The Competative Enterprise Institute is a far right think tank, not a scientific institute. One does not go to wingnuts for sound science.
History
CEI was founded in March 1984. In 1986, it began its "free market legal program," which seeks to overturn government regulations that the CEI regards as inappropriate, such as regulations pertaining to drug safety, rent control, and automobile fuel efficiency (see the case study, Fuel efficiency standards and the laws of physics).
By 1992, CEI's annual budget had reached $765,000. That year it helped coordinate "Earth Summit Alternatives" to counter the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, generating anti-environmental commentary that appeared on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, National Review, Washington Times, Detroit News, Investor's Daily, Inside EPA's Clean Air Report, CNBC, C-SPAN, CBS Radio and Voice of America. It also published its first book, titled Environmental Politics.
In 1992, Jonathan Adler, CEI's director of environmental studies, wrote Implementing the U.S. Clean Air Act in Arizona in conjunction with the Barry Goldwater Institute for Public Policy Research, a small think tank headed by Michael Sanera, a former professor of political science at Northern Arizona University and an adjunct scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation.[3] The following year they wrote another report "Reforming Arizona's Air Pollution Policy".
In 1994 CEI began working on a book with the Alabama Family Alliance and the Arizona Institute for Public Policy Research (also founded and headed by Sanera). Tentatively titled An Environmental Primer for Parents: How to Talk to Your Children About Environmental Issues, the book was eventually published under the title Facts Not Fear, with Sanera and Jane S. Shaw listed as the authors. It claims that environmental education in the classroom is a politicized effort to indoctrinate kids into becoming activists. Sanera was also instrumental in gutting a previously strong environmental education mandate in Arizona. He and CEI have become leading forces behind an ongoing, industry-funded campaign to eliminate funding for environmental education throughout the United States.[4]
In 1995, CEI joined several other think tanks in attacking Our Stolen Future, the book about environmental endocrine disruptors by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and Peter Myer. Just prior to the book's release, CEI released two separate studies belittling "the hypothetical risks to human health" discussed in Colborn's book. On the same day that CEI's reports came out, Consumer Alert (run by Frances B. Smith, the wife of CEI founder Fred Smith) issued its own news release labeling the book "a scaremongering tract."[5]
In March 1996, CEI's Michelle Malkin and Michael Fumento published "Rachel's Folly," which claims that dioxin is good for you.[6] CEI's Jonathan Tolman (who holds a bachelor's degree in political science), published a study that month titled "Nature's Hormone Factory," claiming that naturally-occurring chemicals produced by plants and other living organisms are as dangerous as industrial chemicals.[7] In December of that year, CEI submitted comments opposing the EPA's proposed air quality rule to limit particulate emissions, claiming that "the EPA has failed to consider whether the proposed standard may actually increase mortality due to reductions in disposable income that compliance efforts may produce. ... At all times regulation imposes costs that mean less real income to individuals for alternative expenditure. That deprivation of real income itself has adverse health effects, in the form of poorer diet, more heart attacks, more suicides."[8]
Competitive Enterprise Institute - SourceWatch
