The Guardian considers the downward spiral of the Heartland Institute:

Heartland’s claims to “stay above the fray” of the climate wars was exploded by a billboard campaign earlier this month comparing climate change believers to the Unabomer Ted Kaczynski, and a document sting last February that revealed a plan to spread doubt among kindergarteners on the existence of climate change.

Along with the damage to its reputation, Heartland’s financial future is also threatened by an exodus of corporate donors as well as key members of staff.

In a fiery blogpost on the Heartland website, the organisation’s president Joseph Bast admitted Heartland’s defectors were “abandoning us in this moment of need”.

Over the last few weeks, Heartland has lost at least $825,000 in expected funds for 2012, or more than 35% of the funds its planned to raise from corporate donors, according to the campaign group Forecast the Facts, which is pushing companies to boycott the organisation.

The organisation has been forced to make up those funds by taking its first publicly acknowledged donations from the coal industry. The main Illinois coal lobby is a last-minute sponsor of this week’s conference, undermining Heartland’s claims to operate independently of fossil fuel interests.

Its entire Washington DC office, barring one staffer, decamped, taking Heartland’s biggest project, involving the insurance industry, with them.

Board directors quit, conference speakers cancelled at short-notice, and associates of long standing demanded Heartland remove their names from its website. The list of conference sponsors shrank by nearly half from 2010, and many of those listed sponsors are just websites operating on the rightwing fringe.

“It’s haemorrhaging,” said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, who has spent years tracking climate contrarian outfits. “Heartland’s true colours finally came through, and now people are jumping ship in quick order.”

It does not look like Heartland is about to adopt a corrective course of action.

Incidentally, I think “The Heartland Institute” wins the Most Orwellian Name Ever Prize. Not even the PATRIOT Act combines such innocuous Americana imagery with a hardcore extreme agenda that has little to do with what America is all about. But moving on…

Of course this was going to happen eventually. No completely false ideology survives forever, it’s simply impossible. (Yeah, I know, the atheists among us would argue that religion pokes a hole in that theory, but I’ll get to that momentarily.) Put simply, the more audacious the lie, the more effort it takes to get people to believe it. Lies like this require considerable resources and energy to propagate and maintain, and eventually the interest and resources simply will not be there. In science, false beliefs (which, admittedly, often are due to religious dogma) tend to have a very definite half-life. It was a matter of decades after Galileo’s recantation until basically everyone agreed with him about the Earth orbiting the Sun, even less than that for quantum mechanics to go from a vehemently rejected notion to basically the accepted standard that is taught uncontroversially in schools, even though the implications of that raise far more questions about divine intervention than evolution does. Climate denialism seems to me to be very much of the same trend as the Sun-orbiting-the-Earth stuff, rigorous science rebutted essentially by, “But that’s not what we think is happening!” So we’re talking about a bankrupt ideology with an obvious expiration date, the only question is when that date is. A scientist friend of mine once told me that once-controversial scientific theories don’t gain universal acceptance by convincing the (invariably older and more successful) critics that they’re wrong, but rather by just waiting for those people to retire. I don’t think we can wait that long. But perhaps we will not have to.

What the Heartland Institute shows, really, is how thoroughly the right wing has become Breitbartized. Climate denialism has, I must admit, been quite successful when you consider that they have almost nothing to work with, aside from a resistance to change and some sense that the existence of any doubt on the science means that no action ought to be taken on it. That’s not nothing, to be sure, but it’s hardly a winning hand, and they’ve played it well. But they haven’t won a total victory or anything close to it, their gains are already slipping, and the Ted Kaczynski billboard has laid bare their Breitbartist core. The article leaves the implication that some combination of the Koch and coal money will keep the outfit afloat, but those sources of funding just make “the cause” seem parochial and partisan, which is basically what it is, and as the article notes, will lead to a ghettoizing effect. Big corporations aren’t going to be motivated to save the world by Al Gore, but they’re not going to give money to a Breitbart clone either, for exactly the same reason in both cases: it’s not good business to donate to people that a significant chunk of the public sees as extreme (whether or not that’s actually true) and will boycott over. Andrew Breitbart didn’t manage to see it while alive, but his ideas and style might yet destroy his own cause.

So, what do you think? With ALEC and Heartland severely crippled (and the former focusing solely on economic stuff now), is the stage set for a climate comeback over the next few years?

(As for religion, I would argue that it is a different situation from something that is basically scientific or otherwise fact-based. Obviously, it’s impossible to imagine a universe in which both Islam and Chiristianity are both literally true, and yet both persist. But regardless of whether you believe them or not, both connect to deeper truths about humanity even if the claims they make aren’t correct–these claims are regularly revised anyway. You could argue that this is just good philosophy, which it is to some extent. But the point in religion is that you’re dealing with a rather sophisticated, multilayered notion of truth, which is not the case in science.)