Screen capture from the Der Spiegel article. Click to jump to the article

Yesterday the German news magazine Der Spiegel ran an investigative feature article on the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

This is not the sort of thing one usually finds in the mainstream media, especially not in Germany. For the average member of the public, making informed decisions about which organizations deserve one’s charitable donations is difficult. This article is chock-a-block with the sort of information we all deserve to know.

Here are some direct quotes to whet your appetite:

• “Over the years, the WWF has received a total of $120 million from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).”
• “Companies pay seven-figure fees for the privilege of using the [WWF] logo [on their products].”
• “In Sumatra, members of a tribal group reported how troops hired by WWF partner Wilmar had destroyed their houses…”

• “The Dutch section of WWF helped pay for Greenpeace’s flagship, the Rainbow Warrior.”
• “Experts estimate that in Africa alone, conservation efforts have created 14 million ‘conservation refugees’…”
• “Ruswantu takes affluent eco-tourists on tours of the park on the backs of tamed elephants. The area is off-limits for the locals…’The WWF is in charge here…’”

• “‘Sustainable palm oil, as the WWF promises with its RSPO certificates, is really nonexistent,’ [a former WWF employee] says.”
• “[leftist activist target] Monsanto…has donated $100,000 to the WWF over the years…”
• “The [German branch of the WWF] even paid the travel expenses for representatives of the Argentine branch of the WWF, which was long run by a man with ties to the former military junta…”

During the 1980s the WWF reportedly funded helicopter death squads that exterminated liquidated summarily executed dozens of local poachers in a national park in Zimbabwe. The inescapable conclusion, therefore, is that while the WWF takes extreme measures to prevent poor, indigenous locals from hunting African wildlife, if you’re a wealthy foreigner different rules apply. Says the magazine:

Spanish King Juan Carlos, for example, was recently in the news after he broke his hip while hunting elephants in Botswana. Juan Carlos is the honorary president of WWF Spain, which many find outrageous. In Namibia alone, the WWF has permitted trophy hunting in 38 conservation areas.

Rich Europeans or Americans are allowed to behave as if the colonial period had never ended. They are allowed to shoot elephants, buffalo, leopards, lions, giraffes and zebras…A WWF spokesman defends this practice, saying that quotas have been established, and that the proceeds from this “regulated hunting” can contribute to conservation.

The following passage, however, is perhaps the most interesting of all. At WWF world headquarters near Geneva, the article tells us,

plaques there commemorate the people to whom the organization owes a great debt: the “Members of The 1001.” This elite group of undisclosed financiers was created in 1971 to provide financial backing for the organization.

To this day, the WWF does not like to disclose the names of the donors, probably because some of those appearing on the club’s list would not exactly help their image – people like arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and former Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

Then-WWF President Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was able to recruit oil multinational Shell as his first major sponsor. In 1967, thousands of birds died after a tanker accident off the coast of France, and yet the WWF forbade all criticism. That could “jeopardize” future efforts to secure donations from certain industrial sectors, WWF officials said during a board meeting.

I urge you to read the whole thing here. It’s well worth your time.

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The 3-screen Der Spiegel article is backed up here, here, and here.

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The upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will contain a chapter titled Human Security. According to an official outline, this will examine the following topics:

• Social and economic activities, including employment
• Education
• Inequalities, gender, and marginalized populations
• Culture, values, and society
• Indigenous peoples
• Local communities
• Local and traditional knowledge
• Migration and population displacement
• Conflict
• Community resilience
• [see page 4 here]

We’re told that the IPCC is a scientific organization and that its job is to “provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers.” But what can science possibly tell us about Culture, values and society? Or about Local communities? Why is the IPCC going anywhere near subjects such as these?

The Human Security chapter is being led by Neil Adger, a professor of environmental economics at the University of East Anglia. In 2007 he co-authored a paper that declared:

climate change increasingly undermines human security in the present day, and will increasingly do so in the future… [backup link]

Gee, given that this is the person in charge, do we really suppose the IPCC report will come to a different conclusion?

