[198] Michael Mann. Tea Party channeled public outrage at govt. against scientific experts like him. Originally, he was unconvinced by science of climate change (CC), but in 1999 published study tracking 1000 years of temps in the Northern Hemisphere. Created "Hockey Stick" graph -- powerfully persuasive. Scientific evidence overwhelming that human beings were endangering the earth's climate by burning too much oil, gas, and coal. The CO2 and other gases these fuels released were trapping the earth's heat, with devastating effects.
[199] Official US National Security Strategy report said CC would lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of land across the globe. Also AAAS.
At time of Obama's nomination, he believed that Americans would take steps to action on CC. He supported a "cap and trade" bill forcing the fossil fuel industry to pay for its pollution, as other industries did. It was originally backed by Republicans, and was a market-based solution. Required permits for carbon emissions. A former requirement for reducing industrial emissions that cause acid rain had been successful.
[199-200] Later he noted, "What we didn't take into account was the ferociousness of the moneyed interests and the politicians doing their bidding. We are talking about a direct challenge to the most powerful [200] industry that has ever existed on the face of the earth. There's no depth to which they're unwilling to sink to challenge anything threatening their interests even if it's science and the scientists involved in it." He concluded that "the fossil fuel industry if an oligarchy."
The fossil fuel industry funded and orchestrated a series of vitriolic personal attacks that would threaten Mann's livelihood, derail climate legislation, and alter the course of the Obama Presidency.
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The nucleus of the Koch donor network is coal, oil, and gas magnates. Guest lists for the summits read like a Who's Who of America's most successful and most conservative fossil fuel barons who privately own companies. [201] E.g., Corbin "Corby" Robertson Jr., grandson of one of Texas's most legendary oil barons (Hugh Roy Cullen). When he inherited an oil fortune, he bet almost all of it on coat. Only the US govt. owned more coal. Co: Quintana Resources Capital.
[201] Other donors: Harold Hamm (Continental Resources) and Larry Nichols (head of Devon, and Chair of Amer. Petroleum Inst. in "fracking." Bought Mitchell Energy. He combined horizontal drilled to unleash natural gas. The Kochs also had investments in aspects of fracking.
The donor network also included oilmen like Philip Anschutz, and smaller donors in multiple states. There were ancillary deals of pipelines, drilling, equipment, etc.
[202] There were few Americans for whom government caps on carbon posed a more direct financial threat.
Their problem: by 2008 the arithmetic of climate change presented an almost unimaginable challenge. For the world to remain tolerable, it was estimated that 80% of the fossil fuel industry's reserves would have to stay unused in the ground. I.e., the FF industry owned 5 times more oil, gas, and coal than the planet could safely burn.
As early as 1997, Lew Ward, the Chrm. of Independent Petroleum Association of American, a trade group, warned that the possible 'Carbon Tax' would put the industry under siege. He vowed, "We are not going to let that happen. You can take that to the bank!"
[203] Ward's swagger was well-grounded. The oil industry had held powerful sway over American politics for years. In 1913, it won a special tax loophole, the "oil depletion allowance," allowing oil companies to evade income taxes for five decades.
Lyndon Johnson rose to political power by handing out campaign contributions from his wealthy backers in the Texas oil fields and defending their interests. Even though the oil industry benefited enormously from the fed. govt. for favorable tax treatment, huge government contracts, and aid in building pipelines, it became a bastion of antigovernment conservatism.
[203 cont.] A progenitor of Texas's modern-day ultraconservative oil faction was Hugh Roy Cullen of Quintana. In 1952, he was the single biggest donor in American politics and a key supporter of Sen. Joe. McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade.
[204] Opposition to curbs on carbon had long been building in the industry. The dangers of CC first broke into the mainstream in 1988 when James Hanson testified before a Senate Committee amid a nationwide heat wave. George H. W. Bush accepted the science without dispute and sent his Sec. of State James Baker to the 1st international summit of climate scientists, the IPCC. For decades, the environmental movement had enjoyed bipartisan support.
But the fossil fuel industry organized and financed a stealthy state-of-the-art counteroffensive. $$ was pouring in. Kurt Davies of Greenpeace traced the funds flowing into a web of nonprofits and talking heads denying the reality of global warming. The Koch's in 2005-2008 poured $25m. into dozens of different organizations fighting climate reform. The Koch brothers outspent Exxon Mobil by a factor of 3. In 2010 Greenpeace crowned Koch Industries as "the kingpin of climate science denial."
