The Heartland Institute is an American conservative and libertarian 501(c)(3) nonprofit public policy think tank known for its rejection of both the scientific consensus on climate change and the negative health impacts of smoking.
Founded in 1984, it worked with tobacco company Philip Morris throughout the 1990s to attempt to discredit the health risks of secondhand smoke and lobby against smoking bans. Since the 2000s, the Heartland Institute has been a leading promoter of climate change denial.
History The institute was founded in 1984 by Chicago investor David H. Padden, who served as the organization's chairman until 1995. Padden had been a director of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., since its founding as the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974. Padden was also a former director of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Acton Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Center for Libertarian Studies. At age 26, Joseph L. Bast became Heartland's first employee. Bast's wife, Diane, was Heartland's publications director.
In the 1990s, the Heartland institute worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question serious cancer risks from secondhand smoke, and to lobby against government public-health regulations. Starting in 2008, Heartland has organized conferences to question the scientific consensus on climate change.
After the election of U.S. president Barack Obama in November 2008, the institute became involved with the Tea Party movement. In 2011, the organization's director of communications said that "the support of the Tea Party groups across the country has been extremely valuable." Heartland was among the organizers of the September 2009 Tea Party protest march, the Taxpayer March on Washington.
In March 2020, Heartland laid off staff, reportedly in response to financial issues; they also removed its president, Frank Lasee.
Since 2023, the institute has worked with right-wing members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from Poland, Hungary and Austria, helping coordinate campaigns against proposed environmental laws.
In December 2024, the institute opened a European branch, Heartland UK/Europe, in London. The opening was attended by former UK prime minister Liz Truss; Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, and several Tory MPs.
Policy positions
The institute advocates free market policies. The policy orientation of Heartland has been described as conservative, libertarian, and right wing.It also has been described as right-wing. See, for example:
Roberts, Alasdair Scott, Blacked out: government secrecy in the information age, (2006) Cambridge University Press, p. 253, via GoogleBooks.
Tobacco regulation Heartland has long questioned the links between tobacco smoking, secondhand smoke, and lung cancer and the social costs imposed by smokers. One of Heartland's first campaigns was to oppose tobacco regulation. According to the Los Angeles Times, Heartland's advocacy for the tobacco industry is one of the two things Heartland is most widely known for.
During the 1990s, the institute worked with tobacco company Philip Morris to question the links between smoking, secondhand smoke and health risks. Philip Morris commissioned Heartland to write and distribute reports. Heartland published a policy study which summarized a jointly prepared report by the Association of Private Enterprise Education and Philip Morris. The institute also undertook a variety of other activities on behalf of the tobacco industry, including meeting with legislators, holding off-the-record briefings, and producing op-eds, radio interviews, and letters.
A 1993 internal "Five Year Plan" from Philip Morris to address environmental tobacco smoke regulation called for support for the efforts of the institute. In 1996, Heartland president and chief executive officer Joe Bast wrote an essay entitled "Joe Camel is Innocent!," which said that contributions from the tobacco industry to Republican political campaigns were most likely because Republicans "have been leading the fight against the use of 'junk science' by the Food and Drug Administration and its evil twin, the Environmental Protection Agency." In the "President's Letter" in the July 1998 issue of The Heartlander, the institute's magazine, Bast wrote an essay "Five Lies about Tobacco", which said "smoking in moderation has few, if any, adverse health effects." In 1999, Bast referenced the essays in soliciting financial support from Philip Morris, writing "Heartland does many things that benefit Philip Morris' bottom line, things that no other organization does." A Philip Morris executive, Roy Marden, the firm's manager of industrial affairs, was a member of the board of directors of the institute. Marden collected Key Actions promised by think tanks . Heartland's were "blast faxes to state legislators, off-the-record briefings, op-eds, radio interviews, letters". In 2005, the institute opposed Chicago's public smoking ban, at the time one of the strictest bans in the country. In 2008, Heartland's Environment and Climate News ran an article claiming no danger from secondhand smoke, featuring image of man puffing smoke next to a young girl. In 2011, Environment and Climate News ran article by Fred Singer casting doubt on United States Environmental Protection Agency 1993 findings of harm.
