Wisconsin Climate Change Gag Order Part of Broader Industry-Tied Attacks on Science
On April 7, Wisconsin’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands voted 2-1 to ban those employed by the agency from doing any work pertaining to climate change or global warming while doing public lands related work.
Although the story was covered bymultiple media outlets, lost in the public discussion so far is how the vote fits into the broader multi-front industry attack in America’s Dairyland-turned-Petro State and which industry interests may have played a role in the vote.
The historical roots of the vote appear to trace back to an April 2009 congressional testimony given by Tia Nelson, executive secretary for the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands and daughter of former Wisconsin Democratic Governor Gaylord Nelson, in favor of passage of the American Clean Energy Security Act of 2009.
That bill is better known as the controversial and eventually nixed Waxman-Markey climate bill, a bill opposed vigorously by the fossil fuel industry (and some environmentalists, too).
Gaylord Nelson served as the founder of Earth Day and is the namesake for both the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, as well as Gaylord Nelson State Park.
Tia Nelson, when she testified in front of congress, sat as co-chair of former Wisconsin Democratic Governor Jim Doyle’s global warming task force. The task force — announced during Doyle’s 2007 State of the State address — published a report in July 2008 titled, “Wisconsin’s Strategy for Reducing Global Warming.”
That report was derided by environmentalists for coming out in support of lifting the state’s nuclear energy moratorium and by corporate interests and climate change deniers like State Policy Network (SPN) “stink tank” members Wisconsin Public Research Institute (WPRI) and the Beacon Hill Institute, which co-authored a November 2009 report titled, “The Economics of Climate Change Proposals in Wisconsin.”
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