On That Carbon Tax: The Trib, The AEI And The Truth

From today's op-ed page at the Tribune-Review:

A new federal carbon tax being advocated by leftists and environmentalists would not curb man-made emissions enough to possibly affect climate. But it would hinder commerce and America’s drive for energy independence enough to drag down the economy.

Steve Milloy, the publisher of JunkScience.com , writing for Investor’s Business Daily, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Christopher C. Horner, writing in California’s Orange County Register, point out that a carbon tax...

Before we go any further, we should look at what Milloy and Horner actually wrote about this.  From Horner we learn a little more:

Recently, a leaked agenda laid bare a strategy session among a virtual Who's Who of left-leaning big-government activist groups, hosted by a generally conservative policy group, the American Enterprise Institute. By the agenda's title, this fifth in a series was part of a "Lame Duck Initiative" to strategize enactment of a "carbon" tax, or federal energy tax on oil, coal and gas, in the post-election session of Congress that began this week.

AEI thereby joined former Republican politicians and advisers seeking to rebrand, as a conservative idea, the latest incarnation of what the political Left has long pined for, only to be told it was a dead letter given the political debacle of the Clinton administration's 1993 "BTU tax."

It's from the American Enterprise Institute?  Funny how that part (you know about how it's coming from the Scaife-Funded AEI) never made it into Scaife's paper.  Not sure how they can ignore $8.7 million dollars ($7.8 from Sarah Scaife and $900K from Carthage) worth of support over the last few decades.

That's kinda embarrassing, isn't it?

More Anti-Science Chicanery At The Trib

They must've been running low on teh crazie at the Tribune-Review over the past few days. Take a look at this convoluted route to try (yet again) to do their pro-business science debunking:

Kudos to JunkScience.com's Steve Milloy for debunking suspect blame-mankind research behind demonization of humanity's mercury emissions.

A new Harvard University study links such emissions with increasing levels of methylmercury -- "inorganic" smokestack and tailpipe mercury in the food chain -- and reproductive problems in black-footed albatrosses over the last 140 years.

But as Mr. Milloy points out, the study is manifestly flawed.[Italics in original.

This being the braintrust the first thing a rational person would do is to ask about the source. And the writer, Steven Milloy.

What those sources don't tell you is that Milloy according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute he's (or at least had been, depending on the reliability of the website) an adjunct analyst at CEI as well as an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

What the braintrust won't tell you is that both institutes have been beneficiaries of Scaife Foundation funding.

• $2.9 million for CEI.
• $2.5 million for Cato.

Shouldn't they have?

Milloy is also an "expert" over at Fox "News" and accourding to sourcewatch.com

In January 2006, Paul D. Thacker, a journalist who specializes in science, medicine and environmental topics, reported in The New Republic that Milloy has received thousands of dollars in payments from the Phillip Morris company since the early nineties, and that NGOs controlled by Milloy have received large payments from ExxonMobil. A spokesperson for Fox News stated, "Fox News was unaware of Milloy's connection with Philip Morris. Any affiliation he had should have been disclosed."

Someday the braintrust will disclose that info, too.