Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (32 page)

To dramatize the issue, offshoots of Americans for Prosperity sent “Carbon Cops,” who pranced into Tea Party rallies pretending to be overreaching emissaries from the EPA, warning that backyard barbecues, churches, and lawn mowers were about to be shut down because of new, stricter interpretations of the Clean Air Act. The advocacy group also launched what it called the Cost of Hot Air Tour to mock the cap-and-trade proposal. It featured a seventy-foot-tall bright red hot-air balloon on whose side was emblazoned a slogan reducing the argument against the cap-and-trade proposal to six scary words. Cap and trade, it said, means “higher taxes, lost jobs, less freedom.” Americans for Prosperity sent the balloon to so many states in 2009 that the group’s president, Tim Phillips, later admitted, “
I rode more hot-air balloons in that year-and-a-half period than I ever want to ride again. I do not like hot-air balloons.”

The public campaign was accompanied by a darker covert one. Tom Perriello, a freshman Democratic congressman from Charlottesville, Virginia, who favored the cap-and-trade bill, discovered this in the summer of 2009 when constituents started bombarding his office with angry missives.
Reams of faxes arrived from voters, many representing local chapters of ordinarily supportive liberal groups like the NAACP and the American Association of University Women. Under official letterheads, they argued passionately that the cap-and-trade legislation would raise electric bills, hurting the poor. But an effort by the congressman’s staff to reach the angry constituents revealed that the letters were forgeries, sent on behalf of a coal industry trade group by Bonner and Associates, a Washington-based public relations firm.

After the fraud was exposed, the firm fired an employee. But it wasn’t an isolated incident. Perriello, like many other elected officials that summer, also found himself heckled during town hall meetings. One such heckler called him a “traitor” for supporting the cap-and-trade bill, while another videotaped the showdown.
Later one of the disruptive members of the audience admitted to the investigative reporter Lee Fang that he had been put up to it by the Virginia director of Americans for Prosperity. Similar outbursts took place all over the country that summer.
Mike Castle, a moderate Republican congressman from Delaware, was accosted by voters demanding to know how he could even consider voting for such a “hoax,” according to Eric Pooley’s account in
The Climate War
. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and other industry representatives, it turned out, had created a “grassroots” group called Energy Citizens that joined Tea Party organizations in packing the town halls with protesters.

Fanning the flames were the right-wing radio hosts. “It’s not about saving the planet,” Rush Limbaugh told his audience. “It’s not about anything, folks, other than raising taxes and redistributing wealth.” Glenn Beck warned listeners it would lead to water rationing. “This is about controlling every part of your life, even taking a shower!” Torquing up the fear, Republicans in Congress quoted from a study by the Heritage Foundation that predicted it would add thousands of dollars to Americans’ energy bills and lead to devastating unemployment. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office put out an authoritative study contradicting this, demonstrating that the average cost to Americans would be the same as buying a postage stamp a day. But John Boehner, the Republican minority leader in the House, dismissed the real numbers, suggesting anyone who believed them could “
go ask the unicorns.”

Despite the inflammatory atmosphere, the House passed a bill to cap and trade carbon dioxide emissions on June 26, 2009.
The process wasn’t pretty. It took an extraordinary push from its sponsors, Congressmen Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and an epic amount of horse-trading between environmentalists and the affected industries. Many environmentalists thought the final product was so flawed that it wasn’t worth the trouble. But for those looking for Congress to reach the kind of moderate compromises Obama had been elected to deliver, it was a first step.

Rather than causing elation, though, the victory was clouded by trepidation. Supporters, particularly Democrats from conservative, fossil-fuel-heavy states like Perriello and Rick Boucher of Virginia, feared there would be a steep price to pay. As the threat to the industry grew, so would its determination to stop them.

That fall, television ads began appearing in states like Montana, where the Democratic senator Max Baucus was already under attack from members of the Koch network on the health-care issue. “There is no scientific evidence that CO
₂
is a pollutant. In fact higher CO
₂
levels than we have today would help the Earth’s ecosystems,” the ads said, urging viewers to tell Baucus not to vote for the cap-and-trade bill, which would “cost us jobs.” The sponsor for the ad was a group curiously called CO
₂
Is Green.
Quietly funding it, according to Steven Mufson, the energy reporter for
The Washington Post
, was Corbin Robertson, owner of the country’s largest private cache of coal.

Robertson’s fingerprints were detectable behind another anti-climate-change front group, too, the Coalition for Responsible Regulation.
As soon as Obama’s EPA took steps to regulate greenhouse gases, the previously unknown group took legal action to stop it. The group’s private e-mails surfaced later, revealing how it successfully egged on Texas’s bureaucrats to join the lawsuit, despite the state’s own climatologist’s belief that man-made global warming posed a real danger and that the EPA’s scientific findings were solid. Neither Robertson’s name nor that of his company appeared in the papers incorporating the organization. But its address and its top officers were the same as those of Robertson’s company, Quintana.

Following hard on the summer’s raucous Tea Party protests, things got uglier in Washington as well. As Obama addressed a joint session of Congress laying out his health-care proposal in September 2009, his speech was interrupted by Joe Wilson, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, shouting, “You lie!” from the well of the House. Congress rebuked Wilson for his extraordinary breach of decorum, but within a month, climate skeptics were echoing Wilson’s belligerence.
One posted a report titled “UN Climate Reports: They Lie!”

T
he opposition grew as the Obama administration got ready to head to Copenhagen in December 2009 for its first international climate summit. World leaders expected the United States would finally commit to serious reform. Previously, the United States had declined to join other developed nations in agreeing to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Given Obama’s position, time seemed to be running out for the fossil fuel forces and their free-market allies. Then, on November 17, 2009, an anonymous commenter on a contrarian Web site declared, “
A miracle has happened.”

