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Activists protest outside the Heartland climate-denier conference. (Photo by Forecast the Facts.)

It’s been a rough few weeks for the Heartland Institute, the “intellectual” nexus of the fossil fuel-powered machine that disparages climate science in the United States. Nineteen corporations have pulled more than $1 million in expected funding for the institute, leading President Joe Bast to ask attendees at the recent Heartland climate-denial conference whether they had a “rich uncle” who could help out. Seriously.

At a time when most news about climate change is bad, Heartland’s decline has been a rare bright spot. How did it come about? In the reductive rendering of the mainstream media, the narrative has become that Heartland simply overplayed its hand by launching a billboard campaign comparing people who believe in global warming to the Unabomber, one of the single dumbest PR moves in recent history. Others have gone deeper, pointing out that Heartland has been painting itself into the crazy corner for a long time, and its lies were bound to catch up with it eventually. In that view, Heartland’s demise was essentially inevitable.

The infamous Unabomber billboard.

While these narratives have elements of truth — the billboards were incredibly stupid, and Heartland has been lying for a long time — neither offers a full explanation because both deemphasize the crucial role of citizen action. Simply put, the post-billboard exodus of Heartland’s corporate donors would have been neither as big nor as fast if not for the actions of thousands of everyday Americans calling those donors to account. Indeed, it might not have happened at all.

For those who haven’t been closely following the saga, here is the basic chronology. In February, documents containing a list of Heartland funders were leaked to a number of bloggers by climate scientist Peter Gleick, who risked his professional reputation to expose the sources of Heartland’s support. Two days later, the organization I work for, Forecast the Facts, launched a campaign calling on all corporate funders of Heartland to withdraw their support, with our initial focus on General Motors. Within a week, more than 20,000 people, including 10,000 GM owners, had signed on. After adding their names to the effort, those citizen-activists then called GM, posted hundreds of comments on GM’s Facebook page, uploaded photos of themselves with their GM cars, showed up at events where GM’s CEO was speaking, and generally made it clear that they were extremely upset about GM’s Heartland association. After weeks of pressure, including considerable media coverage, GM pulled its support on March 28 — more than a month before the now infamous billboard went up.

Forecast the Facts isn’t an established player; our ability to influence General Motors was not due to our reputation. It was entirely the result of our active members, who organized around an idea and spoke in a louder voice than any single person or institution could.

Because GM’s pullout happened before Heartland’s Unabomber messaging fiasco — a key point that’s been overlooked by many media outlets — it offers the clearest demonstration of how citizen activism can impact corporations. There is literally nothing more valuable to a public-facing company like General Motors than its brand. And in the wake of the government bailout, GM has a great deal invested in building its environmental identity. Exhibit A: The Chevy Volt. Twenty thousand customers and potential customers pissed off about GM’s ties to climate-change denial represented a real threat to GM’s image makeover. Which is why GM’s CEO agreed to review the matter personally, and eventually decided that the company’s 20-year relationship with Heartland was just not worth the potential brand damage.

In the weeks following GM’s announcement, Forecast the Facts staff, together with partners at Greenpeace, contacted the rest of Heartland’s corporate donors to ask why they were still supporting climate-change denial. In doing so, we made clear that we were speaking on behalf of the 20,000 people who had signed on to the campaign. And our questions sparked conversations within many of those companies about whether the lobbying that Heartland did for them was worth the risk to their brands.

Then came the billboards. The companies that had already been thinking about leaving because of the aforementioned public pressure immediately did so. Another 150,000 people joined our campaign through groups including 350.org, SumOfUs.org, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Sierra Club. And again, these people did more than just sign a petition. Thousands posted on company Facebook pages and chipped in to fund billboards calling out remaining Heartland holdouts, hundreds made phone calls to corporate headquarters, and dozens showed up in person to protest Heartland’s conference. All of those actions sent a message to Heartland’s remaining donors: There are a lot of people who care about this issue, and your brand is at risk. In response, corporate supporters have continued to scurry for the exits.

