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At UN Summit, Businesses Back Climate Reforms While Quietly Financing Lobby To Kill Them

At UN Summit, Businesses Back Climate Reforms While Quietly Financing Lobby To Kill Them

by Lee Fang, Republic Report.

LIMA, PERU — Several fossil fuel interests are here at the United Nations climate negotiations, putting on their best public face in support of reducing carbon emissions. Despite the lofty rhetoric, with some pledging to lead the way in reducing carbon pollution, the same corporate actors are also fueling efforts to block any substantive reforms.

It’s been called the “Jekyll and Hyde Approach to Climate Change.” In other words, businesses are boosting their brand by appearing to support climate reforms, while working to block policies to achieve these goals at very same time.

Republic Report talked to several corporate lobbyists and business representatives at the summit this week about their ties to pressure groups working to block action on carbon reduction in the United States.

The Edison Electric Institute, a lobbying group that represents utility companies, many of which rely on coal-based power plants, is indicative of this approach. The group claims that it is “committed to addressing the challenge of climate change” and says its member companies, including American Electric Power, Duke Energy, Xcel Energy, and others, “have undertaken a wide range of initiatives over the last 30 years to reduce, avoid or sequester GHG emissions.”

But EEI doesn’t just support both sides of the aisle, they support both sides of the moral spectrum on climate change. Brian Wolff, the executive vice president of the group, told us that his organization is a dues-paying member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that recently released a slew of anti-environmental template legislation to express support for abolishing the EPA, delaying greenhouse gas-related regulations, and undercutting the federal government’s ability to enforce climate change rules, including on power plants.

“There are benefits of having stakeholder engagement,” Wolff contends. “We’re involved with many Republican, Democrat organizations,” said Wolff at an event in Lima sponsored by the European Union pavilion. Wolff told us that he sent a staffer to a recent ALEC conference to see “what is going on there and the action coming up,” but said he could not recall if his representative voted to approve ALEC’s new bills focused on climate change.

Shell Oil plays from a similar script. Shell, also a member of ALEC, was revealed recently in a Bloomberg News investigation to be a donor to a campaign in California to attack the state’s landmark climate law, AB32.

At the same EU event, Marnie Funk, the vice president of communications at Shell, declared that her company is committed to climate reforms, telling the audience that her firm is “comfortable with a cap and trade approach.”

But when asked by Republic Report to reconcile her company’s pledge to support cap and trade with Shell’s efforts in California to attack cap and trade in California, Funk downplayed the effort, claiming that a Shell-supported trade group is simply asking for a two year delay of certain AB32 regulations. She did not respond to a question about supporting the rhetoric used by the campaign, known as the “California Drivers Alliance.”

The U.S. commitments to reduce carbon emissions are based on a patchwork of programs, most notably the EPA’s rules on coal-fired power plants, but also state-based plans such as AB32. For businesses that profit from practices that emit carbon emissions, it might make for effective public relations to pledge support for carbon reduction. But for the U.S. to achieve meaningful carbon reduction goals, policies from the EPA and California must succeed. For business groups quietly working to kill climate regulations, the high-minded language heard in Lima rings hollow.

This article originally appeared on Republic Report.

Photo: Shell via Flickr

Obama Can Reform Dark Money With A Stroke Of A Pen

Obama Can Reform Dark Money With A Stroke Of A Pen

by Lee Fang, Republic Report.

There’s a powerful solution for disclosing the secret money sloshing around in our political system. It does not require an act of Congress or action from any of the effectively toothless campaign finance watchdogs, like the Federal Elections Commission. In fact, this solution could be passed in an instant and the only requirement for action is political will.

President Barack Obama can issue an executive order today that requires government contractors to disclose their dark money campaign contributions.

Why doesn’t he? And why don’t campaign finance reform organizations push for such a fix?

