $2 million between 2000 and 2005, but the big oil company hasn't given to CEI directly since 2006, when it began scaling back its funding of groups that deny climate science.

As far back as 1998, Ebell was among a group organized by the American Petroleum Institute and its allies proposing a denialist project to ''maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media and other key audiences,'' according to a memo they wrote. SMOKING GUN

During and after the election of 2000 and the transition from the Clinton-Gore administration to the Bush-Cheney regime, CEI fought to influence Washington's formal climate science assessments. Its lawyers sued to make sure that one major document, the National Climate Assessment, would not carry any policy weight.

In 2002, Ebell offered CEI's help to Philip Cooney, chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, to "clean up the mess." That was in the wake of the State Department filing a U.S. Climate Action Report that included the United Nations finding that global warming posed a significant risk and was caused by fossil fuel emissions.

Cooney, who joined the Bush administration after a decade as a lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute, had edited government reports to emphasize doubt about climate change. That was documented in 2005 by whistleblower Rick Piltz, a former senior official in the government's climate change science program. (Piltz resigned from the government and founded Climate Science Watch in 2005. He died in 2014. Cooney resigned from the Bush administration after Piltz's disclosures and took a job at Exxon.)

"Thanks for calling and asking for our help," Ebell said in an email to Cooney in 2002.

But true to form, his email had a badgering, even threatening tone, criticizing the Bush administration's handling of climate change reports and warning that CEI would fight any policies it viewed as errant. Ebell promised in the email "to do as much as we could to deflect criticism by blaming the EPA for freelancing."

Ebell said it was imperative to "drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think that they are serving the president's interests by publishing this rubbish."

Whitman, he said, should go.

"It seems to me that the folks at EPA are the obvious fall guys, and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible," Ebell wrote.

Whitman, who now runs her own strategic planning and consulting group, said in an interview that she never had any personal dealings with Ebell. While at EPA, the pressures that concerned her the most came mainly from Cheney and his staff. "I suspect he had a little more pull than Myron," Whitman said. As for Ebell: "There's always going to be those kind of people out there. You just can't worry about it."

The incident prompted two state attorneys general to request a Justice Department investigation into any improper collusion, but that went nowhere.

Several Democratic attorneys general referenced possible collusion between Exxon and groups like CEI when they announced investigations of Exxon for potential climate fraud. That came after InsideClimate News and others published histories of Exxon's own climate research and its subsequent support for campaigns to undermine the scientific consensus.

The attorney general of the Virgin Islands went so far as to subpoena CEI's records from the Bush-Cheney transition era, but CEI fought back hard—as did Exxon and several Republican state attorneys general and Republicans on a House committee—and deflected the inquiry.

At a meeting of Republican state attorneys general this summer, Ebell lashed out at Exxon foes, saying the Democratic attorneys general and environmental organizations were colluding to "silence and defund the opponents of global warming alarmism." DOES HE MEAN RICO?

An audio recording of the session "Climate Change Debate: How Speech is Being Stifled" was obtained and released by the Center for Media and Democracy.

Ebell set the tone by disparaging those who embrace the overwhelming scientific evidence that the Earth is warming.

"Why is the left so intent on trying to win the debate by silencing and de-funding their opponents? Well, they have a little problem, we've got reality on our side," Ebell said.

"So when you expose all of these arguments as phony, what is left but trying to win by silencing and defunding your opponents?" he said.

As CEI has done in legal filings and in newspaper advertising, he called it a matter of constitutionally protected free speech.

Months before Trump emerged victorious, and before Ebell was named to play a big role in the new administration's agenda-setting, he declared confidently that "right now the climate inquisition is in retreat," he said. "It's in retreat because of what ExxonMobil has done. What CEI has done."

Now that Ebell is on the inside of an administration, though, his influence is likely to multiply. "That's what worries me," said Whitman. "Of all the promises Trump made during the campaign that now seem to be a little less certain, EPA is probably the one he'll stick with, because it is so universally thought of as being the source of all evil. And that is very troubling."

Neela Banerjee, Marianne Lavelle and David Hasemyer contributed reporting for this story.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

POLITICS

 REGULATION

DONALD TRUMP

 EPA

==

ebell spoke at raga conf on free sp:

wapo ref 2016

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/conservative-groups-pour-money-into-races-for-state-attorneys-general/2016/09/23/7a57030c-7e86-11e6-8d13-d7c704ef9fd9_story.html?utm_term=.c83a00e2b380

The Republican state attorneys general have attacked Democratic AGs over an investigation into whether ExxonMobil knew about the threat of climate change as early as the 1970s and whether the oil giant violated securities law by misleading the public and investors about the potential consequences.

The New York and Massachusetts attorneys general have issued broad subpoenas in the matter, but Exxon, which says it has already provided New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman about 1 million documents, has complained that Schneiderman is violating the company’s freedom of speech.

Republicans have accused Schneiderman of colluding with environmental groups and liberal nonprofits to come up with a plan to use the same strategy against the oil industry that was used against the tobacco industry.

The flap was at the top of the agenda when RAGA held its summer meeting at the Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs on July 11. The first panel, attended by hundreds of corporate executives, was titled “Climate Change Debate — How Speech Is Being Stifled.”

The meeting did not include any scientific experts on climate change. Instead the panel included a longtime denier of climate change, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Chet M. Thompson, president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, whose plants are major emitters of greenhouse gases. The AFPM gave RAGA $50,900 last year and has given $135,000 so far in 2016.

“We’ve got reality on our side,” Ebell said. He called the investigation of Exxon an “inquisition.” Ebell’s group received about $2 million from Exxon in the 2000s before the company switched direction and stopped funding the small group.

Challenging the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change is real, Ebell said that “the first thing they try to do is try to change reality. They try to change the facts.” He added, “The next thing they try to do is exaggerate the impacts.”

“This is not about climate change, and it’s not about fraud,” Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange interjected, according to a recording of the event provided by the Center for Media and Democracy. “It’s about if elected officials should be able to turn the prosecutorial power of their states against their political opponents in contradiction of our First Amendment and our basic speech rights in this country.”