Is Adger a precise thinker, a scrupulously dispassionate researcher, the sort of person who’s likely to examine all the literature, pro and con, in a fair-minded manner? You decide. In 2009 he authored a blog post in which he declared:

we urgently need to decarbonize the global economy… [backup link]

In his view, a “much more unstable climate” is a given rather than a mere possibility. He apparently understands every nuance of the big picture so thoroughly he feels no hesitation in declaring that human actions are “committing every part of the world to fundamental changes.”

His blog post insists we need to fix “our energy system.” Predictably, it criticizes fossil fuel subsidies but expresses no concern about the outrageous amount of money being wasted on not-yet-ready-for-prime-time alternative energy projects. It quotes a report that says “warming above 2°C would be very difficult for contemporary societies and ecosystems to cope with” (italics mine) without acknowledging that it will be future societies that will deal with such warming should it, in fact, occur.

(The world has, after all, come a long way since the 1960s – when 8-track tapes were the latest invention, rotary telephones were the norm, and personal computers weren’t yet part of everyday life. Let’s give future generations some credit. They’ll be equipped with far more than our current tools.)

Adger has also co-authored a journal commentary that begins with these words:

Human-induced climate change is real and is likely to drive increasingly dramatic changes in this century and beyond. [backup link]

It’s so good to know that IPCC-appointed experts approach these matters humbly, and with an open mind. That article, incidentally, relies on IPCC reports as well as a paper in which two of the authors are Greenpeace personnel. The full citation in the latter case is:

Meinshausen M, Meinshausen N, Hare W, Raper S C B, Frieler K, Knutti R, Frame D J, Allen M R, 2009, ‘‘Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C’’ Nature 458 1158-1162 [bold added]

As I explain in this blog post, Malte Meinshausen and William Hare have long been regarded as “key members of the Greenpeace International climate team.”

The public is often told it can have confidence in the conclusion that human-caused climate change is a problem. We’re told that this is because this conclusion rests on multiple lines of independent evidence.

But the more you learn about how the IPCC operates the less true such statements appear to be.

In fact, the same small group of people are often involved. These people quote the IPCC in their own work and then turn around and write the next IPCC report. The fact that some of them are employed by Greenpeace doesn’t disqualify them from participating in the IPCC. Nor does it prevent other IPCC authors from citing their work.

In sum, climate science is a small, incestuous, inbred little community. In no way does it represent the world’s finest scientific minds.

And when the IPCC starts writing about gender equality, marginalized populations, and traditional knowledge, it provides ordinary people with one more reason not to take it’s so-called science seriously.

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Mark Jaccard is a Canadian economist. Earlier this month he was arrested at an anti-coal protest (see Part 1 here).

Two days prior to that event, Jaccard issued a here’s-why-I’m-getting-arrested statement in which he dragged the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) into the picture by highlighting his affiliation with that body.

This was an improper thing to do because the IPCC is supposed to be a scientific organization. Its reports are supposed to be written by grownups – not activists who think it’s cool to break the law.

Jaccard’s CV contains plenty of other accomplishments and affiliations. He need not have mentioned the IPCC. But he did. And that’s a decision that looks decidedly odd when we consider another he made a few years ago.

The book Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge was published in 2007. It was co-authored by three people: Jeffrey Simpson (a senior political commentator/newspaper columnist here in Canada), Jaccard, and Nic Rivers (then one of Jaccard’s graduate students).

I own a copy of this book which, incidentally, has no index. But one can electronically search its contents via Amazon.com here.

Anyone who goes to the trouble to do so will discover that the IPCC is presented within these pages as the ultimate authority on climate change. For example, this is what it says on pages 10-11:

The most comprehensive and conclusive scientific assessment of the evidence has come from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of scientists charged with summarizing evidence from the scientific community and reporting to the United Nations.

The passage continues on, claiming that the 2007 IPPC report “debunked the skeptics’ assertion that climate change came from some source other than human activities.”

My own opinion is that it did nothing of the sort, but never mind. The important point is that this book doesn’t tell us that Jaccard himself is an IPCC participant. It doesn’t acknowledge that he helped shape its conclusions. In other words, it fails to alert us to his conflict-of-interest.

