Last week we noticed that Koch-trained propagandist Michael Bastasch has, between February and April, jumped back to the Daily Caller, after a couple years spent as a writer for the Laura Ingraham show on Fox News. Now he’s a “managing editor,” according to his Twitter bio, but not yet the Daily Caller (which still has his old status as “contributor”) or the Foundation it uses for shady tax reasons.
No new bylines yet, and if he’s editing that’d make sense. But the step up to Managing Editor is quite a big one! It’s also interesting because despite “growing up” as a “journalist” by writing at Fox, Bastasch has otherwise relied on Koch media “philanthropy” for employment.
According to 2019 and 2020 990’s, though, the Daily Caller isn’t getting a bulk of its funding direct from Koch, like it has in the years prior, when Bastasch was busy quoting deniers and running cover for the Koch’ed up Trump administration.
His absence at the Daily Caller, and that of the Koch’s influence, has been palpable in the past two years, with the outlet rarely doing anything original or sinister enough to warrant mention. They’ve covered climate and energy issues, but not with the seemingly-required quote from a Koch-y denier in every story, and only rarely covering polluter “exclusives,” like Bastasch did regularly for years.
Since he was gone, the Daily Caller has still been a player in the disinfo ecosystem, but not the key Koch hub it once was. Now that Bastasch is back, however, perhaps it will be once again!
But for now, that honor, and accompanying funding, seem to have gone to RealClear Energy instead. That’s where we’re now seeing regular appearances from the Koch-funded Young Voices program. And while they haven’t seemed to have tapped any more (former) porn starlets lately, they are still recruiting new talent.
Last week it was Kelsey Grant, who implored “environmentalists” not to “be so quick to tank blue hydrogen.” In response to 200 green groups rejecting supposed climate solutions that would prop up the fossil fuel industry, like claiming we can capture the carbon from turning natural gas into hydrogen, referred to as “blue hydrogen.”
While Grant writes plenty about the amazing potential of natural (methane) gas to produce clean-burning hydrogen (once that pesky CCS thing is figured out, of course) what she doesn’t mention is perhaps the most critical context.
Her byline refers to her as “an energy professional and contributor to Young Voices” as well as “a Udall scholar” who “previously worked for a bipartisan climate policy advocacy organization.”
And if you didn’t know Young Voices is a Koch-funded program, maybe this pro-pollution take could seem like the rare one that wasn’t from someone in polluters’ pocket.
Ever-curious, we popped over to her LinkedIn, and found out that after spending 2 years with Citizens’ Climate Lobby (which is good!) she joined “Adamantine Energy.”
No, it’s not a group converting Wolverine’s skeleton into energy, it’s an oil and gas consultant that really wants to look like it’s about “proactive and transformational” work and offers resources covering “game-changing actions that oil and gas companies can embrace to lead into the energy future.”
When we clicked on their page for “Decarbonization strategies for oil & gas” page, we were hoping it just said “shut down,” but instead they seem to be suggesting greenwashing instead, as the only words that weren’t PR jargon were “Next Fuels: Hydrogen, RNG, Aviation Fuels.”
Back at the RealClear op-ed, Adamantine researcher and Koch’s Young Voice Kelsey Grant did admit that, “To these environmentalists’ credit, their concerns [about greenwashing] are not unfounded.” She also acknowledged that the industry has “been at odds with an increasingly climate-conscious world, undermining public trust.”
What she didn’t say, however, was that she knows concerns about industry hiding behind hydrogen greenwashing are well-founded, because she’s one of the ones doing the greenwashing!