opposed to the hypothesis of anthropogenic warming and proposed mitigation policies ... stressing the free-market and the dangers of government regulation, which they said would hurt the US economy." GMI was one of only a few conservative environmental-policy think tanks to have natural scientists on staff. Noted climate change deniers Sallie Baliunas and (until his death in 2008) Frederick Seitz (a past president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1969) served on its board of directors. Patrick Michaels was a visiting scientist and Stephen McIntyre, Willie Soon and Ross McKitrick were contributing writers. Richard Lindzen served on the institute's Science Advisory Board. In February 2005 GMI co-sponsored a congressional briefing at which Senator James Inhofe praised Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear and attacked the "hockey stick graph". William O'Keefe, chief executive officer of the Marshall Institute, questioned the methods used by advocates of new government restrictions to combat global warming: "We have never said that global warming isn't real. No self-respecting think tank would accept money to support preconceived notions. We make sure what we are saying is both scientifically and analytically defensible." Accusation of conflict of interest Matthew B. Crawford was appointed executive director of GMI in September 2001. He left the GMI after five months, saying that the institute was "fonder of some facts than others". He contended a conflict of interest existed in the funding of the institute. In Shop Class as Soulcraft, he wrote about the institute that "the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise. These positions served various interests, ideological or material. For example, part of my job consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank." In 1998 Jeffrey Salmon, then executive director of GMI, helped develop the American Petroleum Institute's strategy of stressing the uncertainty of climate science. Naomi Oreskes states that the institute, in order to resist and delay regulation, lobbied politically to create a false public perception of scientific uncertainty over the negative effects of second-hand smoke, the carcinogenic nature of tobacco smoking, the existence of acid rain, and on the evidence connecting CFCs and ozone depletion. Funding sources Exxon-Mobil was a funder of the GMI until it pulled funding from it and several similar organizations in 2008. From 1998 to 2008,