Huelskamp lands job at conservative think tank known for climate change denial

Tim Huelskamp

Former Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp is taking a new job as president of a conservative think tank that is known for rejecting the scientific consensus that Earth’s climate is changing due to human activity.

The Heartland Institute, based in suburban Chicago, announced Thursday that Huelskamp will take over as its new president in July. That organization has long argued that there is no scientific evidence to support the idea that manmade carbon emissions are having any measurable effect on Earth’s climate.

“Overwhelming scientific evidence suggests the greenhouse gas-induced global climate signal is so small as to be embedded within the background variability of the natural climate system and is not dangerous,” the organization states on its website.

Huelskamp is a conservative Republican from Fowler who represented the western Kansas 1st District in Congress for three terms, 2011-2017. Known for his firebrand criticisms of political opponents, he fell out of favor with House GOP leaders and former Speaker John Boehner, who stripped him of his seats on the House Agriculture and Budget committees in 2012.

Huelskamp lost his bid for a fourth term in the 2016 elections when Roger Marshall of Great Bend beat him in the Republican primary. Marshall went on to win the general election as well.

The Heartland Institute describes itself as a free-market think tank whose mission is “to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”

The organization has issued position statements on a wide range of public policy issues. But it made national news earlier this year when it mailed out 25,000 copies of its own book, “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming,” in a move that critics said was an attempt to insert climate change denial propaganda into public school classrooms.

Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic who has long been associated with the Heartland Institute, was in charge of President Donald Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency. He suggested as early as January that as president Trump would move to pull the United States out of the global Paris climate agreement, something he ultimately did June 1.