India Pale Ales, or IPAs, can be a divisive drink among beer enthusiasts. Many, particularly of the hipster persuasion, swear by the hoppy and sometimes floral flavors of IPAs, eschewing more normal lagers and pilsners as boring swill. Normal people, on the other hand, often consider IPAs far too bitter to enjoy in any significant quantity.
We’d recommend settling in with a brew of your choice to deal with the overload of denial from down under to come: today we’re talking about an entirely different IPA, Australia’s Institute for Public Affairs.
IPA is basically Australia’s Heartland or Heritage. They’re ostensibly a nonprofit think tank, but in practice they act a whole lot like an arm of the conservative political movement and fossil fuel industry. Now, thanks to court filings reported on by Graham Readfearn this week in DeSmog, we know that IPA is also funded by a major mining interest: Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart.
Rinehart’s company, Hancock Prospecting Proprietary Ltd (HPPL), gave nearly $5 million to IPA in 2016 and 2017, according to documents produced as part of a lawsuit brought by Gina’s daughter Bianca accusing her mother of mismanaging company funds.
This is particularly problematic for IPA, Readfearn notes, because it directly contradicts the organization’s own tax reporting. In 2017, IPA reported that 86 percent of its $6.1 million income for the year came from individuals, and only 1 percent from businesses. But that’s hard to square with the fact that it got $2.2 million from HPPL that year--a full third of its income. Similar story for 2016: IPA claimed that 90 percent of its income was from individuals, despite getting nearly half of its income from an HPPL donation. (For the record, Bianca’s argument, as described in the court proceedings, is that IPA’s reporting implies that the HPPL donations are actually from her mother Gina as an individual, not HPPL as a business.)
Astonishing, though, that a group that promotes climate denial would be so loose with the truth about its industry backers! Something like that could never happen here in the US, right? Especially with the IRS relaxing reporting requirements, making it even easier for dark money groups to hide their funding?
Surely not! And we’re sure that had Scott Pruitt known that the IPA was so heavily reliant on polluter funding, he never would have spent $45,000 sending aides to Australia ahead of a trip he planned to take there to, at least in part, meet with the IPA. A trip that was being planned in part by consultant Matthew Freedman, who once worked for Paul Manafort helping Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. (The Wiki page for Marcos has a whole section on his human rights abuses, ranging from abductions to torture to massacres. Marcos also lootied billions from the country’s coffers, in part to feed his wife’s extensive shoe collection.)
Had Pruitt known the IPA was industry-backed, certainly he would’ve canceled the trip (which he did anyway because of last year’s hurricanes).
Just kidding! He would’ve gone regardless, but probably would have scrubbed the calendar record of the meetings.
Good thing Pruitt’s out and Andrew Wheeler is in. After all, it’s not like a major coal magnate just indicated at a public event that Wheeler has worked for him for 20 years, implying that Wheeler was doing coal’s bidding while a government employee.
Oh wait, that’s exactly what’s happened.
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