The Iowa caucuses are on Monday — the first contest of the 2020 presidential race — and candidates are making a final push in the state. (A tradition that has been disrupted for candidates who are also senators and obligated to observe President Trump’s impeachment trial.)
According to Brulle’s research, the 91 think tanks and advocacy organizations and trade associations that make up the American climate denial industry pull down just shy of a billion dollars each year, money used to lobby or sway public opinion on climate change and other issues. (The grand total also includes funds used to support initiatives unrelated to climate change denial, as explained in a quote Brulle gave to The Guardian: “Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizations, not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.”)
“The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires,” says the Guardian, “often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change.”
“This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power,” he said. “They have their profits and they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hire people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. It ends up that people without economic power don’t have the same size voice as the people who have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy.
What you see is the tactics that this movement uses were developed and tested in the tobacco industry first, and now they’re being applied to the climate change movement, and in fact, some of the same people and some of the same organizations that were involved in the tobacco issue are also involved in climate change.
This chart is impossible to read so I transcribed it. All typos are mine. All dollar amounts listed in MILLIONS. Imagine if these obscenely wealthy fuckers were donating to environmental causes instead of stashing their money (untaxed!!) in these nonprofit “foundations”.
Anyone who listens to NPR or PRI - recognize any of these names?? And on some of the pages I linked above, be sure to check out the assets of these foundations. Many have hundreds of millions of dollars tucked away. You’ll note that all these foundations have all these people running them, just another way that the super wealthy move their money around to each other.
The worst part about googling for these groups is how many websites there are that they’ve set up, that they’ve greenwashed, or where you can ask them to fund something because they’re the only one with money.
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