If I point to a gardening report, presenting it as the most comprehensive and conclusive source available, surely I’m morally obligated to also mention any connection I might have to the organization that produced it.

But this didn’t happen. Instead, the IPCC is discussed in Jaccard’s book as though it’s an entirely separate, unrelated organization – up there on a pedestal, all-knowing, exempt from the shortcomings associated with ordinary human endeavor.

Below is a catalog of the book’s other IPCC references:

• pp. 11-12 tells us that “IPCC scientists” have “forecast” a reduction is sea ice, a thawing of permafrost, increased heat waves, and “more violent storms”
• p. 29 says that IPCC estimates “suggest that sea levels will likely rise by between 10 and 90 centimeters over the 21st century”
• p. 45 says the first IPCC report, in 1988, caused a stir – and claims that the number of IPCC critics have dwindled over the years
• p. 49 tells us that Margaret Thatcher embraced an IPCC report and pledged to slash the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions in response
• p. 104 says the fourth IPCC report, released in 2007, attracted “a standing-room-only crowd of reporters” when it was made public in Canada’s national capital
• pp. 162-163 praises certain corporate executives for accepting “the scientific conclusions” of the IPCC
• p. 165 tells us that successive IPCC reports “took account of new information” and therefore demonstrated “wisdom”
• p. 224 talks about IPCC “recommendations” and tells us what that organization “recommends” – ignoring the fact that the IPCC  is supposed to be a “policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive” organization (see the last line on this page)
• p. 226 ditto
• p. 276 says that the 2007 IPCC report, published the same year that the Jaccard book appeared, may already be out of date
• pp. 277 and 279 are devoted to footnotes, in which two IPCC reports are cited as source material

Now here’s a photo of Jaccard’s dust jacket bio. It contains not one word about the IPCC:

click to see all three bios

In other words, although the IPCC is mentioned numerous times in Hot Air, Jaccard’s connection to this organization is never revealed to readers. Not within the text of the book, and not within the additional biographical information supplied by the publisher.

Readers were invited to trust in the authority and eminence of the IPCC but weren’t told that Jaccard himself has played a role in that body. In effect, he was covertly pointing to his own work as being the last word. Yuck.

So what are we to make of this?

When Jaccard decides to get himself arrested he somehow thinks his IPCC participation is relevant.

And yet, when he co-authors an entire book about climate change he stays suspiciously mum. He decides that a matter entirely germaine to the conversation isn’t even worth mentioning.

This makes no sense.

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Mark Jaccard; click for photo source

Earlier this month 13 anti-coal activists were arrested here in Canada after blockading a railroad track. In this free and democratic country, the combined intellect of this group of people could devise no better way of getting their message across than breaking the law.

The activist whose arrest received the most media attention was an economist named Mark Jaccard. A professor at Simon Fraser University who specializes in sustainable energy modelling, Jaccard is also an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author.

This is a problem. For several reasons.

First, the IPCC is supposed to be a collection of dispassionate experts. Its website says that it assesses the available scientific evidence in an “objective” manner – and that its work is “rigorous and balanced.”

How can such claims be taken seriously when it turns out that one of its authors not only has an activist agenda, but is so committed to that agenda he’s prepared to be hauled away in handcuffs?

Jaccard isn’t shy about advertising his IPCC connection. Two days before his arrest he released a statement that included a short bio (backup link). Here’s how that bio began:

Dr Jaccard is a professor of sustainable energy in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University. He has won the Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change… [bold added]

But if you type Jaccard’s name into the search box over at the NobelPrize.org website you won’t find him mentioned anywhere. That’s because a large number of individuals have, during the IPCC’s 23-year history, helped prepare its various reports. The 2007 document alone ran to 3,000 pages and involved 450 lead authors, 800 contributing authors, and 2,500 scientific expert reviewers.

Together, over the years, thousands of people have participated in the IPCC – which was awarded half of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. (The other half went to Al Gore.)

Nevertheless, when Jaccard issued his here’s-why-I’m-getting-arrested public statement, he made a point of amplifying his infinitesimal sliver of Nobel glory. And the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation fell for it, presenting him as a full-fledged “Nobel Peace Prize winner” in its news story.