I’ve asked a number of people why citizen activism tends to get short shrift, and I’ve gotten a lot of thoughtful responses. One of them stuck out as the most likely explanation: People like the idea that Heartland carried within it the seeds of its own destruction — that is, Heartland consists of a bunch of unhinged conspiracy theorists who mislead the public for a living, and they were destined to eventually destroy themselves because scientific truth inevitably wins. While that teleology is attractive, it ignores the fact that the truth only wins when enough people stand up on its behalf.

Institutions like Heartland don’t fail just because they lie to the public. If that were true, Heartland would have disintegrated a long time ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would be defunct, and the corporate-funded campaign to discredit science would no longer hinder our societal response to the climate threat. Institutions like Heartland only crumble when people speak up and say they are tired of being lied to, and provide a credible threat to whomever makes the misinformation possible — in this case, hypocritical corporate donors that profess to care about climate change while simultaneously supporting a group dedicated to the exact opposite purpose.

A shift in cultural attitudes and attendant policy changes will only come when enough people consistently, loudly, and unrepentantly reject climate denial and demand action. So when everyday people do exactly that, and their actions make an impact, they deserve to be credited. We need to reinforce the behavior that is our only hope for real progress on climate change.

Filed under: Article, Climate Skeptics

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By David Roberts

Photo by Eric Tastad.

On Thursday, President Obama will visit TPI Composites, a wind manufacturer in Newton, Iowa (population, 15,254). There, he will reiterate his support for the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal support program that has helped drive wind’s rapid expansion in the U.S. The PTC is now in peril, as Congress appears unlikely to renew it when it expires at the end of this year. The loss of the PTC would put tens of thousands of current jobs — and almost 100,000 future jobs [PDF] — at risk.

Newton’s experience is incredibly illustrative, so let’s recount a little history.

Vulture capitalism

Newton used to be the “washing machine capital of the world,” with five washing machine manufacturers. One by one they closed, until there was only Maytag, which at its height employed around 4,000 Newtonians. Then, in 2006, Maytag was the subject of a bidding war. On one side was Chinese manufacturer Haier Group, in partnership with none other than former Romney employer Bain Capital (Romney was gone by then). On the other was Whirlpool.

Whirlpool won, but it would have been vulture capitalism either way. The Maytag plant was summarily shuttered and the jobs sent out of state.

Manufacturing jobs return on the wind, with bipartisan support

Since then, Newton has turned itself around, in no small part by attracting several wind-turbine manufacturers, including Trinity Structural Towers and TPI Composites.

It’s not an unusual story in Iowa, which is a leading wind-power state. Almost 19 percent of the state’s power came from wind in 2011 and the industry employs some 6,000-7,000 Iowans. According to wind industry estimates, since the state passed a renewable energy standard in 1983, some $5 billion in wind investment has flooded the state.

Unsurprisingly, these developments have left wind power with broad bipartisan support in Iowa. Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has defended the wind industry and the PTC against attacks from the right. Even Iowa Rep. Steve King (R), one of the most notoriously bigoted right-wing nutbags in all of Congress, has said, “Now is the time for stability in the wind industry, and the PTC offers just that.” When they were in the state, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Thaddeus McCotter (remember him?) all posed next to a wind-turbine blade made by none other than TPI Composites, to show their support for the industry.

(Side bar: A new analysis [PDF] shows that “adding more wind power to the electric grid could reduce wholesale market prices by more than 25 percent in the Midwest region by 2020.”)

But Romney hates wind

Despite support from Iowa Republicans for wind (and despite that turbine photo-op), Mitt Romney has expressed only contempt for the industry. He would end federal support for solar and wind alike, technologies that, he has said, “make little sense for the consuming public but great sense only for the companies reaping profits from taxpayer subsidies.” (Y’know, like Iowa’s own TPI Composites, the 700 people it employs, and the town it saved.)

And here he is in Colorado, smirking about the wind industry losing 10,000 jobs since 2009. That’s true, of course — it’s gone from a high of 85,000 to around 75,000 now — but mainly because the industry is nervous about the future of the PTC. Which Romney wants to kill for good. Thus insuring far greater job losses.

The fact is, if Republicans win Congress and Romney becomes president, all federal support for clean energy will dry up and Newton, along with other Midwestern towns that have been revitalized by wind, will suffer yet another devastating blow. I wonder if Iowa voters — sitting in one of 2012′s most important swing states — were thinking about that when Romney came to the state recently to lecture about the deficit.