In 2011, following the first wave of undisclosed campaign money in the 2010 midterms, the administration floated such an executive order. The idea provoked furious lobbying from business groups concerned that their donors would have to take responsibility for their electioneering.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest dark money group in the last two midterm elections, not so subtly threatened war with the White House over the order. “We will fight it through all available means,” one Chamber lobbyist told the New York Times, referencing the bombing campaign against Muammar Gaddafi, “To quote what they say every day on Libya, all options are on the table.”

The order wouldn’t impact every dark money donor. Individuals and companies without contracts with the federal government would remain untouched.

However, the order would likely impact dozens of firms. General Dynamics, one of the largest defense contractors in the country, has told shareholders that it has directly funded political dark money groups, though they have declined to name them. As journalist Paul Blumenthal has pointed out, “JPMorgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, and the aforementioned Koch Industries all hold government contracts.”

As Republicans prepare to focus narrowly on repealing the medical device tax in the next Congress, a measure that would increase the deficit by nearly $30 billion over 10 years, doesn’t the public have a right to know the full extent of medical device manufacturers’ campaign donations? There’s evidence medical device companies funded some of the largest dark money campaign organs, but we do not have a full picture. Given that major medical device firms hold federal contracts, an executive order could help reporters and members of the public understand what’s really motivating our policymakers.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have cried foul on the disclosure idea, claiming that the executive order would exempt unions. But that’s simply not true: several unions have contracts with the federal government and would be included in the rule with other federal contractors. Moreover, many unions already disclose dark money payments through reports filed with the Department of Labor. The union argument is really a red herring because the rule would not impact dozens of corporate and individual dark money donors.

When the idea was originally floated in 2011, congressional Republicans temporarily blocked any further consideration of the executive order with riders attached to the appropriations bills. “These riders have since expired,” says Public Citizens’ Craig Holman, “and with the pending Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, a significant amount of the president’s agenda will have to be achieved through executive action. Opening up the books on dark money is one such action.”

Holman, Public Citizen’s lobbying expert, emailed Republic Report to say that his organization “is renewing its call to the Obama administration to issue an executive order requiring disclosure of political spending by government contractors.”

After initial floating the possibility of issuing the executive order, the administration backed down. The question is, will the failure to act on dark money be part of Obama’s legacy?

This article originally appeared on Republic Report.

President Obama speaks at “A Salute to the Troops: In Performance at the White House” on the South Lawn on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2014, in Washington, D.C. The president and First Lady invited music legends, members of the U.S. military, military veterans, and their families to the White House for a celebration of the men and women who serve the United States. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT)

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Gerrymandering Rigged The 2014 Elections For Republican Advantage

Gerrymandering Rigged The 2014 Elections For Republican Advantage

by Lee Fang, Republic Report.

In the midterm elections, Republicans appear to have won their largest House majority since the Hoover administration. Republicans won on the weakness of Democratic candidates, a poor resource allocation strategy by Democratic party leaders, particularly DCCC chair Steve Israel, and an election narrative that did little to inspire base Democratic voters. That being said, in many ways, the game was rigged from the start. The GOP benefited from the most egregious gerrymandering in American history.

As Rolling Stonereported, GOP donors plowed cash into state legislative efforts in 2010 for the very purpose of redrawing congressional lines. In the following year, as the Tea Party wave brought hundreds of Republicans into office, newly empowered Republican governors and state legislatures carved congressional districts for maximum partisan advantage. Democrats attempted this too, but only in two states: Maryland and Illinois. For the GOP however, strictly partisan gerrymandering prevailed in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee and beyond.

Here’s an example from the election last night. In Pennsylvania, one state in which the GOP drew the congressional districts in a brazenly partisan way, Democratic candidates collected 44 percent of the vote, yet Democratic candidates won only 5 House seats out of 18. In other words, Democrats secured only 27 percent of Pennsylvania’s congressional seats despite winning nearly half of the votes. See the graph below:

 

A similar dynamic played in North Carolina, another state in which GOP control in 2011 created intensely partisan congressional boundaries. In the 2014 midterm elections, Democrats in North Carolina secured only 3 out of 13 seats (23 percent of NC’s congressional delegation) even though Democratic candidates in that state won about 44 percent of the vote:

 

In 2012, the first congressional election after the last round of gerrymandering, Democratic House candidates won 50.59 percent of the two-party vote — or 1.37 million more votes than Republican candidates — yet secured only 201 seats in Congress, compared to 234 seats for Republicans. The House of Representatives, the “people’s house,” no longer requires the most votes for power.

