Climate change skeptics kick off ninth-annual conference

 
It’s not a Trey Parker-Matt Stone Broadway musical, yet.

It’s the ninth-annual climate-change-skeptics conference being held today and tomorrow in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay hotel. It started at 8 a.m. and it’s being live streamed.

Right now, a speaker is playing video of Al Gore receiving an environmental award, jabbing at him for talking about “we ugly deniers and the tons and tons of carbon that is ruining the planet’s climate.”

“But…” says the speaker, sliding into a softer tone. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is playing in the background over video taken from a satellite as it moves over the earth. “We skeptics love the planet. We want to develop clean energy. We know there is no climate crisis. We know there is no reason to panic. Fossil fuels are not causing significant warming…”

Here’s the schedule and list of speakers.

The event is sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free-market think tank. Heartland President Joseph Bast delivered opening remarks a few minutes ago. Here’s an excerpt from a transcript emailed to reporters:

[blockquote]On the program are economists and policy experts explaining the social BENEFITS as well as the social COSTS of fossil fuels, the futility of spending trillions of dollars attempting to stop uncertain and perhaps unknowable climate changes a century from now, and the need to repeal the bad energy policies and other policies that were adopted at the peak of the global warming scare and are now understood to be unnecessary, costly, and counterproductive…

Speaking of funding and for the record, except for $150 from the Illinois Coal Association and another $150 from Liberty Coin Service, a great little coin shop in Lansing, Michigan, owned by my old friend Pat Heller, no corporate money was raised for this conference. And no, not a nickel from the “Koch brothers.”[/blockquote]