I wonder how Liu Xiaobo, who won the 2010 Peace Prize for what the Nobel committee describes as a long “struggle for fundamental human rights in China,” feels when people such as Jaccard have the impudence to equate their IPCC contribution to his own experiences – which include being sentenced to a labour camp.

Nor is this the only occasion in which Jaccard has drawn attention to his IPCC affiliation while behaving like an activist. In December 2009 he signed an open letter that was released during the Copenhagen climate summit. It urged Canada’s Prime Minister to “do everything possible to raise the negotiations to the level of importance and urgency demanded by the climate threat.”

Rather than mentioning only his day job, Jaccard made a point of highlighting his IPCC role. This is how he was identified at the bottom of that 2009 letter:

Dr. Mark Jaccard, Environmental economist & IPCC author

It’s therefore interesting that I can’t find any trace of his involvement in the IPCC’s 2007 report – or its 2001 report. It seems one needs to go all the way back to 1993-1996 to locate Jaccard’s contribution.

At that time he served as a lead author for an IPCC chapter titled Estimating the costs of mitigating greenhouse gases. Twenty-two others also participated. Additionally, he was a principal lead author for the chapter titled A review of mitigation cost studies. (You can find the names of the other 23 contributors on page 2 here.)

Jaccard’s IPCC involvement appears to have gone dormant until after the Peace Prize was awarded. Then, following the April 2008 decision to prepare a mini IPCC report on renewable energy, it would seem he re-engaged.

His name appears in the 2011 Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation as a lead author for a chapter titled Policy, Financing and Implementation. Nearly 60 others also contributed to that chapter.

Unfortunately for Jaccard, the release of the 2011 report was marred by controversy after people noticed that another of its lead authors, Sven Teske, is a longtime Greenpeace employee (see here, here, here, here, and here). Along with 12 others, Teske wrote the chapter titled Mitigation Potential and Costs.

When the IPCC told the world about this report, the first sentence of the press release highlighted info from a Greenpeace study that Teske himself had helped produce. The degree to which Greenpeace literature was cited is indicated by the fact that an electronic search turns up 75 instances of Teske’s name within that report’s pages.

If you’re thinking that this all sounds tawdry, you aren’t alone. What it boils down to is that Jaccard seems to believe that:

• a 1/23rd contribution to one IPCC chapter (1993-1996)
• a 1/24th contribution to a second IPCC chapter (1993-1996)
• and a 1/57th contribution to a third IPCC chapter (2008-2011)

is somehow equivalent to having won a Nobel Peace Prize as a result of his own brilliance, courage, and tenacity.

This suggests a propensity to exaggerate. It is an approach that is starkly at odds with the painstaking commitment to accuracy the public deserves when a matter as serious as climate change is being discussed.

Neither the IPCC nor Jaccard looks good here.

to be continued…   read Part 2

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h/t Roger Pielke Jr.

the CBC news story discussed throughout is backed up here

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But there’s actually little that’s fresh, urgent, or newsworthy within these 164 pages. The report is primarily a prop – a device to help the WWF keep its name in the news. In March, the media devoted gallons of ink to the corporate-driven WWF event known as Earth Hour. Mere weeks later, it’s once again providing these professional nags with a megaphone.

What message is being broadcast? The same old, same old. Humans are a plague on the planet. The world is headed to hell in a hand basket. The sky is falling, and it’s all our fault.

Over at The Register, Lewis Page has written a critical analysis of the report (be sure to click through to page 2; backup links here and here ). He points out that, rather than using standard measures commonly understood by everyone, the WWF and similar groups have invented their own indices. Might this be because, if they used a standard approach, they’d discover that things are not, in fact, getting worse?

Unlike most journalists, Page takes statements in this WWF document to their logical conclusion. In doing so, he sees a grim, grey future no one would want to bestow on their grandchildren:

the only people on Earth who are [currently] living within their means are those in the poorest nations – their “footprint” exactly matches the “biocapacity” in their countries…offering a picture of the sort of life all human beings could aspire to in a WWF-run world.

…you are to accept a massively lower standard of living, in order to reduce your “footprint” to match your nation’s “biocapacity”…That means less heating when it’s cold – no cooling at all, probably, when it’s hot. It means sharply limited hot water: so dirtier clothes, dirtier bedding and a dirtier you – which will be nice as you will also have to live in a smaller home and travel almost exclusively on crowded buses or trains along with similar smelly fellow eco-citizens. [italics in the original]

Read the whole thing here.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that an electronic search within this report turns up:

• 46 instances in which the WWF talks about what we need (as in “the choices needed to ensure a sustainable existence”)
• and 24 uses of the word must (as in “temperature must not rise more than 2 degrees”)

There’s also heavy use of the word should. Need. Must. Should. Bossy bunch of folks, aren’t they?

Nowhere, however, does the WWF bother to explain why an organization that is supposed to be saving wildlife is making statements about other matters entirely. And yet this report is full of declarations such as “Equitable resource governance is essential…” and catch phrases like “societal inequality” (see pages 61 and 162). Indeed, the terms inequality and equality appear 28 times in this report.

This is a huge red flag. Equality is a political concept. In the world in which I live, people who want to make political decisions first need to get themselves elected.

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Below are links to previous editions of the WWF’s Living Planet report. On some occasions, it appears the WWF produced a custom version for a particular region/country. A thorough, historical examination of these documents would make a fascinating MA thesis, it seems to me.

• 2012 report (backup link)
• 2010 report (backup link)
• 2008 report (backup link)
• 2007 Canada report (backup link)
• 2006 report may be downloaded here (backup copy)
• 2005 Asia Pacific report may be downloaded here (backup copy)
• 2004 report may be downloaded here (backup copy)
• 2002 report may be downloaded here (backup copy)
• 2000 report may be downloaded here (backup copy)
• 1999 report may be downloaded here (backup copy)
• 1998 report may be downloaded here (backup copy)

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It’s official. I’ll be speaking in four Australian cities in a few weeks.

The Institute of Public Affairs has organized a series of events aimed at educating Australians about the shortcomings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

When I set foot in that country a national carbon tax will have gone into effect a few days earlier. What many people fail to appreciate is that the body most responsible for convincing governments that such measures are necessary has an enormous credibility problem.

For years, the mainstream media has given the IPCC a free ride. Rather than scrutinizing this organization, rather than double-checking its claims, journalists have parroted the IPCC’s marketing message. We, the public, have been assured that the IPCC is the equivalent of a mature professional in business attire – reliable, cautious, and painstaking.

But my book – The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert – reveals something else: a slapdash, over-indulged adolescent who has trouble telling right from wrong.

Here’s the schedule. As soon as additional details become available, I’ll let you know.

Melbourne
Friday, July 6th, 5-7:30 pm
venue: CQ Functions, 113 Queen Street

Sydney
Tuesday, July 10th, 5-7:30 pm
venue: Sheraton on the Park, 161 Elizabeth Street

Brisbane
Thursday, July 12th, 5-7:30 pm
venue: Royal on the Park, corner of Alice & Albert Streets

Perth
Sunday, July 15th, 5-7:30 pm
venue: Hyatt Regency, 99 Adelaide Terrace

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I apologize for the longer-than-expected absence. This blog was silent last week, but I wasn’t idle. Among the tasks that consumed my attention was a 1,500-word article that will appear in the Institute of Public Affairs magazine – and a reworking of some of the material at the end of my book for the Australian edition, which will be available soon from Connor Court Publishing.

In recent weeks I’ve also been busy moving. After 30 years in Canada’s largest city, my husband and I have relocated to a small town a 2-hour-drive away. Now surrounded by farm country, we’re looking forward to a quieter pace – and to boatloads of stunning produce.

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This past weekend Christopher Booker’s column in The Telegraph (which kindly cites my book), provides a big-picture analysis. He argues that the WWF has strayed far from its original mandate of saving endangered animals – and that some of its current projects in the developing world are highly controversial.

You can read the whole thing here (backup link).

