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
So let me get this straight…
These activists are claiming that all skeptics (including scientists) are funded by big oil (when very few skeptic scientists, and only a few prominent politicians actually are), while at the same time, THEY are being funded by “green” companies? Did I get that right?
If by “green” companies you mean people and groups that make lots of money, and intend to make even more, by manipulating social and financial markets, then yes
The solution for the whole mess is to go to a minimal rate flat tax, eliminate tax exemption for foundations, etc.
Exactly! But then how would those rent seekers stack the deck?
The whole thing is just plain silly. We have known CO2 causes a warming forcing since 1996. And by how much, in 1906. And arguably before that, even.
Funded by Exxon, do you think?
A warming forcing ?? Really ?
Yes. But it is not a particularly large forcing. And with no positive net feedback, it doesn’t stack up to much. That is the basic lukewarmer position.
It has been reported that Will Rogers, an American political funny guy, said that money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.
Trickle-down economics …
is going on here. Notice the names of the rich and famous that trickle the money out to poster designers, banner makers, all the staff, and all the expenses for paper, ink, paint – oh, and gasoline – needed to keep weepy Bill and others in the news.
Our local ribbon makers and marchers (for the party in Paris) will experience below freezing temperatures this Sunday so will need gloves, hats, and hot chocolate or coffee. Then they will have to go trickle, or whatever the PC term is. A few may injure themselves and need emergency medical treatment or just a cough suppressant. See how it works? – watch the money flow.
The problem being that when we “distributed to the top” by cutting the top rates, we got the Reagan effect. There was a short, sharp recession to cramp out inflation and interest rates. Not only were 20 million jobs added, but federal revenue was up 18% factoring in both inflation and population growth by the end of it. (And, yes, there is more to it than that, but that’s the basic picture.) And the richest 10% were paying a higher percentage of federal taxes than they had before.
When we distributed it to the poor, we got Carter effect. And there were many unfortunate social effects as well as economic effects. (There was growth, it was not all bad.)
Every job I got, I was desperate to get. And I somehow never did manage to get a job until I was desperate. It’s a pity that I had to be desperate, but I would not trade my working life for the same money while not working. I think it would have had a bad effect on me. It’s the human condition.
And every penny I’ve made in my life was “trickled down” to me by someone who had more money than me.
And I want to know howcome so many people are able to set the tax rate perfectly, not too high, not too low in every computer game they played that included a tax rate or made you manage an economy, yet in real life they expound on the subject like, well, braindead, kneejerk chickens.
Every mayor of New York should be denied office until he can cope passably with Sim City. Or Caesar III (a/k/a, Sim City with Funky Helmets). Results to be utubed.
No, I am not singling you out, John. Would that I were. #B^) I agree with a lot of what you say.
another well-funded bunch which get tons of MSM coverage.
TELLUS MATER FOUNDATION among the funders:
Carbon Tracker: Our Funders
The work of Carbon Tracker has been made possible by the vision and openness to innovation shown by organisations such as the following:
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund
The Growald Family Fund
The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust
The Polden Puckham Charitable Foundation
THE TELLUS MATER FOUNDATION
The Ashden Trust
Zennstrom Philanthropies
Wallace Global Fund
The European Climate Foundation
Generation Foundation
MAVA Foundation
The Velux Foundation
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Oak Foundation
The Grantham Foundation
http://www.carbontracker.org/about/
Carbon Tracker: Jeremy Leggett / Non-executive Chairman
Jeremy is non-executive Chairman of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, Founder and a director of Solarcentury, an international solar solutions company, and Founder and Chairman of SolarAid, a solar lighting charity working in Africa.
An Entrepreneur of the Year at the New Energy Awards and a CNN Principal Voice, Jeremy convened the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security and was a Founding Director of the world¹s first private equity fund for renewable energy, Bank Sarasin’s New Energies Invest, where he served as a non-executive board member for twelve years.
As a former geologist, whose research on shale were funded by both BP and Shell, he has authored several books on fossil-fuel dependency, including Half Gone, the Carbon War and most recently The Energy of Nations. He is now publishing his latest work, a free-download, live series The Winning of the Carbon War. At the Business Green Leaders Awards 2014, he was recognised as Champion of the Year. Jeremy is a contributor to Guardian and the Financial Times, and is a visiting lecturer at the universities of Cambridge and St Gallen.
