“Follow the money” advised Deep Throat, the clandestine informer in the movie All the President’s Men about the Watergate break-in. Well, that advice also applies to the massive disinformation campaign financed by the fossil fuel industry and promoted by the Heartland Institute to convince government officials and the public that climate change is a hoax in spite of the fact that peer reviewed science and every National Academy of Science on the planet proves otherwise.

 Very little of Heartland’s anti-climate “science” is peer reviewed which means that it is not really science. Much of it comes from the infamous Fred Singer and his phony Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP). Fred Singer is the “scientist” that the tobacco industry held up against medical research to claim that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Then the chemical industry paraded him out to claim that CFC’s didn’t destroy ozone in the atmosphere. Now, in perfect succession, he goes against overwhelming evidence that proves climate change is very real and at a very dangerous level. In fact Singer is so bogus that he listed Fredrick Seitz as Chairman of SEPP on his IRS 990 forms for two years after Seitz died.  Not only that, there are some highly questionable money transactions being investigate with both SEPP and Heartland along with a few other “think tanks”.

The Heartland Institute boasts of feeding their disinformation to 7,300 state elected officials and 8,400 county and local officials. They say “they reach more elected officials, more often, than any other think tank in the U.S.” Considering that Heartland is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization with restrictions on lobbying activities it would seem they are in violation of the nonprofit laws.

In preparation for its International Conference on Climate Change from May 21 - 23 in Chicago, Heartland sponsored the most sophomoric hysterically lunatic billboard campaign depicting people who believe in the peer reviewed proven climate science as being like some of the world’s most notorious criminals like Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber, and Osama bin Laden. Really now!

Considering all of the above, who in their right mind would give the Heartland Institute the time of day – other than likeminded paranoids?  Besides the fossil fuel industry and the tobacco industry it will be interesting to see who continues to fund them, and even more interesting, who with any serious level of credibility will be willing to be seen in public with them.