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Below is a fundraising letter one of our loyal readers sent along, penned by Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. [7]

It's quite the vitriolic and desperate pitch for money - something the CEI is no doubt in need of after their fall from grace with oil giant ExxonMobil. [8] This vast government, media, science conspiracy theory stuck in Smith's head isn't going to save any shred of credibility he and his organization might have left.

And it won't endear him with media, who he describes in the letter as being "remarkably gullible."

The letter also outlines the CEI's plans to run a national TV campaign to expose the "… hypocrisy and distortions of global warming mania."

Wow, a national TV campaign by CEI!? Hopefully it goes as well as their last one. [9]

Here's the intro:

… about Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”?

… about how we’re supposedly killing the planet?

… about how we Americans must drastically cut back our standard of living to avert an alleged catastrophe?

Here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, we’re the leading group in the country telling the “real” truth about global warming.

And the hard-left environmentalists don’t like it one bit. That’s because their agenda is not based on science but on ideology – an ideology that opposes human technology and progress.

An ideology that is anti-growth, anti-capitalist, and anti-American.

Unfortunately, the global warming movement has become incredibly powerful. It has convinced many Americans that global warming is a catastrophe in the making.

More dangerously, they have recruited powerful allies in a remarkably gullible news media, which have dropped all pretense of balance and instead are committed advocates for the global warming agenda.

Have you noticed, for example, how every heat wave results in more media hysteria, while record cold waves are brushed aside as irrelevant?
And remember the dire predictions that the record 2005 hurricane season was a trend that would continue because it was fueled by global warming?  Remember how it was followed by an embarrassed media in 2006, when not a single hurricane hit the U.S.?

But the radical environmentalists won’t be deterred.

On the contrary, aided by Hollywood elites, pop culture icons and political opportunists like Al Gore, the global warming movement is on the brink of turning its agenda of fear into actual public policy that will do enormous harm to our prosperity and to our freedom.

That’s why I need your help today.
 
As President and Founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market public policy group established in 1984. Mr. Smith is also a frequent guest on national television including such shows as CNN's "Crossfire," PBS's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" and "Now with Bill Moyers," ABC's "20/20" and "This Week," NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and "The Diane Rehm Show," and "The G. Gordon Liddy Show," among many others.

A prolific writer, Mr. Smith's works have been published in leading newspapers and magazines such as the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Economic Affairs, and the Washington Times.

Letter from Smith: 

My name is Fred Smith. I am founder and president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

My colleagues and I are doing everything we can to fight the reckless politics of the global warming movement. And to speak out about the dangers that their radical agenda poses to you, to me and to every single American.

For years now, pro-free market, pro-limited government individuals and organizations have warned of the growing threat posed by unfounded global warming hysteria.

But, as I’m sure you agree, they’ve been unable to actually stop the radical green political juggernaut we see today. That juggernaut that is now a dominant force in American politics thanks to the results of last year’s elections.

That is, until now.

At the Competitive Enterprise Institute we’re ready to do more than just TALK about the hypocrisy and distortions of global warming mania; we’re ready to DO SOMETHING about it.

That’s why we are launching a national TV ad campaign to expose Al Gore and the global warming alarmists. We have produced two hard-hitting 60-second television ads that we have already aired on a limited basis.

TV ads can be expensive, but it’s the best way to reach millions of Americans.

And remember, these ads are only the first step in a massive new public education campaign to stand up to the wild hysteria of the global warming fanatics

These ads are important because they represent a truly new strategy in combating the junk science, scare tactics and blatant propaganda of today’s radical green movement.

That strategy is to take our case directly to the people. These first two ads remind people of how biased the media are in presenting the alleged science behind global warming alarmism, and of how reducing CO2 emissions can’t be achieved without a massive loss of individual freedom and drastic reductions in the living standards of ordinary Americans;

These ads – and the new ones we hope to produce and air soon with your help –are not aimed at scholars and “policy wonks,” but at ordinary Americans.

You Can Help Us Show These Ads by Going Here Now

Let me tell you a bit about CEI.  We are not a traditional "think tank." Our work does not stop with groundbreaking research. We realize it is not enough to simply identify the flaws in the arguments of those who think massive government is the solution to every problem.  Instead, we have to actively reach out - not just to other scholars and to policy makers – but to the public and the media to ensure that our ideas are heard.

This approach has made us one of the nation’s most effective and powerful forces for economic freedom, and against global warming alarmism.

We’ve been called “the best environmental think tank in the country” by The Wall Street Journal.

The Weather Channel named CEI as one of the ten most influential participants in the global warming debate in 2006. No other non-profit group made the list. Not one of the big environmental groups, with annual budgets twenty or fifty times CEI’s, was named to the list. Not the Sierra Club. Not Greenpeace. Not the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Only CEI.

Two liberal U.S. Senators were so upset with our efforts that they wrote a letter which threatened one of our corporate supporters unless they cut off our funding. These two senators even mentioned CEI by name in this outrageous attempt to stifle free speech.

That just tells me we are effective.

CEI has done a tremendous amount of research on global warming alarmism. I invite you to explore our website (www.cei.org [10]) and review the many papers we have published that challenge the so-called “proven” science behind global warming.

But research alone isn’t enough to win this fight.

That’s why we need your help today – Go Here Now

The truth is most of the papers we publish – while enormously influential in policy circles – will never be seen by the general public. And thanks to a biased news media, they will go largely unreported.

This means that we have to go beyond the usual arenas of academic debates, and reach out directly to the public.

The messages contained in our hard-hitting TV ads are the first step in our plan to do this.

IF we can raise the funds we need from concerned Americans like you, we can take those messages to a far wider audience.

