The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) was a nonprofit conservativethink tank in the United States.[2] It was established in 1984 with a focus on science and public policy issues and had an initial focus in defense policy. Starting in the late 1980s, the institute advocated for views in line with environmental skepticism, most notably climate change denial.[3] The think tank received extensive financial support from the fossil fuel industry.[3]
The institute's shift to environmental skepticism began with the publication of a report on global warming by William Nierenberg. During the 1988 United States presidential election, George H. W. Bush had pledged to meet the "greenhouse effect with the White House effect."[5] Nierenberg's report, which blamed global warming on solar activity, had a large impact on the incoming Bush presidency, strengthening those in it opposed to environmental regulation.[5] In 1990 the institute's founders (Jastrow, Nierenberg and Seitz) published a book on climate change.[7] The appointment of David Allan Bromley as presidential science advisor, however, saw Bush sign the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, despite some opposition from within his administration.[5]
In 1994, the institute published a paper by its then chairman, Frederick Seitz, titled Global warming and ozone hole controversies: A challenge to scientific judgment. Seitz questioned the view that CFCs "are the greatest threat to the ozone layer".[8] In the same paper, commenting on the dangers of secondary inhalation of tobacco smoke, he concluded "there is no good scientific evidence that passive inhalation is truly dangerous under normal circumstances."[9]
Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking is a book by the George C. Marshall Institute, edited by Michael Gough. The book, published in 2003, encourages a disinterested objectivity on the part of scientists and policymakers: Ideally, the scientists or analysts who generate estimates of harm that may result from a risk would consider all the relevant facts and alternative interpretations of the data, and remain skeptical about tentative conclusions. Ideally, too, the agency officials and politicians, who have to enact a regulatory program, would consider its costs and benefits, ensure that it will do more good than harm, and remain open to options to stop or change the regulation in situations where the underlying science is tentative.[12][13]
Starting in 1989 GMI was involved in what it terms "a critical examination of the scientific basis for global climate change policy."[14] This was described by Sharon Begley as a "central cog in the denial machine" in a 2007 Newsweek cover story on climate change denial.[15]
In Requiem for a Species, Clive Hamilton is critical of the Marshall Institute and contends that the conservative backlash against global warming research was led by three prominent physicists—Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg, who founded the institute in 1984. According to Hamilton, by the 1990s the Marshall Institute's main activity was attacking climate science.[16]Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway reach a similar conclusion in Merchants of Doubt (2010), where they identified a few contrarian scientists associated with conservative think-tanks who fought the scientific consensus and spread confusion and doubt about global warming.[17] The book Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Science and History, noting that GMI received funding from the automobile and fossil fuel industries and espouses "a mix of conservative, neoliberal, and libertarian ideological positions", states that GMI has "supported authors opposed to the hypothesis of anthropogenic warming and proposed mitigation policies ... stressing the free-market and the dangers of government regulation, which they said would hurt the US economy."[18]
William O'Keefe, chief executive officer of the Marshall Institute, questioned the methods used by advocates of new government restrictions to combat global warming: "We have never said that global warming isn't real. No self-respecting think tank would accept money to support preconceived notions. We make sure what we are saying is both scientifically and analytically defensible."[23]
Accusation of conflict of interest
Matthew B. Crawford was appointed executive director of GMI in September 2001.[24] He left the GMI after five months, saying that the institute was "fonder of some facts than others". He contended a conflict of interest existed in the funding of the institute.[25] In Shop Class as Soulcraft, he wrote about the institute that "the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise. These positions served various interests, ideological or material. For example, part of my job consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank."[26]
In 1998 Jeffrey Salmon, then executive director of GMI, helped develop the American Petroleum Institute's strategy of stressing the uncertainty of climate science.[22]
Exxon-Mobil was a funder of the GMI until it pulled funding from it and several similar organizations in 2008.[28] From 1998 to 2008, the institute received a total of $715,000 in funding from Exxon-Mobil.[29]