Filed under: Article, Cleantech, Election 2012, Energy Policy, Green Jobs, Politics, Renewable Energy, Solar Power, Sustainable Business, Wind Power

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By Jess Zimmerman

Photo by Stefan.

Okay, we don’t want to beat a dead horse here — like, say, the way certain organizations kept harping on the Climategate non-scandal — but allow us just one more instance of pointing and laughing at the Heartland Institute’s gross hypocrisy. When we last left our intrepidly two-faced heroes, they were wounded to the core by the fact that climate scientist Peter Gleick had posed as a board member in order to obtain internal documents. Now it turns out the denialist think tank did basically the same thing to Greenpeace.

Heartland was pearl-clutchy to the extreme about Gleick’s actions — it just couldn’t imagine such a breach of ethics! Why, it would be as if someone from Heartland had called Cindy Baxter of Greenpeace claiming to be part of a U.S. environmental organization, requested a copy of Greenpeace’s media list, and then issued a press release bragging about their extreme cleverness in coming up with the idea of lying to get information. And nobody from Heartland had done such a thing! Not in at LEAST five years.

But that’s exactly what the organization did at the 2007 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Bali:

The Heartland caller phoned Baxter at four in the morning (Bali time), claiming to represent a U.S. environmental organization and asking if she would hand over the UNFCCC media list — which Heartland clearly had failed to secure through legitimate means.

Baxter demurred, after which Taylor sent out a press release, recounting the conversation, linking to a (possibly illegal) recording that Heartland had made of the phonecall, and “exposing” the fact that Greenpeace has a better working relationship than Heartland with just about everyone in the climate, diplomatic and scientific communities.

DeSmogBlog has posted a letter [PDF] from Baxter asking Heartland how exactly it justifies itself, but she’s probably not expecting an answer. Heartland doesn’t deal in anything resembling justice, after all. It deals in hypocritical outrage.

Filed under: Climate & Energy

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By Sarah Laskow

Hey, remember yesterday, when we told you about a video that imagines a world in which climate skepticism is taught in schools? It turns out that that world is not imaginary — not at all. It exists today, and it is named … Canada.

For two years, Tom Harris, a man who according to the Heartland Institute is an “expert” on climate change, taught a course on the subject at Ottawa’s Carleton University. Harris’ course was meant for non-science majors, so, as the Guardian notes, it “may for many students be the only academic exposure they have to climate change while earning their undergraduate degree.” When a group of scientists reviewed Harris’ taped lectures they found 142 “erroneous” claims.

The group, Committee for The Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (that’d be actual scientific skepticism, not knee-jerk denial!), wrote that:

“Key messages for students contradict accepted scientific opinion. These messages include: denying that current climate change has an anthropogenic cause; dismissing the problems that carbon dioxide emissions cause because CO2 is plant food; denying the existence of the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change; and claiming that we should prepare instead for global cooling.”

Plant food. Cute.

Carleton’s not some out-of-the-way, third-tier school: it’s been ranked one of Canada’s top ten universities. And since college students — even Canadian college students! — are well known to believe that they know better than everyone else, you can be sure there’s now a coterie of Carletonians arguing late into the night that global warming just doesn’t exist. To quote the Climate Reality Project, “Of course it’s true. I learned it in school.”

Filed under: Climate Skeptics

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by Brad Johnson.

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

The Wonk Room has previously identified seven key Senate races and 14 House races between a vote for climate action and a global
warming denier. Today, the Wonk Room highlights four gubernatorial races
which could shut down the clean energy revolution in the Midwest. In
Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming, four Democratic governors who have
supported clean energy may be replaced by Republicans who have expressed
fealty to big oil. The Republican candidates—Terry Branstad in Iowa,
Sen. Sam Brownback in Kansas, Rep. Mary Fallin in Oklahoma, and Matt
Mead in Wyoming—hold commanding leads in the polls over their
Democratic opponents. The Republicans mock global warming as a
conspiracy, doubt that it is caused by manmade pollution, and promote
the expansion of the coal and oil industries in their states.