[205] A peer-reviewed academic study (by a prof. of sociology) by Robert Brulle found that from 2003-2010 over half a billion $$ was spent on a "massive campaign to manipulate and mislead the public about the threat posed by climate change." The study examined tax records, and found a corporate lobbying campaign disguised as a tax-exempt, philanthropic endeavor. Some 140 conservative foundations funded the campaign. They distributed $558 m. in 5,299 grants to 91 different non-profit organizations such as think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations, and academic and legal programs. Their purpose was to undermine Americans' faith in climate science and to defeat any effort to regulate carbon emissions. Heavily involved were foundations affiliated with the Koch and Scaife families, the Bradley Fdn. and foundations run by the DeVos family, Art Pope (from NC), and John Templeton Jr.
[206] By the time of Obama's presidency the bank-rollers of the war against climate science had gone further underground by directing their contributions to DonorsTrust. Founded by Whitney Ball [a female], it made contributions appear to be going to the fund rather than to far more controversial conservative groups, thus making donation sources anonymous. 1999-2015, DonorsTrust redistributed $750 million. Ordinarily, under law, in exchange for tax breaks, private foundations were required to publicly disclose the charitable groups to whom they made their grants. But donor-advised funds defeated this minimum transparency. The directors of the DonorsTrust were top officials in several of the most impt. institutions in the conservative movement, including the AEI, Heritage Fdn, and Institute for Justice. They served as a central committee and coordinated grant making.
[207] What the funding bought was the dissemination of scientific doubt. They followed the same deceptive playbook that had been developed by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton on behalf of the tobacco companies in the 1960s, in order to fabricate uncertainty about the science linking smoking to cancer. There was in fact some uncertainty about global warming, as there is about virtually every scientific hypothesis. but as James Baker said in 2005, "There's a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know -- except maybe Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics."
[208] Nevertheless, in 1998 the Amer. Petroleum Institute and others made a secret plan to spend $2 m. to confuse the press and public. They recruited skeptical scientists and trained them in public relations so that they could act as spokesmen, thereby adding legitimacy and covering to the industry's agenda. A think-tank in Va., the George C. Marshall Institute specialized in providing contrarian scientific defenses for dubious clients. It was funded by the Scaife, Olin, and Bradley Foundations, among others. Leading the charge were two elderly retired physicists, Fred Seitz and Fred Singer. Neither of these had any expertise in the environment or health, but for years were quoted as experts.
[209] But winning over public opinion was no easy feat. As late as 2003, over 75% of Republicans supported strict environmental regulations. So the opponents of carbon regulations hired Frank Luntz, who said that the opponents of carbon regulations must not raise economic arguments first, but instead should question the science. Use phrases like "we must not rush to judgment' and "we should not commit America to any international document that handcuffs us." Later Luntz switched sides and publicly admitted that global warming was a real peril.
Subsequently, many libertarian organizations tore into global warming science. Polar bear issue.
[210] It was the authors of the polar bear study (Sallie Baliunas and Wei-Hock Soon) who took shots at Michael Mann's iconic hockey stick study. (Soon was listed as a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, but later it was found that he had a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering, not climate science, and had only a part-time, unpaid affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution. He had accepted more than $1.2 m. from the fossil fuel industry 2205-2015, including at least $230,00 from the Koch Foundation.
As the scientific consensus grew in support of global warming, the industry's efforts to fight it became increasingly aggressive. Koch Industries disbursed over $800,000 in support of Al Gore's opponent George W. Bush and other Republicans.
[211] Political contributions from oil, gas, and coal companies became increasingly polarized during this period. E.g., in 1990, oil/gas political contributions were skewed 60% in favor of Republicans, but 80% by the middle of the Bush years. The investment paid off, and the Republican Party soon swung sharply to the right on climate issues. Partisan differences remained small among the general public but grew into a gaping chasm among elected officials.
Conservative opponents of carbon regulations such as James Inhofe turned up the rhetoric to a boiling point.
[212] George Bush years proved a bonanza for the fossil fuel industry, which had thrown its weight behind his election, particularly the coal industry. Dick Cheney, a former CEO of he oil-field equipment and services company Halliburton, took charge of energy policy, arguing that the science was inconclusive. The 2005 energy bill offered enormous subsidies and tax breaks for fossil-fuel-intensive companies. Regulations on coal-fired power plants weakened regulations. The Bush Administration weakened regulations. The fracking industry boomed.
