On Monday, Jeff Spross at The Week offered up a pretty streamlined way for the US to fight climate change: nationalize the fossil fuel industry. By buying out big oil, Spross says we can put an immediate end to their campaigns of denial and delay, and get on with building the clean energy economy.
The oil industry must be worried now that people are starting to talk about this, and we also learned Monday that the European Union is going to start looking into ExxonMobil’s role in funding climate change denial.
These are likely the sorts of developments that have big oil stepping back from publicly funding denial groups (though what they do with untraceable dark money is, of course, unknown) and instead giving some breadcrumbs to fund pro-carbon tax initiatives.
Further bad news for oil-funded denial groups comes courtesy of Politico Magazine’s recent feature on Chase Koch, son of Charles and heir to the Koch network. The thrust of the piece is that Chase is more interested in the civil society aspect of the network’s efforts than the political “philanthropy” spending. It sounds like Chase is ready to give up the campaign donations and other political spending, but if what he’s focusing on instead is the academic and institutional denial organizations, then this isn’t much of a change.
Either way, the Kochs and Big Oil aren’t the only big spenders. Political spending watchdog MapLight has published the Mercer Family Foundation’s 990 form, which shows that the family gave climate denial groups at least $4 million last year.
Now, donations of $800,000 to Heartland, $300,000 for CATO, $170,000 for the CO2 Coalition, $500,000 to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and $500,000 to the Federalist Society aren’t exactly surprising.
What is interesting, though, is that the Mercers also gave $200,000 to the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, the sister group of the legal attack dog organization that went up in flames earlier this year after internal disagreements. A key player there is former tobacco and coal lobbyist Chris Horner who has been trying and failing to make “climategate” a recurring event. By releasing emails he portrays as scandalous and representative of collusion between non-profits and governments, Horner attacks climate action by muddying the waters.
Consider, for a moment though, some connections. The Mercers, you may remember, were behind Cambridge Analytica, the company that shut down after it was revealed they more or less stole millions of Facebook user’s data. It’s the group that worked with the Trump campaign to get him elected and funded Bannon and Breitbart as they laundered white supremacy into the mainstream. The group that bragged about running voter suppression operations specifically targeted at minority communities.
The Mercers’ Cambridge Analytica work was key to Trump’s winning social media strategy. The Russian government’s farm of social media trolls that targeted minority communities with a voter suppression campaign, were also an important part of Trump’s social media success, particularly the hackers that strategically released a tranche of stolen emails with the purpose of influencing political decisions. And this strategy of releasing emails, as some have noted, looks a whole lot like the original “Climategate,” in which a tranche of climate scientists’ emails were stolen and released prior to a big political decision. (Because Russia has long-played a lowkey climate denial role in international negotiations, now being helped along by Trump’s denial.)
Clearly, the Mercers, just like the Russians, recognize the political value in exploiting emails. And in what is surely a coincidence and not an example of the classic propaganda strategy of accusing your opponent of your weak point, Horner is suing on behalf of a big oil group for State Department records concerning potential collusion between US environmental groups and, of all countries, Russia.
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