Joseph Bast

Joseph Lee Bast
Joseph L. Bast at The Heartland Benefit Dinner on September 15, 2016.
Born	January 22, 1958 (1958-01-22) (age 59) Kimberly, Wisconsin
Nationality	American
Occupation	President, The Heartland Institute

Joseph Lee Bast is president and CEO of the Heartland Institute, an American nonprofit conservative and libertarian public policy think tank based in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Bast was born on January 22, 1958 in Kimberly, Wisconsin where he attended a Catholic elementary school. He studied economics at the University of Chicago but dropped out of school in order to devote more time to the Heartland Institute. Bast married Diane Bast, who grew up with him in Kimberly.

In 1984, David Padden founded the Heartland Institute — an American conservative and libertarian public policy think tank — and put Bast in charge of the nascent organization. Bast has been president and CEO ever since. "Personally, I'm a fallen-away libertarian. I place a high value on individual freedom and I tend to look at most issues from that perspective. But I'm not sure it is the only way anymore," Bast told the Chicago Tribune in 1995.

Bast is one of the editors of the Climate Change Reconsidered series by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). He was also involved in the creation of the State Policy Network, and has written several books, some of which challenge mainstream claims about cigarette smoking. In 2014, he co-authored an article entitled "The Myth of the Climate Change '97%'" in the Wall Street Journal along with Roy Spencer which argued that the oft-cited claim that "97% of the world's scientists believe climate change is an urgent problem" is misleading because the figure is derived from surveys with small sample sizes, and the questionnaire conflates belief in negligible global warming with belief in dangerous global warming. A 2011 article in Nature criticized his position on global warming and second-hand smoke.