Welcome to the world of the conservative think-tank, where “the precautionary principle can lead to greater environmental degradation”, modern forestry “helps preserve wildlife habitat”, “commercial logging is not a major cause of deforestation”, “radioactive waste has a great advantage over other kinds of waste”, “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”, and we are “entering an age of increasing and unprecedented natural resources abundance”.

Conservative think-tanks are one of the tools used by corporations in their assault on environmentalism, along with corporate front groups, advertising and public relations, law suits designed to intimidate and silence environmentalists, and violence, whether direct or through the agency of the state.

Corporations use both “good cop”, greenwashing strategies (designed to co-opt environmentalists and to win public acceptance, “people don’t care what we know until they know that we care!”) and “bad cop” strategies (designed to demonise and marginalise environmentalists).

And so it is with the conservative think-tanks, although there is a very heavy emphasis on demonisation - environmentalists are anti-environment, anti-freedom, anti-jobs, racist, imperialist, fascist, dishonest sorcerers. All at the same time!

Think-tanks have become increasingly numerous over the past 20-30 years - there are over 1000 in the United States alone. Now, there’s even a think-tank devoted to the study of think-tanks (<http://www.thinktankconsultants.com/thinktank.html>).

Think-tanks present themselves as independent research institutes - “universities without students”. However, their funding sources, and the composition of their boards and research teams, lays clear their role as attack dogs for capital.

Funding is usually obtained from a variety of corporations, topped up with private donations. So think-tanks are generally not beholden to any particular corporation, though claims of “independence” need to be taken with a grain of salt given the extent of corporate funding and corporate control of think-tanks. Obfuscation and secrecy are sometimes used to conceal the extent of corporate funding.

Networks

Think-tanks aim to influence governments, bureaucrats, the public, and the media. As Sharon Beder noted in the Arena Magazine (June/July 1999), “(Think-tanks) insinuate themselves into the networks of people who are influential in particular areas of policy. They do this by organising conferences, seminars and workshops and by publishing books, briefing papers, journals and media releases. They liaise with bureaucrats, consultants, interest groups and lobbyists. They seek to provide advice directly to the government officials in policy networks and to government agencies and committees.”

Australian think-tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) boast about their frequent contributions to the capitalist media - which sits uncomfortably with their frequent rants about left-wing media bias. The US Heritage Foundation claims that 200 or more media stories follows the release of each of its “position papers”.

Even the exceptions prove the rule of left-wing media bias. Stephen Dawson, in his “Free_Enterprise.com” column in the March 2000 IPA Review, said, “I happened upon something almost unbelievable on TV the other night: a show giving the other side of the environmental debate. Of course, that television even recognizes that an ‘other side’ exists is extraordinary. Occasionally, though, something of this nature does appear on SBS. What was almost unbelievable was that this series, Against Nature, was run by the ABC. And at a viewable 9:30 at night. Congratulations ABC! (My faith in the ABC’s own nature has since been restored by a brief mention on ABC Radio National of the programme as ‘controversial and largely discredited’.)”

(Ironically, the March 2000 IPA Review also noted that Michael Warby had resigned as editor of the IPA Review, having been caught plagiarising by the ABC’s Media Watch program.)

Think-tanks used to be stodgy, little-known organisations, functioning primarily as retirement homes for embittered conservative ideologues. While they still play that role, they have become considerably more sophisticated and influential in the past 20 years. And, for better or worse, their agenda has expanded beyond economics and industrial relations to encompass environmentalism, feminism, media bias and other issues.

A revolving door links think-tanks to industry, universities, and government bureaucracies. Capitalists such as Hugh Morgan (Western Mining Corporation) and Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation) have been associated with Australian think-tanks, as has federal minister Rod Kemp (whose father founded the IPA), John Stone (former Secretary of the Treasury, former federal Senator), Gerard Henderson (former adviser to John Howard, media columnist, now linked to the Sydney Institute), and John Hyde (former former federal Liberal MP, media columnist).

Think-tanks have shifted the emphasis of their work from research to a more overtly political role. The US National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which describes itself as a “watchdog organization with a mission to make philanthropic institutions more accountable and accessible to the disadvantaged”, notes, “Conservative policy groups have shown increasing sophistication in waging high-intensity battles over extended periods of time, better coordinating their activities with lobbyists in the private sector, political operatives ... and activists at the grassroots. Major battles in the 1990s have helped them to refine their advocacy machines.”

