New Disclosures Help Pull Back Curtain on Who’s Funding Manufactured Climate Investigation
by Steve Everley
energyindepth.org , Dallas, Tex.
A letter reportedly being circulated among a handful of Democrats this week in the U.S. House of Representatives, calling for an investigation into energy companies’ opinions on climate change, references news reports that the letter’s authors characterize as independent journalism. But according to online records, the reports were actually financed by large foundations that oppose oil and natural gas development.
Fewer than two dozen Democratic members of the U.S. House have signed on to a letter circulated by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), which cites “investigations by the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News” that accused at least one U.S. oil and natural gas company of “financing efforts to amplify doubt about the state of climate science.” Congressman Lieu’s office says it will send the letter “in a few weeks,” which means it wouldn’t be delivered until after the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris.
Contrary to the letter’s suggestion, the LA Times merely published the investigations that were cited. They were not authored by reporters from the LA Times, but rather by a group of researchers affiliated with the Energy and Environment Reporting Fellowship at the Columbia School of Journalism, which was disclosed at the end of the two reports.
But what was not revealed in the pages of the LA Times is who provided funding for the reports. According to the Fellowship’s website, the program receives funding from a number of anti-fossil fuel foundations:
“The program is supported by the Energy Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund, Lorana Sullivan Foundation and the Tellus Mater Foundation.” (emphasis added)
As well-documented in a 2014 oversight report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) actively backs campaigns to ban oil and natural gas development, including major financing for the activist group 350.org, which environmental activist Bill McKibben co-founded. RBF’s support for 350.org and its anti-fossil fuel campaigns is significant, as McKibben himself called RBF a “great ally.”
According to RBF’s website, the Fund supports efforts to “reduce reliance on carbon-intensive energy sources.”
As Energy In Depth reported last year, RBF also provides funding for InsideClimate News, an activist organization that shares numerous funding sources with extreme anti-fossil fuel groups, such as Food & Water Watch and Earthworks. David Sassoon, the publisher for InsideClimate News, is a former Rockefeller Brothers Fund employee. According to the New York Times, InsideClimate News is “an outgrowth of Mr. Sassoon’s consulting work for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that emphasizes climate policy.”
One of the board members at InsideClimate News, Michael Northrup, directs the Sustainable Development grantmaking program at RBF. According to InsideClimate News’ website, Northrup “provided the seed grant that got InsideClimate News started in 2007.”
According to Inside Philanthropy, RBF is “not afraid to get involved in a political fight or take a few risks with its grantmaking.” Inside Philanthropy’s summary of RBF’s climate-related grants previously disclosed the extent of its advocacy against fossil fuels, though the following paragraph has since been scrubbed from its page (accessed via the Internet Archive):
“RBF is not afraid of a fight, and it has been a supporter lately of efforts to block the Keystone XL pipeline. For instance, it gave $50,000 to the League of Conservation Voters in 2013 to educate voters on the issues around Keystone and has addressed the broader threat posed by tar sands oil through a half-million-dollar grant to the Sierra Club Foundation. In the past few years, RBF also has been a major funder of 350.org — a group at the forefront of the Keystone fight and other activist efforts to raise awareness about climate change.” (emphasis added)
The Columbia fellows did not disclose in their two-part report that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund were financial supporters of their work. InsideClimate News lists RBF as one of its financial supporters on its “Our Funders” page.
In a 2014 report, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online newspaper, detailed how environmental foundations have created their own “echo chamber” by funding advocacy groups and the news outlets to cover those groups’ activities:
“Wealthy foundations fighting oil and gas extraction around the country have incorporated ostensibly dispassionate news outlets into their grant-making portfolios, creating what some describe as a self-sustaining environmentalist echo chamber.
“Observers see a pattern at work: A handful of wealthy foundations fund environmental activist groups, news organizations to report on the activists’ activities, and groups that then push out those news reports.
“The perception of a critical mass of public voices on key environmental issues is frequently picked up by more established news organizations.”
