Democrats’ dark money and the climate industrial complex
“Billionaires and special interests are conspiring to buy our political system,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., declared on the Senate floor last month. “They have created an evasive enemy that slithers out of sight, with only glimpses here or there.” Well blow me over. The senator must have been talking about the dark money of the "Climate Industrial Complex." Wait, of course she wasn’t. It was yet another attack by a top Democratic pol on the Koch brothers.
Warren’s beef was that the Kochs were funnelling some of their wealth through organizations such as Donors Trust and the State Policy Network to think tanks that apparently trick people into believing they are “genuine and unbiased.” The speech reveals how much the Left fears ideas, to the point that its best hope is to suppress competition.
Three years ago, Warren’s colleague, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., was calling for anti-racketeering laws to be used to prosecute climate change dissidents. Two years ago, the now-disgraced former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman led a posse of Democratic state attorneys general to use the courts to intimidate opponents of former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, with one even issuing a subpoena to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Democracy requires the clash of ideas. It is the lifeblood of politics. Ideas are not free and disseminating them costs money. Neither of my two books on global warming would have seen the light of day without financial support from the Searle Freedom Trust. But the Left is not willing to win the argument in the public square. Whereas conservative and libertarian money funds research and its dissemination, donors on the opposite side of politics fund outfits that are in the business of doing the opposite – silencing ideas and voices they don’t like.
Three years ago, climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr found out what this meant. He got kicked off Nate Silver’s 538 website for citing research in the most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showing there was no increase in damage from extreme weather events.
“I think it’s fair to say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate for 538,” boasted a Center for American Progress staffer in an email to leading Democratic donor Tom Steyer, who happened to be giving John Podesta’s “think tank” $3 million. “Thanks for your support of this work.”
Blue-collar workers and other traditional Democratic constituencies are the biggest losers from the green policies peddled by Podesta and funded by Steyer and the the billionaires and progressive foundations who finance the Climate Industrial Complex. To make up for this democratic deficit, big ticket donors ensure their dollars are bundled out through often secretive intermediaries such as the Environmental Grantmakers Association to finance phony grassroots campaigns. Purportedly spontaneous climate activism turns out to be centrally financed. Research by Canadian journalist Vivian Krause revealed that what Bill McKibben describes as his “scruffy little” 350.org outfit had been bankrolled by the Rockefeller Family Fund and a handful of other large foundations.
Krause also found that a separate Rockefeller fund has been financing anti-pipeline activism in Canada, kick starting the effort with a donation to the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation to launch the Tar Sands Campaign. Between 2009 and 2015, Tides made more than 400 payments to nearly 100 anti-pipeline groups.
More here:
https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/democrats-dark-money-and-the-climate-industrial-complex