December 17 2019, 12:17 p.m.
IN 2018, a new group
appeared seemingly out of nowhere and immediately took aim at the recent
wave of lawsuits filed
by state attorneys general designed to hold major fossil fuel companies
responsible for allegedly misleading investors and customers about the true
risk of carbon pollution.
“The global warming lobby has
gone too far this time,” declared the innocuously named group, Government
Accountability and Oversight, in a video posted
on its website. GAO claimed that the lawsuits, which target Exxon Mobil, Shell
Oil, and Chevron, among other corporations, represent a form of government
overreach and that prosecutors are colluding with activist interest groups in
an unethical manner.
GAO, which is run as a
for-profit company and foundation, does not disclose its donors nor does it
provide much information about its origins. But on Saturday, a bankruptcy court
in southern Ohio released a filing revealing that the organization
received three donations totaling $300,000 from Murray Energy, the largest
privately held coal-mining company in the United States. The first payment was
made on June 7, 2018, just one month after GAO announced its intention to
“expose”
the litigation effort against energy companies.
That a secretive group working
to defend the fossil fuel industry is financed by Murray Energy may come as no
surprise.
Bob Murray, the
billionaire founder of Murray Energy, a prolific GOP donor, and early
supporter of President Donald Trump, is an outspoken critic of
environmental regulations and activist groups. Murray’s influence over the
administration, including the push to unravel Environmental Protection
Agency rules on carbon emissions and exit the Paris climate accords, is well documented. Even
the current chief of the EPA, Andrew Wheeler, is a former lobbyist for
Murray.
GAO and Murray Energy did not
immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has provided over
$3.8 million in campaign contributions to a range of federal politicians over
the last five years, according to the Federal Election Commission. That
figure, however, appears to be only part of the story in terms of the
company’s influence over the political debate.
In October, following a
precipitous drop in coal demand, Murray’s company filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection, forcing the firm to disclose its recent history of
payments to outside political entities. As part of the company’s restructuring
process, it filed a statement of financial
affairs, which lists creditors and liabilities, as well as a list of recent
charitable donations and grants, which revealed the payments to GAO, among many
other new revelations about the coal company’s hidden hand in the climate
change debate.
Murray Energy showered
donations to several think tanks focused on questioning the link between human
activity and global warming, providing grants to groups such as the Heartland
Institute, which once sponsored billboards comparing
those who accept climate change to the Unabomber. The Ohio-based coal giant
gave $30,000 to the Heartland Institute in March of last year, shortly after
the group announced a
campaign to save coal companies on the brink of closure, followed by another
$100,00 in contributions in the months that followed.
Other think tanks listed in
the filing as having received money from Murray Energy include the
Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a group that claimed “there
is no scientific consensus though that global warming is man-caused”; the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, which briefs lawmakers on how the
science behind climate change is a “hoax“;
the Cato Institute, the Charles Koch-founded think tank that has long sponsored prominent
climate change deniers; and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and
Global Change, which argues for the “many benefits” of increasing carbon
emissions. (“Atmospheric carbon dioxide is the elixir of life,” one
pamphlet reads. Emphasis in the original.)
The filing lists nearly a
dozen similar payments to right-wing organizations that do not disclose donors.
Murray Energy provided $130,000 to “Hardworking Ohioians Inc.,” a
mysterious for-profit
group, which revealed no information about its donors, tied closely to Ohio
House Speaker Larry Householder, and aired advertisements last year
to maintain the Republican majority in the legislature. Another $50,000 was
spent in support of FreedomWorks, a grassroots group that mobilizes public
support for rolling back EPA regulations. Judicial Watch, a GOP-aligned
investigative nonprofit, is also a beneficiary of Murray Energy money.
“The bankruptcy filing
confirms what environmentalists have long suspected about Murray Energy’s
connections to a network of special-interest groups that have worked to
manufacture doubt about climate change and attack climate scientists and
activists,” said David Anderson, communications and policy manager for the
Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group.
Bankruptcy filings have
provided a unique opportunity for the public to better understand the political
agenda of powerful corporate interests, which typically shroud sensitive
donations through nondisclosing entities. The sudden collapse earlier this year
of Cloud Peak Energy, a Wyoming-based coal firm, revealed several
donations to climate change denial groups. In 2015, The
Intercept reported on
another wave of coal bankruptcies, which revealed ties
between coal firms to a subterranean network of groups dedicated to blocking
environmental reform.
The bankruptcy of Alpha
Natural Resources three years ago, for instance, showed secret payments to
Chris Horner, a former lobbyist who had hounded climate scientists in an
attempt to discredit their work. The disclosure was the first time Horner and
his nonprofit, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, had been directly tied
to the fossil fuel industry.
Horner is now onto new
projects. Along with several other lawyers, he is a co-founder of Government
Accountability and Oversight.
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