With lethal timing, an unidentified saboteur had hacked expertly into the University of East Anglia’s Web site and uploaded thousands of internal e-mails detailing the private communications of the scientists working in its famed Climatic Research Unit. The climatologists at the British university had been in constant communication with those in America, and now all of their unguarded professional doubts, along with their unguarded and sometimes contemptuous asides about their opponents, stretching all the way back to 1996, were visible for the entire world to read.

Chris Horner, a conservative climate contrarian working at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, another pro-corporate think tank subsidized by oil and other fossil fuel fortunes, including the Kochs’, declared, “
The blue dress moment may have arrived.” But instead of using Monica Lewinsky’s telltale garment to impeach Bill Clinton, they would use the words of the world’s leading climate scientists to impeach the climate change movement. If edited down and taken out of context, their exchanges could be made to appear to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming was real.

Dubbing the alleged scandal Climategate, they went into overdrive. The web of organizations, funded in part by the Kochs, pounced on the hacked e-mails. Cato scholars were particularly energetic in promoting the story. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar alone gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. The story soon spread from obviously slanted venues to the pages of
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
, adding mainstream credence. Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, jumped on the hacked e-mails, describing them to a gathering of conservative bloggers at the Heritage Foundation as “
a crucial tipping point” and adding, “If we win the science argument, I think it’s game, set, and match for them.”

Eventually, seven independent inquiries exonerated the climate scientists, finding nothing in the e-mails to discredit their work or the larger consensus on global warming. In the meantime, though, Michael Mann’s life, along with the environmental movement, was plunged into turmoil.

Mann was among the scientists most roiled by the mysterious hacking incident. Four words in the purloined e-mails were seized upon as evidence that he was a fraud. In describing his research, his colleagues had praised his use of a “trick” that had helped him “hide the decline.” Mann’s detractors leaped to the conclusion that these words proved that his research was just a “trick” to fool the public and that he had deliberately hidden an actual “decline” in twentieth-century temperatures in order to fake evidence of global warming.

The facts, when fully understood, were very different. It was a British colleague, not Mann, who had written the ostensibly damning words, and when examined in context, they were utterly mundane. The “trick” referred to was just a clever technique Mann had devised in order to provide a backup data set. The “decline” in question was a reference to a decline in available information from certain kinds of tree rings after 1961, which had made it hard to have a consistent set of data. Another scientist, not Mann, had found an alternative source of data to compensate for this problem, which was what was meant by “hide the decline.” The only genuinely negative disclosure from the e-mails was that Mann and the other climatologists had agreed among themselves to withhold, rather than share, their research with some of their critics, whom they disparaged. Given the harassment they had been subjected to, their reasoning was understandable, but it violated the customary transparency expected within the scientific community. Other than that, the “Climategate” scandal was, in other words, not one.

It took no time, nevertheless, for the hacked e-mails to spur a witch hunt. Within days, Inhofe and other Republicans in Congress who were recipients of Koch campaign donations demanded an investigation into Mann. They sent threatening letters to Penn State, where he was by then a tenured professor. Later, Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a graduate of the George Mason School of Law, would also subpoena Mann’s former employer, the University of Virginia, demanding all records relating to his decade-old academic research, regardless of libertarians’ professed concerns about government intrusion. Eventually, Virginia’s Supreme Court dismissed its own attorney general’s case “with prejudice,” finding he had misread the law.

By New Year’s Eve 2009, Mann was feeling under attack from all sides. Conservative talk radio hosts lambasted him regularly. Contrarian Web sites were lit up with blog posts detailing his iniquity. A self-described former CIA officer contacted colleagues in Mann’s department offering a $10,000 reward to any who would provide dirt on him, “confidentiality assured.” Soon after, Mann asserts, a think tank called the National Center for Public Policy Research led a campaign to get Mann’s National Science Foundation grants revoked.
As Mann recounts in his book
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
, two conservative nonprofit law firms, the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Landmark Legal Foundation, brought legal actions aimed at him. The think tank and the two law firms were funded by combinations of the same small constellation of family fortunes through their private charitable foundations. Omnipresent were Bradley, Olin, and Scaife.

Charles Koch’s foundation also was engaged in piling on. It helped subsidize the Landmark Legal Foundation. The Kochs evidently admired Landmark’s president, Mark Levin, a longtime associate of the former attorney general Edwin Meese III. In 2010, Americans for Prosperity hired Levin to promote it on his nationally syndicated talk radio show, thereby copying the deal that FreedomWorks had struck with Glenn Beck. Levin was a curious choice of spokesman for the buttoned-down, erudite Koch brothers. His style was incendiary, even rude. He later called Kenneth Vogel, the
Politico
reporter who broke the news of the deal with Americans for Prosperity, “
a vicious S.O.B.” and told a female caller, “
I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the Hell out of here!” His attacks on Obama’s policies were similarly heated, particularly regarding climate change. He said Mann “
and the other advocates of man-made global warming” did not “know how to conduct a correct statistical analysis” and accused “enviro-statists” of inventing global warming in order to justify a tyrannical government takeover. Their “pursuit,” he claimed, “after all, is power, not truth.”

An especially grave attack on Mann’s livelihood was launched, meanwhile, by yet another group, the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The self-described think tank belonged to a national web of similar conservative organizations known as the State Policy Network. Much of Commonwealth’s financial support came through DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, making it impossible to identify the individual backers. But because it was based in Scaife’s home state, Commonwealth had particularly deep ties to his family foundations. Michael Gleba, the chair of Commonwealth’s board of directors, was also the president of the Sarah Scaife Foundation and treasurer of Scaife’s Carthage Foundation and a trustee of both. This arrangement gave Commonwealth unusual clout, particularly over Pennsylvania’s state legislature.