Heartland Institute Not in ‘Tactical Retreat’ from Climate Realism

Washington Post column by Dana Milbank read too much
into a four-month-old op-ed

Washington Post Columnist Dana Milbank wrote in his April 6 column that The Heartland Institute was making “a tactical retreat” away from the fight against global warming alarmism. I wish he had called me first, I would have told him: Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the coming months we will distribute more than a quarter-million books and reports on climate change and host the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change on June 11-12 in Washington, DC. The man-made global warming paradigm is crumbling, public support is vanishing, and except for a few last hold-outs at the Washington Post and New York Times, the whole world knows it. Human activity is not causing a climate crisis.

To invent his story, Milbank took out of context two passages from a December 24, 2014 opinion piece at Human Events by Justin Haskins, an editor for The Heartland Institute. I would have phrased it a bit differently, but I don’t disagree with the points Haskins made.

The Heartland Institute is a think tank, not a church. We don’t all sing from the same hymnal. I encourage debate and tolerate dissent, that’s how I learn new things and how my staff gets better. We agree on the important stuff: that individual liberty must expand, markets must be free, and government ought to be limited.

Joseph Bast
President
The Heartland Institute
jbast@heartland.org
312/377-4000