(Pics by this blog)
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| Koch Industries are behind Trump |
WASHINGTON — In
2009, the Obama administration’s environmental team called a group of
climate activists to the White House to deliver a message: Climate
change doesn’t sell and only provokes economic attacks from the right
that are too difficult to counter.
As
former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to assume the
Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, the changing climate is now a
core campaign issue — and a focus for fund-raising. Plans for tackling
rising global temperatures will be in the spotlight Wednesday at the
Democratic convention. And Mr. Biden has raised more than $15 million in
candidate contributions from hundreds of new donors who specifically
identify with climate change as a cause.
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| Biden: Build Back Better |
That
climate-specific fund-raising may make up just about 5 percent of the
total he has raised so far. It’s dwarfed by fossil fuel donations to President Trump,
who took in $10 million from a single fund-raiser in June, held by the
oil billionaire Kelcy Warren, and whose super PAC,America First Action,
has seen millions pour in from coal and oil moguls, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign donations.
It
is not known how much unregulated money is going to super PACs aligned
with Democrats from other self-identified climate donors.
But the hard money climate donations
represent a growing counterweight to oil, gas and coal money that has
long warped the
energy conversation in Washington. Self-identified
“climate donors” are a new phenomenon in the 2020 election and are
working overtime to show candidates that campaigning to eliminate
emissions from fossil fuels pays — in cash.
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| Biden and Harris at first joint campaign event. |
“That
is a sea change. We’ve now got a class of people called ‘climate
donors’ in a way we had environmental donors before,” said David
Bookbinder, general counsel for the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think
tank in Washington.
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| Trump's environmental rollbacks |
“Climate has taken over as an issue on
its own. People are finally understanding that we have a truly
existential crisis on our hands,” Mr. Bookbinder added. Publicly
embracing climate change solutions was viewed as a political liability,
as recently as a decade ago, he said. During Barack Obama’s re-election
run in 2012, the issue was hardly mentioned.'
Now
donors are sending a new message: “We want to make it easy to do the
right thing. We should reward campaigns and candidates for having the
right policies,” said Matt Rogers, a co-founder of the digital
thermostat company Nest." ............
"A version of this article appears in print on
Aug. 19, 2020"
Trump, Biden, Harris, #climatechange, fossil fuel industry, Koch brothers, political party donations from corporations, Democrats, Republicans, #jailclimatecriminals
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