Ten thousand miles away, a thoughtful opinion piece has also just been published by BeefCentral.com, which describes itself as a “news and market intelligence service dedicated to the Australian beef industry.”

Titled Can producers trust WWF to be accountable?, it was written by Dale Stiller, a spokesperson for those who raise cattle in that country. He points out that while the WWF is in the business of telling other people what to do, this organization is itself “not accountable to anyone.”

Rather wisely, it seems to me, Stiller’s piece contains a warning for businesses that think that cozying up to/engaging in partnerships with the WWF is a great way to enhance their public image. The plan may backfire:

WWF is developing an unsavoury reputation that will ultimately devalue its panda brand name…

In the not-too-distant future businesses that have self-righteously slapped a WWF logo on the side of their products may find themselves receiving a call from a reporter. Does their company really think it’s OK to displace the poorest of the poor in the Third World in order to save a bit of forest? What comment would it care to make regarding the sudden departure of WWF employees in Tanzania, the suspension of funding by Norway’s government to WWF-linked projects, and the ongoing embezzlement investigation? (see here, backup link here)

Stiller’s piece also links to a number of other perspectives regarding the WWF that are worth considering. Read it here (backup link here).

For 50 years the WWF has led a charmed life. Its good intentions have been taken for granted. Its actions have been viewed through fuzzy, soft-focus spectacles. But to quote Bob Dylan:

The times they are a-changin’

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The next 10 days (ending around May 16th) will be insanely busy for me. Some changes are taking place in my personal life that require an unusual amount of my attention. I’ll try to check in a few times between now and then, but this blog will resume mid-month for sure. 

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A few weeks ago I was invited to take part in a debate at a conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute. The topic of the debate was:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Is it still a credible voice in the climate change debate?

Having just written a book-length exposé about that organization, I accepted this invitation. I had intended to argue that the IPCC is an international embarrassment. Much of what it has told the public about its own personnel – and about how its reports are prepared – is nonsense.

Writing The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert was like fact-checking a pathological liar’s resumé. One by one, I worked my way down a list of IPCC claims, attempting to verify their accuracy. Again and again, I found no evidence to support them.

It turns out the mainstream media has, for years, simply accepted the IPCC’s rosy view of itself. It turns out the IPCC falls well short of being the rigorous, objective, scientific body it claims to be.

My findings are important because governments around the world point to IPCC reports as the reason they’re pursuing emissions reduction programs, implementing carbon taxes, and adding to the red tape with which small businesses must cope. In my view, the more people who hear about my book, the more likely it is that governments will start making more informed decisions.

But my participation in the upcoming Heartland conference has now become untenable. I’m a Canadian who has never been a member of any political party. Sometimes I agree with the left, sometimes I agree with the right. Many people base their climate opinions on the political tribe to which they belong. I’m not one of them.

I believe in pragmatism and common sense. I believe in cold, hard facts – and in treating people with whom I disagree with courtesy and respect.

Over a 24-hour period late this week, Heartland ran an ad on an electronic billboard along a highway in suburban Chicago. It featured a photo of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, who is currently serving a life sentence in a Colorado penitentiary for killing three people and injuring 23 more. The billboard read: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”

This ad was part of a larger campaign. To quote the Heartland’s website:

The billboard series features Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber; Charles Manson, a mass murderer; and Fidel Castro, a tyrant. Other global warming alarmists who may appear on future billboards include Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee (who took hostages inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in 2010).

The ad has since been pulled. Heartland now says it “was always intended to be an experiment.” But its own press release announcing these ads gave no indication of that (backup link).

Instead, those of us who had accepted Heartland’s invitation to take part in its conference found ourselves blindsided – a mere two weeks before the conference is set to begin – by a torrent of negative press. Suddenly, we were all publicly linked to an organization that thinks it’s OK to equate people concerned about climate change with psychopaths.

As economist Ross McKitrick said in an a strongly-worded letter to Heartland yesterday:

You cannot simultaneously say that you want to promote a debate while equating the other side to terrorists and mass murderers.

Indeed.

In the three years I’ve been researching the climate debate I’ve witnessed lots of ugliness – lots of people behaving badly. It reminds me, unpleasantly, of when I used to write about messy divorces. The systemic problems were real, but far too often both sides were their own worst enemy.

