Competitive Enterprise Institute

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Competitive Enterprise Institute
legal form 501 (c) Corporation
founding 1984
founder Fred L. Smith Jr.
Seat Washington, DC United StatesUnited States
sales 6.3 million US dollars
Employees 43
Volunteers 9
Website cei.org
As of September 30, 2013

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is an American, politically conservative , libertarian think tank . The stated goals are to spread the principles of limited government (i.e. the restriction of state control), the free market and individual freedom.

activities

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with other conservative think tanks such as the Cato Institute , the Heartland Institute, and the George C. Marshall Institute, play an important role in attempts to deny the existence of man-made global warming through targeted attacks on climate science. In the first few years after the turn of the millennium, the CEI was in all probability the most important of all think tanks that fought against climate research. At the same time, of all organizations, he received the highest grants from the oil company ExxonMobil. Activities of the CEI aim, among other things, to prevent political measures against global warming, which could possibly lead to restrictions on individual freedom. Furthermore, together with the American Tradition Institute, the CEI specialized in harassment of climate researchers.

Against the Earth Hour , the CEI cried the first time in 2009 to take a shower, for example hot at that hour to Human Achievement ( "human achievement") and progress to help to minimize rather than energy expenditure.

In 2002, the CEI led a campaign to get US President George W. Bush to stay away from the World Summit on Sustainable Development . Indeed, Bush was not one of the numerous heads of government at the summit. The Prime Ministers of the People's Republic of China and Russia announced there that they had ratified or at least signed the Kyoto Protocol . Not doing this, Bush Foreign Secretary Colin Powell neglected in his final speech, praising the USA as a role model and thus ending the summit in a scandal .

In 2003 the British newspaper The Observer reported an email from Myron Ebell (Director of Global Warming and Environmental Policy at the CEI) to Phil Cooney (then Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality under the Bush administration, previously at the American Petroleum Institute ) from 2002 shows that Cooney was assisted by the CEI in manipulating government reports on climate change. Under Cooney's leadership, sections and formulations that warned of the threat of global warming were repeatedly removed or changed from climate reports. In addition, the email was about how to remove members of the Environmental Protection Agency , including the then Environment Minister Christine Whitman , from their posts. The CEI and the White House denied these allegations. Ebell said the corrections were part of the normal linguistic adaptation of government documents to align with political goals. Cooney resigned after an investigation into the matter and an extensive report in the New York Times in June 2005.

In 2006, prior to the release of the film An Inconvenient Truth From Al Gore , the CEI released commercials, among other things, questioning global warming and Al Gore's motives. In these lavishly produced commercials, which among other things showed a magnificent sunrise behind an oil refinery, the CEI contradicted the harmful effects of carbon dioxide emissions and instead praised greenhouse gas as an elixir of life. Among other things, the spokeswoman warned in one of the spots that "a few politicians wanted to name carbon dioxide a pollutant" and then asked suggestive questions. "Imagine if you succeeded - what would our life be like then?" The commercial then ended with the sentence: "Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution, we call it life."

In July 2012, Rand Simberg, a member of the CEI's scientific advisory board, accused climate researcher Michael E. Mann of fraud on the CEI's blog . He compared Mann to Jerry Sandusky, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in the US for repeated child abuse . Instead of mistreating children, men have "abused and tortured" data ("he has molested and tortured data"). A few days later, the CEI deleted the contribution. However, Mark Steyn quoted him on the National Review blog and commented that Simberg was right because Mann was "the man behind the fake hockey stick diagram ." Mann then filed a defamation suit, including against the CEI.

In 2015, the CEI-affiliated lawyer and climate denier, Chris Horner, sued the EPA because its head had deleted text messages from her mobile phone that might have been archived.

After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic , the CEI began, like many other climate deniers, to write on this topic and to spread false information about it. The tactics used correspond to those that have been perfected since the 1990s in order to undermine the results of climate research.

Directors of the CEI and their connections to other think tanks

The Board of Directors consists of Michael S. Greve (Chairman, including visiting professor at the American Enterprise Institute ), Lawson Bader (President, including past Vice-President of the Mercatus Center ), James R. Curley, Michael W. Gleba, Jean-Claude Gruffat, Kerry Halferty Hardy (formerly at the Cato Institute ), W. Thomas Haynes, Frances B. Smith, Fred L. Smith, Jr., James R. Von Ehr, Todd J. Zywicki (also lecturer at the Mercatus Center), Leonard Liggio (including Vice President of the Atlas Network ) and Thomas Gale Moore (including Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution ).

Past directors included William O'Keefe, who is a board member of the politically conservative George C. Marshall Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition , and was formerly vice president of the American Petroleum Institute .

