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climate accountability research project
Report Reveals How US Taxpayers Are Unwittingly Subsidizing Climate Lies
"It is high time for the American public to understand just how much charitable money is funding climate change disinformation and to recognize the key individuals behind this effort."
Sep 18, 2024
A report published Wednesday identifies nearly 140 "climate disinformation organizations" in the United States financed by wealthy donors who receive massive subsidies from the nation's taxpayers.
The analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Climate Accountability Research Project (CARP) explains that wealthy donors are "pouring billions of dollars" into nonprofit organizations to "advance misleading, self-serving agendas that do irreparable harm to our planet"—all while reaping the benefits of charitable contribution deductions in the U.S. tax code.
"Funds directed to fossil fuel industry-friendly think tanks and policy groups help turn disinformation into accepted truth and sow doubt about science," the analysis notes. "Then, these ideas get turned into action—or, more often, inaction—by the policy brass of lawmakers and presidential administrations."
The new report highlights "two troubling examples of this chain of influence: The Competitive Enterprise Institute, or CEI, received $21 million in charitable contributions from 2020 to 2022; it bills itself as 'instrumental' both in blocking ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and in pressuring former President [Donald] Trump to withdraw from the 2016 Paris agreement."
"And the Heritage Foundation received $236 million in contributions over the same three years; this money allowed Heritage to write Project 2025, a policy blueprint overseen by several former Trump administration appointees, that proposes changes to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency that would be disastrous for our climate," the report adds.
IPS and CARP estimate that donors to the two right-wing organizations were able to deduct "much of" their $257 million in gifts—effectively receiving major public subsidies.
"We are calling for fundamental transparency reforms so we can assess the total amount of taxpayer-subsidized charitable donations flowing to climate disinformation organizations."
In total, the report counts 137 "climate disinformation" nonprofits that received charitable donations between 2020 and 2022, with six of them focused "largely or entirely" on climate issues. The 137 organizations collectively received $5.8 billion in contributions over the three-year period examined in the analysis, which estimates that the total sum the nonprofits spent on climate disinformation "could range anywhere from a conservative $219 million into the billions of dollars."
The three "climate disinformation charities" that held the most in assets in 2022, according to the new report, were the Charles Koch Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Seminar Network.
Between 2020 and 2022, the climate disinformation groups that received the most in total contributions were the Seminar Network, the Stand Together Foundation, and the 85 Fund—an organization connected to Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo.
Chuck Collins, director of IPS' Program on Inequality and a co-author of the report, said in a statement that the analysis "provides some much-needed transparency so that the American public can understand the deceptive ways in which the rich seek to advance and protect their interests."
"Based on our findings from the data sources available to us, we are calling for fundamental transparency reforms so we can assess the total amount of taxpayer-subsidized charitable donations flowing to climate disinformation organizations," said Collins. "Many of these donors have built their fortunes in energy or the banking, insurance, transportation, and legal businesses that support the carbon-intensive industries, so they have strong personal interests in ensuring the world's dependence on fossil fuels."
The report notes that wealthy donors have recently been funneling billions of dollars into so-called donor-advised funds (DAFs), which IPS and CARP describe as a kind of "charitable bank account: a donor can donate to a personalized fund managed by a sponsoring nonprofit organization, and take a charitable deduction for that donation right away, but the donor then retains advisory privileges that let them recommend grants out of the fund to whichever charities they want, on whatever timeline they want."
IPS and CARP found that the three largest sponsors of DAFs between 2020 and 2022 were the National Philanthropic Trust, the Schwab Charitable Fund, and DonorsTrust.
"Because DAFs have a near-complete lack of donor and grantee reporting requirements, they allow for a high level of secrecy in donating funds," the report observes.
Private foundations are also major funders of climate disinformation, according to the new report, which lists the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, among others.
The report outlines a number of potential policy changes to stem the ability of individuals and organizations with fossil fuel ties to secretively finance climate disinformation with the help of taxpayer subsidies, including barring private foundations from "using grants to donor-advised funds to meet their payout requirements" and requiring DAF sponsors to disclose "the names of all individual donors who have contributed $10,000 or more to each DAF account."
"It is high time for the American public to understand just how much charitable money is funding climate change disinformation and to recognize the key individuals behind this effort," the analysis says.
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Prosecute the Climate Criminals
A new website and project calls for accountability.
Jul 22, 2024
Imagine a time, in the not-too-distant future, when an international tribunal convenes to ask the question: Who is responsible for climate disruption? Who knew about the dangers of burning oil, gas, and coal, with their atmosphere-altering properties, but did nothing about it? Or worse, which individuals worked to promote disinformation, block changes, and delay action?
We are all responsible for climate change, especially those of us who live in industrialized countries with a higher standard of living based on a century of low-cost, easy-to-extract fossil fuels. But not all contributions to climate disruption are equal: Some take the bus while others fly private jets. And some people have considerably more political power and wealth to influence the paths we have taken and, regrettably, not taken.