Strange, who becomes RAGA chairman in November, told the group that he had “never received a penny from Exxon in any campaign I’ve run.” The oil giant, however, gave $50,000 to RAGA in 2015 and another $50,000 this year, according to filings by RAGA to the Treasury.

http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/10/12/media-guide-fossil-fuel-industry-players-setting-trump-s-energy-agenda/213618

Myron Ebell

The Trump Connection

Myron Ebell is reportedly running the Trump campaign’s EPA transition team.

The Fossil Fuel Connection

Ebell is the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has received $1,690,000 in funding from ExxonMobil since Ebell joined CEI in 1999. During that time period, CEI also received approximately $5.2 million from DonorsTrust and $1.1 million from Donors Capital Fund -- two dark-money groups backed by the oil billionaire Koch brothers -- as well as $150,000 from the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation and $104,703 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. The Washington Post recently reported that DonorsTrust “is staffed largely by people who have worked for Koch Industries or non-profit groups supported by the conservative Koch brothers” and “has given to other non-profit groups supported by the Kochs.” Ebell said in an August 5 interview on C-SPAN that he would “like to see a lot more funding” from big coal companies.

What Else You Need To Know

Ebell has claimed that the Clean Power Plan is “obviously illegal,” and on Federalist Radio, he said of the Paris climate agreement: “I don’t want to say it’s a disaster, but I think it is potentially a disaster for humankind and not necessarily any good for the planet.”

Ebell is also the chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a collection of groups that “question global warming alarmism and oppose energy-rationing policies,” according to CEI. In 2006, CEI ran a television ad with a tagline about carbon pollution that stated, "They call it pollution. We call it life." According to Vanity Fair, Ebell said he was “delighted at the howls it provoked.” In March 2015, during a Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) panel on climate change, Ebell falsely claimed that NASA deceptively "switch[es] the data" to make its climate change models look accurate. And in September 2015, Ebell spoke at a panel at the Republican Attorney Generals’ Association (RAGA) summer meeting titled “Climate Change Debate — How Speech Is Being Stifled.” The Post reported that during the panel, Ebell “challeng[ed] the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change is real.”

In 2003, Ebell worked with the Bush administration to attack an EPA report stating that human activities cause climate change. The Guardian reported:

    Central to the revelations of double dealing is the discovery of an email sent to Phil Cooney, chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, by Myron Ebell, a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI is an ultra-conservative lobby group that has received more than $1 million in donations since 1998 from the oil giant Exxon, which sells Esso petrol in Britain.

    The email, dated 3 June 2002, reveals how White House officials wanted the CEI's help to play down the impact of a report last summer by the government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in which the US admitted for the first time that humans are contributing to global warming. 'Thanks for calling and asking for our help,' Ebell tells Cooney.

    The email discusses possible tactics for playing down the report and getting rid of EPA officials, including its then head, Christine Whitman. 'It seems to me that the folks at the EPA are the obvious fall guys and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible,' Ebell wrote in the email. 'Perhaps tomorrow we will call for Whitman to be fired,' he added.

Harold Hamm

The Trump Connection

Trump is considering Harold Hamm as energy secretary, according to a Reuters report. Additionally, Trump adviser Stephen Moore told Politico’s Morning Energy that Hamm is the “most influential” person in shaping Trump’s energy policies.

The Fossil Fuel Connection

Hamm is the CEO of Continental Resources, one of the top independent oil producers in the U.S. and a pioneer in fracking. Hamm is reportedly worth $10 billion. If appointed, Hamm would be the “first U.S. energy secretary drawn directly from the oil and gas industry since the cabinet position was created in 1977," according to Reuters.

What Else You Need To Know

Hamm is a member of the Interstate Oil And Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), a “quasi-governmental” organization created by Congress that, according to Donald Flexner, chief of the energy section of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, essentially serves as an oil industry lobbying group and “has been quietly working for decades to restrict federal oversight of oil and gas,” as InsideClimate News (ICN) reported. The IOGCC claimed credit for a measure within the 2005 Energy Policy Act that exempted hydraulic fracturing -- or fracking -- from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. That provision, known as the “Halliburton loophole,” has “helped enable the modern fracking boom that has created vast economic benefits, but also has been implicated in cases of drinking water contamination, air pollution and rising emissions of climate-changing methane,” ICN reported.

In 2014, a New York Times investigation documented that Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and other Republican attorneys general were engaged in an “unprecedented, secretive alliance” with large fossil fuel companies to “push back against the Obama regulatory agenda," and that Hamm was one of Pruitt’s “closest partners.” Hamm served as chairman of Pruitt’s re-election campaign in 2013 and 2014, and in recent years, Pruitt has been fighting the EPA’s efforts to protect drinking water from industrial pollution and reduce methane emissions, among other environmental and health safeguards.

Hamm also exploited the June mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub to baselessly call for more drilling. During his July 20 speech supporting Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Hamm stated: "Every time we can't drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded. Orlando brought this home once again. … Every onerous regulation puts American lives at risk. Developing America's own oil supply is a matter of national security.” But the CIA chief said he was not “able to uncover any link” between the Orlando shooter Omar Mateen and ISIS, and increased U.S. oil production has done nothing to weaken -- and may even have helped -- ISIS, as Fortune reporter Chris Matthews has explained.

Stephen Moore

The Trump Connection

In May, Politico reported that Trump tapped Stephen Moore to assist in remaking his tax plan. Moore is currently listed on Trump’s “economic advisory council.”

The Fossil Fuel Connection

In January 2014, Moore became the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that received almost $800,000 from ExxonMobil and millions from the Koch Family Foundations. On September 28, Politico reported that Moore went on leave from the Heritage Foundation through the election, but he is currently listed on the website as a “Distinguished Visiting Fellow.”

What Else You Need To Know

In November, Moore completely distorted a NASA scientist’s study about East Antarctic ice to claim it was an “indication” that global warming is “actually not happening.” Moore has also claimed that opposing fracking “is like being against a cure for cancer” because it is “one of the great seismic technological breakthroughs” that is “giving us huge amounts of energy at very low prices.”

==

the good e&E:

TRANSITION

Who is Myron Ebell?