Carbon Tracker:
Our Advisory Board includes ***Ben Caldecott, Programme Director, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford (see author below):
pdf: 62 pages: Aug 2015: Oxford Uni: Investment consultants and green investment: Risking stranded advice?
Working Paper
The Programme is currently supported by grants from: Craigmore Sustainables, European Climate Foundation, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Generation Foundation, Growald Family Fund, HSBC Holdings plc, KR Foundation, Lloyd’s of London, ***TELLUS MATER FOUNDATION, The Luc Hoffmann Institute, The Rothschild Foundation, The Woodchester Trust, and WWF-UK. Past grant-makers include: Ashden Trust, Aviva Investors, and Bunge Ltd. Our research partners include: Standard & Poor’s, Carbon Disclosure Project, TruCost, Ceres, Carbon Tracker Initiative, Asset Owners Disclosure Project, 2° Investing
Initiative, Global Footprint Network, RISKERGY, and Corporate Knights.
About the Authors
***Ben Caldecott is the Founder and Director of the Stranded Assets Programme. He is concurrently an Adviser to The Prince of Wales’ International Sustainability Unit and an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England…ETC
Acknowledgements
This research project would not have been possible without grants from the Growald Family Fund, the ***KR Foundation (Chair, former UN climate chief, Connie Hedegaard), and the ***TELLUS MATER FOUNDATION.
We would also like to thank the following organisations for providing in-kind support to the project: The Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S), Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC), Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), Ceres, and ShareAction.
http://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/research-programmes/stranded-assets/Investment%20Consultants%20and%20Green %20Investment.pdf
Rockefellers has been funding eco-transformers since 1974 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED107165.pdf
The relevant question to ask at this point is “Where’s the money for financial backers of said foundations in this scheme?”
The answer is simple. Any substantial distortion of the market can be exploited, be it by mass misperception or flawed legislation following such madness. The exact way to do that may vary by case, but there is a way for sure and those fellows will find it. Once found, big money can be ripped off with no actual contribution to public good whatsoever, so there’s ample profit to be made on investment. And that’s the point.
more Tellus Mater:
Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU)
http://eciu.net/
check the homepage, to see the agenda.
ECIU Who We Are
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit is a non-profit organisation that supports informed debate on energy and climate change issues in the UK…
All of our funding comes from philanthropic foundations. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Climate Foundation, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, the TELLUS MATER FOUNDATION, and, from financial year 2015-16, the Climate Change Collaboration (group of four Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts – Ashden Trust, JJ Charitable Trust, Mark Leonard Trust and Tedworth Trust)
Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) – The Team
Richard Black, Director
Richard Black studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University before joining BBC World Service in 1985 as a studio manager. He subsequently worked there as producer and presenter on a wide range of programming including current affairs, science, health and sport, and as Science Correspondent…
As BBC Environment Correspondent, his reporting assignments included many UN summits including five UNFCCC meetings and Rio+20…
From 2012 Richard was Director of Communications for the Global Ocean Commission prior to ***SETTING UP ECIU…
READ THE REST OF THE TEAMS’ BIOS WHICH INCLUDES:
Germana Canzi, Senior International Analyst, who spent three years working on energy issues for the WWF European Policy Office before joining Friends of the Earth in London as head of energy policy; and George Smeeton, Head of Communications, who previously worked as a media relations manager for WWF-UK, was also seconded to WWF’s Global Climate and Energy Initiative (GCEI), and was media lead for their global campaign, Seize Your Power.
ECIU’s Advisory Board includes: Sir Crispin Tickell, BBC’s Robin Lustig , ***Lord Oxburgh, Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti (former UK climate envoy), etc.
***Lord Oxburgh:
April 2010: WUWT: Global warming: The Oxburgh Inquiry was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Guest post by Thomas Fuller, San Francisco Environmental Examiner
5. East Anglia University commissioned an investigation into the practices of its research unit and asked Lord Oxburgh to chair the panel.
6. Lord Oxburgh is chairman of Falck Renewables, a manufacturer of windfarms and the UK subsidiary of The Falck Group, a Milan-based manufacturer.
7. A sister company of Oxburgh’s Falck Renewables, Actelios, is publicly traded and had suffered serious falls in its stock price during the period of Climategate, etc.
8. Lord Oxburgh’s company, its parent and more than one of its sister companies have had organised crime activities surrounding their acquisition of property and installation of green energy systems.
