The free market lobbying group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), has hit back at Google, which announced this week that it was leaving the network over its “lies” about climate change.

Alec, a secretive organization that acts as a dating agency between largely Republican state politicians and big corporations by producing “model bills”, has released a letter (pdf) addressed to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and eight other executives. Signed by 156 state legislators who are active members of Alec, the letter expresses disappointment at comments made by Schmidt on National Public Radio (NPR) and strongly denies that Alec has anything to do with climate change denial.

“The facts are: Alec recognizes that climate change is an important issue and just hosted a roundtable conversation for a variety of companies – including Google – on this very issue … The organizations that pressured you consistently conflate climate change denial with having significant concerns over government mandates, subsidies and climate regulations,” the letter says.

Shortly after Alec’s rebuttal was released, two of the organizations it accused of mounting the pressure – the watchdogs the Center for Media and Democracy, and Forecast the Facts – released their own account of Alec’s record of climate change denial. They said that, at the network’s most recent meeting in Dallas, the president of the rightwing Heartland Institute Joseph Bast led a workshop in which a presentation was made that denounced the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has produced some of the most authoritative accounts of global warming, as “not a credible source of science and economics”.

The presentation went on to state that “there is no scientific consensus on the human role in climate change”, “global warming is not a crisis, the threat was exaggerated”, and “there is no need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and no point in attempting to do so.”

The watchdogs also point out that a file called “top 10 myths about global warming” (pdf), written by the then head of Alec’s national resources taskforce, appeared on Alec’s website for many years.

It has been a testing week for Alec in terms of its relationship with major technology companies. Schmidt laid into the network in an interview on NPR, when he said: “The facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people – they’re just, they’re just literally lying.”

In the wake of Google’s outburst, Yahoo dropped its Alec membership, Facebook said it was unlikely to renew next year and Yelp said its membership had lapsed.



The tension with the technology companies follows a run of bad news for Alec which came heavily under fire for its dissemination around the country of stand-your-ground laws in the fallout to the Florida shooting of the black teenager, Trayvon Martin. Desperate to regain corporate members and shore up its ailing finances, Alec put together a list of companies it wished to woo back under the title “the Prodigal Son Project”.

