Correcting record on smoking, climate views

We here at The Heartland Institute - your friendly neighborhood free-market think tank in Arlington Heights - are used to calumnies like those from letter-writer and citizens climate lobbyist Rick Knight, who gets his false talking points from turgid agitprop "documentaries." [Letter to the editor, "Smoking-cancer link and climate denial," May 25.] Let me correct the record.

Heartland has never attempted to "confuse the public about smoking," nor, as Knight claims, have we denied that smoking kills.

Heartland has argued the risks of smoking are exaggerated by the public health community to justify their calls for more regulations on businesses and higher taxes on smokers.

We've also argued that risk of adverse health effects from secondhand smoke is dramatically less than for active smoking. This exaggerated junk science is then used to clear the way for higher taxes on smokers, restrictions on their personal freedom and restrictions on the property rights of the owners of bars and other businesses.

This use of exaggerated science to try to raise taxes and curtail freedoms has also long been a feature of the climate change debate. Case in point would be the highly regressive, environmentally-impotent carbon tax that the Citizens' Climate Lobby spends all its time soliciting for.

As for climate change, I agree that certainly the planet is warming and human activity factors into this. However, there is much debate about how much the planet is warming, whether that warming is catastrophic and how much of that is attributed to human activities.

That last point - whether human activity is the only factor, the most important factor, or a trivial factor - has not been sufficiently established by the scientific literature. And the proclamations that 97 percent of scientists agree that it is entirely or mostly man-caused and catastrophic is a persistent myth, but a myth nonetheless.

Timothy Benson, Policy Analyst

The Heartland Institute

Arlington Heights