The Think Tank That Destroyed the Paris Climate Agreement

A little-known US think tank has played an outsized role in encouraging the Trump Administration to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.

Here is more from Axios:

The non-profit Competitive Enterprise Institute played a big role in rallying outside conservative groups.  An administration source says CEI was "the energy" and "enabled the issue to stay high profile in the White House for months."  CEI marshaled a coalition letter of influential outside groups, and helped generate the letter from the 22 Republican senators — including Mitch McConnell — that gave Trump crucial ammo.

Myron Ebell, Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at CEI, and the leader of Trump's transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), recently said that the Trump Administration is moving too slowly to unravel climate change regulations.

Ebell correctly noted that Trump would pull out of the deal before the official announcement was made.  Here is CEI's statement commending Trump on pulling out of the agreement.

Here is a CEI statement on why the Paris agreement "is all pain and no gain" for Americans.

Here are some more tidbits about CEI's influence from The Daily Caller:

In early May, the heads of 44 free market groups sent a letter to Trump, urging him to withdraw from the agreement.  The coalition was led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

In May, CEI launched an online petition and ad campaign to remind Trump of his campaign promise to withdraw from the Paris accord, and AEA circulated another petition calling for Trump to withdraw from the agreement.

CEI senior fellows Chris Horner and Marlo Lewis published a report detailing the legal risks of remaining in the accord.  CEI’s Myron Ebell, who headed Trump’s EPA transition team, was also public about his opposition to the Paris agreement.

CEI has also been a big defender of EPA chief Scott Pruitt, and was among the groups that supported his nomination.

According to the latest publicly available Internal Revenue Service (IRS) records, CEI has 33 employees, annual revenue of around $7.4 million, and net assets of around $2.4 million.

In related news, the president of the conservative think tank Heartland Institute was among those invited to the White House climate announcement.

In more related news, the Heritage Foundation says that it impacted Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

Think Tanker Attacked by Name on Senate Floor...22 Years Later

There is some good news for think tankers out there who are wondering if the policy papers they write get any attention.  They certainly do, although it can sometimes take decades.  The case of former think tanker Sasha Volokh is a perfect example.  Here is what he just wrote for the Washington Post:

One of the problems with working in policy — whether at think tanks or in academia — is that it’s hard to measure one’s impact. We kind of believe that ideas have some effect in the real world (if we’re being optimistic), but it’s rare for us to see the evidence as to ourselves personally. Even intermediate measures — do people even read our stuff? — can be hard to come by.

In my case, I finally know that someone is reading my work from 22 years ago! Straight out of college, in 1993-94, I worked at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market policy organization in Washington, D.C. One of the areas I worked in a lot was the FDA and tobacco policy — this was shortly before the Clinton FDA asserted jurisdiction over tobacco, a move that the Supreme Court said in FDA v. Brown & Williamson (2000) was contrary to the statute. The capstone of that year was getting my first Wall Street Journal op-ed published: “Feel a Heart Attack Coming? Go to France."

Last week, I finally got tangible proof that someone was reading my pieces from back then. As part of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s (D-NH) attack on CEI, she said..."CEI lobbied politicians, conducted symposia, and published policy papers and op-eds with titles such as ‘Safety Is a Relative Thing for Cars: Why Not for Cigarettes?’ CEI’s then-policy analyst, Alexander Volokh, even went so far as to describe the act of smoking as a civic duty."

The video of the attack can be viewed here (go to 5:15).  So do not fear you young think tankers.  After all, you too may one day have your paper blasted on the Senate or House floor, just like Mr. Volokh.

Coolest Think Tank Studies Program

Bland think tank studies programs focusing on topics such as economics, foreign policy, immigration studies, and education policy abound at think tanks.  Boring.

But do not fear all of you bon vivants, for the conservative think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) probably has the coolest program around, and it is run by Michelle Minton, a Fellow at CEI and Director of "Sindustry Studies."

Yes, sindustry studies. Her Twitter description says that she fights for the right to eat, drink, gamble, and be merry.

In other words, she writes about beer, wine, liquor, soda, sugar, meat, doughnuts, junk food, Internet gambling, and even tampons.  Where do we sign up?

We think that the program should join forces with what is probably the coolest corporate think tank in 2015: Absolut Labs.  The brand director of that new think tank also happens to have the coolest think tank business card around.