The Free Beacon cited the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as one such foundation, noting its financial support for InsideClimate News, the Center for Public Integrity, and a number of other groups that campaign against oil and natural gas development.
Several RBF-backed groups, including 350.org, have used the reports from InsideClimate News and Columbia fellows to call for government investigations. InsideClimate News has covered those activities extensively.
The financial ties to anti-fossil fuel advocacy raise significant questions about the objectivity of the reports from InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times. Yet the funding of these advocacy pieces may only be the beginning.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Rep. Ted Lieu – the author of the letter calling for an investigation of energy companies’ climate-related activities – has received $1,000 in campaign contributions from the RBF-backed League of Conservation Voters (LCV). Since 2008, Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), the co-author of the letter, has accepted over $3,000 from LCV and the Sierra Club, another group backed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
h/t to WUWT reader Matt Dempsey
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You have to work pretty hard to find out who is behind this activity. Ironically, Exxon was happy to show the results of their work to the public.
Who should be investigated?
Yes, any forensic account will tell you that this sort shell game (pardon the pun) is very similar to money laundering of the less than legal kind.
I’m not saying that this is the case, but it does show the rank hypocrisy of the warmists: if their message is so sciency, why all the squink (an old UseNet phrase meaning squid ink)?
Oh the Irony! This from the heirs of the founder of Standard Oil!
What better way to maximize the profita from old oil than to demonize coal, fracking, and shale oil.
Exactly.
They have created a false environmental front, the Rock. Bros Fund, in order to hinder oil and gas development in this country as an attempt to undermine small to medium sized E&P companies. This increases profits for their much larger investments in the Rockefeller Family Fund.
The RBF isn’t just a false environmental front:
http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2014/5/21/is-the-rockefeller-brothers-fund-consciously-funding-delegitimization-of-israel#.U7UFGrEeySE=
Furthermore, it should be noted that the Rockefeller Family was one of, if not the largest, financiers and proponents of the Eugenics Movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
Unless they have since divested all of their holdings ….. me thinks the Rockefeller Foundation is still rooted in fossil fuel extractions in Appalachia.
And to protect their investments therein ….. me thinks they were instrumental in installing “a fox in the henhouse, ….. to wit:.
They have to buy CO2 for injection into old oil fields for enhanced recovery.
What could be better than forcing the competition, coal, to pay THEM to take it via capture and sequestratoon mandates?
No doubt this conflict of interest will be easily shrugged off and ignored. After all, “deniers” are nothing but conspiracy theorists financed by big Oil.
It would be interesting to get a comprehensive history done on the sources of funding for a wide array of environmentalist groups and precisely the same sort of echo chamber institutions for peddling that nonsense as “settled science” in more than just climate issues. Observe that the absolutely safest form of of electrical energy production on record (nuclear) is, in the popular mind, “dangerous”
Not going to happen here. All research for the wingnuts stops at greenies, i.e., not the money and influence behind them. I just spent about 30 secs on the first name I saw of the RBF “leadership” —guess what? A Goldman Sachs plant. In the text above it says, “As well-documented in a 2014 oversight report.” Laughable. The “minority” Senate report was a wordy tracing of money to the greenies, then stopped tracing the money and influence further, as if it would tear apart their hope-y fantasies about how businesses operate in the real world. They will not follow the money, most of them are just pretending.
The propaganda has traveled around the world and through the halls of Congress before the truth puts on its shoes.
EMBASSY, Nov.20, 2015
‘Senior Liberals shaped 2010 plan for Energy’
“Carr is being called a ‘key player,’ and was author of the final report”
Jim Carr, Manitoba, is now the new, just elected, Minister of Natural Resources Canada.
Marlo Raynolds is now chief of staff to the new Environment Minister Catherine McKenna.
Raynolds met (in Ottawa Sept.2010 at the U.S. Embassy) with Nancy Pelosi and now Senator Ed Markey.