Think-tanks are almost always conservative in their political orientation. Some deny their conservatism - for example, the Australian Institute of Public Affairs claims to be “small-l liberal” in its political orientation. Others have successfully generated a false public perception of being moderate or liberal. For example, the Brookings Institution in the US is frequently described as liberal or left-of-centre, yet, as Brookings spokesperson Stan Wellborn notes, “Our economics department is just full of antigovernment free-marketeers.”

Influence

Robert Bothwell, President of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, says, “It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the millions effectively spent by conservative think tanks have enabled them virtually to dictate the issues and terms of national political debates.”

A 1982 survey in the US found that most government officials were more influenced in the long-term by think-tanks than by public opinion or by special interest groups, and many officials were more influenced by think-tanks than by media or by interaction with members of Congress.

No doubt think-tanks exert influence, but it’s almost impossible to say how much influence. Determining cause-and-effect can be problematic. For example, the Coalition government can be relied upon to put corporate profits ahead of environmental protection, with or without prodding from industry or from industry-funded think-tanks.

A second difficulty in determining the influence of think-tanks concerns their methods. Often, think-tanks use informal networks to exert influence - hence the value of former politicians and bureaucrats. Few would have heard of the Rumour Tank, a conservative networking/lobbying group in Victoria, until recent press reports linked it to the Victorian Governor, Sir James Gobbo.

A third complication is that most analysts believe that the most important role of think-tanks lies not in swinging particular debates, but in the more nebulous realm of setting the agenda of the debate, widening the parameters of “respectable” opinion. In the environmental field, think-tanks have played a role in popularising a range of market-based “solutions” to environmental problems, arguably the most important of which is carbon trading as a “solution” to the greenhouse problem.

Bob Burton, writing in Chain Reaction (Number 73-74), says, “There are twin dangers in trying to understand the right wing think tanks. The first is to dismiss them and their policy positions as loopy and irrelevant. The second is to believe that they are all powerful. The truth is somewhere in between.”

Funding gives a gauge of the influence of think-tanks, or at least industry perceptions of their effectiveness. In the US, the top 20 conservative think-tanks spent US$158 million in 1996 and their total spending between 1990-2000 is likely to exceed US$1 billion. The 20 US think-tanks included in a study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy more than doubled their budgets between 1992 and 1999.

The growing influence of think-tanks (and other conservative organisations) also needs to be understood in the context of the retreat of organised labour and the declining influence of the social movements over the past 20 years. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy points to “... organized labor's declining ability to help set broad national budget and policy priorities, the single-issue focus on many left institutions, and the left's failure to develop and communicate to the American electorate an overarching public philosophy for the country.”

Think-tanks in Australia

In Australia, the most prominent think-tank is the IPA, with a budget of about $1 million annually. Almost all of the members of the IPA’s Board come from industry, and another is the “AMP Professor of Finance” at Melbourne University.

The CIS is another influential Australian think-tank. The CIS has a clumsy method of listing its members contributions to the establishment press, which yields results such as these:
- Australian Financial Review - Stop Subsidising A Failure
- Business Review Weekly - It Is No Sin To Be Rich
- News Weekly - Are We Producing a Generation of Hyperactive Zombies?
- Australian Financial Review - Farrago of Fallacies
- The Australian - Democracy Doesn't Deserve Total Devotion
- Australian Financial Review - Working on Welfare Reform
- Courier Mail - Lessons to be Learnt
- The Australian - Curtail the Glut of Arts Graduates
- The Australian - Unworkable and Unfair
- Daily Telegraph - Putting Market Forces at the Top of the Class

There a few surprises with the Australian think-tanks, which are often modeled on US think-tanks and share close links with them. In August 1997, for example, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, a US think-tank, organised a conference on climate change in Canberra in conjunction with the Australian APEC Study Centre. The head of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute said the conference would “offer world leaders the tools to break with the Kyoto Treaty”.

 The IPA advocates “less regulation and smaller government generally” and “rational economic policies”. The CIS is committed to “an economy based on free and competitive markets” and “individual liberty and choice” including “the right to property”.

What is surprising - and, for environmentalists, flattering - is the amount of attention conservative think-tanks pay to environmental issues. With some issues, such as carbon trading and energy markets, the interest is primarily in economics, not the environment. Nonetheless, environmentalism still attracts plenty of attention.

The IPA established a new project on genetically modified foods in mid-1999, under the direction of John Hyde (“Spreading fear of the future can be good for anti-business.”). “Environmental Policy” is one of the IPA’s four “units”. The December 1999 IPA Review contains the following contributions:
- federal Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey on forests (“Kangaroos happily inhabit golf courses but apparently not a regrowth or clear felled forest”, and “The fact that seems to escape many people is that a forest is a good place to grow a tree.”);
- Roger Bate, Director of the IPA’s Environment Unit, “It’s Official: Greenpeace Serves No Public Purpose” (on Greenpeace’s failure to get tax-exempt status in Canada); and
- an article on radioactive waste (“Emotive language implies irresponsible operators have casually abandoned leaking drums ... in pristine natural surroundings in a national park!”, and “Radioactive waste has a great advantage over other kinds of waste, namely the ability to detect its presence, even in minute quantities and often at a distance.”)

