‘Climate Donors’ Flock to Biden to Counter Trump’s Fossil Fuel Money (excerpt): New York Times

(Pics by this blog)

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.

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

Biden and Harris at first joint campaign event.

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.

“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.

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

By Lisa Friedman

• Aug. 18, 2020

Aug. 19, 2020"

Go to complete NYT online article

Related:  Trump will roll back more environmental regulations if reelected, says EPA chief: CNBC

 Trump, Biden, Harris, #climatechange, fossil fuel industry, Koch brothers, political party donations from corporations, Democrats, Republicans, #jailclimatecriminals

Trump will roll back more environmental regulations if reelected, says EPA chief: CNBC

Koch industries fund Trump

 "Key Points

 

* President Trump will continue to weaken environmental regulations on industries if reelected in November, the EPA’s Andrew Wheeler told The Wall Street Journal. 

* The administration would establish a cost-benefit analysis of any new regulation and expand the use of “science transparency” to justify new regulations. 

* After three years in office, the administration sought to reverse

Politicians and Climate Change

more than 100 major environmental rules that it has deemed burdensome to the fossil fuel industry, even as climate change accelerates. 

* Analysts say many of the administration’s rollbacks could increase emissions and lead to thousands of additional deaths from bad air quality."

 

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"Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has released a plan to put $2 trillion into green infrastructure and energy over four years to curb climate change and spur economic growth, which the Trump campaign has argued would hurt the oil and gas industry. "

 

Go to the CNBC article 

Published Thu, Sep 3 2020

The Carbon Club/Book: 'You bastards sacked me.' (excerpt): SMH

The Carbon Club

How did environmental issues become so politicised? The people purge early in the Abbott government – beginning in 2013 with the "night of the short knives" – gives some clues.

By Marian Wilkinson
August 29, 2020

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"What surprised the scientists most was not their hasty sacking but how quickly the government obliterated their work. “The website that we’d spent a lot of time building was taken down with absolutely no justification as far as I could see,” says Flannery, the one-time principal research scientist at the Australian Museum and internationally renowned scientific author. “It was giving basic information that was being used by many, many people – teachers and others – just to gain a better understanding of what climate science was actually about.”

Corruption

The Climate Commission had been set up in 2011 by Julia Gillard’s Labor government as an independent source of information for the public to understand climate change and its impacts on Australia. But the commission and its members had been pilloried as “alarmist” by sceptical columnists in the Murdoch media and by radio shock jocks from the beginning. Flannery was expecting the commission to be disbanded, but the decision to kill its website hurt."

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We Want Climate Action Now

"Not long before this, the Liberal Party’s donor cash cow, the Cormack Foundation, which Morgan chaired, had stumped up another $300,000 for the Institute of Public Affairs. The conservative think tank’s latest publication, Climate Change: The Facts 2014, was soon in the works with essays from Australia’s best known climate sceptics, News Corp’s Andrew Bolt and former James Cook University professor Bob Carter, along with their international cohorts by now so familiar here: MIT’s Professor Richard Lindzen, Dr Pat Michaels from the US Cato Institute – a think tank co-founded by American billionaire Charles Koch – and the former UK chancellor Nigel Lawson.

Climate Justice

At the same time as Morgan’s attack, Lawson’s UK think tank, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, welcomed Abbott’s old mentor, John Howard, to deliver its annual lecture in London. The former Liberal prime minister used the opportunity to enthusiastically back Abbott’s plan to dismantle Labor’s climate policies in a speech he called “One Religion is Enough”."

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"By the end of Abbott’s first year in office, the PM had made it clear he didn’t believe most climate scientists, even those who worked for his government. But while his climate scepticism could shape policy in Canberra, it would soon put him in conflict with the most powerful leader in the world, US president Barack Obama.

This is an edited extract from Marian Wilkinson’s The Carbon Club (Allen & Unwin, $33), out Monday."


Related:   MAJOR PARTIES LEAVE BACKDOOR OPEN FOR DIRTY DONATIONS

Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government, carbon emissions, corrupting donations, Institute of Public Affairs IPA, Koch brothers, Murdoch media, political party donations from corporations, Professor Flannery

DESMOG Newsletter

Message From the Editor This week was all about the Kochs. Drawing from a major new archive on the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers, Sharon Kelly explains how its documents help illuminate the origin story for Charles and David Kochs' powerful network of influence. DeSmog also launched a new research tool, the Koch Network Database, to profile the dozens of organizations and individuals linked to Charles Koch or other members of the Koch family, Koch Industries, and related entities. The Koch political network includes a wide range of groups working to spread the Kochs’ free market vision on a range of civic issues, which includes fighting against regulations on carbon emissions and denying the existence or seriousness of man-made climate change. Now, you can find this network’s members and activities, all in one place. We have around 50 profiles to start and many more to come. Please let us know if you have any information or documents to contribute. Have a story tip or feedback? Get in touch: editor@desmogblog.com. Thanks, Brendan DeMelle Executive Director

Global Research Article: Who Is Guilty of Climate Crimes?

Climate Crime Exposed

" ..... Not surprisingly, the authors’ focus is primarily on the fossil fuel corporations–who are engaged in an elaborate, multi-billion dollar misinformation campaign — and on the governments who have subsidized them and colluded with them through inaction. These are the key perpetrators of the largest human rights violation in history.

It was fascinating, and sickening, to learn more about how the climate-denial machine actually works, such as the Heartland Institute mailing a climate-denying DVD to 200,000  high school science teachers. The description of the Koch brothers’ activities was particularly staggering: