About
Steve Milloy is a former Fox News columnist and lobbyist for the tobacco and fossil fuel industries who generally aims to discredit science and any factual evidence scientists discover. He currently sits on the boards of the libertarian Heartland Institute, the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Institute and the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (a nonprofit law firm dedicated to opposing renewable energy projects and regulation of fossil fuels), where he’s also a senior policy fellow. He is also a member of the Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council, and is an adjunct fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR).
Milloy regularly refers to all proponents of using financial leverage to address the climate crisis as being part of an “ESG cartel.” He loudly and adamantly denies the reality of climate change and the health impacts of secondhand smoke. In the early 1990s, he headed the Advancement of Sound Science Center, a pseudo think tank established by the tobacco giant Philip Morris to counter legislation unfavorable to smoking and the industry. He also claims that the academic peer-review process is biased against corporate interests, and as a frequent commentator on Fox News, he denies the impact of climate change.
Milloy was formerly an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank where he hosted an offshoot website called junkscience.com dedicated to spreading skepticism about scientific consensus on a variety of subjects. While serving on the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, he was able to normalize many of the anti-science viewpoints he shares with his pro-corporate allies, according to journalist Amy Westervelt.
As a shareholder activist, Milloy regularly files shareholder resolutions that attempt to undermine climate resolutions and emissions reductions proposed by large public companies. He holds a bachelor’s degree in natural science and a master’s in biostatistics, both from Johns Hopkins University, and a law degree from the University of Baltimore.
Actions
- Spoke on ESG at the Council for National Policy’s 2024 March meeting (3/2024)
- Wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Examiner in which he declared that ESG is a part of “America being sold out by the elites for the economic and geopolitical benefit of foreign competitors” (8/11/23)
- Spoke on a panel with Scott Shepard, director of NCPPR’s Free Enterprise Project, and Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks on “how shareholder proposals are being used to advance a social agenda and what states can do to stop it” at SFOF’s 2022 Fall National Meeting (11/15/22)
- In comments submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), called ESG “an illegal communist scheme for circumventing democratic processes to impose arbitrarily-determined standards on corporations in order to hijack the free enterprise system for political purposes” (8/15/22)