Environmental debate

The approach of think-tanks to environmental problems is predictable. The first strategy is to deny the existence of environmental problems. No matter how strong the scientific evidence, just one or two dissident voices (often industry-funded voices) will have the think-tanks screaming “unproven” and branding advocates of change as politically-motivated ideologues, and governments showing a willingness to take action, however modest, as being hostage to the “minority interest group” that is the environmental movement.

Michael Warby, from the Australian Institute of Public Affairs, celebrating Earth Day in 1999, asserted that “many indicators show improving environmental conditions” and said it is “unfortunate that an atmosphere of crisis and looming disaster greatly aids flows of donations and recruitment of members for environmentalist movements”.

Warby asserted that “Over 80 prominent climate scientists have since signed the Leipzig Declaration denying that there is a consensus on global warming and warning against the adoption of drastic measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions.” However, these “prominent climate scientists” include a television weather presenter from Tampa Bay, Florida; a man who runs a service providing telephone callers with yesterday's weather in Springfield, Ohio; and several scientists whose bread is buttered by industries that produce greenhouse gases.

The second strategy of think-tanks is to argue that addressing environmental problems is undesirable or unaffordable. The biggest US think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, estimates the cost of federal regulations to the US economy at $500 billion per year, or $5000 per household, while Republican politician Newt Gingrich says that the US Environmental Protection Agency “may well be the biggest job-killing agency in the inner city in America today”.

Think-tanks are well versed in “paralysis by analysis” tactics. In the US, conservatives lobbied for the so-called Risk Assessment and Cost-Benefit Act of 1995, which would require government agencies to undertake a full risk assessment and cost benefit analysis before any government regulation likely to result in an annual cost of $25 million or more. The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that it would need 980 new employees and more than US$220 million to comply with the risk assessment requirements of the Act. Ironically, conservative think-tanks also argue for reduced funding for agencies like the EPA, or their abolition altogether.

The third strategy, adopted by think-tanks when some form of change is inevitable, is to argue for change which leaves corporate power and profits intact, and to argue against “command-and-control” legislation which would force industry to reduce or stop environmental destruction.

Typical think-tank nostrums include industry self-regulation, establishing incentives for industry (not to be confused with government handouts!), and creating environmental property “rights”.

Celebrating World Environment Day, 1999, with a speech at Melbourne University, the Institute of Public Affairs’ Michael Warby was talking up private ownership: “Cattle were owned, were looked after and multiplied enormously. Bison were unowned, and were hunted almost to extinction.” As proof of capitalism’s ability to look after the environment, Warby noted that “the Ohio River no longer catches alight”.

For all the think-tanks’ pontificating about “rational” economics, they never confront the central problem - that all too often environmental destruction is economically rational. The Environmental News Service reported on July 28 that an “environmental cleanup company” has been charged over several intentional spills of diesel fuel and other pollutants. Company employees are accused of using trap-doors in a van to dump diesel fuel into the Huron River. The company then anonymously reported the spill, and won the clean-up contract. This was rational economics to the tune of US$36,000.

Market-based nostrums often leave it in the hands of industry whether they will reduce their environmental impact or pay a cost for maintaining business as usual. If there is a cost, it is likely to be passed on to consumers. Still more satisfactory for the “free” marketeers is creative accounting. For example, a likely outcome of greenhouse negotiations will be a system whereby companies exceeding their greenhouse emission limits will be able to “borrow” emissions from future accounting periods - no cost or penalty, no greenhouse gas reduction.

The ideological and political shaping of economic instruments has been hidden by a mask of neutrality. As Sharon Beder writes in her book Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, “Far from being a neutral tool, the promotion of market-based instruments is viewed by many of its advocates as a way of resurrecting the role of the market in the face of environmental failure. They claim that economic instruments provide a means by which the power of the market can be harnessed to environmental goals. They serve a political purpose in that they reinforce the role of the ‘free market’ at a time which environmentalism most threatens it.”

Conspiracies

Bob Burton, in the May 1995 Chain Reaction, says that, “Being at arms length from the corporate sector enables think-tanks to advocate positions far more controversial than most companies would want to be identified with. While companies busily advertise themselves as being environmentally responsible in glossy campaigns, via the back door they fund think tanks to advocate policies aimed at containing or reversing he momentum towards environmental protection.”