Evan Lehmann, E&E News reporter

Climatewire: Monday, November 21, 2016

Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, testifies at a 2009 hearing on cap-and-trade legislation in the House. Ebell, a prominent climate change skeptic, is leading the U.S. EPA transition for the Trump administration. Photo courtesy of C-SPAN.

Andrew Moylan was about to make waves. So he arranged a meeting with Myron Ebell, to lay out his plan to push Republicans toward supporting a carbon tax.

Moylan was giving early notice to one of Washington's biggest critics of climate science. He didn't expect the bespectacled Ebell to lend his support. Still, Moylan described what happened next as "unusual."

"Myron just cut right to the chase and said, 'Listen, you're wrong, and we're going to beat you,'" recalled Moylan, now executive director of the libertarian R Street Institute.

The encounter, which occurred several years ago, encapsulates Ebell's unmoving attitude against climate action or even a willingness to discuss it, according to people who have tried.

E&E News' ongoing coverage of the new administration and the changes taking place on Capitol Hill. Click here to view the continuing coverage.]

Now, after a career of advancing theories that question the scientific underpinnings of global warming, he is overseeing U.S. EPA's transition into President-elect Donald Trump's administration. It's not lost on many observers, liberal and conservative alike, that Ebell is not a scientist and has never worked for the agency whose environmental mission he has attacked for years.

Environmentalists have called his selection a "sick joke." Even some Republicans wonder how someone who has spent most of his career at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, could be thrust into a prominent role that includes interviewing agency staff, identifying potential employees and designing a new direction for EPA under a president who has threatened to shrink its authority.

"Given that Arrhenius sussed out the mechanics of global warming in the 19th century, it's kind of sad that we have a physics denier leading the environmental transition for a 21st-century president," said Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an environmental group leading efforts to end the use of fossil fuels.

He was referring to the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, who in 1896 pioneered the "greenhouse law," a mathematical formula that is still used to calculate carbon dioxide's impact on temperatures.

Ebell declined to comment for this story. But it's likely that he would welcome a debate with McKibben about how much the Earth is warming, or not warming, because of human activity. It's also plausible that Ebell would feel victorious at the end.

Those who know him shrug off the idea that Ebell is a hired gun for the fossil fuel industry. He's a true believer, they say.

Professionally, he's fought with lawmakers and criticized the pope. He's declared war, and victory, over climate advocates. And he takes partial credit for convincing Republicans to avoid action on warming.

Away from work, Ebell is married to a Sunday school teacher, and he has four grown children. Along the way, he has stumbled financially on his house and with the IRS.

Before all of that, he was a bookish kid who shot mule deer.

A homestead on fire

Ebell grew up in the sagebrush hills of eastern Oregon, in a town settled by gold miners at the beginning of the Civil War. Baker City is nestled in a small bowl at 3,500 feet, and tall mountains climb toward the sky in most directions.

It's closer to Idaho geographically, and politically, than to the liberal coastline and Portland. Ebell would have seen the strong influence of the federal government, which owns more than half the land in Baker County, on policies affecting cattle grazing, land access and wildfire.

To this day, Ebell criticizes the "bicoastal urban elite" who insist on being "hysterical" about the idea that climate change affects everything from storms to drought. Environmentalism isn't about protecting nature, he has said, but about advancing "eco-imperialism."

The Ebells homesteaded their Oregon farm in the 1860s. It grew to several thousand acres, and to this day, a creek and other features carry his family name. Ebell's childhood property, named Sky Ranch, is still in the family. Much of its evergreen forest burned in a wildfire last August.

Ebell was there, watching the trees crackle with flame from the base of small Cassidy Mountain at his cousin's barn lot. He blamed the government, not climate change. Mismanaged federal forests left too much tinder in the mountains, and rules preventing roads slowed response times, said John Ebell, the cousin.

"He knows what the problems are," he said of Myron.

As children, they sometimes hunted deer together and rode horseback. They grew apart in high school because of divergent interests. Myron was focused on "learning and book reading," said John Ebell, who preferred fixing tractors and other machinery.

Ebell left his family's remote mountain home in 1971 to attend Colorado College. But he carried his childhood convictions with him.

After graduating, he attended the London School of Economics, where he earned a master's degree, according to a two-page biography written by Ebell. He appears to have been unhurried during that period of his life, taking postgraduate classes at Cambridge University and the University of California, San Diego.

The first professional job Ebell lists on his biography is assistant to the chairman of the National Taxpayers Union. News reports suggest that occurred sometime in the late 1980s.

By 1990, then in his late 30s, he was representing the National Inholders Association as a lobbyist. The group fought against federal policies on behalf of people with cabins and other property in national parks and forests — so-called inholders.

It was then that Ebell first tussled with former Rep. Barney Frank, the Democratic gay lawmaker from Massachusetts.

Ebell arranged for himself to testify, at the last minute, about private easements to public lands. At one point, he called environmental groups "radical," and Frank, who was acting chairman of the subcommittee, pushed him to cite those that were and were not on the fringe.

Ebell: "Well ... some are more radical than others."

Frank: "Why don't you start with the most radical and we'll go from there."

Ebell later provided a list in writing.

Ebellian or Orwellian?

He kept appearing in Congress, though usually in the audience. In 1994, Democratic Senate staffers summoned three U.S. Capitol Police officers when Ebell refused to remove fliers from a press table describing Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt as secretary "of the inferior." Ebell was verbally reprimanded.

Six months later, in early 1995, Ebell showed his willingness to antagonize authority again. This time, he poked the top Republican. In a leaked memo, he claimed that House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) was going to be a "big problem" on loosening the Endangered Species Act. The memo said Gingrich has "soft feelings for cuddly little critters."

Ebell also served as a legislative assistant to former Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) and as policy director at Frontiers of Freedom.

At about that time, Ebell and his family ran into financial trouble. Public records show that his house in Prince George's County, Md., was foreclosed on in 1996. He had purchased it eight years earlier for $130,000. The Maryland Department of Assessment & Taxation lists the current owner as Citicorp Mortgage Inc., but court records from last year involving the bank say Ebell and his wife "are the owners of the property."

Ebell and his family still live in the house.

