Photo by Stefan.
Okay, we don’t want to beat a dead horse here — like, say, the way certain organizations kept harping on the Climategate non-scandal — but allow us just one more instance of pointing and laughing at the Heartland Institute’s gross hypocrisy. When we last left our intrepidly two-faced heroes, they were wounded to the core by the fact that climate scientist Peter Gleick had posed as a board member in order to obtain internal documents. Now it turns out the denialist think tank did basically the same thing to Greenpeace.
Heartland was pearl-clutchy to the extreme about Gleick’s actions — it just couldn’t imagine such a breach of ethics! Why, it would be as if someone from Heartland had called Cindy Baxter of Greenpeace claiming to be part of a U.S. environmental organization, requested a copy of Greenpeace’s media list, and then issued a press release bragging about their extreme cleverness in coming up with the idea of lying to get information. And nobody from Heartland had done such a thing! Not in at LEAST five years.
But that’s exactly what the organization did at the 2007 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Bali:
The Heartland caller phoned Baxter at four in the morning (Bali time), claiming to represent a U.S. environmental organization and asking if she would hand over the UNFCCC media list — which Heartland clearly had failed to secure through legitimate means.
Baxter demurred, after which Taylor sent out a press release, recounting the conversation, linking to a (possibly illegal) recording that Heartland had made of the phonecall, and “exposing” the fact that Greenpeace has a better working relationship than Heartland with just about everyone in the climate, diplomatic and scientific communities.
DeSmogBlog has posted a letter [PDF] from Baxter asking Heartland how exactly it justifies itself, but she’s probably not expecting an answer. Heartland doesn’t deal in anything resembling justice, after all. It deals in hypocritical outrage.
