Major Corporations Now Backing Climate-Denier Think Tanks

by Article of the Day on February 26, 2012 | Trackback URI | Email This Post | 122 Views

The Article: Which Major Corporations are Backing a Climate-Denier Think Tank? by Jaeah Lee in Mother Jones.

The Text: Over at ThinkProgress Green, Josh Israel and Brad Johnson expose 19 major corporations backing the Heartland Institute, the think tank whose internal documents were leaked this week, laying bare its plans to teach students that climate change is a hoax and other anti-climate efforts. As my colleague Kate Sheppard reported on Thursday, the documents—posted here and here—prompted a backlash from Heartland, which deemed at least one of the documents fake and some tampered with. Interestingly, Heartland president Joseph Bast then used the incident to write to donors, first to apologize—the leaked emails identified some private donors, to whom Heartland promises anonymity “because nobody wants the risk of nutty environmentalists or Occupy Wall Street goons harassing them”—and then to ask for more money (“Now more than ever, I need you to stand by us in our time of need”).

Heartland’s fundraising tactics (PDF) seem to have worked well in the past, given the group’s impressive suite of corporate donations in 2010 and 2011. Here’s the full list of Heartland’s corporate backers, via ThinkProgress:

Altria Client Services Inc.: $90,000

Amgen, USA: $25,000

Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc.: $5,000

AT&T: $100,000

BB&T: $16,105

Comcast Corporation: $35,000

General Motors Foundation: $30,000

GlaxoSmithKline: $50,000

Microsoft Corporation: $59,908

Nucor Corporation: $502,000

PepsiCo, Inc.: $5,000

Pfizer: $130,000