When polluters needs someone to write an industry-friendly article, or make an appearance in the media to argue against the science of climate change, they often turn to a man named Marlo Lewis. A senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Marlo has been on the front lines of the energy industry’s war on science, as well as the fight against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the battle over the Keystone XL tar sans pipeline.

What makes Marlo a valuable asset is that he actually has a great resume. He received a Ph.D. in government from Harvard – a daunting and admirable task that commands respect. He’s also served in various governmental positions, including a brief stint in the Reagan administration, bolstering his credentials among elected officials in Washington, D.C. His position at the CEI also allows him a great deal of influence over our elected officials (it also happens to pay him a $100,000 a year salary for his work.) These credentials allowed him access to Congress a few years ago, when he was permitted to give a rebuttal to Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” to the assembly. Marlo was also allowed to tout the “dangers” of the Kyoto Protocol to Congress in 1998.

But Marlo’s resume does not qualify him as an expert on anything climate or science related. In fact, if you look just below the surface, it becomes starkly apparent that he is just another energy industry crony who is paid to deny that fossil fuel pollution causes problems.

Let’s start with his position at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The CEI has received funding from all sorts of energy industry interests, including the Koch family foundations, ExxonMobil, Texaco, Arch Coal, and the American Petroleum Institute. Because of their funding from the energy industry, CEI has been one of the loudest voices claiming that anthropogenic climate change is a myth, and that the government does not need to limit any global warming pollution.

CEI has even gone as far as running television ads touting the benefit of excessive C02 emissions into the atmosphere. CEI has also staunchly defended mountaintop removal mining, claiming that limiting the practice would destroy jobs and therefore the economy of Appalachian towns.

Marlo Lewis’s work with the CEI eventually earned him a spot as the chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a climate-change denial group representing members of the energy industry and various conservative think tanks. The group makes the following claim in an archived version of their website from 2004: “The risks of global warming are speculative; the risks of global warming policies are all too real.”

The group’s main project is their website – GlobalWarming.org – designed to spread misinformation about climate change.

While his affiliations – and their corporate backing – are bad enough, to really get a sense of how dangerous he is, you have to look at his work. Here are a few choice pieces that Marlo has written in the last few months:

– A short blog post touting the economic benefits of coal.

– An article claiming that cap-and-trade is an unfair tax on coal companies.

– A call to action to stop the EPA from “destroying democracy.”

– A story about environmentalists “institutionalizing” the Department of Defense.

– Claiming environmental policies are hindering economic growth.

– Questioning the legality of President Obama’s fuel economy standards.

As absurd as some of these stories may be, they pale in comparison to his undying support for the Keystone XL Pipeline. Marlo Lewis has posted several stories proclaiming the “benefits” of Keystone XL and the tar sands, and even made a trip to Canada to view the existing Keystone pipeline. (You can find some amusing photos of Marlo posing with the pipe here.) The headline of his enthusiastic story was “My Excellent Journey to Canada’s Oil Sands.”

In another recent story, he made a list of the reasons why we should all “love” the Keystone XL pipeline. Here are a few of Marlo’s colorful reasons:

A win for Keystone XL is a defeat for the global warming movement. Green groups view Keystone as an opportunity to regain momentum and offset their losses after the death of cap-and-trade. If friends of affordable energy win this fight, which seems likely, the greenhouse lobby will take another hit to its prestige, morale, and influence.

Keystone XL strains relations between Obama and his environmentalist base. If Obama approves the pipeline, greenies will be less motivated to work for his re-election. If he disapproves, Republicans and moderate Democrats will hammer him for killing job creation and increasing pain at the pump. Either way, the prospects for new anti-energy legislation should be dimmer.

Keystone XL is bringing aging, New Lefties out of the woodwork, where they can misbehave and get themselves arrested.

Marlo Lewis, a man with a Ph.D. from one of the most distinguished universities on the planet, honestly wants the Keystone XL Pipeline built for little more than his personal pleasure so he can give the finger to people who care about the environment. Well, at least he’s being mature about it all.

The point is this – Marlo Lewis is someone whom both the press and the government have previously handed a megaphone to. But given his documented misinformation work for fossil fuel interests, and his chief role working to confuse the public about climate change and the threats posed by reckless dirty energy projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline, why does anyone take him seriously?