It’s Thursday, May 30, and The Cato Institute’s climate-denying science center has closed up shop. Permanently.
The Cato Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank known for disseminating misleading climate information, quietly shut down its Center for the Study of Science this month.
The Cato Institute has had deep ties to Big Oil from the start. It was co-founded by Charles Koch in the 1970s, and has since received almost $12 million in funding from Koch foundations, as well as more than $100,000 in backing from ExxonMobil.
Although no public statement has been made as to why the center shut down, it might be linked to the departure of former director and long-time climate denier Patrick Michaels around the end of March.
“They informed me that they didn’t think their vision of a think tank was in the science business,” he told E&E on Tuesday, “and so I said, ‘OK, bye.'” Despite the closure of the center, a spokesperson for the organization said the Cato Institute will “continue to work on science policy issues.”
But that work could be moving slightly closer to the center on climate science: Meteorologist and former Cato scholar, Ryan Maue, said he suspects that conservatives and big businesses may begin shifting their support to think tanks like the Niskanen Center which promote a more moderate response to climate change.
The Smog
Need-to-know basis
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