News on what’s taking place prior to COP 21.
http://www.embassynews.ca/news/2015/11/18/senior-liberals-shaped-2010-plan-for-energy-strategy/47873
Parliament of Canada
Debates of the Senate (Hansard)
1st Session, 41st Parliament, Volume 148, Issue 57
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Scroll down to: Orders of the Day
Involvement of Foreign Foundations in Canadian Domestic Affairs > then about 1/2 page down in the Debate.
Hon. Grant Mitchell: “in fact, I have one here. In its annual report, the Pembina Institute already does. It lists who gives it money. One of them is The Natural Resources Defense Council, an American group. It is one of the single biggest contributors.”
http://www.parl.gc.ca/content/sen/chamber/411/debates/057db_2012-03-06-e.htm
The same Rockefeller Brothers Fund, as revealed by Paul Chesser, that financed several US states’ efforts to develop cap-and-trade plans ( http://www.globalwarming.org/2008/06/16/rockefeller-brothers-fund-at-it-again/ ) via an organization called the Center for Climate Strategies. Within agreements set up by CCS, the state agencies were not permitted to debate the science of man-caused global warming, as in the wording out of the Arkansas plan, for example: “Participants will not debate the science of climate change or the directive of the Act, but will instead provide leadership and vision for how Arkansas will rise to the challenges and opportunities of addressing climate change.”
It might be a safe bet that the guys at RBF would not have been pleased to see fair-and-balanced skeptic rebuttal at the Inside Climate News article series….
Is the Tides Foundation involved in any of these groups? How about George Soros?
How…(Jeepers)
No, you were right the first time.
Drummond Pike, founder of Tides Foundation, is now with INET/Institute for New Economic Thinking in NYC co-founded by George Soros, Jim Balsallie (Blackberry fame) and another fellow.
The long term goal is to impoverish americans and enrich the Rockefellers as they pour money into “renewables”.
Don’t renewables just grow on trees ??
Who needs funding, if it grows on trees.
g
IMO, political campaigns to merely vilify producers and impoverish consumers of carbon-intensive energy sources falls way short of any reasonable claim to “support efforts to reduce reliance” on carbon-intensive energy sources. People less wealthy than those funded by the Rockerfellers should be offered a working affordable alternative before you kick away the props that support their modest lifestyles and current life-expectancies. No reasonable person would do it to the food supply for a group of people, and shouldn’t do it to their energy supplies either.
A starvation diet is not a diet. It is starvation.
I find you can usually tell the honest and competent activists by their attitude to nuclear power.
Following recent news reports that Exxon Mobil Corp. knew as early as the 1970s that oil and natural gas cause global warming…..and for the past 4 decades they have been trying to prove it
“A group of House Democrats is investigating whether oil and coal companies have lied to the public regarding what they know about climate change.”
What you know must be the same as knowledge. Ideas based on inductivism isn´t knowledge. Knowledge is the sum of objective statements which has survived when objective falsifiable statements has been exposed to conclusive tests. Ideas are corroborated by the severity of the tests they have been exposed to and survived, and not at all by inductive reasoning in favor of it.
We must object to inductivism and demand critical rationalism. Or – we might have to bend over and welcome idiocracy.
United Nations has created an international problem of a cultural character, an international body pretending to be strictly scientific, while it is obvious from its “Principles governing the work by IPCC” and from “Guidance Note on Consistent Treatment of Uncertainties”, that it is not at all based on robust scientific methods.
More on my argument behind that conclusion here:
https://dhf66.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/united-nations-were-supposed-to-solve-problems-of-an-international-cultural-character/
Both sides have lots of money (from oil sales, ironically).
The funding isn’t relevant. The facts are.
And the facts are that Climategate showed the ‘World’s Greatest Climatologists’ weren’t sure of what warming was natural or anthropogenic.
The whole case is a Travesty.
Actually both sides are the same. I have a feeling that they have been anti-U.S. ever since the feds made the family break the massive company into pieces.
The worst of all is that United Nations initiated and stands behind this travesty.