[213] In all, the Bush energy act contained $6 billion in oil and gas subsidies, and $9 billion in coal subsidies. While the Koch Brothers deplored government taxes, but they took full advantage of the special tax credits and subsidies available to the oil, ethanol, and pipeline business. Their companies benefitted from $100 million in govt. contracts after 2000.
2007 was a turning point in fight about CC. Al Gore won Nobel Peace Prize and published film An Inconvenient Truth. 41% of public said CC worried them a great deal.
Opponents fought back with new vigor. The entire conservative media was enlisted in the Fight. Fox Television and conservative talk radio hosts gave saturation coverage to the issue. Think tanks pumped out books and position papers. Conservative evangelical Christian leaders also were involved.
214] Concern about CC collapsed by 2008. By the time of the Obama election, 85% of US energy came from oil, gas, and coal. Lisa Jackson, EPA administrator regulated GHG emissions under the Clean Air Act. Democrats also planned to pass a cap-and-trade bill.
[215] Koch Industries began lobbying against government mandates to reduce carbon emissions. Americans for Prosperity created TV ads, funded by David Koch, against government regulation of CC. Koch Industries released some 300 m. tons of CO2 a year. Any financial penalty that the govt. placed on carbon pollution would threaten both their immediate profit margins and the value of the investments they had in still-untapped fossil fuel reserves. They argued that mankind would be better off adapting to CC.
[216] 2009 climate issue appears in Tea Party rallies. Supported by AFP and Freedom Works.
[217] Forged letters supposedly from NAACP and AAUW bombarded the office of a freshman Democratic congressman in VA., who favored the cap-and-trade bill. They also provided hecklers at other political meetings. Right-wing radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck also were against doing anything about climate change.
[218] Despite the above, the House passed a bill to cap-and-trade carbon dioxide emissions in 2009. TV ads began to appear against the bill in states where Democrats were running for office. One was funded by Corbin Robertson owner of the country's largest private cache of coal. A new anti-climate-change group, Coalition for Responsible Regulation took legal action to stop the House bill. The address and top officials were the same as those of Robertson's company, Quintana.
[219] Opposition grew before the meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 for its first international climate summit. But then the hacking of the emails of scientists working in the University of East Anglia, England's famed Climate Research Unit.
[220] "Climategate" was name of the alleged scandal. Many conservation organizations, particularly the Cato Institute, pounced in the hacked emails, and trumpeted the alleged scandal. But -- eventually 7 independent inquiries exonerated the climate scientists, finding nothing in the emails to discredit their work or the larger consensus on global warming. But Michael Mann's life was plunged into turmoil. They pounced on colleagues emails praising Mann's u se of a "trick" that had helped him "hide the decline" (which critics assumed was an actual decline in 20th century temperatures). But it actually was just a technique Mann had devised to order to provide a backup data set. The "decline" was a decline in available information from certain kinds of tree rings after 1961, which made it harder to have a consistent set of data. Another scientist had fund an alternative source of data to compensate for this problem, which was what was meant by "hide the decline." The only genuinely negative disclosure from the emails was that Mann and the other climatologists had agreed among themselves to withhold their research from some of their critics.
[221] But this became a witch-hunt. Inhofe and other Republicans in Congress who were recipients of Koch campaign donations demanded an investigation into Mann. They sent threatening letters to Penn State, where he was a tenured professor. Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli subpoenaed Mann's former employer, the U. of Pa. to provide all records relating to his academic research, regardless of libertarians' professed concerns about government intrusion. Eventually Virginia's Supreme Court dismissed its own attorney general's case," finding Cuccinelli had misread the law.
By New Year's Eve 2009, Mann was being attacked from all sides. See p. 221 for more details. A think tank and two law firms that helped mount the attacks were funded by the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife foundations, as well as Koch's.
[222] More about the funding of the attacks, and nature of the continuing attacks.
[223] Death threats appeared in Mann's inbox. Several other climatologists also received death threats. The Penn State and National Science investigations exonerated Mann.
[224] By the time Mann's research was upheld by the investigations the percentage of Americans who believed that the world was warming had dropped a precipitous 14 points from 2008. 48% of Americans in a Gallup poll of the time believed that fears of global warming were "generally exaggerated."
Although the cap-and-trade bill moved to the Senate, it was already dead. Lindsey Graham (Republican of South Carolina) took leadership in the fight, was attacked by Fox News for backing a "gas tax." Others denounced him as "gay, and American Solutions, funded by many in the Koch fold, launched a negative campaign against him for h is climate stance. Graham withdrew. Then Harry Reid, facing a tough reelection, refused to bring the legislation to the Senate floor for a vote.
