Senate Liberals, Targeting Climate Change ‘Deniers,’ Demand to Know Donors to 22 Think Tanks
Some of the Senate’s most liberal Democrats, demanding that 22 national and state-based think tanks disclose their donors, disparaged them as being part of a network of free-market policy organizations the senators accuse of “laundering” identities while denying climate change exists.
The existence of the conservative and libertarian policy research and education organizations, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and eight fellow senators wrote in a letter to some of the organizations’ leaders, suggests the extent of a “web of denial” about man’s contribution to global warming, or climate change.
“Because your organizations do not regularly disclose where your donations come from, we cannot know for sure how deep and wide the web of denial truly is,” the nine senators write.
Reid and the other senators also assailed the Virginia-based State Policy Network as “a network of organizations bound together by common funding, shared staff, and false messages.”
The network’s members include private, nonprofit Washington institutions such as The Heritage Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Americans for Tax Reform, but also private, free-market think tanks in Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and other states.
“Freedom of speech does not prevent us from speaking out when your organizations, as well-funded agents of hidden principals with …read more