His finances were again pulled into public view in 2011, when the IRS applied a federal tax lien to his finances in the amount of $114,780. Court records indicate that Ebell satisfied that debt in 2013.

I think he understands other people's viewpoints. I think he just dismisses them.

Andrew Moylan, R Street Institute

Ebell began working on climate policy in earnest just before he joined the Competitive Enterprise Institute in 1999.

A year earlier, he and 12 other people representing the fossil fuel industry and conservative groups wrote the "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan." The memo by the American Petroleum Institute outlines a strategy to "undercut" mainstream findings on global warming. Its goal was to persuade journalists, teachers and others to highlight scientific uncertainties in climate change.

Over the years, Ebell has argued that warming is a good outcome, especially for Minnesotans and other northerners who face bitter winters. He said a report released this year by the National Intelligence Council is "filled with gems of junk science." And he promised to make the idea of a carbon tax politically "toxic" in 2012, so that Republicans would think twice before supporting initiatives like the one proposed by Moylan, of the conservative R Street Institute.

In person, Ebell sometimes talks with razor blades. Those who have dealt with him, even Republicans, say he tends to categorize people as adversaries or allies. There isn't often an in-between.

He has been known to treat those on the right who accept the scientific underpinnings of rising temperatures as "traitors" and "enemies," according to sources.

"He's very Orwellian," said one Republican. "If there's a Republican who wants to be constructive [on climate policy], they're an enemy."

Some believe that Ebell's dissenting voice can benefit serious discussions about climate action. One Republican, who believes that warming deserves Congress' attention, said meaningful legislation should be shaped by everyone in the debate, even those who question the science.

"I think his value is that he shares such a passion. It will help thread the needle" on drafting policy, the Republican strategist said. "You need both opposing viewpoints to get to the art of the possible."

To others, Ebell seems to be eagerly impolite, especially in the world of think-tankers who are used to having their ideas challenged, if it happens, in a starched-shirt kind of way.

Or he's just blunt.

That's how Moylan sees him, even after the meeting in which Ebell promised to fight his carbon tax idea tooth-and-nail. He describes Ebell as a smart, honest, and "exceedingly interesting" person. He also happens to be rigidly adhered to his worldview.

"I think he understands other people's viewpoints; I think he just dismisses them," said Moylan.

Reporters Emily Holden and Kavya Balaraman contributed.

 Email: elehmann@eenews.net

==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Land_Rights_Association

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The American Land Rights Association (ALRA) is a Wise Use organization based in Battle Ground, Washington. The group describes itself as "dedicated to the wise-use of our resources, access to our Federal lands and the protection of our private property rights."[1]

History

The organization was founded in 1978 by property owners in the community of Wawona, California,[2] located within Yosemite National Park.[3] It was initially named the National Park Inholders Association; it describes its mission at that time as "to protect private property landowners from unwanted acquisition by the National Park Service".[1]

The group changed its name to the National Inholders Association (NIA) in 1980. In 1985, it added a number of grazing permittees on federal land to its membership roll. In the early 1990s, it championed the cause of mining claimholders. In 1995, the organization was renamed the American Land Rights Association (ALRA).[1]

ALRA and other Wise Use organizations were most politically active in the 1990s fighting land use restrictions by the Clinton administration.[citation needed] With Republicans in control in Congress and the White House in the 2000s, ALRA had more friends in Washington;[citation needed] this allowed them to exercise some power over the administration's appointments. A notable case was that of John Turner, a friend of vice-president Dick Cheney,[4] who was under consideration for the #2 position in the Department of the Interior.[5] ALRA and other property-rights organizations opposed Turner's appointment because of his position as president of the Conservation Fund, which an ALRA release asserted was "dedicated to threatening, dividing and isolating land owners and small towns".[6] President George W. Bush chose not to appoint Turner, instead selecting mining-industry lobbyist J. Steven Griles.[5]

Activism

ALRA cooperates with broad-based conservative organizations on land-use related issues.[7][8][9] It sponsors the Land Rights Network, a nationwide mail, phone, fax and e-mail lobby outreach network.[citation needed] It also organizes the League of Private Property Voters, which has published a vote index since 1990, scoring members of Congress on votes relating to regulations on private property rights and restrictions on use of federal public lands.[10] The League promotes some general conservative causes unrelated to land use as well: for example, their 2007 ratings of U.S. Senate members were based on ten votes, one of which was a measure to prevent restoration of the Fairness Doctrine on radio and television.[11] ALRA has also sent representatives to testify before various governing bodies.[12][13]

References

     "ALRA Mission and History". ALRA website. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     Cushman, Chuck. "Yosemite Alert." ALRA Action Alerts. 2003-03-31. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     "The Redwoods" (vacation-home rental website). Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     Mcallister, Bill. "Interior politics take odd twist over top posts". Denver Post. 2001-02-04. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     Seelye, Katharine G."Bush Is Choosing Industry Insiders to Fill Several Environmental Positions". New York Times. 2001-05-12. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     Eckles, Susan. "Interior Department: the Good, Bad, and Very Ugly". American Land Rights Association: Land Rights Network. Quoted in full at off-road.com. 2005-12-01. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     "American Land Rights Association". State Policy Network. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     "American Land Rights Association (ALRA)".Policy Experts. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     "Land Rights Group Supports Bush Tax Plan". E-Wire press release. 2001-03-05. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     "League of Private Property Voters". American Land Rights Association. 1998-10-16. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     "2007 Private Property Congressional Vote Index". League of Private Property Voters. February 2007. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     "Hearings: Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, and Water". U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. 2003-06-17. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

     "National Trails Act: Testimony by Chuck Cushman". American Land Rights Association. 2005-07-26. Retrieved 2010-01-08.

External links

    Official website

Categories:

    Advocacy groups in the United States

==

sercwatch

The American Land Rights Association was founded in 1977 by property owners located within Yosemite National Park and was known as the National Park Inholders Assosiation.

"Its mission was to protect private property landowners from unwanted acquisition by the National Park Service," ALRA's website states. [1] In 1980 it changed its name to National Inholders Association (NIA) to broaden its focus to all private land owners within or adjoining public lands. In 1995, the NIA was renamed the American Land Rights Association (ALRA).

