Last month, we pointed out how the fossil fuel industry is proud of its success in buying democracy, as evidenced by all the deniers in Congress whose denial better serves the industry than their constituents.
While there’s no shortage of issues with fossil fuel spending influencing the federal government, that’s only part of the story. Evlondo Cooper at Media Matters dove into the industry front groups Monday that are spending heavily against climate action in Vermont and Oregon.
Building on the industry’s $31 million success in bending Washington’s ballots to their will in 2018, shady dark money organizations have begun assailing a Clean Energy Jobs bill in Oregon. It’s a type of cap and trade policy that, after a couple years of failure, has a real chance of passing in Oregon now that Democrats hold the House, Senate, and Governorship.
That’s why Priority Oregon, a 501c4 group which includes members associated with Koch groups, along with the Cascade Policy Institute, the Oregon Farm Bureau and other industry fronts, have spent the past few years making the usual baseless accusations about climate action raising energy prices and destroying jobs.
On the other side of the country, Vermont is poised to pass a carbon price on gas and heating oil. Like Oregon, Vermont has a veto-proof Democratic majority in the legislature, but unlike Oregon they’ll need it: the governor opposes the policy. The opposition of Republican Gov. Phil Scott comes even as a study commissioned by Vermont’s Congress found that a carbon price plus other climate policies would reduce emissions without harming low-income communities or the economy.
But being wrong has not, of course, stopped Vermont’s local Koch branches from using low-income communities as human shields to claim they’d be hurt by a new carbon price. And, Cooper notes, those ridiculous claims are spread easily by a right-wing, Koch-affiliated, conservative-donor-backed website posing as a news outlet, True North Reports.
As for the actual content of the attacks? Well, as Cooper concludes, considering the unabashedly liberal Green New Deal is getting hit with the same sorts of attacks as these more conservative-friendly market based proposals, it seems pretty clear that their criticisms have nothing to do with the policy itself.
When they can’t just buy politicians, the industry’s strategy appears to be blanketing the media with a suite of fear mongering. If that doesn’t work, they resort to creating “media” outlets of their own to serve propaganda to local communities.
Apparently the old bumper sticker slogan has taken hold: the industry that warms globally buys democracy locally.
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