I admit that this will be one tough fight.  Our adversaries have been masterful at manipulating public opinion.

Because of films like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Hollywood thriller, “The Day After Tomorrow,” and countless unquestioning TV news reports and newspaper articles, more than 8 out of 10 Americans now believe that human-induced global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions threatens our planet.

Thanks especially to Al Gore and his movie, which has been called one of the “slickest science propaganda films of all time,” ordinary people are now haunted by visions of droughts, floods, disease, famine, mass extinctions, ferocious storms and catastrophic rises in sea level.

But in reality Gore’s movie is more science fiction than science.  Most of his claims are not even backed by the scientists that he claims support him.  (I urge you to read our point-by-point rebuttal of Al Gore; just look for Al Gore’s Science Fiction at www.cei.org [11].)

In fact, a growing body of evidence demonstrates how little basis there is for claims that we face a global warming catastrophe:

Yes, there has been a slight warming trend (about 1 degree Fahrenheit) in the 20th century.  This was to be expected, since the Earth was still recovering, after all, from a multi-century cold spell known as the Little Ice Age.
But it’s highly uncertain that CO2 had much to do with that slight warming.  From 1940 to 1975, the global temperature fell even as CO2 emissions rose. Since 2001, global temperatures have only gone up a statistically insignificant .03 degrees Celsius.
And as for whether mankind played a role in that slight warming, two new scholarly books have just been published throwing new doubt on this claim.

[]


In "Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years," scientists Fred Singer and Dennis Avery present evidence of 600 global warming and cooling periods in the last million years.
In "The Chilling Stars," Professor Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder discuss how cosmic rays amplify small changes in the sun's brightness, creating 1- to 2-degree increases in temperatures on earth.

Global warming alarmists would have you believe that, until now, the Earth has always had a stable climate.  But in fact, over the millennia, the earth has warmed and cooled repeatedly.  The reasons for this are unclear, but they were certainly unrelated to human activity.  Yet Al Gore and the other alarmists want us to ignore this.

We won’t. Help us expose Al Gore – Go Here Now

In fact, the green lobby pretends that there is an absolute “scientific consensus” on a coming climate disaster, and they want to shut down the debate altogether.  In Mr. Gore’s words, "the debate in the scientific community is over."

Those scientists and analysts who disagree are under increasing professional and personal attack.

For example, Heidi Cullen, an "expert" for the Weather Channel, declared that meteorologists who disagree with her about global warming should not be certified to report the weather on television.
More outrageously, liberal newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman wrote, “We’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.”

But if global warming alarmists are so certain of their position, then why do they react so harshly when anyone challenges their views?

I believe the answer is that they’re not all that certain at all.  They know full well that many of their claims can’t withstand critical review.

And they know that once their pretense of a consensus starts falling apart, their radical political agenda will collapse as well!

In short, we can win this debate.

And, in fact, we must win it.

Too much is at stake for our children’s future, our nation’s prosperity, our way of life, our freedom, to do anything less than our utmost on this issue.

We need to take the battle of global warming hysteria to the next level.

And I must ask for your most generous financial support to make this happen.
 
We need to run our new series of hard hitting ads, not in just a few cities, but in every media market in the United States. And we need to air them often enough and continuously enough to change public opinion.

Our initial budget for this massive undertaking is $6.5 million dollars. This budget allows us to create and air a series of ads challenging the false claims of the global warming crowd with indisputable scientific evidence.

I am convinced these ads will get results.

Our goals with this campaign are clearly ambitious. Nothing on this scale has ever been tried before. $6.5 million is a lot of money.

But it is really a very small amount when you consider the potential danger our economy faces from ill-advised, politically-motivated global warming legislation. Some have estimated that the cost to enact panic legislation to curb carbon emissions will be in the TRILLIONS of dollars.

If the alarmists get their way you could end up paying twice as much as you do now for gasoline or electricity.  Great Britain is considering limiting the number of personal plane trips that a “regular” person can take to one a year.

I believe we can succeed in turning this debate around. But we are absolutely dependant on the generous financial support of Americans like you.

You can make a difference today – Go Here Now

Will you become a Friend of the Competitive Enterprise Institute by sending a tax-deductible donation of $1,000 or more today?

Your $1,000 donation can pay to run as many as 20 – or perhaps more – of our ads on television stations and cable channels around the country.

While I hope you will consider a gift at that level, please know your donation today of $100, $250 or $500 is also most welcome and urgently needed.

Rest assured, at whatever donation level you feel comfortable, your tax-deductible contribution will be much appreciated and put to immediate good use in our campaign against global warming alarmism … and for affordable energy and economic freedom around the world.

I have enclosed a donor information page detailing the benefits of giving to CEI at a number of levels.

Remember, no one does what we do. No other public policy group is duplicating the work we are doing to counter the global warming fanatics. And if we don’t succeed now in changing public opinion, we will lose this debate and America will be changed forever.

For 20 years CEI has been at the forefront of the struggle for liberty. And despite modest resources, we’ve succeeded time and time again! But we cannot succeed alone.

Time is short. Ill advised, global warming legislation is being introduced and debated right now. We have very little time to get the truth out about global warming.

Please make your most generous possible contribution
to CEI without delay - Go Here Now.

Sincerely,
Fred L. Smith, Jr.
President and Founder

P.S. Please, do not put this letter aside thinking one person can't make a difference. Your $100, $250, $500 or hopefully $1,000 or more, tax-deductible contribution to CEI today can truly have an impact on public opinion. As a thoughtful and concerned American, your personal commitment to our crusade to tell the truth about global warming is important to our success.

Take a minute to help us fight back – Go Here