Free Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by Richard Littlemore James Hoggan Page A

federal government’s Lobbyist Code of Conduct says: “Lobbyists shall, when making a representation to a public office holder, disclose the identity of the person or organization on whose behalf the representation is made, as well as the reasons for the approach.”
    But Tom Harris is not technically a lobbyist, and Timothy Egan and Julio Legos may well have been “volunteering” their time as directors of the NRSP.
    So during this period Egan was a registered lobbyist for the Canadian Gas Association, which is part of an energy industry coalition that includes the Canadian Nuclear Association, the Canadian Association of Oil Well Drilling Contractors, the Canadian Energy Alliance, the Propane Gas Association of Canada, the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, and the Coal Association of Canada, as well as some conservation and alternative-energy interests such as the Canadian Energy Efficiency Alliance, the Canadian Wind Energy Association, and Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Canada. But regardless of that status, and irrespective of the NRSP’s stated purpose to block government action on climate change, the nearly arm’s-length relationship between High Park and the NRSP meant that the Canadian public had no right to ask who was paying the bills for the NRSP campaign.
    Harris continued to run the NRSP through all of 2007, even after Canada’s largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, ran a feature (“Who’s Still Cool on Global Warming?”) on January 28, 2007, exposing his energy-industry connections. But in March 2008 he popped up as the new executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, which operates from the same IP address and with most of the same “experts” (hello, Tim Ball and Albert Jacobs) as the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and the Australian Climate Science Coalition. The International Climate Science Coalition Web site, climatescienceinternational .org, states that the group “is an international association of scientists, economists and energy and policy experts working to promote better public understanding of climate change science and policy worldwide. ICSC is committed to providing a highly credible alternative to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thereby fostering a more rational, open discussion about climate issues.”
    Although Harris doesn’t tend to invoke the word “grassroots” quite so often at the International Climate Science Coalition, he remains committed to the old tactics. At a strategy session at the “2008 International Conference on Climate Change,” a gathering of climate deniers organized by the Heartland Institute, Harris said this (emphasis added):
    We need regular high-impact media coverage of the findings of leading scientists—not just one or two publications, but we need to have hundreds all over the world. We need to have a high degree of information sharing and cooperation between groups, so that when [the well-known New Zealand climate change denier] Vincent Gray, for example, has an article published in New Zealand, we can take the same piece and we can submit it to newspapers all over North America and Europe.
    Then we have a nicely well-coordinated response, where letters to the editor and phone calls are made. “Congratulations on publishing that article!” You know, it’s interesting because I’ve had many of my articles opposed so strongly, by environmentalists through phone calls and letters to the editor, that they just simply dry up, they just won’t publish us again. So this does have feedback, I mean, these are people that run these newspapers, and they’re scared, and impressed, and encouraged, depending on the feedback they get.
    We have to have grassroots organizations doing exactly that kind of thing: coordinated local activism.
    And finally, as I said, we