The Heartland Institute is a climate-denying "think tank" in which industry-paid wordwhores scribble out industry-dictated assertions that fossil fuels are great, climate change isn't real, pollution is good for you, cancer is a vitamin, or whatever else their patrons have written down on the memo lines of their latest checks. It's that bad. It's one of the nation's leading industry propaganda teams—when you hear some dimwitted know-nothing on Fox News blurt out lines about how malevolent scientists have it in for Ma and Pa Oil Well, it's the Heartland Institute that sends out the releases coaching them on how to do it.
Heartland has been having a tougher go of things these days; the nation's biggest funder of anti-environmental propaganda, Rex Tillerson's ExxonMobil, has had to curtail that propaganda on the heels of the discovery that Exxon scientists themselves were certain of fossil-fuel based climate change even as the company was funding fraudulent "studies" to the contrary. But things have not been all bad: The stupidest fucking people in America have now all been given jobs in the federal government, thanks to President Doesn'tGiveACrap.
So last week Team Garbage Fire dispatched an entire team of freshly ensconced (and extremely dumb) government officials to wallow around in Heartland's deepest denial-bog.
The America First Energy Conference drew several federal officials. The Interior Department’s counselor for energy policy, Vincent DeVito, gave a keynote over dinner; Richard Westerdale II, a senior energy adviser at the State Department, was a panelist; and Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, addressed attendees in a pre-taped video.
The meeting’s mostly celebratory panels focused on climate myths, fossil fuels, and the dramatic shift in environmental policy under Trump: his announcement to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, the proposed repeal of pollution rules for power plants, and EPA’s overhaul of its science advisory boards.
In past iterations of this game it's seemed that everyone on Heartland's staff was betting they'd be long dead before the most catastrophic effects of climate change were felt—but with recent climate measurements more often than not suggesting global changes are already happening faster than past theories supposed, that is an increasingly risky bet. At this point, it appears that they are instead betting that they will be able to catch a quick plane ride to a friendly kleptocracy before the true victims of climate change—for example, anyone who owns property in Florida—are able to fully assemble the guillotines.
As usual, Heartland's prime obsession is to undo any and all regulations that harm the "energy" industry, by which they invariably mean the fossil fuel industry and no others. This is not limited to arguments about climate change; the "Institute" is also extremely irritated at the thought that the check-writers can't just murder American citizens outright.
Other suggestions included redoing the EPA’s valuation for a human life, rolling back standards for small particulates and ozone, and updating the cost-benefit analysis of new regulations to include job impacts.
I mean, c'mon. If you can't poison entire downwind communities, what the hell is even the point of running an "energy" company?
So yes, America, the Heartland Institute is still a thing. They are still rolling along unhindered by either ethics or actual science; they still make a fine living whoring for whatever industry is willing to write the biggest checks.
And, of course, Team Garbage Fire is all over a hip new scene like that.