TV News LIES

One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. Heartland has issued a press release claiming that some of these documents were sent to an outsider under false pretenses and that one document in the set is a fake, but the AP independently verified their contents.

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the climate-denial think tank Heartland Institute received funding from at least 19 publicly traded corporations in 2010 and 2011.

The concern that hydraulic fracturing of shale formations to extract natural gas is contaminating groundwater is overstated, claims a new report. Charles "Chip" Groat, associate director of Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, led the study.

Fracking, though, has become highly controversial, with claims that the pressurised fluids can find their way into water courses and drinking supplies, and also trigger small earthquakes.

The UK government's scientific advisory group found no link between childhood leukaemia and proximity to nuclear power plants, but German and French research has found an alarming doubling of risk. Matilda Lee reports.

The study, conducted by the Institut de Radioprotection et de Surete Nucleaire (INSERM) and reported in the International Journal on Cancer in January 2012, looked at child leukaemia cases nationwide diagnosed between 2002 and 2007, with addresses coded around 19 nuclear power plants. It demonstrated a stastically signficant doubling of the incidence of leukaemia childhood near nuclear power plants.

Questions about the authenticity of the leaked Heartland Institute documents are fading, as projects described therein are confirmed. Heartland’s senior fellow James Taylor confirmed the existence of the climate-denier classroom curriculum project to ThinkProgress Green yesterday.

Now, anti-science blogger Anthony Watts has confirmed that Heartland is funding his project to display weather station data, detailed in the leaked fundraising plan. In a comment at Andrew Montford’s Bishop Hill blog, Watts claims there are no “nefarious motives” in his project:

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.”

This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

Since 1996, 200 farmers have reported health problems to the agricultural branch of the French social security system that potentially are a result of pesticides.

But prior cases by farmers against Monsanto have been less successful, as they tried to argue about health problems accumulated over time.