BY JIM GREEN
Welcome to the world of the conservative think tank, a world in which modern forestry "helps preserve wildlife habitat", "radioactive waste has a great advantage over other kinds of waste", "a camel is a horse designed by a committee", and humanity is "entering an age of increasing and unprecedented natural resources abundance".
Conservative think tanks are tools used by corporations in their assault on environmentalism, along with corporate front groups, advertising and public relations, law suits designed to intimidate and silence environmentalists and violence, whether direct or by the state.
Corporations use "greenwashing" strategies designed to co-opt environmentalists and to win public acceptance by painting their operations as environmentally sound, as well as propaganda strategies to demonise and marginalise environmentalists in the public eye.
So too do the conservative think tanks, although there is a very heavy emphasis on demonisation: environmentalists are anti-environment, anti-freedom, anti-jobs, racist, imperialist, fascist, dishonest sorcerers. All at the same time!
Think tanks have become increasingly numerous over the past 20-30 years — there are more than 1000 in the United States alone. Think tanks present themselves as independent research institutes — "universities without students". However, their main source of funds and the composition of their boards and research teams expose them as attack dogs for big business.
Networks
Think tanks' aim is to influence governments, bureaucrats, the public and the media. As Sharon Beder noted in the June-July 1999 Arena magazine, "[Think tanks] insinuate themselves into the networks of people who are influential in particular areas of policy. They do this by organising conferences, seminars and workshops and by publishing books, briefing papers, journals and media releases. They liaise with bureaucrats, consultants, interest groups and lobbyists. They seek to provide advice directly to the government officials in policy networks and to government agencies and committees."
Australian think tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) boast about their frequent contributions to the capitalist media — which sit uncomfortably with their frequent rants about "left-wing media bias". The US Heritage Foundation claims that 200 or more media stories follow the release of each of its "position papers".
Think tanks used to be stodgy, little-known organisations, functioning primarily as retirement homes for embittered conservative ideologues. While they still play that role, they have become considerably more sophisticated and influential in the past 20 years. And, for better or worse, their agenda has expanded beyond economics and industrial relations to encompass environmentalism, feminism, the media and other issues.
A revolving door links think tanks to industry, universities and government bureaucracies. Capitalists such as Hugh Morgan (Western Mining Corporation) and Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation) have been associated with Australian think tanks, as have federal minister Rod Kemp (whose father founded the IPA), John Stone (former secretary of the treasury and a Coalition senator), Gerard Henderson (media columnist, former adviser to John Howard and now with the Sydney Institute) and John Hyde (media columnist, former federal Liberal MP).
Think tanks are almost always conservative in their political orientation. Some deny their conservatism, for example the IPA claims to be "small-l liberal". Others have successfully generated a false public perception of being moderate, for example the Brookings Institution in the US is frequently described as liberal or left-of-centre despite Brookings spokesperson Stan Wellborn admitting, "Our economics department is just full of anti-government free-marketeers."
Influence
Robert Bothwell, president of the US National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, says, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the millions effectively spent by conservative think tanks have enabled them virtually to dictate the issues and terms of national political debates."
A 1982 survey in the US found that government officials were more influenced in the long-term by think tanks than by public opinion or by special interest groups, and many officials were more influenced by think tanks than by media or interaction with members of Congress.
No doubt think tanks exert influence, but it is impossible to say how much. The federal Coalition government can be relied upon to put corporate profits ahead of environmental protection, with or without prodding from industry-funded think tanks. Often, think tanks use informal networks to exert influence — hence the value of employing former politicians and bureaucrats.
The most important function of think tanks lies, not in swinging particular debates, but in the more nebulous realm of "setting the agenda" and widening the parameters of "respectable" opinion.
Bob Burton, writing in Chain Reaction, warns that: "There are twin dangers in trying to understand the right wing think tanks. The first is to dismiss them and their policy positions as loopy and irrelevant. The second is to believe that they are all powerful. The truth is somewhere in between."
In the US, the top 20 conservative think tanks spent US$158 million in 1996. Total spending between 1990-2000 is likely to exceed US$1 billion. The 20 US think tanks, according to a study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, more than doubled their budgets between 1992 and 1999.
The growing influence of think tanks (and other conservative organisations) also needs to be understood in the context of the retreat of organised labour and the declining influence of the social movements over the past 20 years. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy points to "organized labor's declining ability to help set broad national budget and policy priorities, the single-issue focus on many left institutions, and the left's failure to develop and communicate to the American electorate an overarching public philosophy for the country."
Think tanks in Australia
In Australia, the most prominent think tank is the IPA, with a budget of about $1 million annually. Almost all of the members of the IPA's board come from business; one is the "AMP Professor of Finance" at Melbourne University.
Other prominent Australian think tanks include the CIS, the H.R. Nichols Society, the Tasman Institute and the Committee for Economic Development. Australian think tanks are often modelled on US think tanks and share close links with them.
In August 1997, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, a US think tank, organised a conference on climate change in Canberra in conjunction with the Australian APEC Study Centre. The head of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute said the conference would "offer world leaders the tools to break with the Kyoto Treaty".
Conservative think tanks pay a lot of attention to environmental issues. With some issues, such as carbon trading and energy markets, the interest is primarily economic. The IPA established a project on genetically modified foods in mid-1999, under the direction of John Hyde. "Environmental Policy" is one of the IPA's four "units".
