Forty years ago, on this day, May 13, 1983, the Heritage Foundation made a clever pre-emptive assault on the impending conference of the “Global Tomorrow Coalition” in Washington DC…
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 346.1ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Global 2000 report ordered in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter had continued to be a rallying point for environmentalists and those concerned about, well, the future. The Heritage Foundation, which had been set up in 1973, as an attack dog on precisely these questions, wanted to throw a spanner in the works and give journalists covering the upcoming conference, either ammunition or else a quandary. Report it as a “some say/others say ” horse race or, if they did not report on the Heritage Foundation’s critique, they can be smeared as “biased”, and part of the liberal media establishment.
What we can learn from this is that organisations like the Heritage Foundation are fantastically good at shaping the public discourse. They seek to minimise the splash that their opponents can make. They do this with both preemptive and responsive propaganda efforts. This only comes about if you have lots of money and the people who have lots of money understand for the most part, that funding outfits like the Heritage Foundation, or whatever new group is required, is money well spent.
What happened next
The conference happened. The Heritage Foundation released a book called The Resourceful Earth in 1984. Edited by Julian Simon who had already been attacking the Global 2000 report. And in The Resourceful Earth the meteorologist Helmut Landsberg, who was to die a year later made unfortunate predictions about what the climate would be. Oops. Landsberg, like Brian Tucker in Australia, couldn’t cope with the fact that climate science was undercutting the cherished technocracy and economic growth “values.”
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.