Heartland Institute leak: media coverage picks up, promise of more to come

The Guardian has picked it up:

The Valentine’s Day exposé of Heartland is reminscent to a certain extent of the hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in 2009. Those documents helped sink the UN’s climate summit later that year.

In this instance, however, the Heartland documents are policy statements – not private email correspondence. Desmogblog said they came from an insider at Heartland and were not the result of a hack.

The documents posted on Desmog’s website include confidential memos of Heartland’s climate science denial strategy, its 2012 budget and fundraising plan, and minutes from a recent board meeting.

The fundraising plan suggests Heartland is hoping for a banner year, projecting it will raise $7.7m in 2012, up 70% from last year.

The papers indicate that discrediting established climate science remains a core mission of the organisation, which has received support from a network of wealthy individuals – including the Koch oil billionaires as well as corporations such as Microsoft and RJR Tobacco.

The Huffington Post gets wind:

Internal Heartland Institute strategy and funding documents obtained by DeSmogBlog expose the heart of the climate denial machine — its current plans, many of its funders, and details that confirm what DeSmogBlog and others have reported for years. The heart of the climate denial machine relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from U.S. businesses including Microsoft, Koch Industries, Altria (parent company of Philip Morris), RJR Tobacco and more.

We are releasing the entire trove of documents now to allow crowd-sourcing of the material. Here are a few quick highlights, stay tuned for much more.

Hints of more?

I’ll be looking at the Australian angle. I note there is a mention of another Australian in the documents, I’m researching that individual right now.

Message to the deniers…

There are no secrets. Everything can be, and will be, exposed. The evidence exists. We will source it. We will publish it.

Expect us.