[225] The Massey mine in West Virginia collapsed in a methane explosion, killing 29 miners. A leak in the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico triggered the largest accidental oil spill in history. The oil rig's principle owner, British Petroleum, was found guilty of gross negligence. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was by then already above the level that scientists said risked causing runaway global warming.
[226] May 2010: David Koch is honored for his generosity to the New York City American Ballet Theatre. It marked the arrival of David Koch as one of New York’s most prominent philanthropists.
[227] Conspicuously absent from the gala was the 3rd honorary chair, Michelle Obama. (“Scheduling conflict.”) In NY philanthropic circles, David Koch was a celebrity. It would take years before the faint outlines of the Kochs’ massive political machinations began to surface through required public tax filings, and the full story may never be known. At the moment that David Koch took the stage in NY, operatives working for him and his brother were quietly converting 30 years’ worth of ideological institution building into a machine that would resemble and rival those of the two major political parties. The machine was financed by a tiny fraction of the wealthiest families in America, who could now spend their entire fortunes influencing the country’s politics, if they want to.
[227-228] On 1/21/10, the Court announced its 54 decision in the Citizens United case, overturning a century of restrictions banning corporations and unions from spending all they wanted to elect candidates. It accepted the argument that corporations had the same rights to free speech as citizens. An appeals court then overturned limits on how much money individuals could give to outside groups, so no longer capped at $5,000 per person per year. The courts argued that independent spending would not corrupt. The Court endorsed the idea that any spending in a political campaign should be visible to the public, but this assumption soon proved wrong.
[229] Money flooded into secretive nonprofit organizations that claimed the right to conceal their donors' identities. The American political system became awash in unlimited, untraceable cash. This eviscerated a century of reform.
[230] The backstory: Some ultrarich activists wanted to spend more than the previous law allowed. Particularly active was the DeVos clan of Michigan, which had made its fortune from Amway. The DeVoses were devout members of the Dutch Reformed Church, a branch of Calvinism. Amway was structured to avoid federal taxes by defining door-to-door salesmen as "independent business owners" rather than employees.
[231] Thus Amway could avoid Social Security contributions and other employee benefits. It became very politically active. In 1974, Congress set new contribution limits and established the public financing of presidential campaigns. But in 1976 the Supreme Courts struck down limits on "independent expenditures."
[232] In 1982, Amway was found to have committed a tax scam, lowering its tax bills by $26.4 million from 1965 to 1978. Amway agreed to pay a $20 million fine to the Canadian government if criminal charges would be dropped for 4 of the top executives. In 1989, Amway paid an additional $38 million to settle a related civil suit. DeVos was soon dethroned as the RNC's finance chair,
[233] but the DeVos family nevertheless remained huge financiers of the Republican Party and the growing conservative movement. The donated at least $200 million into every branch of the New Right's infrastructure. They also were involved in the secretive Council for National Policy, a little-known club of several hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country which met secretively in undisclosed locations for a confidential conference three times a year. Members included Jerry Falwell, Phylllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, and Wayne LaPierre of the NRA.
[234] For the DeVos family, eradicating restraints on political spending was a major issue. They established the James Madison Center for Free Speech chaired by Senator Mitch McConnell. This organization was run by a lawyer, James Bopp Jr., who channeled money to his firm.
[236] Some rich liberal Democrats also fought campaign-finance restrictions, spending $185 million in 2004 to defeat George W. Bush's reelection. Most important was NY hedge fund magnate George Soros, who funneled $27 million+ to defeat Bush. (Later, Soros withdrew from high campaign contributions.)
The DeVoses investment in Jim Bopp paid off in the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. He battered away at the foundation of modern campaign-finance law, using the liberal's language of civil rights and free speech. Thus Citizens United was cast as the right of corporations to exercise their free speech.
[238]. The people involved in the litigation are detailed on this page. Soon the sums pledged at the Koch donor summits began to soar to nearly $900 million. Citizens United also shifted the balance of power from parties built on broad consensus to individuals who were wealthy and zealous enough to spend millions from their own funds.
[239] Critics saw the Citizens United as very consequential. In his 2010 State of the Union address, Obama denounced the Court's decision, saying it will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations to spend without limit in our elections. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito Jr., who attended the address, was seen shaking his head and mouthing the words "not true." Another consequences was that the decision shifted the balance of power from parties built on broad consensus to individuals who were wealthy, empowering a tiny, atypical minority of the population.