On Monday, The Center for Biological Diversity’s online news site The Revelator ran an editorial describing just how far scientists are forced to stretch their grants, giving lie to the denier line that alarmists are just in it for the money. As the editorial describes, with all of zero dollars of every grant going into their pockets, researchers clearly aren’t in it for the money. Bottom line: if you want to get rich, academia is not the place to do it.
But if you want to make so much money that you can be Congress’s own Santa Claus, lobbying might be up your alley. This weekend, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT)’s Instagram account posted a photo of Hatch (almost) smiling while sitting on Santa’s lap. As the Washington Post reports, this happened at a Christmas party hosted by Santa himself, GOP lobbyist Richard Hohlt. A quick Google shows that Hohlt is a Trump appointee (to an obscure and relatively powerless commission) who the Center for Public Integrity reported as having earned over $400,000 by lobbying for Saudi Arabia in the first half of 2017.
Unfortunately, playing Santa and lobbying on behalf of a petro-state is only the tip of the influence fossil fuels have over our government. In fact, one need not even leave the Center for Public Integrity’s website to see a whole host of problems.
In a new three-part series titled The United States of Petroleum, the Center details how the Trump administration is a major payoff for decades of oil industry propaganda. Key to the story is the American Petroleum Institute, a central node in organized denial who has been grappling with what to do about climate change since the 1960s. Trump has been an ideal solution for API: as the first story details, a 25-page wishlist of API’s priorities (.pdf) has more or less steered Trump’s energy policy since May.
The second story dives into one of API’s more insidious efforts: attacking general air pollution science instead of targeting carbon dioxide specifically. The actors here, and their actions over the past years, are now unfortunately relevant, in that they are some of the pro-pollution voices that Steve Milloy has successfully lobbied to have installed on the EPA’s science panels. As part of their work on behalf of polluters, they published their studies in industry-friendly journals, while laying decades of pseudo-academic groundwork that can now be put to use.
The story of these tobacco-friendly pollution advocates continues in part three, which covers API’s past court cases and influence peddling. Fortunately, the series ends on a slightly more hopeful note, pointing to the suit brought by 21 kids against the federal government to force it to protect their right to a livable climate. Which is certainly timely, given Monday’s oral arguments for the case, which appeared to go relatively well for the kids.
Perhaps instead of a lawsuit, these kids could ask Santa for climate action for Christmas?
Oh wait, it’s 2017 and Santa Claus is a Saudi lobbyist who caters to Congressmen. You’re on your own, kids.
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