In a statement issued late yesterday, Heartland says:

We know that our billboard angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters, but we hope they understand what we were trying to do with this experiment. We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the ‘realist’ message on the climate.

Well here’s the problem. My name – and the name of my book – is currently on the same page of the Heartland website where the above quote appears. Without prior knowledge or informed consent, my work has been aggressively associated with this odious ad campaign.

Forget disappointment. In my view, my reputation has been harmed. And the Heartland thinks it has nothing to apologize for.

Adding insult to injury, it proclaims that it will “continue to experiment” with how it presents its message. That’s all well and good. But being collateral damage in someone else’s ongoing marketing experiments isn’t my idea of a good time.

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Heartland personnel were sent a courtesy copy of this post three hours prior to its publication here.

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A year-and-a-half ago a high-profile, UK-based green group released a video that was intended to be shown in cinemas prior to the main attraction. Titled No Pressure, it featured people – including school children – being summarily executed. Exploded, in fact, in a shower of blood and gore. Their crime? They’d expressed insufficient enthusiasm for reducing their carbon footprint.

While the creators of this film apparently thought they were being funny, others were horrified. In the words of Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic magazine, the video was “a complete catastrophe for environmentalism.” Australian blogger Joanne Nova called it the ‘marketing disaster of the century.’ Environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. described it as “the worst climate PR stunt ever.”

Most of us who viewed this video had no trouble figuring out that people who regard four-minute massacres as helpful to their cause are downright scary. Such people should be kept far away from any positions of power.

Unfortunately, much of the media declined to report on this video. Six weeks after the fact, I could find only two instances of it even being mentioned in Canadian newspapers. One was in the business section of the National Post. The other was in a small local paper.

These days it’s getting harder to find this video. If you attempt to view it via my older blog posts (or via the ethically challenged coverage over at the Guardian) this is what you see after clicking the Play button:

The account of the person who’d reposted it has been terminated. Allegedly, there were multiple copyright infringement issues.

But what happens if you simply search for “No Pressure” – keeping in mind that many young people now use YouTube as their substitute Google? The list of results includes annoyingly annotated versions of the video (see here and here) – and those that incorporate bits and pieces from it (for example, here).

If you use the search term “10:10″ – the name of the 10-percent-per-year C02 reduction campaign with which this video is associated – the same thing happens.

After a good deal of trial and error it appears that the only YouTube search term that will now point you directly to the video in its intact, original state is “10:10 video.” After clicking the Play button in many posts around the web I’ve discovered that the version of the video embedded in The Atlantic story still functions. So does the one embedded in the Pielke blog. You can view those copies here and here.

The No Pressure video is an important historical document. It sheds light on the mindset of the people who created it and on the green groups that failed to condemn it (come on down Greenpeace, Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council). It tells us important things about what mainstream journalists consider news and not news.

I’ve attempted to back up the video here, but it isn’t clear that the WebCite service I’ve used works in the event that content is later removed from YouTube.

Those who know more about these matters than I do may wish to undertake their own archiving efforts.

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Yesterday Panetta gave a speech. You can read all about it at the National Defense magazine’s website (backup link). The occasion was:

a reception hosted in his honor by the Environmental Defense Fund at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. [bold added]

I’ve written about the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) before. When UK activists released their No Pressure video – in which school kids uninterested in reducing their carbon footprint are blown to bloody pulp – the EDF was among those green groups that failed to condemn the film (backup link).

A year ago I observed that the EDF is enormous, well-funded, and influential:

take a look at its list of staff experts. There are 130 names on that list. They have a program manager for “Latin America & Caribbean” and a separate one for Cuba. They have seven attorneys, eight economists, a recreational fisheries specialist, and a vice-president of corporate sponsorships.

The EDF likes to paint itself as an underdog, fighting the good fight against corporate giants. But any group that’s wining and dining the Secretary of Defense – who just happens to be the former director of the CIA – is no grassroots operation.

The EDF is part of the establishment. Period. Full stop.

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h/t Tom Nelson

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