The Heartland Institute is a right-wing think tank infamous among climate change researchers and activists. It has a long history of funnelling enormous amounts of money into climate denial campaigns across the media and social media. It has played a major role in disseminating false information to millions of people and creating a sense of scientific legitimacy to what is an anti-science agenda. As is almost always the case, they receive financial support from oil and gas firms, including ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, both major donors to the think-tank.
Most conservative think tanks frame their agenda around purely economic policy goals motivated by the failed ideology of trickle-down economics. In fact, one of its founders, Joseph Bast studied Economics at the University of Chicago which is often credited as the birthplace of this brand of economics as it exists today due to its association with Milton Friedman.
Their ideology sees climate change as an attempt by socialists, or people with sympathies towards socialism, to regulate the oil and gas industry. This threatens their ideology since substantial regulation is required to offset the damage oil corporations like Koch Industries have done to the planet. Regulation is a slippery slope to communism according to this ideology and a threat they take very seriously - a deep-seated fear that has its origin in red scare propaganda that was popular during the Cold War. It’s important to understand that this being their starting point means that they are going to have bias inherent to all work associated with their organisation. The Heartland Institute is primarily a pro-free market, anti-regulation think tank and tries to distort the scientific consensus to fit in with their political ideology. This is the case with pretty much every right-wing think tank, however, the Heartland Institute has been phenomenally successful in portraying itself as scientific and, even if purely aesthetic, many people fall for their propaganda.
They organise conferences that are supposed to mirror those of the scientific community, albeit more focused on economics than the scientific problem at hand (they invite many climate sceptics to give talks too). In addition to climate denial, they have worked closely in the past with tobacco companies to spread misinformation about the links between lung cancer and smoking plus the impacts of passive smoking. They also placate the anti-vaxx movement, promoting anti-mask mandate measures, vaccine mandates (a completely made up moral panic), and downplaying risks associated with COVID-19. Again they work back from their political viewpoint that government intervention and regulation are bad no matter what. Reducing the spread of a disease that’s killed over 6 million people, or the impacts associated with climate change are not priorities as they fear these issues will be weaponized to control people. Interestingly, they are anti-abortion so their anti-government stance vanishes when it is convenient to them and, when it comes to women controlling their bodies, they draw the line.
Their website's environment section (which they pretend is a scientific “centre on climate and environmental policy”) is a litany of worn-out denialist arguments and reframing of these flawed attempts to undermine scientific conclusions across so many different disciplines that all point towards climate change being very real.
Almost every book on their website that is promoted includes authorships by Fred. S. Singer. Singer was an example of a great scientist whose political ideology, at the height of the Cold War, led him to become an enemy of science and the scientific method. He became more of a mouthpiece for whichever industry needed someone with a scientific background to sell their credentials and promote misinformation. In addition to his views on climate change, Fred Singer opposed the scientific consensus on tobacco smoke causing cancer, acid rain, CFCs causing ozone depletion, and many more topics that involved government regulation to mitigate. The government connections he gained during his time working on US military projects during WWII, coupled with an aptitude for public relations, gave him extraordinary power in ensuring that his views spread far and wide. Fred Singer’s career is documented in the book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which is worth a read for anyone interested in how varying industries used the tactics of the tobacco industry to drive anti-scientific viewpoints into the mainstream.
The Heartland Institute relies heavily on obscene PR stunts and gimmicks that imply climate scientists are engaged in a global conspiracy to suppress the real science of climate change, which happens to align perfectly with whatever generates the most amount of profit for their financiers. Leaked documents in 2012 brought to light how entrenched this organisation is with corporations that exploit the environment to maximise their profits. In addition to the usual suspects like ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, an anonymous donor was pouring eye-watering amounts of money into the think tank. $8.6 million came into their hands via. this anonymous backer between 2007 and 2011.
The most repulsive and widely reported of their stunts involved a billboard that compared people who believe in climate change to the “Unabomber”, Ted Kaczynski. This psychotic example of a PR stunt highlights the lengths the organisation will go to in order to smear and spread hate towards people for merely believing in global warming.
The organisation also embarked on a campaign to send out hundreds of thousands of copies of their book, disguised as a scientific report, to teachers across the US in response to the Paris Agreement. They have developed their own curriculum based on this material and of course their material bypasses any peer-reviewed science and is purely emotionally and politically motivated.
The most strange of their PR stunts was their attempt to fund a young teenage girl to act as a mouthpiece for their interests, marketed as the anti-Greta (since this was around the time Greta Thunberg was gaining immense popularity for her climate activism). Naomi Seibt, who has shown sympathies towards nationalist pundits such as Stefan Molyneux, was used by the Heartland Institute to counter what Greta was saying about climate change and has made appearances in mainstream TV programs across the US and UK. She predictably only refers to the same arguments against climate change that are easy to disprove: the climate has always been changing, changes in solar output are responsible for the current changes in climate, etc... She is no longer affiliated with the Heartland Institute however she continues to promote misinformation about any given topic she goes near, especially on vaccines and COVID. It seems like a common theme for climate denialists to also peddle misinformation on vaccines, another testament to the fact they are motivated by fear of regulation rather than scientific consensus and peer-reviewed research.
Without trying to turn my blog into a politics blog, I have to mention how much these types of organisations have undermined democracy. Think tanks have so much power to pump out misinformation, and in the case of our case study, one anonymous megarich donor can finance a coordinated effort to undermine scientists and this clearly has a significant impact on the public discourse around climate change and the policy decisions that involve the environment. The mainstream media continues to fail as it platforms and legitimises many of these ideas, that are fringe ideas within scientific communities yet are afforded the same amount of airtime and treated as equal in merit. There is nothing wrong with giving everyone a voice but if someone is saying tobacco doesn’t cause lung cancer, we have the right to know if they are taking money from tobacco companies and the same applies to the “experts” that the Heartland Institute props up.
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