FOCUS SHIFTED
Ford chose an unusual way to display its Focus during a press preview day at the Geneva Motor Show Wednesday.
General Motors, a company that has made strides to lower the carbon footprint of driving, is taking heat from 10,000 of its customers for a donation its charitable foundation made to an institute that casts doubt on climate science.
GM vehicle buyers have posted online comments objecting to the GM Foundation’s gifts of $30,000 in the past two years to the Heartland Institute, a free-market advocacy organization that publicizes its disagreement with prevailing scientific views about evidence of climate change.
Dozens of comments were posted by Forecast the Facts, a group that advocates for accurate climate reporting by meteorologists.
Many companies support the Heartland Institute, but Forecast the Facts focused on GM because it got taxpayers’ dollars in the auto bailout, and “people really care about GM and what it stands for in American society and in the American economy,” said the group’s campaign director, Daniel Souweine.
The foundation’s $15,000 annual gift in 2010, repeated in 2011, went to the Heartland Institute’s general funds, not its climate program, said a GM spokeswoman, Carolyn Markey. Heartland also takes a free-market approach to other areas.
The GM Foundation hasn’t decided on its 2012 funding yet, Markey said.
It was set up with a GM endowment but hasn’t received GM funding since 2001. In the past 10 years, the foundation has given $303 million to various causes, including $27 million to increase graduation rates in Detroit and a $4.5-million annual college scholarship program.
Souweine said Tuesday that more than 10,000 current and former owners of GM vehicles were asking the company to stop supporting Heartland.
Heartland contends global warming has stopped, a view that is contradicted by global data and reports from many scientists, including those at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA, for example, has reported that each of the last three decades has been warmer than the decade before.
Heartland, however, sees global warming as part of a “liberal political agenda,” according to its website.
It argues that warming rose mostly from natural causes and has stopped, and that the benefits of “moderate warming” will probably outweigh the costs. The organization plans to fund a K-12 curriculum saying climate science is controversial.