Jay Lehr is a Senior Fellow and Science Director at the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. Also a prolific national speaker on environmental and agricultural issues, Lehr earned America's first doctorate in Ground Water Hydrology back in 1962.
According to the Heartland Institute, Lehr is the author of more than 1,000 journal and magazine articles. His profile on the Encyclopedia of Water states Lehr has written more than 400 articles on ground water hydrology, his area of expertise. According to a Google Scholar search, however, Lehr has not published any articles on climate change in peer-reviewed journals.
For more than 20 years, Lehr has maintained environmentalists are fear-mongering zealots. In an editorial piece published in a 1990 edition of the journal Ground Water, Dr. Lehr states:
"I am an environmentalist. Having said this, and with no desire to waffle on the issue or be disingenuous, it is time to stop scaring the !?#*!?! out of the American public with fraudulent, malicious, and totally inaccurate risk assessments of the latest environmental screwups.
The public, inadequately schooled in science and totally untrained in risk assessment, is being held captive by an 'environmental industry' reaping its economic and political rewards by malicious overstatement. The American media's sales and rating-point incentives encourage many reporters to walk in lock-step with those who would enslave our population in needless fear."
During a recent speech, Lehr took his message one step further, identifying the "seven vested interests" in global warming:
- Media - "Bad news sells."
- Environmentalists - "It's a cash cow for environmental groups, who are all essentially socialists. Global warming is the greatest thing to socialize the world."
- Politicians - "They want a crisis. They want a problem to solve, that's how they get elected."
- United Nations - "They want to run the world, and global warming is the best mechanism to do that."
- Scientists - "If they are unsure of a science problem they will lean in the direction that will get them the most money." He's inferring, climate science is a financial thing for scientists.
- Capitalists - "All Fortune 500 companies have bought into global warming because they've figured out how to make a buck."
- Nuclear industry - "The industry is saying build nuclear plants, we don't produce CO2. There have got to be some smart people among nuclear physicists to know CO2 is not causing global warming."
Through his national speaking circuit, Lehr says he reaches 18,000 people a year. And, no matter what the topic he is speaking on, he always includes a section on global warming. This section holds the same thesis every time: "global warming is the biggest scam ever perpetrated on society."
Outside of his work for the Heartland Institute, Dr. Lehr's current client list includes biotech giant Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences Canada (a division of Dow Chemical) -- one of the world's largest chemical companies. During the 2009 U.N. Conference on Climate Change, Monsanto was named the world's "worst corporate climate lobbyist."