Environmental debate
The approach of think tanks to environmental problems is predictable. Their first strategy is to deny the existence of environmental problems. No matter how strong the scientific evidence, just one or two dissidents (often industry-funded) will be enough for the think tanks to scream "unproven", brand advocates of change as politically motivated ideologues, and denounce governments willing to take action as being hostages to "minority interest groups" (e.g. the environmental movement).
A second strategy is to argue that addressing environmental problems is undesirable or unaffordable. Republican politician Newt Gingrich has claimed the US Environmental Protection Agency "may well be the biggest job-killing agency in the inner city in America today".
Another strategy, adopted by think tanks when some form of
change is inevitable, is to argue for changes that leave corporate power and profits intact, and to argue against "command-and-control" legislation which would force industry to reduce or stop environmental destruction.
Typical think-tank nostrums include industry "self-regulation", incentives for industry (not to be confused with government handouts!) and creating environmental property "rights".
In a World Environment Day speech last year, the IPA's Michael Warby talked up private ownership: "Cattle were owned, were looked after and multiplied enormously. Bison were unowned, and were hunted almost to extinction". As proof of capitalism"s ability to look after the environment, Warby noted that "the Ohio River no longer catches alight".
For all the think tanks' pontificating about "rational" economics, they never confront the central problem — that all too often environmental destruction is economically rational for capitalists. The Environmental News Service reported on July 28 that an "environmental cleanup company" has been charged over several intentional spills of diesel fuel and other pollutants. Company employees were accused of using trap-doors in a van to dump diesel fuel into the Huron River. The company then anonymously reported the spill, and won the clean-up contract. This was "rational economics" to the tune of US$36,000.
Market-based nostrums often leave it to industry to decide whether to reduce its environmental impact or pay a cost for maintaining business as usual. If there is a cost, it is likely to be passed on to consumers. Better still is to engage in creative accounting, for example a likely outcome of greenhouse negotiations will be a system in which companies exceeding greenhouse emission limits will be able to "borrow" emissions from future accounting periods at no cost or penalty — and no greenhouse gas reduction.
The ideological and political shaping of economic instruments has been hidden behind a mask of neutrality. As Beder writes in Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, "Far from being a neutral tool, the promotion of market-based instruments is viewed by many of its advocates as a way of resurrecting the role of the market in the face of environmental failure. They claim that economic instruments provide a means by which the power of the market can be harnessed to environmental goals. They serve a political purpose in that they reinforce the role of the 'free market' at a time which environmentalism most threatens it."
Conspiracies
On the one hand, think tanks portray themselves as reasonable and moderate, as with Hugh Morgan's article "Keeping Sustainable Development in Balance" in the September 1999 IPA Review. For the most part, however, think tanks concentrate on bizarre conspiracy theories, presumably designed to provide their audience with an ideological fix.
The September 1999 IPA Review made the following links between Nazism and environmentalism: the first country in Europe to ban fox-hunting was Nazi Germany; Germany's two distinctive contributions to 20th century political practice have been Nazism and environmentalism, both of which can be linked to 'the German cultural obsession with purity'.
In the same IPA Review, Roger Bate reviewed James M. Sheehan's book, Global Greens: Inside the International Environmental Establishment. Sheehan "foresees an ominous future as the last of the central planners advance their global agenda through a professed concern for Mother Earth", wrote Bate. He "shows how protectionist northern business interests ally with environmental NGOs in this type of process."
The Australian Institute for Public Policy's Facts magazine asserts that environmentalists are responsible for hundreds of thousands of cases of malaria in Sri Lanka by orchestrating the banning of the carcinogen DDT.
The alleged alliance between environmentalists and sections of industry is a hobby-horse of Terry L. Anderson, whose work is publicised by US think tanks. Anderson claims that "environmental special interest groups provide the moral high ground for economic special interest groups that stand to gain from legislation that hampers competitors."
Co-option
The influence of think tanks extends beyond conservative politicians. Free-market nostrums are the new orthodoxy within social democratic parties.
The Australian Labor Party, in its federal policy platform adopted at its recent national conference in Hobart, stated: "It is the fundamental responsibility of all governments to ensure ... that industry is not faced with a choice between responsible environmental management and economic profit". How the ALP proposes to resolve that dilemma is unexplained.
Moreover, free-market environmental nostrums have been swallowed by the right-wing of the environmental movement. As Beder notes in Global Spin: "The fact is that many environmentalists have been persuaded by the rhetoric of free-market environmentalism ... Economic instruments are being advocated as a technocratic solution to environmental problems, premised on the conservative think tanks' view of the problem — that environmental degradation is caused by a failure to 'value' the environment and a lack of properly defined property rights. By allowing this redefinition of environmental problems, environmentalists and others not only forestall criticism of the market system but in fact implicitly agree that an extension of markets is the only way to solve the problem."
The only "environmentalist" to get a good rap from the Australian think tanks is John Wamsley, who runs Earth Sanctuaries Ltd, a company which uses investors funds to buy land for conservation. Wamsley told the March IPA Review, "The first investor who came in said he wanted to be green, but he took out his half million profit when it came to that." Wamsley is as blinkered by economics as the best of the think tankers: "Things which are not profitable must fail, or be run in a minimum way. That is why Australia's conservation record is so poor."
"Is there anything you want to say in conclusion?", the IPA Review asked Wamsley. "If anybody has any sense, they would buy our shares. The future will tell that they are an excellent buy now."