The reason I got into this is because industry used to be for sound science. Industry used to be attacked by environmentalists and so, of course, industry was interested in defending itself. So they contributed to think tanks that stood for sound science and sound economic analysis. But that’s completely changed. Industry is now teamed up with the environmentalists. My side, we get extremely little, if any, industry funding. Even the Bush administration is giving global warming alarmists $5 billion a year. If you go on the Greenpeace Web site or whatever, the total money that global warming skeptics have ever gotten amounts to about $16 million. Now $5.5 billion annually compared to $16 million lifetime -- that’s a David and Goliath fight.

Q: Why should we believe anything you say, if indeed you are supported by energy and tobacco companies?

A: I’ll just turn that around on you: Why should we believe anything the environmentalists say? They have been proven time and time again to be wrong. Their actions have resulted in documentable harm to people. They have political as well as financial interests. In the end, you really have to look at the arguments and look at the data. Even U.N. scientists are coming out now and saying there’s going to be no global warming happening anytime soon. Now why would we want to crush our economy for something that is not going to be happening anytime soon -- if ever?

Q: Who are your main adversaries -- politicians, scientists, the media, all of them?

A: Unfortunately, and we came up with this term yesterday, we are suffering from a sort of societal “gang-green,” where this sort of “green” has spread throughout society from corporations and politicians to local governments. Everybody wants to be green. No one really knows what it means. No one really knows what the big goals are.

Lots of people are hypocritical about the whole green thing -- especially people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Gore. Al Gore wants you to be green, but he’s not being particularly green. He’s still going to have his swimming pool, which costs $600 a year to heat. But you’ve got to use two squares of toilet paper.

Michael Crichton, in his “State of Fear,” had a whole appendix at the end of his book about eugenics and how eugenics swept the country and the world in the 1920s and 1930s. That’s kind of what global warming is -- a misanthropic, anti-people public policy that is based on junk science.

Nothing that they’ve every predicted has ever come true. If you go back 20 years, when that NASA guy, Jim Hansen, went to Congress and said global warming is happening, every prediction he made has been wrong.

Q: Recently, it seems there is a little shift in thinking going on -- even in the media -- that maybe global warming isn’t really coming or coming so soon. There are signs of global cooling popping up. Do you think this is just a passing fancy or have we turned a corner?

A: I’d hate to say we’ve turned a corner. We’re kind of at a precipice right now. Congress in the first week of June is going to be debating the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill. I don’t think anything is going to pass this year, but certainly the next president, whether it’s McCain, Hillary or Obama, all of them have committed to fighting climate change. Most people haven’t realized this yet, which is why we do what we do, but the weak spot is the corporations.

I can’t make Al Gore tell the truth. I can’t make Barbara Boxer tell the truth.

I can’t make (NASA climatologist) James Hansen tell the truth. But you know what? I can make a CEO tell the truth. I can maybe even sue a CEO. I can maybe get the Securities and Exchange Commission interested in some of the statements they’ve made about global warming that aren’t true. That’s why we have the Free Enterprise Action Fund, and that’s kind of the route that we are pursuing because we think the CEOs are vulnerable on this.

Once these global warming bills come to the floor and different companies start to see who the winners and losers are, I think at that point we’re going to turn a corner. All the companies want different things, and they are irreconcilable a lot of the times. For example, Alcoa wants Congress to give it free credits -- which is basically like getting free money from the taxpayer -- for past reductions in greenhouse gases.

Well, a company like Duke Energy, which is a big coal-burning utility in North Carolina, is going to wind up needing to buy carbon credits, which they can’t afford. So Duke is not for carbon credits; they’re for a carbon tax. Well, you can’t do carbon credits and a carbon tax. It’s going to be one way or the other. So when the winners and losers get identified, I think the USCAP will ultimately get blown up. Then we’ll see where things are.

Of course, the alternative is that we’ll get a global warming regime but no one will live by it. U.S. CAP emissions will not go down. It’ll be just like a farm bill. Once you create that global warming constituency, like the constituency made up of the few farmers who get their subsidies, it’ll never go away no matter how bogus it is. Has ethanol gone away? No.