Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute is an American conservative and libertarian[2] public policy think tank based in Chicago, which states that it advocates free market policies.[3][4][5][6] The Institute is designated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit by the Internal Revenue Service and has a full-time staff of 40, including editors and senior fellows.[7] The Institute was founded in 1984 and conducts research and advocacy work on issues including government spending, taxation, healthcare, tobacco policy, hydraulic fracturing[8] global warming, information technology, and free-market environmentalism.

In the 1990s, the group worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question the science linking secondhand smoke to health risks, and to lobby against government public-health reforms.[9][10][11] More recently, the Institute has focused on questioning the science of human-caused climate change, and was described by the New York Times as "the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism."[12] The Institute has sponsored meetings of climate change skeptics,[13] and has been reported to promote public school curricula challenging the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.