If anyone can be called “leader” of the climate change denialist movement in the US today, it might be Myron Ebell. Ebell is former Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and (until 2024) chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group devoted to what they perceive as“dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis”. What Ebell is not, is a scientist, and he has no background in science. And although he of course claims to advocate “for sensible energy policies that benefit everyone. Instead of policies that simply reacts [sic] to alarmism,” Ebell has tirelessly used his positions and organization to promote climate change denialism. In September 2016, Ebell was appointed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Ebell rose to prominence as a climate change denialist in the 1990s, after making a name for himself as a staunch critic of what he saw as Newt Gingrich’s radical environmentalism. In 1998, he and a group of PR experts and wingnut think-tank representatives (such as David Rothbard and Steve Milloy) produced a “Global Climate Science Communications” plan aimed to convince “a majority of the American public” and policymakers that “significant uncertainties exist in climate science”– yes, the plan was explicitly to manufacture uncertainty– and that the science was inaccurate and should be ignored. Though CEI was funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, the Dow Chemical Company and the Murray Energy Corporation coal mining group, Ebell has reassured everyone that “We’re not beholden to our donors”. Ebell was, however, instrumental in getting then-president George W. Bush to drop any pledge to curb emisions, withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, and to push out people at the EPA who were willing to actually use facts as an important element in their decision making (some more details about Ebell and the CEI’s involvement with the Bush administration here).
For the last two decades, Ebell has been a favorite go-to person for media outlets seeking to achieve a false balance between scientific consensus and layperson Ebell’s scientific denialism, a position Ebell (and CEI colleagues like Marlo Lewis, Iain Murray or Christopher Horner, author of the wingnut conspiracy theory piece of disinformation The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming) has used e.g. to dismiss UK’s then-Chief Scientist David King (a real scientist) as“an alarmist with ridiculous views who knows nothing about climate change.” Ebell has also criticized climate scientist James Hansen's by claiming that “James Hansen was not trained as a climate scientist. He was trained as an astronomer. He’s a physicist” and climate scientist and Arctic expert Robert Corell as “not a climate scientist” and “not an Arctic expert”. As for his own complete lack of scientific training, Ebell maintins that “people other than scientists [should] be allowed to participate” because “that [is] what a representative democracy is” (we can’t help but wonder why Ebell put ‘representative’ in there, even though that’s hardly the most glaring problem with his reasoning).
Ebell and the CEI have affirmed their opinion that global warming is a hoax (so much for “uncertainties”), that the data predicting climate change are false, and that the scientific consensus is “phony”, and they have weighed in on most significant events and findings with predictable denialist talking points and conspiracy theories, such as when a Climatic Research Unit computer server at the University of East Anglia was hacked and thousands of emails leaked in 2009: quick to attempt to muddy the waters, Ebell claimed – without any basis in reality– that the hacked emails “make it clear that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an organized conspiracy dedicated to tricking the world into believing that global warming is a crisis that requires a drastic response.” Ebell also falselythinks (or at least: claims) that“the rate of warming according to the data is much slower than the models used by the IPCC,” which is not supported by anything, though remember that Ebell’s goal is not to get it right but to convince you that the science is unclear and can be ignored– “if he deserves credit for anything – I would call it a black mark – it would be taking the tobacco playbook and applying it to climate change,” said Jeremy Symons, the assistant vice president for climate political affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund, of Myron Ebell. Ebell is at least abundantly clear thatscience, knowledge, evidence and research should be ignored when coming to conclusions about facts.
In 2006, CEI did a TV commercial about carbon dioxide with the slogan“They call it pollution; we call it life.” Ebell, meanwhile wrote a Forbes article called “Love Global Warming”, pointing out that “More people die from blizzards and cold spells than from heat waves.”
And of course he is the underdog here: Ebell has compared his efforts to fight science with funding from the oil industry and politicians as a “David versus Goliath struggle” against “corrupt environmentalism and big government”; the “environmental movement is not an objective, well-intentioned movement that cares about saving the planet” but a ploy instigated by Marxist and the radical left to ensure “lower material standards of living, more government control, and more power for the technocratic elite.”
In 2024, Ebell retired from CEI, citing (a.o.) alleged side effects from COVID-19 vaccines. Yes, if you’re career has been devoted to science denialism and conspiracy theories in one area, why not go for ideologically motivated denialism and conspiracy theories everywhere? Current CEI president CEI President Kent Lassman at least said he was“tremendously grateful” for Ebell’s work: “As a result, we enjoy an enviable position as a leader on crucial issues to the future of America and the economy.”
Ebell was also a signatory to a 2021 letter, authored by Cleta Mitchell, urging Senate Republicans to “protect the republic” by contesting electors from battleground states won by Joe Biden in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
There is a decent Myron Ebell portrait here.
Diagnosis: According to the Sierra Club, Myron Ebell is “One of the single greatest threats our planet has ever faced”. He is, without doubt, one of the most influential climate change denialists in the US, and one of the least principled ones when it comes to willingness to subvert facts to serve ideology. We have no doubt, however, that one of the first victims of Ebell’s disinformation campaigns was himself – the distinction between spineless fraud and true believer is messy here.