Given the increasingly important role the Heartland Institute is playing in leading the fight to prevent the implementation of dangerous policy actions to address the supposed risks of global warming, it is useful to set priorities for our efforts in 2012. This document offers such a set of priorities. I propose that at this point it be kept confidential and only be distributed to a subset of Institute Board and senior staff. More details can be found in our 2012 Proposed Budget document and 2012 Fundraising Strategy memo.These priorities include:
- Heartland’s 2012 Fundraising Plan, which shows that they expect to raise $7.7 million, a 70 percent increase over last year. Their budget for the year is $6.5 million.
- A plan for a K-12 school curriculum to be developed by a consultant that will, “show that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.” An anonymous donor has pledged $100,000 to cover this expense.
- Funding for parallel organizations, such as the NIPCC to “undermine the official United Nation's IPCC reports.” They include $388,000 for a team of writers. (Hmmm, that’s pretty good money.)
- There is also another $18k per month, for “funding for high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message.” (We put stuff like this in our novel Vapor Trails, but we thought we were making it up.)
- Expanded Climate Communications, where they say, “Heartland plays an important role in climate communications, especially through our in-house experts (e.g., Taylor) through his Forbes blog and related high profile outlets, our conferences, and through coordination with external networks (such as WUWT and other groups capable of rapidly mobilizing responses to new scientific findings, news stories, or unfavorable blog posts). Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”
RP Siegel (1952-2021), was an author and inventor who shined a powerful light on numerous environmental and technological topics. His work appeared in TriplePundit, GreenBiz, Justmeans, CSRWire, Sustainable Brands, Grist, Strategy+Business, Mechanical Engineering, Design News, PolicyInnovations, Social Earth, Environmental Science, 3BL Media, ThomasNet, Huffington Post, Eniday, and engineering.com among others . He was the co-author, with Roger Saillant, of Vapor Trails, an adventure novel that shows climate change from a human perspective. RP was a professional engineer - a prolific inventor with 53 patents and President of Rain Mountain LLC a an independent product development group. RP was the winner of the 2015 Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week blogging competition. RP passed away on September 30, 2021. We here at TriplePundit will always be grateful for his insight, wit and hard work.