United Nations was supposed to solve problems of an international character – not to become one!
“The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General from 1953 to 1961
Thanks, the facts ARE the issue. Even so, the funding may well tell us a lot about the Lame Stream Media and their regurgitations of lies.
I think that as an act of penance “Big Oil” should withdraw their product from the market for one month in the states of the senators who sign this document, and at any time in the future when these allegations are raised.
Not from the states, as that will be punishing a lot of innocent folks. Withdraw it from state government.
yes, but unless the VOTERS feel the pain personally for their decisions at the voting booth in sending these anti-science fascists to the congress, they will keep sending them back.
Better yet, require that no government body or agency can purchase any internal combustion engine using product. Nor can any employee who works for any government body or department, and gets paid by the taxpayers.
Nothing but electric for all government vehicles. Military exempted of course.
g
Since I’m not going to get a check from big oil, I might as well find a way to get a check from Rockefeller Brothers Fund. I don’t have to be sincere in asking for the money, just sincere in spending right?
J. Philip Peterson – to answer your question re George Soros, note what Everley wrote:
“The program is supported by the Energy Foundation, OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund, Lorana Sullivan Foundation and the Tellus Mater Foundation.” (emphasis added)”
Wikipedia: Open Society Foundations
Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is an international grantmaking network founded by progressive-liberal business magnate George Soros…
Since its founding in 1993, OSF has reported expenditures of over $11 billion…
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, while OSF spends much of its resources on democratic causes around the world, it has also contributed to political advocacy groups such as the Tides Foundation…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Society_Foundations
Thanks for doing my “homework”!
22 years.
11 – it says – billion dollars.
And see, pretty soon – a billion here, a billion there – and you’re into real money.
# obviously a bigger sofa to search behind than I have.
Auto
I wish this website (WUWT) would get 1% of a billion dollars = $10,000,000 USD…
What would Anthony do with 10 million dollars? I can only imagine…
How much money does it take to control the weather?
more! (really simple answer, no?)
Not quite the monitor-killer!
Not quite!
But + lots!
So is this part of what they were hiding about the effects of increasing CO2?
That the earth would be greening up? Crop yields and world food production would explode higher?
The number of violent tornadoes in the US would plunge?
There would be no major hurricane strikes in the US for periods of a decade or longer?
It makes sense that they would have known all this, based on meteorology 101 and the fact that when you decrease the meridional temperature gradient by warming the higher latitudes, you reduce the potential energy(and need for the planet to equalize the imbalance).
So if they knew that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and that it would cause these things, that have in fact occurred……….. should hold them accountable?
Maybe we should be thanking them for helping to rescue the planet from dangerously low levels of atmospheric CO2. Imagine if CO2 had dropped 120 ppm, instead of having risen 120ppm?
From an assumed initial state of 280ppm, that would mean atmospheric CO2 levels of 160 ppm. Plants would be shutting down and life on this planet would be suffering catastrophic harm.
Actually, the reality is that at the current 400ppm, the atmospheric level of atmospheric CO2 is still deficient for life, based on the objective/biological science.
The noted exception is a huge group of humans that have defined the ideal level of CO2, as well as global temperatures as being those levels that existed just before humans started burning fossil fuels.
Regarding the “climate change” angle. Climate is just the weather over a long period of time, by some standards, a minimum of 30 years.
As an operational meteorologist for 33 years, who also has weather records that date back to when weather conditions were first recorded, it appears that many measures of weather/climate, during the past 3 decades have featured the best atmospheric conditions for life on this planet since the Medieval Warm Period, around 1,000 years ago…………… that was (likely) warmer than this in many locations.
Why would we be absurdly blaming an entity for knowing that their product would play a role in this outcome.?
Because liberals do not live in the real world !!!
An operational meteorologist ought to know when and why the 30-years reporting of the “normal” weather came about – from the IMO 1934 Wiesbaden meeting. It was not a climate thing. Part of the reasoning was to reference the prior life-span of a young adult. Also, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_meteorology
“They were not authored by reporters from the LA Times”
From the cited article:
“the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, with the Los Angeles Times, has been researching the gap between Exxon Mobil’s public position and its internal planning on the issue of climate change.”
