Repealing Section 403 of the Bipartisan Budget Act
Floor Speech
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Madam President, I come to the floor today for the 57th consecutive week that the Senate has been in session to urge my colleagues to wake up to what carbon pollution is doing to our atmosphere and oceans.
I have described Congress as surrounded by a barricade of lies. Today I will be more specific. There is not just lying going on about climate change; there is a whole carefully built apparatus of lies. This apparatus is big and artfully constructed, phony-baloney organizations designed to look and sound as if they are real, messages honed by public relations experts to sound as if they are truthful, payroll scientists whom polluters can trot out when they need them, and the whole thing big and complicated enough that when you see its parts, you could be fooled into thinking it is not all the same beast. But it is, just like the mythological Hydra--many heads, same beast. So this speech is going to be about that beast.
A recent research article published by Dr. Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University, describes the beast.
He joins a tradition of scholarship in this area, including work by Naomi Oreskes, Aaron McCright, and Riley Dunlap, each of whom has studied the forces behind climate denial; and David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, who explored chemical and lead industry campaigns to deceive Americans about the dangers of those products.
The intricate, interconnected propaganda web and funding network of this climate denial beast encompasses over 100 organizations, including industry trade associations, conservative think tanks, and plain old phony front groups for polluter interests. It has even co-opted media outlets, a phenomenon I chronicled in an earlier speech about the Wall Street Journal editorial page becoming a tool of polluter propaganda.
So let's take a look at this climate denial beast, and how polluter money and dark money flows through its veins. This chart from Dr. Brulle's report shows the complex interconnection of the beast's major players. The green diamonds are the big funders, the Koch-affiliated foundations, the Scaife-affiliated foundations, the American Petroleum Institute, and so on.
The blue circles are the who's-who of climate denial groups: the Heartland Institute--they are the group that compared folks concerned about climate change to the Unabomber, to give you a sense of what sort of people they are--the American Enterprise Institute, right here, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, to name just a few.
The purpose of this network, to quote the report, is "a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public's understanding of climate.''
To misdirect and distort. The coordinated tactics of this network, the report shows, and I will quote again, "span a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts that aim at undermining climate science.''
That is the beast. Big money flows through it, more than half a billion dollars. The Drexel University report chronicles that from 2003 to 2010, 140 foundations made grants totaling $558 million to 91 organizations that actively oppose climate action. It looks like a big beast to build just to propagate climate denial. But if you look at carbon emissions from fossil fuels, which in 2011 EPA estimated to be over 5.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide--so take 5.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide and then multiple that by the social cost of carbon, the economic and health costs that the polluters cause and inflict on the rest of society, which OMB recently set at $37 per metric of CO
2--5.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted, $37 per metric ton of CO
2 on the social cost of carbon. Just 1 year's emissions will cost roughly 200 billion--with a B--dollars. So the stakes are pretty high for the polluters. If they were to pay for the harm they are causing, half a billion dollars through the beast, over 7 years, to get away with $200 billion of harm every year is a bargain.
More than that, a lot of this machinery was already built. The beast did not spring up at once full grown, it grew over time--in industry-fueled campaigns to obscure the dangers of cigarette smoke, of acid rain, of ozone depletion. Who knows. There are probably parts of it that go back to the benefits of requiring seat belts and airbags in cars.
Looking back on the effects of these industry-funded campaigns of denial, we see that real people were hurt. But the denial machinery stalled action and made the wrongdoers money. It worked. So now the climate denial machine, the beast, is calling plays from the same playbook and even using many of the same front organizations.
So who is behind this base? Unfortunately for the proponents of transparency, a large portion of the funding is not traceable. Much of the money fueling the beast is laundered through organizations which exist to conceal donor identity. Some of the organizations examined by Dr. Brulle get over 90 percent of their money from hidden sources. Indeed, more than one-third of these organizations get over 90 percent of their money from hidden sources. The biggest identity laundering shop is Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. Indeed, it is by far the biggest source of funding in this web. These twin entities reported giving a combined $78 million to climate denier groups between 2003 and 2010, and they refused to identify their funders.
According to the Drexel report, the Donors Trust and Donors Capital funding operation does double duty. It is the "central component'' and "predominant funder'' of the denier apparatus, and at the same time it is the "black box'' that conceals the identity of contributors.
Interestingly, anonymous funding through Donors Trust and Donors Capital fund has grown in tandem with disclosed funding from fossil fuel polluters declining, anonymous dollars up, disclosed dollars down. As we see here, Donors Trust and Donors Capital donations to the beast went from 3 percent of all foundation funding in 2003 to more than 23 percent in 2010.
At the same time, for example, the Koch brothers' affiliated foundations declined from 9 percent of all foundation funding in 2006 down to 2 percent by 2010. The same is true for other polluter-backed foundations. The Exxon Mobil Foundations wound down its disclosed funding of organizations in the climate denier network and basically zeroed out by 2007.
It makes perfect sense. Why would the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil come under fire for obviously funding climate denial when Donors Trust and Donors Capital creates a mechanism for polluters to secretly fund the base?
Plus, the phony-baloney front organizations within the beast can pretend they are not funded by polluter money. Everybody wins in this identity-laundering charade except the public, obviously, whom this elaborate construction is designed to fool.
The product of the denial apparatus is a complex ruse to delegitimize the science that supports curbing carbon emissions, foisted on the American people with all of the financing and fantasy of a Hollywood blockbuster production. Here is Dr. Brulle describing what you see when you look behind the actors who appear in the media spotlight. I will quote.
The roots of climate-change denial go deeper ..... Just as in a theatrical show, there are stars in the spotlight. In the drama of climate change, these are often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians. ..... However, they are only the most visible and transparent parts of a larger production. Supporting this effort are directors, script writers, and, most certainly, a series of producers, in the form of conservative foundations.
Frankly, this apparatus is a disgrace. When the inevitable happens, and the impact of climate change really starts to hit home, people will want to know--Americans will want to know, people around the world will want to know why, why we did not take proper steps in time. It is not as if there is not enough scientific evidence for us to act. Why not? This denial operation, the beast, will then go down as one of our great American scandals, like Watergate or Teapot Dome, a deliberate, complex scheme of lies and propaganda that caused real harm to the American people and to our country, all so that a small group of people could make more money a little longer.
The fact that one of our great political parties is in on the scheme will be to its lasting shame. There is an old hymn that says, "Turn back O man, forswear thy foolish ways.'' It is time for our denier colleagues to turn back and forswear their foolish ways. If they do not, there will be a day of reckoning and a harsh price to pay.
Every day, more and more Americans realize the truth, and they increasingly want this Congress to wake up. They know climate change is real. As the President said in his State of the Union Address:
The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.
Sir Winston Churchill once said this:
Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger. ..... The era of procrastination, of half-measures, soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences. ..... We cannot avoid this period; we are in it now.
Well, we are now in a period of consequences. We have got to break the back of the beast and break the barricade of blandishments and lies that the beast has built around Congress. This campaign of denial, this beast, is as poisonous to our democracy as carbon pollution is to our atmosphere and oceans. With money and lobbyists and threats, it has infiltrated itself in an unseemly influence in our government. For the sake of our democracy, for the sake of our future, for the sake of our honor, it is time to wake up.
I yield the floor.
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