On Monday, Dana Nuccitelli at the Guardian wrote his column on the results of a Stanford energy modeling forum, where eleven different teams all confirmed what’s already well known: a carbon tax can be an efficient way to fight climate change without unduly harming low-income communities.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives decided to put facts to a vote with a nonbinding resolution, and decided that no, actually, a carbon tax is bad.
The public’s opinion on Congress is always pretty low, but how is it a whole group of people who should be well aware of policy impacts come to the totally wrong conclusion? Why are conservatives so against this conservative, market-based policy? Even those conservatives belonging to what is supposed to be a pro-climate caucus, and who could have sunk the resolution?
Maybe this disparity has something to do with the findings of a new study published Thursday in Climatic Change. Research found that$2 billion was spent lobbying Congress on energy between 2000 and 2016. Was this spending split evenly between those for and against climate action? Of course not! The energy industry outspent environment and public health groups by an incredible 10 to 1.
This is a staggering, depressing figure.
But wait, there’s more!
That 10:1 ratio is just disclosed lobbying figures. It doesn’t account for the massive web of energy industry-funded groups that lobby behind the guise of being a public interest charity. The Koch network, for example, spearheaded two separate letters this month to the House advocating against a carbon tax, in addition to the letter that came directly from the company opposing the policy.
One Koch front-group effort launched last week was from the American Energy Alliance, and most of its 21 signers are affiliated with Koch-funded groups. The second was spearheaded by the Koch-funded Americans for Tax Reform, and included 41 signers--yet again, most, if not all, of the signers listed an affiliation with a group that’s received Koch money.
The Kochs sent a letter from their company and two letters from their network of front groups. Surely that was the extent of their lobbying? Nope!
You have to remember that in addition to the lobbying, the Kochs also have a network of fake news sites to push their message. For example, the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal managed to ignore the vast body of peer-reviewed literature that supports a carbon tax and instead cited various Koch-sponsored pseudo-studies to advocate against such a tax. And, of course, the Daily Caller has a long history of masking its anti-climate advocacy as journalism: a search on its website for “Carbon tax” returns over 500 stories.
To be fair to the Kochs, they give a lot of money to all sorts of things. They fund the National Black Chamber of Commerce, who signed the AEA letter, for example. Which, if it the group were anything other than a shameless front for energy interests, would be hard to square with the Koch’s recent donation to white supremacist Representative Steve King.
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