Who is surprised?
What does Rod Adams (and his progressive friends) have to say?
Please tease him…
while others dig into the Rockefeller angle, less known is the heavy involvement of TELLUS MATER FOUNDATION in CAGW advocacy:
Asset Owners Disclosure Project: Our Supporters
THE TELLUS MATER FOUNDATION
Tellus Mater’s mission is to catalyse a shift to sustainable capitalism: to change the operating rules for capitalism so that finance can better fulfill it’s role in directing the flows of Financial Capital to production systems that preserve and enhance Natural Capital…
http://aodproject.net/about/our-supporters/81-the-tellus-mater-foundation.html
(AOD Project Chairman is Dr John Hewson, a former leader of the Liberal Party of Australia. John Connor, CEO of Australia’s climate change research and advocacy group, The Climate Institute, is a director, as is ex-Goldman Sachs’ Chairman of the Quantitative Investment Strategies group, Bob Litterman. Litterman is also a board member of the World Wildlife Fund)
worth reading all of the following because, ultimately, the goal is to have friendly institutional fund managers pump trillions of dollars of pension funds into the CAGW scam:
Feb 2014: Guardian: Craig Scott: A new calling for capitalism
At the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos last month, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations’ secretary general, called on financial institutions to increase their investments in sustainable energy sources and low-carbon businesses. A day earlier, the UN Environment Programme launched an inquiry into the global financial system and how it could transition to a green economy.
The need for the world’s financial systems to move towards a more sustainable model is clearly attracting high-profile attention. However, such a transition is an enormous task: the WEF estimates that $6 trillion (£3.6tn) will need to be invested globally in infrastructure, every year, up to 2030 to deliver a low-carbon economy…
So how can the general public become more engaged and demand change from the financial institutions that serve them? “Transparency will be the thing that gets the next generation,” said Kelly Clark, director of the Tellus Mater Foundation…
For Litvack and many other contributors, the drive for change has to come from fund managers – in particular, those who control pension funds…
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/new-calling-for-capitalism
It sounds like they want environmental fascism leading perhaps to de facto totalitarianism. What government or Greenie could resist?
Any lawyers or people with true in depth legal knowledge. If so I have a question. If say for example the NY AG files charges against Exxon. Would they not be civil charges and thus subject to a counter suit like Mark Steyn did to Mann with all the potentially embarrassing and revealing revelations coming out in discovery?
Congrats Steve on the fine sleuthing.
Bring it on. These folks have drunk deeply from their own Kool Aid bucket. This isn’t anything like tobacco but they beleive it can be. They are very wrong. To our advantage.
troe
Also – to the world’s advantage.
We can be inclusive.
Auto
Yes, early papers by Exxon researchers were co-authored by academics in the 70s and 80s. They actually were the first to speculate that all this CO2 from burning their products was going to cause warming. There is no hidden secret here. Indeed, there hasn’t been one new development since then by the proponents of global warming. It can be said unequivocally that Exxon is responsible for today’s hysteria.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/22/what-did-exxonmobil-know-and-when-did-they-know-it-part-1/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/23/what-did-exxonmobil-know-and-when-did-they-know-it-part-deux-same-as-it-ever-was/
There are no smoking guns – the whole thing is a show for Paris.
“A non-profit is trying to get professional science societies to sign a letter condemning a House Republican investigation of the government’s climate agency over a study that drastically rewrote the global temperature record.
The letter may have actually been written by a left-wing environmental activist, and not The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) personnel — undercutting the notion this letter is the work of a disinterested scientific body.
The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained the AAAS letter, and an examination of its metadata shows the document was created by Michael Halperin, who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)”.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/20/science-orgs-letter-condemning-gops-noaa-probe-actually-written-by-an-environmental-activist/