Energy and environment Academic research has identified CEI as one of the think tanks funded to overturn the
environmentalism of the 1960s, central to promoting
climate change denial. It was involved in assisting the anti-environmental
climate change policy of the George W. Bush administration. CEI promotes environmental policies based on limited government regulation and property rights, rejects what it calls "
global warming alarmism", and denies the
science of climate change. CEI is an opponent of government action by the
Environmental Protection Agency that would require limits on
greenhouse gas emissions. It favors
free-market environmentalism and supports the idea that market institutions are more effective in protecting the environment than is government. In 2016, CEI president Kent Lassman wrote on the organization's blog that, "there is no debate about whether the Earth's climate is warming", that "human activities very likely contribute to that warming", and that "this has long been the CEI's position". In March 1992, CEI's founder Fred Smith said of
global warming: "Most of the indications right now are it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we're moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture." In May 2006, CEI's global warming policy activities attracted attention as it embarked upon an ad campaign with two television commercials. These ads promote
carbon dioxide as a positive factor in the environment and argue that
global warming is not a concern. One ad focuses on the message that
CO2 is misrepresented as a
pollutant, stating that "it's essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in... They call it pollution. We call it life." It cites
Science articles to support its claims. However, the editor of
Science stated that the ad "misrepresents the conclusions of the two cited
Science papers... by selective referencing". The author of the articles, Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the
University of Missouri, said CEI was misrepresenting his previous research to inflate their claims. "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," Davis said. In 2009, CEI's director of energy and global warming policy told
The Washington Post, "The only thing that's been demonstrated to reduce emissions is economic collapse". In 2014, CEI sued the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy over a video that linked the
polar vortex to
climate change.
Regulatory reform CEI advocates for regulatory reform on a range of policy issues, including energy, environment, business and finance, labor, technology and telecommunications, transportation, and food and drug regulation. Its annual survey of the federal regulatory state "Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State," documents the size, scope, and cost of federal regulations, and how the U.S. regulatory burden affects American consumers, businesses, and the economy. CEI's Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. coined the phrase "regulatory dark matter," referencing astrophysics to distinguish between ordinary government regulations or "visible matter," and "regulatory dark matter," which consists of "thousands of executive branch and federal agency proclamations and issuances, including memos, guidance documents, bulletins, circulars and announcements with practical regulatory effect." CEI has argued against using antitrust regulation to break up big technology companies such as Facebook and Google.
Capitalism CEI has a longstanding project to recapture what they term "the moral legitimacy of capitalism" through research, writing, events, and other outreach activities. In 2019, CEI's vice president for Strategy Iain Murray argued, in an op-ed for The
Wall Street Journal, that advocates of capitalism and free markets had taken the support of social conservatives for granted.
Project 2025 CEI was a member of the advisory board of
Project 2025, a collection of
conservative and
right-wing policy proposals from
the Heritage Foundation to reshape the
United States federal government and consolidate
executive power should the
Republican nominee win the
2024 presidential election, from June 2022 through March 2024. ==Legal advocacy==