Hayward & Green on the attack on AEI:

On February 2, an AEI research project on climate change policy that we have been organizing was the target of a journalistic hit piece in Britain’s largest left-wing newspaper, the Guardian. The article’s allegation–that we tried to bribe scientists to criticize the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)–is easy to refute. More troubling is the growing worldwide effort to silence anyone with doubts about the catastrophic warming scenario that Al Gore and other climate extremists are putting forth. “Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today,” read the Guardian’s lead. The byline was Ian Sample, the paper’s science correspondent, and his story ran under the headline “Scientists Offered Cash to Dispute Climate Study.” Sample spoke to one of us for five minutes to gather a perfunctory quotation to round out his copy, but he clearly was not interested in learning the full story. He found time, however, to canvass critics for colorful denunciations of the American Enterprise Institute as “the Bush administration’s intellectual Cosa Nostra,” with nothing but “a suitcase full of cash.” Every claim in the story was false or grossly distorted, starting with the description of the American Enterprise Institute as a “lobby group”–AEI engages in no lobbying–funded by the world’s largest oil company.