Q: What is The Heartland Institute?

A: The Heartland Institute is a national nonprofit research and education organization, tax exempt under Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code, headquartered in Chicago, and founded in 1984. It is not affiliated with any political party, business, or foundation.

Heartland’s mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Such solutions include parental choice in education, choice and personal responsibility in health care, market-based approaches to environmental protection, privatization of public services, and deregulation in areas where property rights and markets do a better job than government bureaucracies.

Q: Is Heartland a ‘Front Group’?

A: Web sites such as ExxonSecrets.org, DeSmogBlog.org, Mediatransparency.org, and Sourcewatch.org claim The Heartland Institute is a “front group” for (take your pick) oil companies, drug companies, telephone companies, fast-food companies, and tobacco companies. These Web sites are full of false and misleading claims about Heartland and other groups that support free-market ideas. The very fact that they attack all free-market think tanks and advocacy groups makes their bias and dishonesty clear.

It is true that interest groups sometimes create front groups that are not really legitimate organizations with real histories, real members, and a real commitment to advancing the public interest. For example, ExxonSecrets.org, DeSmogBlog.org, Mediatransparency.org, and Sourcewatch.org were created by liberal environmental groups and a few foundations strictly to attack conservatives and libertarians. How “real” is that?

The Heartland Institute, by contrast, is the real thing:

• Heartland was created in 1984 by a small group of individuals who shared a deep concern over the growth in the size and power of government. They incorporated The Heartland Institute as a nonprofit charitable organization to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

• Joseph Bast, Heartland’s original executive director, is still there ... now as president and CEO.

• Heartland has grown slowly over the years. Today it has 2,700 supporters. In 2007 it received 71 percent of its income from foundations, 16 percent from corporations, and 11 percent from individuals. No corporate donor gave more than 5 percent of its annual budget.

• More than 125 academics and professional economists serve as policy advisors to The Heartland Institute, including members of the faculties of Harvard University, The University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and scores of other respected universities.

• Approximately 500 elected officials -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- serve on Heartland’s Board of Legislative Advisors. These elected officials use Heartland’s research and vouch for its credibility.

The Heartland Institute does accept corporate funding, as do virtually all of the nonprofit “think tanks” in the U.S. But that support comes because these corporations agree with Heartland’s free-market stands, just as left-wing foundations fund liberal advocacy groups that take opposing views. And no corporation gives more than 5 percent of Heartland’s budget. More information about our funding and policies concerning working with donors is posted on our Web site.

Heartland doesn’t take positions to raise money. If it did, it would avoid controversial positions on such topics as global warming, the war on drugs, and smoking bans.

Finally, and for the record, no one on Heartland’s board of directors works for a tobacco company (Roy Marden retired years ago) or for an oil company (Walter Buchholtz was on the board but no longer is. Also, Buchholtz was never a “public relations advisor” for The Heartland Institute -- that was his title with ExxonMobil, not Heartland). One member of the board is an economist for an auto company ... and the last time we checked, the auto companies and oil companies didn’t agree on much. Heartland’s board of directors has 15 members, some of whom were founding members of the organization.

Q: Who funds The Heartland Institute?

A: The Heartland Institute is a publicly supported charity under Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. Its funding comes from tax-deductible contributions from approximately 2,700 individuals, foundations, and corporations.

Heartland does not solicit or accept grants from government agencies, does not conduct contract research, and it does not rely on direct mail to raise money. No corporate donor contributes more than 5 percent of its annual budget.

People contribute to The Heartland Institute because they share our belief that better information and understanding can improve public policies in such important areas as education, environmental protection, and health care. For more than two decades, Heartland authors have discovered and promoted free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

We do not take positions in order to appease or avoid losing support from individual donors. We have, in fact, a long record of standing behind our research even when it means losing the support of major donors.

For many years, we provided a complete list of Heartland’s corporate and foundation donors on this Web site and challenged other think tanks and advocacy groups to do the same. To our knowledge, not a single group followed our lead.

After much deliberation and with some regret, we now keep confidential the identities of all our donors for the following reasons:

• People who disagree with our views have taken to selectively disclosing names of donors who they think are unpopular in order to avoid addressing the merits of our positions. Listing our donors makes this unfair and misleading tactic possible. By not disclosing our donors, we keep the focus on the issue.

• We have procedures in place that protect our writers and editors from undue influence by donors. This makes the identities of our donors irrelevant.

• We frequently take positions at odds with those of the individuals and companies who fund us, so it is unfair to them as well as to us to mention their funding when expressing our point of view.

• No corporate donor gives more than 5 percent of our budget, and most give far less than that. We have a diverse funding base that is too large to accurately summarize each time we issue a statement.

If you do not approve of this policy, your argument is not with us but with those who would abuse a sincere effort at transparency. We urge anyone who sees the need for objective research and commentary on public policy issues to join us as a Member or donor.

Q: What is The Heartland Institute’s stance on environment issues, particularly global warming?

A: The Heartland Institute seeks to bring sound science and economics to the debate on environmental issues. We believe there is too much alarmism in the debates over many environmental issues, and too little attention being paid to the real science. In the specific case of global warming, we believe some warming occurred during the 20th century, but there is no consensus on how much of that warming was due to human activities, whether the warming will continue, or whether its consequences will be positive for plants and wildlife and human civilization, or negative.

Heartland is a major source of research and commentary in the U.S. questioning whether enough is known about climate change to justify government action. It has run newspaper ads challenging Al Gore to debate his critics; hosted an international conference in March 2008 that attracted some 550 scientists, economists, and policy experts “to explore issues ignored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)”; and distributed more than 1 million videos and books on global warming in 2007.

