The conservative think tank is commemorating Green Week with four days of science-baiting, pro-nuclear energy, global warming-doubting workshops.

But I'm game. I'll play along - to a point.

On Earth Day, I listened to Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality and a leading advocate for tearing up wilderness to build nuclear power plants and harvest subterranean coal. Innis compares the environmental debate to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It's Portland college students hugging trees versus Newark single moms clutching heating oil bills.

"The American people want to do the right thing. And in our desire to do the right thing, bad people can take advantage of us," Innis says. Those bad people are "environmental extremists" and an alternately gullible or complicit media.

Innis is a reliable, go-to guy to play on Utahns' racial guilt in a bid to undermine the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Sierra Club, Utah Rivers Council and any other environmental group that tweaks Republican lawmakers. He came to town during the 2008 Legislature to bolster Noel's case for a nuclear power plant on the Green River. And he's just one of the flat-earthers converging on Sutherland this week in a bid to prolong the debate about wilderness preservation, the miracle of nuclear power and the uptick in the thermometer.

Institute President Paul Mero says the conservative think tank is trying to broaden the environmental debate before Leonardo DiCaprio and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. cede the argument to scientists.

Mero and Sutherland board members were alarmed last year when Huntsman signed an agreement with California Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger to lower the two states' greenhouse gas emissions. Before "Gore and the Hollywood crowd" can make global warming widely accepted, Sutherland wants to keep the dispute alive.

"For heaven's sake, they made a movie about it. It must be true," Mero says, sardonically. "Public policy has a momentum in and of itself."

For scientists, Sutherland's Earth Week is an unwitting parody of Galileo's Inquisition. But business leaders also wonder at some conservatives' reliance on the handful of researchers who still question global warming.

"Even in the large energy companies I work for, there's no question that some climate change is happening, that we're pumping carbon into the environment," says Jim Holtkamp, a Salt Lake City attorney who has represented EnergySolutions. "There's a lot of debate, but the debate is shifting."

Huntsman's energy adviser Dianne Nielson says Utah has to move beyond the warming debate to take advantage of new technology and lower energy prices. "All of the states are recognizing this," Nielson says.

Sutherland's session today on global warming and a Friday screening of the documentary "Mine Your Own Business" are overbooked. With fingers in ears, Sutherland followers will carry on their intellectual exercise, blaming environmental "tyranny" and "Armageddon scenarios."

And the new debate about solutions will pass them by.

walsh@sltrib.com