The heartland of America is under extreme
threat from the destructive power of global warming, including
increasingly frequent catastrophic storms, heat waves, and drought.
Furthermore, by denying the opportunity of clean energy jobs, these
potential governors risk turning their states into economic wastelands.

Iowa

Former Gov. Terry Branstad is leading Gov.
Chet Culver (D-Iowa) in the race to run Iowa’s government. Remarkably,
even though Iowa is increasingly
devastated by catastrophic
floods, Branstad’s only public policy position on global warming
pollution is:

- To “wholeheartedly”
support a coal-fired power plant opposed
by NASA scientist Jim Hansen because it would emit 5.9 million tons
of carbon dioxide each year, and

- To support the construction of a South Dakota oil refinery near the Iowa border that will emit 19
million tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Furthermore, Branstad has attacked
Culver’s $875 million flood recovery plan, falsely claiming “it
saddled Iowans with excessive debt.”

Kansas

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) is positioned to take the seat
formerly held by climate champion Kathleen Sibelius. Under Gov.
Sibelius, Kansas fought
against coal pollution. Her successor Mark Parkinson established a renewable
electricity standard but permitted a coal plant expansion.

Although Brownback said in 2007 that “we
need to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere,” he has since
embraced radical conspiracy theories about climate science. Last
December, he embraced the Climategate
smear campaign:

The recent disclosure of the manipulation of
scientific evidence by climate researchers is exactly the kind
of important information that needs to be brought to light. The emails
and documents recently disclosed paint an alarming picture of the state
of climate research. In the emails that have been disclosed we’ve seen
evidence of manipulation, efforts to avoid freedom of act information
requests, abuse of the peer review process and a research
process that that is driven more by a political agenda than a quest for
truth.

Although Brownback is a supporter of a federal renewable
electricity standard, he called Obama’s climate plan “one
of the worst ideas to come along in a long time,” and his
gubernatorial campaign is heavily
supported by Kansas-based Koch Industries, the right-wing pollution
conglomerate that directs right-wing global warming denial. Over his
career, Brownback has received about $200,000
from the Koch brothers in campaign contributions.

Unlike Brownback, Democratic candidate Tom Holland is “not
questioning the science. We need to take this subject seriously.”

Oklahoma

Rep. Mary Fallin (R-Okla.) has a dominant lead over Democratic
Lt. Gov. Jari Askins. Fallin has mocked
the national security threat of climate change:

Protecting our nation should be a number one priority. Does
leadership really think that our surveillance satellites should be
aimed at polar ice caps and not terror cells, and that spies should be
investigating global warming? Congress must adequately fund our
intelligence operations. If we don’t, we may need to be more concerned
about global warming in the U.S. caused by a nuclear attack in our own back yard. [Emphasis mine.]

Fallin has called climate legislation “entirely
unnecessary.”  Fallin signed the Americans for Prosperity No
Climate Tax pledge and has been endorsed by global warming deniers Sarah
Palin and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.).
She received $5000
from Koch Industries in campaign contributions.

Democratic Gov. Brad Henry signed a renewable
energy standard that also promotes natural gas this year. Fallin’s
position: “My goal as governor would be to stimulate
the oil and gas industry in the state and support the Legislature
for incentives for oil and gas production.”

Wyoming

In Wyoming, Republican millionaire Matt Mead holds a
commanding lead over Leslie Petersen to replace Democratic Gov. Dave
Freudenthal. Mead is a proud global warming denier:

I am unconvinced that climate change is man-made,
but I do recognize we may face challenges presented by those who
propose and believe they can change our climate by law with
ill-thought-out policy like cap and trade (the latest version of which
is the Senate Climate Bill, S. 1733, unveiled May 12th).

“We
have been very blessed for many, many years to have the energy
industry here in Wyoming,” Mead said in June at an energy policy debate.
As a U.S. Attorney under George W. Bush, Mead
defended Koch Industries in a lawsuit that alleged massive natural
gas royalties fraud by the company.

Petersen, by contrast, says Wyoming will have to do something about
global warming “whether we believe it or not.”

Related Links:

Anatomy of a Senate climate bill death

Stupid goes viral: Climate Zombies of Oregon, Hawaii, Minnesota, and northern Rocky Mountains

Wisconsin governor’s race: Barrett vs. Walker

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