Heartland is not a scientific research organization. In recent years, it has been providing a platform for the so-called “skeptics” in the global warming debate because (a) it’s apparent that advocates of more government power exploit the public’s scientific illiteracy to advance their agenda, (b) the economic consequences of greenhouse gas emission programs (on the scale proposed by Gore etc.) would be devastating, and (c) no other group seems able to raise the dollars needed to run ads, host conferences, and distribute books, studies, and videos as we’ve been doing.

Q: How much funding does The Heartland Institute receive from energy companies?

A: Heartland reported income and spending of $5.2 million and a full-time staff of 25 in 2007. Funding comes from approximately 2,700 individuals, foundations, and corporations.

Heartland’s donor base has always been diverse, with no one company ever contributing more than 5 percent of its annual budget. All energy companies combined -- oil, coal, natural gas, and utilities -- gave less than 5 percent of its budget in 2007 and probably will in 2008. About 16 percent of its budget comes from corporations, with the rest from foundations and individuals.

Q: Is Heartland’s research affected by donor influence?

A: No. The Heartland Institute has policies in place that insulate its researchers from undue influence by donors. In most cases, a person writing or speaking for Heartland doesn’t even know who is a contributor. Donors can elect to participate in peer review, but their comments and recommendations are given no more weight than those of other experts.

We don’t “carry water” for any industry, corporation, or individual donor. Since we started to speak out against “global warming alarmism” we lost the financial support of several major corporations. There is big money to be made by backing the gloom-and-doom side in the global warming debate, and financial ruin for standing in opposition to it. Thankfully, Heartland’s diversified funding base means individuals and foundations have stepped up their support as corporations have abandoned us. Though out-spent 100-to-1, Heartland and a rag-tag band of similarly small groups have battled the alarmists to a stand-still on global warming. The latest Gallup Poll shows they lost ground since last year.

ExxonMobil was never a major source of funding for free-market think tanks, measured as a percentage of total funds raised. Its gifts to The Heartland Institute never amounted to more than 5 percent of the organization’s annual receipts. We are dedicated to finding the truth, not currying favor with corporate interest groups, and the same is true of our colleagues at other think tanks.

Q: Who is Heartland’s audience, how do you reach them, and what topics do you focus on?

A: Three things make The Heartland Institute distinctive: (1) we focus on reaching every state elected official in the U.S. (there are 7,300 of them) rather than national elected officials or officials in one particular state; (2) we publish “public policy newspapers” -- tabloid-sized, 20-page monthly publications on newsprint -- on five key public policy topics: school reform, environmental protection, budget and tax, health care, and telecom policy; (3) we act as a clearinghouse for the work of other free-market think tanks and advocacy groups in the U.S. (there are more than 300 of them now), featuring their work on our Web site, in our publications, and as speakers at our events.

Q: Who is Joseph Bast?

A: Joseph Bast is the president and CEO of The Heartland Institute. He was Heartland’s first employee, back in 1984, and over the course of the past 24 years has researched, written, edited, and testified on a wide range of public policy issues. Prior to joining Heartland he was a student at The University of Chicago and editor of Nomos: Studies in Spontaneous Order, a magazine.

Bast (and Heartland) first began to address environmental issues in 1994 when Bast coauthored Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism (Madison Books, 1994, second ed. 1995). Of his perspective on environmental issues, Bast has written,

I was an outdoors boy growing up in a small town near Green Bay, Wisconsin and was deeply involved in environmental groups during my college days and even after starting The Heartland Institute. I edited the Sierra Club’s Illinois newsletter, subscribed to Earth First! read all of Edward Abbey’s books, etc. My epiphany occurred around 1993, when a professor of economics at Wheaton College, P.J. Hill, invited me to coauthor a book with him on environmental issues. I was astonished to learn that most of what I “knew” about environmental issues was simply wrong, and that market-based solutions exist to most environmental problems. That book, Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism, sold more than 20,000 copies and went through two editions.

Since 1995, Bast launched Environment & Climate News, one of Heartland’s five monthly public policy newspapers; coauthored several Heartland policy studies on climate change issues; and edited the revised second edition of Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 1,500 Years by S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, as well as a new edition of Roy Innis’ Energy Keepers – Energy Killers, The New Civil Rights Battle. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, The Cato Journal, and USA Today.

Q: Why do organizations target The Heartland Institute with misleading and inaccurate claims?

A: Heartland has been relentlessly demonized by attack groups on the left, currently by DeSmogBlog for example, and misleading and inaccurate claims fill entries in SourceWatch, ExxonSecrets, and similar sockpuppet sites. They refuse to correct mistakes and apparently cannot be sued. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that Heartland gets 95 percent of its income from non-energy company sources, that it has been consistent in its messages and principles for 24 years, that no energy company executives serve on its board (one did briefly), etc. The errors and falsehoods are deliberate, lies and exaggerations designed to smear us, drive away donors, and get the mainstream press to avoid covering us.

Notes Heartland President Joe Bast,

In 24 years of engaging in public policy debates, on topics ranging from school reform and health care reform to telecom deregulation -- my life’s work -- I’ve never seen a debate more dominated by one side’s ideology and self-interest than the one now taking place on global warming, nor one where the attacks were so fierce and immoral. It’s often said that environmentalism is a religion -- an insult, I think, to people with genuine religious convictions -- and this does help explain the ferocity with which environmentalists react when criticized or corrected.

Having been an environmentalist myself I can appreciate the big emotional stake in being right, but I guess I never needed as much from environmentalism as other people do. It’s the only explanation I’ve been able to find.