Apparently not content with a mere 92% of Reform UK’s funding already coming from “Fossil Fuel Interests, Climate Deniers, and Polluters” Nigel Farage decided to go speak at a gathering of the Heartland Institute.
Desmog shares what looks to be the (extremely off-putting) invite for a panel called “Net Zero: The new Brexit?”.
You would think that that would be an anti-net-zero chat given the devastating failure and unpopularity of Brexit, but, from the context of where it is being delivered and who it is being delivered by I’m certain it’s the exact opposite.
The Heartland Institute is a 55 Tufton Street “thinktank” that is considered by some as the UK’s main group of deranged climate science deniers. It is, unsurprisingly, funded by various huge fossil fuels companies – ExxonMobil and Koch Industries for example.
What is the Heartland Insitute? It’s a think tank, very close to Donald Trump’s administration, that is, or acts like it is, extreme climate change sceptics:
The group promotes false claims that climate change is not potentially catastrophic to the world and it could actually be ‘beneficial’.
It has also incorrectly claimed that heatwaves and temperatures in the US are not increasing as a result of climate change.
Also:
The group has previously expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised”, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet” and should be “two or three times” higher than its current level.
Naomi Klein sees them for what they probably are:
Author Naomi Klein wrote in her book This Changes Everything that staff at the Institute “recognize that climate change is a profound threat to our economic and social systems and therefore deny its scientific reality.”
They do things like mail 8000 textbooks riddled with climate misinformation to schools in the hope that this will brainwash children to reject the truth.
One of their failed stunts was to release absurd billboards that indicated a moral equivalence between the Unabomber, a terrorist, and believe that believe in the truth of global warming.
Heartland began an advertising campaign in 2012 which featured a photo of the Unabomber, a US terrorist who killed three people and injured others. The picture was accompanied by text, which read: “I still believe in global warming, do you?” The group withdrew the billboards a day later.
The institute planned for the campaign to feature murderer Charles Manson, communist leader Fidel Castro and the founder of al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden.
The group justified the billboards at the time, saying: “The most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”
Although the billboard didn’t last long, The Guardian lets us witness the horror of truth and design:
The Heartland Institute doesn’t only take money from those with those whose fossil fuel interests will make them ever richer if they are allowed to continue to destroy the environment around them. Perhaps most famously, in the 1990s they worked with the huge tobacco company, Philip Morris, to try and convince law-makers that smoking is perfectly healthy and hence should not be subject to profit-curtailing regulations.
The institute set out to discredit the vast amount of science that says otherwise which is now almost universally accepted. Their former president Joe Bast claimed that moderate smoking doesn’t add to the risk of lung cancer. It could easily be argued that their climate change denial is equally as factually and morally obscene.