Trouble in the Heartland

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13362/trouble_in_the_heartland/

There had been warnings about the possibility of trouble at the Heartland Institute’s Seventh International Conference on Climate Change. In his opening remarks, the president of this think tank of radical free marketeers, Joseph Bast, asked attendees to help security personnel identify anyone who might disrupt the proceedings. And the tote bag stuffed with printed materials contained a sheet with “PLEASE READ” printed in bold red letters at the top. It advised us to avoid engaging protestors; to carry personal identification at all times; and to refrain from wearing our name badges outside the Hilton Chicago, where the conference was held.

The last day of the NATO summit overlapped with the first day of the Heartland conference, so there were plenty of protesters in the vicinity. But the mix of urgency, exasperation and exhilaration went deeper than NATO’s presence. It was like how I imagine the 1950s, when Joseph McCarthy’s true believers knew that the U.S. government was full of Communist subversives, but precious few people had the courage and wisdom to recognize this fact.

McCarthy once said that the nation’s predicament “must be the product of … a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” For the climate-change skeptics gathered here at the Heartland conference for three days in late May, the new grand conspirators are “Warmists” and “Alarmists”—people who believe that human activity drives climate change and that global warming is a threat to human civilization.

I was there to observe the proceedings as an avowed Alarmist. Despite the warnings, the only violence I witnessed was actually self-inflicted—Larry Bell, a popular writer and climate-change skeptic, tripped on a suitcase sitting in the middle of a doorway and went crashing to the ground. He took his walking companion halfway to the floor with him, and a gaggle of staff and security personnel gathered around.

“For a second there,” someone blurted out, “I thought it was an Alarmist attack.”