“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.
Tides has a history. As related in Green Tyranny, during the Soviet-orchestrated nuclear winter scare in the 1980s, Tides co-funded a satellite link-up between the Kremlin and a nuclear winter conference being held in Washington, DC., the conference advisory board including three Soviet representatives. In fact, the U.S. end of the nuclear winter scare had been initiated by executives of the Rockefeller Family Fund. The aim of the nuclear winter scare was to force the Reagan administration to reverse its nuclear arms build-up. If it had succeeded, the Soviet Union would have quite likely prevailed in its aim of splitting the Atlantic Alliance when it deployed medium range nuclear missiles in Europe. The outcome would have been the U.S. losing the Cold War.
The Climate Industrial Complex’s biggest political challenge is squaring its de-industrialization agenda with what used to constitute the backbone of the Democratic coalition. The Blue-Green Alliance was set up to anesthetize pain from the green squeeze on well paid blue-collar jobs and desensitise the labor movement to the enormous subsidies going to China’s solar industry. But its phoniness was blown open when it opposed the Keystone XL project.
“We’re repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women,” stormed Richard Trumka, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
Not content with financing green Potemkin labor and activist front organizations, green billionaires and foundations are turning state governments into fronts for the Climate Industrial Complex. Using state Freedom of Information laws, CEI’s Chris Horner has uncovered emails showing climate donors funding and hiring staff for Washington governor Jay Inslee to push forward their green agenda. The World Resources Institute, which hired Washington’s state government as its contractor using Hewlett Foundation money, calls these novel and deeply questionable arrangements “public partnerships” to enable state governments “to hire experts to advise them on policies that benefit their constituents.” You can pull the other one.
In the past, Democrats’ machine politics was about looking after the constituent groups that made up the Democratic coalition. The deal was, we’ll look after you in return for your votes. That’s all changed, at least for blue collar America. Billionaire and foundation climate money has transformed the Democratic Party into the political arm of the Climate Industrial Complex.
But selling its soul has come at a steep cost. Without the war on coal, Hillary Clinton would very likely be in the White House. This election cycle, Democrats are defending a number of seats in coal states carried by Donald Trump. RCP lists West Virginia, Missouri and Indiana as toss-ups and Ohio as “leans Democrat.” If there is a Trump realignment, the Climate Industrial Complex will have been a big factor. When you’ve sold your soul, no amount of money will get it back.
Rupert Darwall is the author of Green Tyranny: Exposing the totalitarian roots of the Climate Industrial Complex (Encounter Books, 2017).
