the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives that drafts and shares model state-level legislation for distribution among state governments in the United States. ALEC's board of directors adopted the model legislation in October 2012. False endorsement claim In 2013, the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a report from the Heartland Institute in order to better understand the public debate and encourage discussion of other views. The preface included a disclaimer that the academy did not endorse the views in the report, but in June, the institute announced that the Chinese Academy of Sciences supported their views, and said the publication placed significant scientific weight against climate change. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, responding to the announcement, said "The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS' endorsement of its report is completely false," clarified that they did not endorse the views of the institute, and asked for a retraction. Vatican Council on climate change On April 28, 2015, the Catholic Church convened a council to discuss the religious implications of global warming. Held at the Vatican and hosted by the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, it was attended by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, as well as national presidents, CEOs, academics, scientists, and representatives of the world's major religions. The institute sent a delegation in an attempt to present a dissenting opinion. It held a "prebuttal" of the conference and argued that climate science does not justify papal recognition of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. After the council ended, a representative (Marc Morano) from the institute broke into a press briefing being given by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was reporting on his meeting with the Pope. He interrupted the Secretary-General and the moderator, asking that global-warming skeptics be allowed to speak. After a few minutes, he was escorted from the premises by Vatican officials. In response to the papal encyclical "Laudato Si'", which outlined the Church's moral case for addressing climate change, and in anticipation of Pope Francis' September 2015 visit to the United States, Gene Koprowski, director of marketing for the institute, suggested that the Pope's pronouncements on climate change indicate that "pagan forms are returning to the Church this day." Mass mailing of unsolicited material to science teachers In March 2017, the institute's program the Center for Transforming Education began an unsolicited mailing of the