On the one hand, think-tanks aim to portray themselves as reasonable and moderate, as with Hugh Morgan’s “Keeping Sustainable Development in Balance” in the September 1999 IPA Review. For the most part, however, the think-tanks concentrate on bizarre conspiracy theories, presumably designed to provide their audience with an ideological fix.

The September 1999 IPA Review makes the following links between Nazism and environmentalism: the first country in Europe to ban fox-hunting was Nazi Germany; Germany’s two distinctive contributions to twentieth-century political practice have been Nazism and environmentalism, both of which can be linked to “the German cultural obsession with purity”.

An article by Christopher Lingle, an “independent corporate consultant and adjunct scholar of the CIS”, posted on the CIS website, argues that “German National Socialists under Hitler implemented policies that might warm the heart of some of the most extreme ecologists of today. Just as Hitler relied upon false generalities about Jews and gypsies, environmentalists gain support by generating a certain amount of hysteria over issues that are unsupported by logic or science.”

In the September 1999 IPA Review, Roger Bate’s reviews James M. Sheehan’s book, Global Greens: Inside the International Environmental Establishment. Sheehan “foresees an ominous future as the last of the central planners advance their global agenda through a professed concern for Mother Earth.” And he “shows how protectionist northern business interests ally with environmental NGOs in this type of process.”

In the same issue of IPA Review, Jeremy Rabkin analyses the European Union’s “Green Imperialism”.

The Australian Institute for Public Policy’s “Facts” magazine asserts that environmentalists are responsible for hundreds of thousands of cases of malaria in Sri Lanka by orchestrating the banning of the carcinogen DDT.

The alleged alliance between environmentalists and sections of industry is a hobby-horse of Terry L. Anderson, whose work is publicised by US think-tanks: “environmental special interest groups provide the moral high ground for economic special interest groups that stand to gain from legislation that hampers competitors.”

The churches are also part of the conspiracy, according to Samuel Gregg, director of the Centre for Independent Studies’ research program on Religion and the Free Society, who asserts that is is no coincidence that “many of the foremost ‘eco-theologians’ were once passionate promoters of liberation theology”.

Co-option

The influence of think-tanks extends beyond conservative politicians. Free-market nostrums are the new orthodoxy within social-democratic parties. US President Bill Clinton said in 1992 that it was “time for a new era in environmental protection which used the market to help us get our environment on track - to recognise that Adam Smith’s invisible hand can have a green thumb.”

The federal Labor Party, in its policy platform adopted in the recent national conference in Hobart, states that, “It is the fundamental responsibility of all governments to ensure ... that industry is not faced with a choice between responsible environmental management and economic profit”. How the ALP proposes to resolve that dilemma is left unexplained.

Moreover, free-market environmental nostrums has been swallowed by the right-wing of the environmental movement. As Sharon Beder notes in Global Spin, “The fact is that many environmentalists have been persuaded by the rhetoric of free-market environmentalism. They have accepted the conservative definition of the problem, that environmental degradation results from a failure of the market to attach a price to environmental goods and services, and the argument that these instruments will work better than outdated ‘command-and-control’ type regulations.

“Economic instruments are being advocated as a technocratic solution to environmental problems, premised on the conservative think-tank’s view of the problem - that environmental degradation is caused by a failure to ‘value’ the environment and a lack of properly defined property rights. By allowing this redefinition of environmental problems, environmentalists and others not only forestall criticism of the market system but in fact implicitly agree that an extension of markets is the only way to solve the problem.”

The only “environmentalist” to get a good rap from the Australian think-tanks in living memory is John Wamsley, who runs Earth Sanctuaries Ltd, a company which uses investors funds to buy land for conservation. Wamsley told the March 2000 IPA Review, “The first investor who came in said he wanted to be green, but he took out his half million profit when it came to that.”

Wamsley is as blinkered by economics as the best of the tank-thinkers: “... things which are not profitable must fail, or be run in a minimum way. That is why Australia’s conservation record is so poor.”

And Wamsley buys into conspiracy theories: “The not-for-profit organisations form an extreme breadth of groups. If you look at the extreme left, you see groups which are basically government funded to lobby and protest. There is an interesting symbiosis there: generally Labor governments give a fair bit of funding to green groups and they generally support Labor governments. This has built up over time. Those groups don’t believe you should do things, they believe you should just talk about it.”

“Thanks for speaking with us, is there anything you want to say in conclusion?”, the IPA asked Wamsley. “If anybody has any sense, they would buy our shares. The future will tell that they are an excellent buy now.”