9. The green energy industry, organised crime investors, Falck Renewables and its parent and sister companies stood to benefit from an investigation the results of which did not overturn the science findings of CRU…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/25/global-warming-the-oxburgh-inquiry-was-an-offer-he-couldnt-refuse/
The New York Ag has made a huge strategic and tactical blunder. By bringing this issue into the courts XOM now has the legal right to subpoena each and every document pertaining to “Climate Change” that for years has been withheld from view by various universities and government agencies. Let the fun and whining begin.
Is that a paper shredder I hear? And did you hear about that most unfortunate system crash that happened next Tuesday?
Nobody said nothin’. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Move along.
While it is interesting, and maybe important, that the anti-Exxon movement is a circular entity — one organization directly funds biased reporting, which the same organization then uses as independently verified information to further its campaign, the last paragraph is a joke:
“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.”
So what? The amounts stated are incredibly small for a member of the House of Representatives — the equivalent of a single plate at a $1000/plate fundraising dinner and that from a vaguely associated group, already known for advocacy in conservation politics.
Pointing out these small contributions makes the author look silly and extremely naive about American politics.
It’s the connections that matter in this situation! Shows spheres of influence.
Reply to Barbara ==> There is no connection here….only very small political campaign donations. “Shows spheres of influence” reeks of conspiracy theories.
These types of idiotic “connections” are used to try to tar less-convinced climate scientists with “connections to Big Oil” — it is nonsensical.
It is even more nonsensical when we see less-convinced climate scientists use the same illegitimate trick against “the other side” .
It’s not always the case, but in general, I find that corporate political contributions tend to go to the candidate who supports them already. They don’t have to buy him. (But obviously they want him to win because he supports their position.) Heck, sometimes propaganda is actually true and sometimes lobbyists have very valid points. And not.
But in the not-too-distant past, moneyed interests did not “influence” American politics. They owned it. They didn’t need no stinkin’ lobbyists. You weren’t the Senator from Delaware, you were DuPont’s man. It was on a whole grander scale than today. There is a huge amount of political money sloshing around, these days, but that’s only because there is so much more wealth. Yeah, you can buy a certain amount of influence. But it’s lower-grade influence, and the cost is disproportionate.
Also, as a historian I acknowledge that our past and present contain conspiracies. But except on the rarest occasion (only one I can think of) do the wacky-sounding ones even turn out vaguely to be true. (Yes, the CIA really, truly did try to assassinate Castro’s beard. It’s a fact, Jack.) However, I find conspiracies to be far less common, far more limited, and far more prosaic than is popularly entertained.
Take World War I. The Black Hand got in with Serbian intel, with maybe a little more than a nod from the Russkies (or not). A few things go wrong, they get off a lucky shot, and like that. Pretty good conspiracy, I think, as far as these thing go.
But not good enough for the conspiracy theorists, oh, no. How could a lone gunman who was not a crack shot eliminate the target? Who changed the Archduke’s route? Who arranged for the president of France to be at sea when the crisis occurred? Answer: Those dratted Rothschilds and other fellow-traveling International Bankers and Arms Dealers knew it would be a long destructive war and planned to make a killing while killing Europe. They arranged it all. Down to the last detail. Nevermind that no one in their wildest dreams envisioned trench warfare at the outset. Nevermind that long, destructive wars do not generally result in International Bankers, Arms Dealers, and even those Dratted Rothschilds actually getting paid.
My father wanted to go back to the UK and do a slow train tour like they did before. That didn’t suit my mother, who acerbically commented, “The sheep always face in the same direction.” But that doesn’t mean the sheep were party to a conspiracy. (I think.)
A “Conspiracy Theory” is a conclusion in search of a hypothesis. A destination in search of a path. And oh, the paths they weave.
This looks very similar to a trend I’ve seen in the anti-GMO and similar “control-what everyone-eats” organizations: find or create scientific-sounding studies (which can be thoroughly discredited, it is merely their existence that is important), report the results of the study without any linking or appropriate accreditation, then another site, blog, or news outlet will report on the report, then a bunch more will report on the report about the report – and pretty soon you have hundreds of sites (and thus Google hits) all reporting that eating hot dogs increases your risk of cancer 600% or some such nonsense … and it all appears very scientific – “… the science is settled …” – to the lay person.
Of course it is all just smoke and mirrors – within a day or two nobody actually remembers what the original study was, or who did it, or whether it was actually ever a well-regarded study (much less peer-reviewed) …