Common Ground: The Hoover Institute vs. The Earth

March 2007 | From the Editor

The Hoover Institute vs. The Earth

Conservative think tank is Bay Area embarrassment

From time to time, I venture outside “the bubble” that is the Bay Area for doses of “flyover” culture.

I do this often by reading The Detroit News (detnews.com). That right-leaning daily that I delivered from porch to porch as a wide-eyed adolescent features a syndicated columnist these days by the name of Thomas Sowell.

Sowell is one of the right wing’s lesser-known but more virulent examples of the worst strain of pro-corporate hack: the global warming denier [hissss….].

Here’s two sentences from his February 17 column, “Why senators try to smear global warming skeptics”:

“Politicians who have hitched their wagons to the star of ‘global warming’ cannot admit any doubts on their part or permit any doubts by others from becoming part of the debate. Neither can environmental crusaders, whose whole sense of themselves as saviors of the planet is at stake, as they try to stamp out any views to the contrary.”

There are fifteen things that are completely heinous about those two sentences, but that’s not my point here. Sowell is not the only denier. A few others are out there, serving up big oil-, energy- an auto-industry talking points hoping to keep global warming a “matter of opinion” that’s protected by First Amendment right, exactly as the tobacco industry did for decades with the cancer-cigarette link.

But what’s so shocking about Sowell is that his disinformation and propaganda is coming not from Ted Nugent’s barbecue patio in nearby Jackson, Mich, but from back here in “the bubble.” He’s a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which is mentioned at the end of his column, giving him instant credibility with casual readers who might accidentally associate Stanford with intelligence.

The elite school’s right-wing think tank is hardly a beacon of academic thought it turns out, but rather a mouthpiece for funders GM, Ford, Chrysler, Exxon and ARCO among them, that happily glom onto the school’s reputation to open doors for its self-serving messages.

But wait! Could it be that I am just another moon bat conspiracy theorist or that Sowell is just a bad apple souring the Hoover Institute’s otherwise fair and balanced views about Mother Nature?

Well, let’s see. A quick search of hoover.org brings up the bio of senior fellow Terry Anderson, billed as an expert in “environmental policy.” The Montana State University professor of economics and author of the book, You Have to Admit It’s Getting Better: From Economic Prosperity to Environmental Quality (Hoover Institution Press) [It’s getting better? -ed] is a peculiar sort of environmentalist: His bio says he’s an avid outdoorsmen “who enjoys…archery hunting, especially in Africa.” Hey, aren’t most of the game animals in Africa on the endangered list? Maybe Anderson isn’t hip to the endangered list. Maybe it has not made it to backwaters like Montana and Palo Alto.

What’s even scarier about the Hoover Institute is that reporters from the mainstream media get sent there for…brainwashing. One such media fellow, reporter John Berlau (USA Today, Wall Street Journal), has a new book called Eco-Freaks where he asserts that trees cause more pollution than cars. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. It’s right there in his press release.

All I can hope for is that these scribes from Stanford are actually right. Maybe global warming doesn’t exist, or maybe if it does simply all we need to do is cut down the rest of the trees to stem its tide. I did not attend Stanford like Berlau, Anderson and Sowell did. I only went to a state school and maybe they know better.

Either that, or it’s high-time Stanford stopped allowing Hoover fellows to drop its good name in their columns and books, giving these writers’ wacky words undeserved cachet with their unwary readers in Detroit and Montana.

Oh, this just in from Stanford: Smoking is good for you! Relaxes the nerves, you know. And gravity? Gravity’s just a myth that’s hip with the liberal media.

—Todd Spencer

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