Topic: NewsBusters
In a June 29 NewsBusters post, Noel Sheppard continues his deceptive descriptors of anti-global warming activists. This time, he calls the Heartland Institute, which had issued a press release critical of Al Gore, "a non-partisan social and economic think tank."
In fact, the Heartland Institute is a conservative activist group in thrall to big business. According to SourceWatch, the institute "campaigns on what it calls 'junk science', 'common-sense environmentalism' (i.e. anti-Kyoto, pro-GM), the privatization of public services, smokers' rights (anti-tobacco tax, denial of problems from passive smoking), the introduction of school vouchers, and the deregulation of health care insurance. The institute is one of several organizations the tobacco industry has cultivated to promote its interests, and it refuses to publicly disclose who its corporate and foundation funders are.
The institute's press release quoted by Sheppard states: "The Heartland Institute has been running ads in national newspapers calling on Al Gore to debate Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent global warming 'skeptic.'" But as we've previously noted, Monckton has his own credibility problems. The institute's website has a page in which it promotes the dubious claims about the environment and global warming made by Michael Crichton in his book "State of Fear."