We now know that certain corporations, like ExxonMobil and Shell, hold oversized responsibility for running out humanity’s clock and limiting our present options. There are individuals, often presiding over powerful transnational corporations and institutions, with the clout of medium-sized nation-states. These are the “apex predators” in the climate inaction ecosystem. Future generations will know their names: They are the climate criminals.
We want the public to learn the names of these climate criminals and understand how they are largely to blame for the devastating climate impacts happening all around us.
These alleged climate criminals deploy their power to promote climate change denial while knowing the science documenting the harms of emitting billions of tons of carbon and methane into the atmosphere. When a scientific consensus emerged in the last two decades, the climate criminals sowed doubt to foster societal paralysis and inaction.
When the public began to awaken to the harms of greenhouse gas emissions, the climate criminals worked to capture our political system to thwart any efforts to regulate carbon pollution. They insidiously used their power to block less-polluting alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.
As each year has passed, the opportunities for averting the worst disruptions of climate change have diminished. The climate criminals use their power to run out the clock on climate change. They have brought us to the point of living through rising climate disruption with unprecedented rising temperatures, droughts, wildfires, floods, and rising ocean temperatures and sea levels.
Today, on Climate Emergency Day, we are releasing the names of the 2024 North American Climate Criminals: Individuals we have identified who are actively engaged in “crimes-in-progress.”
The 2024 Climate Criminals include leaders of energy companies, major financiers of fossil fuel projects, insurance companies, think tanks and foundations that fund climate change denial, and communications firms that spin disinformation and distraction.
A new project called the Climate Accountability Research Project (CARP) received over 300 nominations for climate criminals and prepared extensive dossiers on over 150. In selecting the 2024 Climate Criminals, we identified 40 individuals recently involved in jeopardizing our shared future. A committee of activists and researchers narrowed the list down to 24.
Most of the 2024 Climate Criminals, unlike their recent predecessors, do not deny the existence of human-created climate change. They leaped from outright denial to distracting delay in a nanosecond. Today’s climate criminals exercise their considerable clout to deflect responsibility, block meaningful action, and promote “greenwashed” solutions. They have staked their future on unrealistic, expensive, and unscalable technological fixes to distract us for a few more years while they squeeze riches from the fossil fuel stone.
The 2024 Climate Criminals have been personally enriched by their climate crimes. Their combined wealth is at least $29.8 billion, with an average of $1.7 billion. Three are billionaires: Kelcy Warren (worth $7.1 billion), Jamie Dimon ($2.3 billion), and Harold Hamm ($18.4 billion). Their combined annual compensation is $232 million, with an average of $11 million.
Even those at foundations, think tanks, and national lobbying associations are paid hefty salaries. Michelle Bloodworth, CEO of America’s Power, has been paid over $4 million since 2017 to lobby on behalf of the moribund coal industry. She hopes a Trump administration will declare coal plants as “critical infrastructure” and keep them spewing. Brian Hooks was paid over $5 million between 2020 and 2022 by one Koch-funded organization—and millions more through decades of work at the Koch Foundation and other Koch-funded climate-denying and action-delaying organizations.
Several 2024 Climate Criminals were involved in writing the environment and energy sections of the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership,” a public policy blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation that dismantles environmental protection and reduces investment in renewable energy while expanding Arctic drilling and Western coal mining. It would remove the U.S. from international climate change agreements.
In April 2024, four of our 2024 Climate Criminals attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago of fossil fuel executives, organized by climate criminal Harold Hamm. Trump allegedly asked for $1 billion in campaign donations in exchange for rolling back U.S. President Joe Biden’s regulatory policies. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, and American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers were reportedly also at the dinner. Hamm also co-hosted another fundraising luncheon for Trump with climate criminal Kelcy Warren on May 22, 2024.
This Climate Criminals educational campaign aims to shift the national conversation about who is responsible for climate disruption. We want the public to learn the names of these climate criminals and understand how they are largely to blame for the devastating climate impacts happening all around us. During the next heatwave, name the climate criminals out loud. Next flood or wildfire smoke in your eyes? Damn those climate criminals.
We support nonviolent protests against the climate criminals when they show up to be recognized at a charity gala or speak at a conference. We urge people to take public action at www.climatecriminals.org with a petition urging the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute these climate criminals.
When we understand the role of Climate Criminals in narrowing our options as citizens and consumers, we won’t tolerate insults like those dished out by Exxon CEO Darren Woods. Woods recognizes that our societies are failing to meet climate change mitigation goals, but instead of taking responsibility for his company’s leading role in causing climate change, he blames consumers. “The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” Woods told Fortune in March 2024. “We have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.”
The real dirty secret is that it’s Darren Woods and his fellow climate criminals who’ve been running out the clock, engaging in denial, and blocking the development of the green technologies that we need to preserve a livable planet. They are responsible, and they need to be held to account.
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