He was also chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a politically conservative group formed in 1997 focused on "dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis".
[2][3] In September 2016, Ebell was appointed by then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
In 1995 he sent a nine-page memo to staff at the United States House Committee on Natural Resources opposing Newt Gingrich's proposals to reform the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
Ebell became a senior legislative assistant to Republican Representative John Shadegg and advocated the elimination of federal conservation regulations, leaving protection of the environment in the hands of state and local officials.
[15] In the 1990s, while serving as Policy Director at the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, Ebell worked as part of a team to make regulating the tobacco industry "politically unpalatable".
[16] In 2011, as part of its "Control Abuse of Power" (CAP) project, the CEI launched lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA).
"[8] After this meeting, ExxonMobil, even though aware as early as 1981 that fossil fuels affected climate change,[20][21] began funding Frontiers of Freedom, where Ebell was a staff member.
[22] On October 27, 2006, Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican senator Olympia Snowe sent a joint bipartisan letter to Rex Tillerson, the new CEO of ExxonMobil, about its funding of various groups, stating "We fervently hope that reports that ExxonMobil intends to end its funding of the climate change denial campaign of the Competitive Enterprise Institute are true.
[32][33] That same day, Cooney contacted Ebell, who emailed back "I know you're in crisis mode", and advised "what we can do is limited until there is an official statement from the administration repudiating the report".
[34] The recently introduced Data Quality Act had already been used by industry to suppress scientific information, and on August 6, 2003, the CEI sued the Bush administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Act, demanding that it should invalidate the National Assessment as allegedly inaccurate, biased and not based on "sound science", and should also invalidate the Climate Action Report which was based on the Assessment.
On August 11, they asked the U.S. Justice Department under John Ashcroft to investigate – Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said the email "indicates a secret initiative by the administration to invite and orchestrate a lawsuit against itself to discredit an official United States government report on global warming dangers", which could be improper and possibly illegal;[35][36][37] G. Steven Rowe as attorney general of Maine said "The idea that the Bush administration may have invited a lawsuit from a special interest group in order to undermine the federal government's own work under an international treaty is very troubling.
"[38][35] On 24 August, Senator Joe Lieberman wrote to the White House expressing hope that the lawsuit was "not the result of a collusive plan conceived by the CEI in concert with the Administration, itself.
[8] A study of false equivalence in the media used as an example the Scripps Howard media company "incredibly" giving equal space to Ebell's comments that reports of recent warming from the World Meteorological Organisation and the National Climatic Data Center were unsurprising because of the Little Ice Age, so "it isn’t much to worry about", and of a Science paper by Thomas R. Karl and Kevin Trenberth that "the Karl-Trenberth analysis is nothing new—it's just kind of a summary of what the establishment thinks is true".
[39] In an interview on BBC Radio 4 in 2005, Ebell said that the UK's Chief Scientist David King was "an alarmist with ridiculous views who knows nothing about climate change".
[39] An early day motion deploring "in the strongest possible terms" Ebell's "unfounded and insulting criticism" was raised in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, and was signed by 66 Members of Parliament.
"[8] Through CEI, Ebell has stated his belief that global warming is a hoax,[43] that most of the data predicting climate change is false,[44] and that the scientific consensus was "phony".
Ebell said the hacked emails "make it clear that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an organized conspiracy dedicated to tricking the world into believing that global warming is a crisis that requires a drastic response.
[51] In September 2016, Ebell was appointed by then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).