"In Las Vegas, Climate Change Deniers Re-Group, Vow to Keep Doubt Alive"

"On Monday, the Heartland Institute convened its Ninth International Climate Change Conference in Las Vegas. A Chicago-based, non-profit free-market think tank with a $6 million annual budget, Heartland has been hosting conferences for those dubious of the science confirming human-caused climate change since 2008. Called the ICCC for short, the acronym is an intentional echo of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international body that has published the most comprehensive studies of global warming. The ICCC, not IPCC, conference has been held in New York, Munich, and Chicago. This year’s kicked off with a dinner for roughly 600 in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, the top floors of which were decorated with a glinting advertisement for a Michael Jackson reenactment show.

'The headline is probably going to be, Coal Industry Funds Denier Conference in Boiling Hot Las Vegas,' Heartland president Joseph Bast said during his opening address, as the lemon chicken was cleared. Near the ICCC registration table a sign thanked a long list of cosponsors, among them The Australian Taxpayer’s Alliance, the Ayn Rand Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Illinois Coal Alliance, which, according to Heartland, donated a mere $150 to the conference. His joke was clearly a pre-emptive jab to any reporter tempted to cite Vegas’s triple-digit heat and the ICCC’s fossil-fuel sponsors in the same sentence."

Abe Streep reports for Bloomberg Businessweek July 10, 2014.