Myron Ebell is director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, which is one of the most effective advocates for Free Market Environmentalism. He also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, an ad hoc coalition of over two dozen non-profit groups that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy-rationing policies. CEI and the Cooler Heads Coalition led the successful decade-long fight to defeat cap-and-trade legislation and more recently led the effort to convince President Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty.
Bill McKibben, the founder of the global warming alarmist group 350.org, wrote in February 2019 that, “Myron Ebell of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, the man who led the drive to pull America out of the Paris climate accords, said the other day that the Green New Deal was a ‘back-to-the-dark-ages manifesto.’ That’s language worth thinking about, coming from perhaps the Right’s most influential spokesman on climate change.”
On the Paris decision, Axios said CEI was “the energy that enabled the issue to stay high profile in the White House for months,” while CNN credited Mr. Ebell with having “as much influence shaping Trump’s decision as any single individual” and “might have helped change the political and environmental direction of the U.S.”
Mr. Ebell led the Trump Presidential Transition’s agency action team for the Environmental Protection Agency in 2016 and January 2017. His involvement in the transition led to public protests and marches in several cities in America and Europe. In one of countless fundraising e-mails and letters from environmental pressure groups, Sierra Club President Michael Brune wrote that “Myron Ebell is…one of the single greatest threats our planet has ever faced.”
The Business Insider commented, “Myron Ebell may be enemy #1 to the current climate change community.” Rolling Stone named Mr. Ebell one of six top “Misleaders” on global warming along with Senator James M. Inhofe. Eric Pooley devotes a chapter of his book, The Climate War, to Mr. Ebell. He has also been featured in a number of documentary films, including PBS Frontline’s Climate of Doubt (2012) and The War on the EPA (2017).
Among many recognitions, Greenpeace featured Mr. Ebell and three of his CEI colleagues in their Field Guide to Climate Criminals. As a result of a BBC radio interview, seven members of the British House of Commons from all three major parties introduced a motion to censure Mr. Ebell “in the strongest possible terms.”
He concentrated on federal lands and property rights issues throughout the 1990s while working at Frontiers of Freedom, founded by the late Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming, for Representative John Shadegg of Arizona, and for the American Land Rights Association and other grassroots property rights and wise use groups. He helped Rep. Shadegg develop the Endangered Species Recovery and Conservation Incentive Act, introduced as H. R. 2364 in the 104th Congress, which was described by CEI founder Fred Smith as “the single best environmental reform bill ever introduced.”
Mr. Ebell grew up on a cattle ranch in Baker County in eastern Oregon. He earned degrees at Colorado College (cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) and the London School of Economics (where he was a student of the renowned political philosopher Michael Oakeshott) and did graduate work at the University of California, San Diego, and at Peterhouse, Cambridge University in philosophy, history, and political theory.