Sponsors and supporters

The sponsors of a fundraising event organized by the CEI in July 2013 included (according to information from the Washington Post ) primarily the oil / coal industry and conservative organizations (three of which are associated with the brothers Charles and David H. Koch ). The largest single sponsor was Google . Also listed as sponsors were Facebook , Mastercard , GlaxoSmithKline , Altria / Philip Morris , Monsanto , Microsoft , Ford and Volkswagen, among others . The keynote address for the dinner was given by Rand Paul .

The Union of Concerned Scientists also named ExxonMobil as a sponsor of the CEI in a report from 2007 . The Observer daily reported that ExxonMobil donated more than $ 1 million between 1998 and 2003, and over $ 2 million by 2005, according to Greenpeace .

Also according to Greenpeace, foundations associated with the Koch brothers donated a total of over $ 700,000 to the CEI between 1986 and 2011.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax (PDF; 888 KB) CEI. May 15, 2014. Retrieved July 12, 2014.
  2. ↑ a b CEI: Board of Directors . Retrieved March 6, 2014.
  3. ^ CEI: About CEI . Retrieved March 6, 2014.
  4. ^ Riley E. Dunlap and Peter J. Jacques: Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks: Exploring the Connection . In: American Behavioral Scientist . tape 57 , no. 6 , 2013, p. 699-731; here p. 700. , doi : 10.1177 / 0002764213477096 .
  5. ↑ James Hoggan, Richard Littlemore: Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming . Greystone Books 2009, p. 82.
  6. ^ Riley Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Challenging Climate Change. The Denial Countermovement . In: Riley Dunlap, Robert J. Brulle (Eds.): Climate Change and Society. Sociological Perspectives. Report of the American Sociological Association's Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change . Oxford University Press 2015, 300-332, p. 323.
  7. ↑ Miguel Llanos: Lights on or off? Earth Hour challenged by Human Achievement Hour . National Broadcasting Company . March 30, 2012. Retrieved July 12, 2014.
  8. ↑ Terry Macalister, Duncan Campbell: Exxon mauled by green tiger protest. In: The Guardian , May 28, 2003. Retrieved May 7, 2014.
  9. ^ Holger Kulick: Summit in Johannesburg: Kofi Annan demands offensive . In: Spiegel Online . September 2, 2002. Retrieved July 12, 2014.
  10. ↑ Climate protection: Small sensation on the earth's summit . In: Spiegel Online . September 3, 2002. Retrieved July 12, 2014.
  11. ^ Holger Kulick: Scandal in Johannesburg: Powell whistled . In: Spiegel Online . September 4, 2002. Retrieved July 12, 2014.
  12. ^ A b c Paul Harris: Bush covers up climate research. In: The Observer , September 21, 2003. Retrieved March 7, 2014.
  13. ^ A b Andrew Revkin: Editor of Climate Reports Resigns. In: The New York Times, June 10, 2005. Retrieved March 7, 2014.
  14. ^ Andrew Revkin: Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming. In: The New York Times, June 8, 2005. Retrieved March 7, 2014.
  15. ^ CO2 propaganda: "They call it pollution, we call it life" . In: Spiegel Online , May 18, 2006.
  16. ↑ See also: James Hoggan, Richard Littlemore: Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming . Greystone Books 2009, pp. 82f.
  17. ↑ Suzanne Goldenberg: Climate scientist Michael Mann sues over sex offender comparison In: The Guardian , October 24, 2012. Retrieved March 7, 2014.
  18. ↑ Seth Shulman: Got Science? Why This Climate Scientist's Libel Case Matters. . In: The Huffington Post Blog, February 12, 2014. Retrieved March 6, 2014.
  19. ^ EPA facing suit over McCarthy's deleted text messages - Washington Times
  20. ↑ Bernhard Pötter : Climate deniers discover Corona: The same tricksters . In: taz , May 11, 2020. Retrieved May 11, 2020.
  21. ↑ a b Union of Concerned Scientists : Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air. How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science. January 2007 ( PDF , accessed March 6, 2014).
  22. ^ Juliet Eilperin: Anatomy of a Washington dinner: Who funds the Competitive Enterprise Institute? In: The Washington Post , June 20, 2013. Retrieved March 6, 2014.
  23. ↑ Jan Willmroth: Donations: Google and Facebook support climate skeptics . In: WirtschaftsWoche Green, November 19, 2013. Accessed March 22, 2014.
  24. ^ Phil Radford: What are Facebook and Google Doing in Bed with Climate Deniers? . On: occupy .com, September 26, 2013. Retrieved March 22, 2014.
  25. ↑ Greenpeace : Factsheet: Competitive Enterprise Institute ( Memento of the original from September 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . On: exxonsecrets.org . Retrieved March 17, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.exxonsecrets.org
  26. ↑ Greenpeace USA: Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group: Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) . Retrieved March 17, 2014.