"ALRA is a national clearinghouse and support coalition encouraging family recreation, multiple-use, commodity production, and access to federally-controlled and state lands. Its purpose is to oppose selfish, single-use, restrictive land use designations that damage local economies, schools and roads in rural America," it states on its website.[2]

ALRA was one of the leading groups in the anti-environmental Wise Use Movement that reached its peak in the 1990's opposing public lands initiatives of the Clinton administration. With Republicans taking control in Congress and the White House, ALRA had more friends in Washington DC [3] but has still opposed some Republican initiatives [4] and nominees [5].

It sponsors the Land Rights Network, a nationwide mail, phone, fax and e-mail lobby network.

Other SourceWatch resources

    Wise Use Movement

Contact details

ALRA

30218 N.E. 82nd Ave.

PO Box 400

Battle Ground, WA 98604

Tel: 360-687-3087

FAX: 360-687-2973

Web: http://www.landrights.org

Categories:

    EnvironmentUnited States

==

https://books.google.com/books?id=giTwwvtIkdEC&pg=PA112&lpg=PA112&dq=National+Inholders+Association+as+a+lobbyist&source=bl&ots=EmJe3EWyxO&sig=XVP4r-bEAgRB5Pn5sfC7tfFnvBk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjH2vqq3qbRAhXMSyYKHStuADYQ6AEIQjAG#v=onepage&q=National%20Inholders%20Association%20as%20a%20lobbyist&f=false

cushman bankrupt, irs, borows from elderly; wife recycle organic gardner divorce, envies ron robinson on that score

The War Against the Greens: The "Wise-Use" Movement, the New Right, and the ...

By David Helvarg

==

no link img

Here's what we know about Myron Ebell, Trump's top climate advisor

When it comes to climate change, President-elect Donald Trump has said he does not believe human activity is one of its leading causes - despite 97% of scientists making statements to the contrary, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

In 2012, Trump tweeted that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive."

    The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

Along his presidential campaign trail, Trump vowed to cancel the Paris agreement, dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and remove restrictions on oil, gas and coal mining. To achieve these goals, Trump has named Myron Ebell, a climate change doubter, to oversee the EPA transition.

Who is Myron Ebell? Here's what we know.

Ebell is a self-proclaimed policy wonk.

Here's what we know about Myron Ebell, Trump's top climate advisor

Myron Ebell believes climate change is a hoax.

Source: The Young Turks/YouTube

According to the Washington Post, Ebell works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that has received funding from ExxonMobil. Like Trump, he takes a strong stance against the scientific consensus that climate change is overwhelmingly human-caused.

Ironically, he's not actually considered a scientist. He majored in philosophy at University of California, San Diego and pursued studies in political theory and history at the London School of Economics and Cambridge, respectively.

He believes global warming is sheer alarmism.

Here's what we know about Myron Ebell, Trump's top climate advisor

According to Ebell, climate change is something you should not worry about.

Source: Bill Wechter/Getty Images

Ebell is the head of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an organization that describes itself as "an ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming focused on dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis." Ebell leads this group, which challenges "global alarmism" and opposes "energy rationing policies."

He admits that there has been an unusual temperature rise, yet he deems it normal: "There has been a little bit of warming ... but it's been very modest and well within the range of natural variability, and whether it's by human beings or not, it's nothing to worry about," he told Vanity Fair in 2007.

He's been called a "climate criminal."

A protester holds a sign that reads "Myron Ebell Criminal" in Berlin, Germany.

Source: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

During the 2015 U.N. Climate Summit in Paris, global advocacy organization Avaaz ran a campaign that named a group of seven "climate criminals" from a list of over 50,000 delegates at the summit. Ebell was among the seven notorious lobbyists who Avaaz's Acting Executive Director Emma Ruby-Sachs said were sabotaging "a global deal for ambitious climate action, despite over 3.6 million citizens around the world calling for 100% clean energy."

According to Mashable, Avaaz plastered nearly 1,000 "Wanted" posters featuring the faces of "climate criminals" outside five-star hotels in Paris. The organization also handed out flyers at important Metro stations in France's capital city with photos of the lobbyists. 

It's a moniker Ebell had been tagged with before. According to his bio, submitted to the House of Representatives, Greenpeace featured him in "A Field Guide to Climate Criminals" at the 2005 U.N. climate meeting in Montreal.

He opposes the Clean Power Plan.

Here's what we know about Myron Ebell, Trump's top climate advisor

Ebell calls President Obama's Clean Power Plan "illegal."

Source: Reed Saxon/AP

In August 2015, President Barack Obama presented the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 32% from 2005 levels by 2030. Thanks to the Clean Power Plan, the Environmental Protection Agency would have the authority to regulate carbon pollution and expand renewable energy.

Ebell called the plan "illegal," according to Fortune. The New York Times reported that Ebell hoped whoever was elected president "would undo the EPA power plant regs and some of the other regs that are very harmful to our economy." Now that Trump is president-elect, Ebell may have the power to roll back the Clean Power Act.

Robert is a news staff writer based in New York. His writing has appeared in the World Politics Review, Fusion, and the Miami Herald. He's a frequent guest in English- and Spanish-speaking media, including CNN, Univision, Al Jazeera, Public Radio International, and Voice of America. You can reach him at rvalencia@mic.com

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watts glee on "meltdown" petition reactions

There is so much incredulity, that Snopes had to make a page saying that it was in fact true.

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nyt on trans team:

mug-shot posters, pasted on walls and lampposts around Paris by an activist group during the United Nations climate talks last year, were hardly flattering. They depicted Myron Ebell, a climate contrarian, as one of seven “climate criminals” wanted for “destroying our future.”

But in his customary mild-mannered way, Mr. Ebell, who directs environmental and energy policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy group in Washington, brushed it off.

“I’ve gotten used to this over the years,” he told an interviewer at the talks. “But I did go out and get my photo taken with my poster, just so I have it as a memento.”

In looking for someone to follow through on his campaign vow to dismantle one of the Obama administration’s signature climate change policies, President-elect Donald J. Trump probably could not have found a better candidate for the job than Mr. Ebell.

Mr. Ebell, who revels in taking on the scientific consensus on global warming, will be Mr. Trump’s lead agent in choosing personnel and setting the direction of the federal agencies that address climate change and environmental policy more broadly.

Mr. Ebell, whose organization is financed in part by the coal industry, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the linchpin of that policy, the Clean Power Plan. Developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the plan is a far-reaching set of regulations that, by seeking to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation, could result in the closing of many coal-burning power plants, among other effects.

Mr. Ebell has said that the plan, which has been tied up in the courts since it was finalized in 2015, is illegal. In the interview in Paris last year, he said he hoped whoever was elected president would “undo the E.P.A. power plant regs and some of the other regs that are very harmful to our economy.”

As the person Mr. Trump has chosen to lead the transition at the E.P.A., Mr. Ebell, 63, will be in a position to begin to do just that.

Mr. Ebell, who did not respond to a request for an interview, grew up on a ranch in Oregon. He got his undergraduate degree at Colorado College and master’s at the London School of Economics, where he studied under the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. He has described himself as “sort of a contrarian by nature and upbringing,” and has said he was very strongly influenced by the “question authority” ethos of 1960s and ’70s counterculture

“I really think that people should be suspicious of authority,” he told an interviewer last year. “The more you’re told that you have to believe something, the more you should question it.”

Mr. Ebell leads the Cooler Heads Coalition, a loose-knit group that says it is “focused on dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis.” He has been one of the nation’s most visible climate contrarians, known for dispensing memorable sound bites on cable news shows and at events like the annual conferences sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based group that rejects the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.

ref, just rebranded cei cee blog:

http://www.globalwarming.org/about/

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http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/11/17/cnn-s-jake-tapper-exposes-trump-adviser-myron-ebell-industry-funded-climate-change-denier/214515

    JAKE TAPPER (HOST): As the world tries to figure out just what comes next, one of the clearest policy differences between the current president and his successor, President-elect Trump, has to do with combating climate change. President-elect Trump has made no bones about his belief, contrary to the vast majority of scientists, that man-made climate change is not a legitimate phenomenon. And now he is tapping one of the nation’s leading climate change deniers to head the transition for the Environmental Protection Agency, someone who may not want the agency to exist at all.

    [...]

    TAPPER: Suffice it to say, Donald Trump is not a big believer in man-made climate change, contrary to the views and data of the vast majority of scientists.

    [BEGIN VIDEO CLIP]

    DONALD TRUMP: Our plan will end the EPA, which is a -- hey, look, it's all wonderful, but it's a disaster.

    [END VIDEO CLIP]

    TAPPER: That's why the former EPA administrators under Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush hammered Trump during the election for pledging to yank the U.S. from the Paris accords, an international agreement to fight climate change, a move they said, quote, would set the world back decades. Leading the Trump transition team on environmental matters is an avid climate change denier. A man who was once funded by the tobacco industry to fight those seeking to further regulate cigarettes. Myron Ebell is the director of the Center For Energy And Environment, part of a libertarian think tank that, quote, questions global warming alarmism, partly funded by some of the same industries such as coal that are being hurt by the regulations of the fossil fuel industry. Ebell has long fought against environmental regulations, arguing they're an extension of government power. As he told PBS in 2012, he rejects the reams of data and evidence suggesting that man-made climate change is real.

    [BEGIN VIDEO CLIP]

    MYRON EBELL:  We believed that the so-called global warming consensus was not based on science but was a political consensus.

    [END VIDEO CLIP]

    TAPPER: That's rejecting evidence accepted by most scientists, as well as a growing number of Republicans, including former South Carolina Congressman Bob Inglis.

    [BEGIN VIDEO CLIP]

    BOB INGLIS: It's really quite comical, really, to have one of the Merchants of Doubt as the head of EPA. That really would be a continuing joke on America.

    [END VIDEO CLIP]

    TAPPER: As founder of environmental group republicEn, Inglis says there must be a way everyone can move forward together. A balanced way.

    [BEGIN VIDEO CLIP]

    INGLIS: This is for real. And it’s happening to us now. We want to take care of the problem. It may be, just maybe, that somebody like Donald Trump could show that there is a free enterprise answer to climate change. But he won't show it if he's got Myron Ebell as the director -- as the administrator of EPA, however.

    [END VIDEO CLIP]

    TAPPER: Trump's appointee will also have the power to affect how we work with the international community to combat a changing environment that has proven deadly time and again. Ebell tops Trump's list less than a year after protesters publicly named him a climate criminal during an annual U.N. conference in Paris.

Related:

InsideClimate News: Myron Ebell, the Climate Contrarian Now Plotting the EPA's Precarious Future

Previously:

Media Guide: The Fossil Fuel Industry Players Setting Trump’s Energy Agenda

Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell: "I'd Like To See A Lot More Funding" From Big Coal

CNN Anchor Fact-Checks Trump’s Climate Science Denial: "That's Just Not True"

jake tapper seems like good guy, BBR, palin, trump

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cee actually cei bs

https://cei.org/issues/energy-and-environment

grab

    SJW-day at COP22

    William Yeatman

    18 November 2016

    Clean Power Plan: EPA’s Updated Base Case Now Tallies with EIA Data

    Marlo Lewis

    3 November 2016

    Clean Power Plan Oral Argument Transcript Available Here!

    Marlo Lewis

    14 October 2016

    President Obama and Chinese President Xi will officially join the Paris Climate Treaty on 3rd September

    Myron Ebell

    2 September 2016

    South China Morning Post reports: China and US to ratify landmark Paris climate deal ahead of G20 summit, sources reveal

    Myron Ebell

    26 August 2016

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/activists-take-myron-ebell-protest-directly-epa

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omfg

Homeland Security transition is being led by tobacco giant Altria’s Cindy Hayden. Leading labor is Steve Hart, chairman of Williams & Jensen, who represents small businesses like Coca-Cola, General Electric, HSBC, and VISA. The agricultural sector is being managed by Michael Torrey, who represents lil’ ol’ American Beverage Association.

