By David J. Sanders

A little review: A group called the Center for Climate Strategies held undue influence over the Arkansas Governor’s Commission on Global Warming and was forced onto the commission without any serious debate.

CCS acts at the behest of its wealthy donors who pay for their work to carry out its aggressive advocacy agenda. Here’s how the scheme works:

CCS helps set up a state-based global warming policy study group and then gets hired to direct it. The group will adopt one of CCS’s canned policy reports. Then, the policy group’s members lobby their state government to adopt controversial and costly environmental policies.

The GCGW reproduced one of CCS’s reports, which contained 54 policy recommendations and carried a price tag of $3.7 billion.

The governor’s office supplied a copy of CCS’s contract with the state, signed on Oct. 31. 2008. There was little explanation as to why CCS had begun working months before the commission was hurriedly pressured to hire the group at its first meeting.

But new information sheds more light on CCS’s heavy-hand, casting further doubt on the fidelity of the commission’s processes and policy recommendations.

On Monday, Dr. Richard Ford, commission member and economist and tenured faculty member at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, thumbed through a notebook on his desk, stopping at a copy of the law — Act 696 — that set up the global warming commission.

“Right here,” he said, pointing to the law’s emergency clause. “It says that ‘it is imperative that Arkansas study the scientific data … to determine whether global warming is an immediate threat to the citizens in the State of Arkansas.’ We did not do that.”

According to Ford, the only economist on the commission, the group wasn’t allowed to do what it was instructed by law to do. He explained that the commission never “studied or even debated the scientific data” on global warming.

So why would a commission set up to study and make policy recommendations about global warming not study it? It’s simple; CCS wouldn’t allow it, according to a memo entitled “Proposal to Develop an Arkansas Climate Action Plan” sent to Morril Harriman, Gov. Beebe’s chief of staff on June 27, 2007.

Under the heading “Participant Guidelines,” the memo stated, “Participants will not debate the science of climate change or the directive of the Act, but will instead provide leadership and vision for how Arkansas will rise to the challenges and opportunities of addressing climate change.”

This information was deleted from a similar memo on the GCGW’s Web site.

When asked about CCS’s insistence to limit debate, a governor’s spokesman tried to justify it by claiming that it wasn’t the commission’s job to debate climate change (Later he admitted that in spite of CCS’s “standards of conduct,” it wasn’t the policy of the governor’s office that debate on climate change be stifled.)

The memo also contained a projected budget totaling $435,383 for CCS’s cost to work with the commission. According to the governor’s office, the state only paid $50,000 of the total amount. The memo stated that CCS’s “group of private foundation donors” would “share” the rest of the cost.

The governor’s spokesman didn’t know who paid the remaining cost … of the commission that, mind you, was set up by law. He, instead, encouraged me to contact CCS.

But in the GCGW’s final report, a handful of donors, who are widely viewed as global warming alarmists or who have close ties to liberal causes, are identified as having paid the rest of Arkansas’ bill. The Blue Moon Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York Community Trust, Energy Foundation, and the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation are all listed.

It’s becoming clearer: CCS helped set up the GCGW, then got hired to advise the group, limited the terms of the debate, pushed its policies, which were eventually adopted, and then found liberal donors sympathetic to the cause to pay the bill.

A bargain? No. A ruse? Yes.

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David Sanders writes twice weekly for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and is a host of the Arkansas Education Television Network’s “Unconventional Wisdom.” His e-mail address is DavidJSanders@aol.com.