#2910: Indur Goklany

Indur M. Goklany is a science policy advisor to the United States Department of the Interior and one of the most influential promoters of climate change denialism in the US. Goklany has an extensive network, and has worked with numerous organizations promoting climate change denial, such as the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the Global Warming Policy Foundation – for instance taking part in the CEI’s film Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies are More Dangerous than Global Warming Itself, and writing papers for the Heartland Institute, who also paid him $1,000 a month in 2012 for writing a chapter in their book (pure and unadulterated corruption of a government official, of course (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Denialgate)) – which was also the qualification the Trump administration relied on when promoting him to a position charged with reviewing climate policy in 2017. In 2020, it was predictably revealed that he had repeatedly tried to insert misleading language on climate change into the agency’s scientific reports.

 

Goklany is trained as an electrical engineer, and although he has published numerous reports, documents, books and rants about climate change and climate change policy, he has of course been involved in no relevant scientific research on climate-related issues.

 

The kind of nonsense he promotes and inserted into official reports (some also made it here) belongs to the category of nonsense usually promoted by climate change denialists, including falsely asserting that there is a lack of agreement among scientists and (at best misleadingly) arguing that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has various beneficial effects. At a Heartland-organized conference in 2017, Goklany presented a correlation between rising CO₂ levels and life expectancy and GDP, concluding that “we’re actually living in the best of times, and carbon dioxide and fossils fuels are a good part of that” – we don’t think he’s that oblivious to how to reason about correlation vs. causation, so we’ll chalk that one up to rank dishonesty. In response to the WWF’s and the UN’s claim that stabilizing population would help sustain the planet, Goklany pointed out that “the problem, however, is not population but poverty,” which ought to be a textbook example of a non-sequitur.

 

There’s a decent portrait of Goklany and his deeds here. 

 

Diagnosis: We’ve got no doubt he is a true believer w.r.t his denialism, which makes it notable that he feels the need to support his claims with rank dishonesty. He has anyways caused a lot of damage and seems to be on a trajectory to continue to do so.