As the results from this year roll in, we see a similar dynamic. Republican gerrymandering means Democratic voters are packed tightly into single districts, while Republicans are spread out in such a way to translate into the most congressional seats for the GOP.

There are a lot of structural issues that influence congressional elections, from voter ID requirements to early voting access. But what does it matter if you’ve been packed into a district in which your vote can’t change the composition of Congress?

This article originally appeared on Republic Report.

Photo: Diliff via Wikimedia Commons

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Charles Koch Personally Founded Group Protecting Oil Industry Hand-Outs, Documents Reveal

Charles Koch Personally Founded Group Protecting Oil Industry Hand-Outs, Documents Reveal

by Lee Fang, Republic Report

“Lifestyles of the Rich Environmentalists,” produced by a group called the Institute for Energy Research, is a slick web video campaign designed to lampoon Leonardo DiCaprio and will.i.am as hypocrites for supporting action on climate change. The claim is that wealthy celebrities who oppose industrial-scale pollution supposedly shouldn’t fly in airplanes that use fossil fuels. The group, along with its subsidiary, the American Energy Alliance, churns out a steady stream of related content, from Facebook memes criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency, to commercials demanding approval of new oil projects like the Keystone XL, to a series of television campaign advertisements this year attacking Democratic candidates in West Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Alaska. On Capitol Hill, IER aggressively opposes any effort to repeal tax breaks afforded to the oil and gas industry.

Documents obtained by Republic Report reveal for the first time that the group was actually founded by none other than Charles Koch, the petrochemical, manufacturing, and oil-refining tycoon worth an estimated $52 billion.

IER has no information about its founding members on its website, and only lists a board composed of seemingly independent conservative scholars and businessmen. Earlier reports revealed that IER/AEA has received grants from Koch-funded foundations, and its leadership includes several individuals who have at times worked for Koch or Koch-related interests. But this is the first time it has been revealed that Charles personally founded the organization.

In October of 1984, Charles, then using a Menlo Park, California address, founded a non-profit called the Institute for Humane Studies of Texas. That organization briefly lost its charter in 1989 for failure to pay the Texas state franchise tax. Four years later, incorporation documents reveal, the group rebranded as the Institute for Energy Research, or IER, which later formed a subsidiary called the American Energy Alliance.

IER/AEA’s advocacy contrasts sharply with Charles’ personal brand as a selfless libertarian activist. The industrialist has argued that he is resolutely against special government handouts, such as tax credits or subsidies that benefit one industry over another. “Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs—even when we benefit from them,” Charles wrote in a column for The Wall Street Journal this year.

But Charles’ group, IER/AEA, has fought to protect special tax breaks that benefit fossil fuel producers. Along with issuing press releases against various federal efforts to eliminate oil and gas industry tax credits, IER/AEA commissioned a study claiming that such tax reforms would have an adverse effect on jobs and on oil production.

Charles and his brother David are personally responsible for founding and funding much of the modern conservative infrastructure. The popular libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, was in fact first named the Charles Koch Foundation, Inc before rebranding. The largest political organization in America outside the Democratic and Republican parties is Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party-organizing foundation also founded by the Kochs.

The latest organs in the Koch political network have carefully guarded the sources of their funding and direction. There is the new youth group, Generation Opportunity, along with the new veterans-related campaign organization, Concerned Veterans for America. But IER/AEA’s true origin casts new light on its motivations.

This article originally appeared on Republic Report.

Screenshot: YouTube

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