But what about our core issues of environment and energy? For the Energy Department, Trump’s taking advice from Michael McKenna, who works for MWR Strategies, which represents the chemical giant Dow, the Kochs, and coal giant Southern Company. It’s been reported for months now that fracking magnate Harold Hamm is in the lead for Secretary of Energy.

For Interior, if Trump doesn’t give the position to Trump Jr. (because what did we overthrow British rule for, if not nepotism?) then it may go to Forrest Lucas, co-founder of Lucas Oil.

And for the EPA transition, Trump has tapped none other than Myron Ebell. He not only works for CEI, which is funded by Exxon, the Kochs, big tobacco and other industries, but also directed the Cooler Heads Coalition, which was more or less a front group for Koch front groups.

Ebell’s got quite a history of meddling at the highest level. Back in the George W. Bush administration, he was contacted to help suppress climate research coming from the government, and suggested then-EPA head Christine Todd Whitman be fired for allowing the EPA to commit the mortal sin of releasing a report about the reality and dangers of climate change. Now he gets to present to Trump candidates to choose from, which should cut down on the need for Ebell to have them fired in the future. (Assuming he doesn’t take the job himself, which is rumored that he might.)

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16112016/myron-ebell-climate-denier-epa-donald-trump

icn

Myron Ebell, chosen by Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, traces a long history as a determined conservative firebrand.

He rose through the ranks of the "wise-use" movement to land at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, pushing an ideology of private property and free markets reigning supreme. He led activists calling themselves the Cooler Heads Coalition, pushing a brand of no-holds-barred climate denial, putting himself at the center of divisive advocacy wars over fossil fuels and the environment.

For decades, he has pushed the radical insistence that the environmental left has it all wrong: the science, the ideology, the economics and the politics of climate change.

The same views apply across the landscape of environmental policy, from land and water conservation to energy production.

During an earlier transition from one administration to another, as the Bush-Cheney Republicans arrived to displace the Clinton-Gore Democrats in 2001, he shared his views in an online chat sponsored by the Washington Post. He said Gail Norton, a Reagan-era private-property-rights champion nominated for Interior Secretary, and Spencer Abraham, a founder of the Federalist Society who had voted to abolish the Energy Department but now would run it, were "superb choices." But he reckoned that Christine Todd Whitman, a moderate from New Jersey who was to head the EPA, "may turn out to be a good choice or may not."

It was a savvy move to damn Whitman with such vanishingly faint praise. It would not be long before she was a victim of intense maneuvering against forceful action on climate change during the opening Bush-Cheney years. Ebell thought Whitman should only be retained if her EPA would "stop claiming regulatory authorities far beyond its legal authority."

It's just like his view today, except that there are new Obama-era targets, like the Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States rule.

Through all that ensued since 2001—the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol and the rise of the Paris Agreement; the Supreme Court decree that the EPA must control carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels; and the ensuing fight over regulations to do just that—Ebell has never wavered in his views.

So his ascendancy in the Trump camp alarms and exasperates people like Eric Schaeffer, former head of enforcement at EPA and now executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit watchdog group.

They know him as the author of a famous denialist alt-science memo in the 1990s, as an advocate who helped scuttle the Kyoto Protocol in the 2000s. He is also known as a happy warrior at CEI, funded generously by Exxon and by dark-money donors, that never concedes the field. They know that CEI remains engaged in a furious fight with state attorneys general over its own role in Exxon's record on climate change. They can only imagine how far he and the Trump team might go in de-funding and de-fanging the EPA.

"It tells me they are not approaching this analytically, logically, or even as economists," Schaeffer said. "They are approaching it as ideologues. And that's pretty dangerous. It used to be, even to some extent under 'W,' you talked in code or at least made some kind of showing of your interest in the environment and clean air and water, and having a credible EPA. They've completely thrown that overboard."

Already, CEI is getting very specific about the kinds of actions the Trump administration should take. This week it listed three executive orders exemplifying those that should be deep-sixed. (They involve energy conservation by the federal government, international development aid and protection of infrastructure from climate impacts.)

If the Clean Power Plan meets its demise, and particularly if the Paris Agreement goes down the same drain, the defeat for 21st century environmentalism would exceed the undoing of the Kyoto Protocol or the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate bill early in the Obama years.

At its heart, it would be a victory for denial. And it would vindicate the long game plan of fossil fuel forces that recognized that financing the machinery of ideology was just as important as financing political campaigns—because Big Oil and Big Coal contributed relatively little this year to the Trump campaign, even as the fossil fuel camp scripted his thinly-embellished policy declarations.

One irony, said Jeremy Symons, associate vice president for climate policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, "is that Trump said he would 'drain the swamp,' but Ebell is a creature of the swamp. He has been taking money from years from industry to slow and stop climate change."

Robert Brulle, a sociologist who has extensively documented the industry's support of climate denial, said CEI's biggest funder, pouring in $9.1 million between 2002 and 2013, was the Florida-based Dunn's Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking. Run by futures trader William Dunn, the foundation is a major donor to free market think tanks and advocacy groups like the Reason Foundation and the Cato Institute.

The second largest funder, with $5 million since 2004, is Donors Trust, which has been called the "dark money ATM of the conservative movement." Its donors include the libertarian Koch brothers and other free enterprise philanthropists. Exxon also is among CEI's largest funders with $2 million between 2000 and 2005, but the big oil company hasn't given to CEI directly since 2006, when it began scaling back its funding of groups that deny climate science.

As far back as 1998, Ebell was among a group organized by the American Petroleum Institute and its allies proposing a denialist project to ''maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media and other key audiences,'' according to a memo they wrote.

During and after the election of 2000 and the transition from the Clinton-Gore administration to the Bush-Cheney regime, CEI fought to influence Washington's formal climate science assessments. Its lawyers sued to make sure that one major document, the National Climate Assessment, would not carry any policy weight.

In 2002, Ebell offered CEI's help to Philip Cooney, chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, to "clean up the mess." That was in the wake of the State Department filing a U.S. Climate Action Report that included the United Nations finding that global warming posed a significant risk and was caused by fossil fuel emissions.

Cooney, who joined the Bush administration after a decade as a lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute, had edited government reports to emphasize doubt about climate change. That was documented in 2005 by whistleblower Rick Piltz, a former senior official in the government's climate change science program. (Piltz resigned from the government and founded Climate Science Watch in 2005. He died in 2014. Cooney resigned from the Bush administration after Piltz's disclosures and took a job at Exxon.)

"Thanks for calling and asking for our help," Ebell said in an email to Cooney in 2002.

But true to form, his email had a badgering, even threatening tone, criticizing the Bush administration's handling of climate change reports and warning that CEI would fight any policies it viewed as errant. Ebell promised in the email "to do as much as we could to deflect criticism by blaming the EPA for freelancing."

Ebell said it was imperative to "drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think that they are serving the president's interests by publishing this rubbish."

Whitman, he said, should go.

"It seems to me that the folks at EPA are the obvious fall guys, and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible," Ebell wrote.

Whitman, who now runs her own strategic planning and consulting group, said in an interview that she never had any personal dealings with Ebell. While at EPA, the pressures that concerned her the most came mainly from Cheney and his staff. "I suspect he had a little more pull than Myron," Whitman said. As for Ebell: "There's always going to be those kind of people out there. You just can't worry about it."

The incident prompted two state attorneys general to request a Justice Department investigation into any improper collusion, but that went nowhere.

Several Democratic attorneys general referenced possible collusion between Exxon and groups like CEI when they announced investigations of Exxon for potential climate fraud. That came after InsideClimate News and others published histories of Exxon's own climate research and its subsequent support for campaigns to undermine the scientific consensus.

The attorney general of the Virgin Islands went so far as to subpoena CEI's records from the Bush-Cheney transition era, but CEI fought back hard—as did Exxon and several Republican state attorneys general and Republicans on a House committee—and deflected the inquiry.

At a meeting of Republican state attorneys general this summer, Ebell lashed out at Exxon foes, saying the Democratic attorneys general and environmental organizations were colluding to "silence and defund the opponents of global warming alarmism."

An audio recording of the session "Climate Change Debate: How Speech is Being Stifled" was obtained and released by the Center for Media and Democracy.

Ebell set the tone by disparaging those who embrace the overwhelming scientific evidence that the Earth is warming.

"Why is the left so intent on trying to win the debate by silencing and de-funding their opponents? Well, they have a little problem, we've got reality on our side," Ebell said.

"So when you expose all of these arguments as phony, what is left but trying to win by silencing and defunding your opponents?" he said.

As CEI has done in legal filings and in newspaper advertising, he called it a matter of constitutionally protected free speech.

Months before Trump emerged victorious, and before Ebell was named to play a big role in the new administration's agenda-setting, he declared confidently that "right now the climate inquisition is in retreat," he said. "It's in retreat because of what ExxonMobil has done. What CEI has done."

Now that Ebell is on the inside of an administration, though, his influence is likely to multiply. "That's what worries me," said Whitman. "Of all the promises Trump made during the campaign that now seem to be a little less certain, EPA is probably the one he'll stick with, because it is so universally thought of as being the source of all evil. And that is very troubling."

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http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/27/climate-science-denialist-myron-ebell-named-trump-adviser

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s energy policy to dig, drill, and frack as much fossil fuel out of the ground as possible only really works by denying two realities.

The first reality denied is that there is no global agreement to move the world away from the fuels that Trump thinks are the future.

The second reality denied, of course, is the existence of decades of scientific evidence linking fossil fuel burning to dangerous climate change.

So with this in mind, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) Myron Ebell seems a perfect addition to Trump’s team.

As the U.S. media picks through the entrails from the first presidential debate, a few hours earlier it was revealed that should Trump win, Ebell would lead the Republican’s “EPA transition team” that would strip the agency of key powers.

Ebell has long fought the legitimacy of climate science while promoting fossil fuels — epitomizing Trump’s current approach to energy and climate science.

For the best part of 20 years, Ebell has been actively working in favor of the fossil fuel industry by attempting to undermine climate science.

In 1998, Ebell joined with the American Petroleum Institute and staff from fossil fuel companies Exxon, Chevron, and Southern Company to try to reshape how the U.S. people understood the risks of climate change.

In a multi-million dollar plan that was leaked, Ebell and others concluded that a “victory” would be theirs only when the public doubted the links between dangerous global warming and fossil fuel burning.

Over the years, the CEI, where Ebell works as the director of the Center for Energy and Environment, has accepted cash from fossil fuel interests including oil giant ExxonMobil and foundations funded and controlled by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Bad Company

Ebell looks to be in good company in the Republican nominee’s camp.

In August, Trump’s team announced Kathleen Hartnett-White as one of several new additions to its “economic advisory team.”

Hartnett-White is another who doubts the well-established link between fossil fuel burning and climate change.

In a column last year, Hartnett-White lauded the “environmental benefits” of fossil fuel burning, while claiming the evidence for climate change was waning.

Hartnett-White is director of an energy and environment project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) — another group that has taken money from the Koch brothers.

In July, the TPPF released a “research booklet” written by contrarian Dr. Roy Spencer that attempted to undermine findings related to sea level rise, extreme temperatures, and other impacts from burning fossil fuels.

Hartnett-White is also an adviser to the CO2 Coalition — a group that includes extreme climate science denier Patrick Moore, who rejects any evidence for human-caused climate change.

Trump’s key energy adviser, Republican congressman Kevin Cramer, is also a self-confessed “skeptic.”

Another Trump aide and potential energy secretary in a Trump presidency is Harold Hamm, the founder and CEO of major oil producer Continental Resources. Hamm has also been a donor to Cramer's political campaigns. As DeSmog has reported, Hamm's company could gain from any future decisions to allow the Keystone XL pipeline.

Trump's Climate Hoax

During the presidential debate, climate change was barely mentioned. At one point, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton taunted Trump, saying that he “thinks climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.”

Trump interjected, saying “I do not say that,” going on to disparage solar power. He has claimed a tweet saying global warming was a concept “created by and for the Chinese” was a joke, but has continued to refer to climate change using terms like “hoax” since.

Given the “advisers” Trump is surrounding himself with so far, it seems unlikely he will get in touch with reality ahead of the November election.

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