Climate change The institute rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, and promotes climate change denial with claims that the amount of climate change is not catastrophic, claims that climate change might be beneficial, and that the economic costs of trying to mitigate climate change exceed the benefits. According to The New York Times, Heartland is "the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism." The institute has been a member of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group dedicated to denying climate change science, since 1997. Institute staff "recognize that climate change is a profound threat to our economic and social systems and therefore deny its scientific reality," wrote Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything.
In their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway wrote that the institute was known "for its persistent questioning of climate science, for its promotion of 'experts' who have done little, if any, peer-reviewed climate research, and for its sponsorship of a conference in New York City in 2008 alleging that the scientific community's work on global warming is fake." The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society in a chapter "Organized Climate Change Denial" identified Heartland as a conservative think tank with a strong interest in environmental and climate issues involved in climate change denial. Heartland "emerged as a leading force in climate change denial" in the decade 2003–2013, according to sociology professor Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University and political science professor Peter J. Jacques of the University of Central Florida. Historians James Morton Turner and Andrew Isenberg describe Heartland as a leader in the "scientific misinformation campaign" against climate change.
Fred Singer was the founder and president of the closely-allied Science and Environmental Policy Project, and Heartland is a member organization of the Cooler Heads Coalition.
"Heartland's influence on national climate policy is at an apex" in March 2017 according to PBS Frontline.
The institute previously employed German YouTube personality Naomi Seibt as an "anti-Greta". The institute's president, James Taylor, considered Seibt the star of its "media strategy for the masses" in the "fight against climate protection measures" which "needs a better image"—to "move away from old white men and instead showcase a younger generation."
Heartland's list of scientists said to doubt global warming In 2008, the institute published a list purporting to identify "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares". The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the work of Jim Salinger, chief scientist at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, was "misrepresented" as part of a "denial campaign". In response to criticism, the institute changed the title of the list to "500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares." Heartland did not remove any scientist's name from the list. Avery explained, "Not all of these researchers would describe themselves as global warming skeptics...but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see." The institute's then president, Joseph Bast, argued that the scientists "have no right—legally or ethically—to demand that their names be removed" from Heartland's list.
International Conferences on Climate Change
Heartland's conventions of climate change doubters are one of the things the institute is largely known for, according to the Los Angeles Times. Between 2008 and 2023, the institute organized fifteen International Conferences on Climate Change, bringing together hundreds of global warming deniers. Conference speakers have included Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT; Roy Spencer, a research scientist and climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville; S. Fred Singer, a senior fellow of the institute and who was founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences at the University of Miami and founding director of the National Weather Satellite Service; Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and former NASA astronaut and Apollo 17 moonwalker; Dr. John Theon, atmospheric scientist and former NASA supervisor; and Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon, a part-time employee of the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
At the first conference in 2008, participants criticized the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. In 2010 the BBC reported that the heavily politicized nature of the Heartland conferences led some "moderate" climate skeptics to avoid them. In an article in The Nation, the 2011 conference was described as "the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet". The 2012 conference was the main subject of the film Climate of Doubt by the Frontline documentary TV series. At the conclusion of that conference, Bast announced that the organization might discontinue the conferences. But the conference series continued; the fifteenth was held in 2023.
"Unabomber" billboard campaign
On Thursday May 3, 2012, Heartland launched an advertising campaign in the Chicago area, and put up digital billboards along the Eisenhower Expressway in Maywood, Illinois, featuring a photo of Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber" whose mail bombs killed three people and injured 23 others, asking the question, "I still believe in global warming, do you?" They withdrew the billboards a day later. The institute planned for the campaign to feature murderer Charles Manson, communist leader Fidel Castro and perhaps Osama bin Laden, asking the same question. The institute justified the billboards saying "the most prominent advocates of global warming aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen."