Finally, some coverage of the massive amount of money pumping the Big-Green agenda. What is really so remarkable about this is that skeptics are winning, despite the fact that the greens have almost all the institutional, academic, government, and big-media support, and far, far more money. All we have is truth and wits.
Mainstream media don’t know Big Green has deeper pockets than Big Oil
Ron Arnold
Mainstream reporters appear not to be aware of the component parts that comprise Big Green: environmentalist membership groups, nonprofit law firms, nonprofit real estate trusts (The Nature Conservancy alone holds $6 billion in assets), wealthy foundations giving prescriptive grants, and agenda-making cartels such as the 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association. They each play a major socio-political role.
Seeing Big-Green funding means taking a broader view of the money trail:
Invisible fact: the environmental movement is a mature, highly developed network with top leadership stewarding a vast institutional memory, a fiercely loyal cadre of competent social and political operatives, and millions of high-demographic members ready to be mobilized as needed.
That membership base is a built-in free public relations machine responsive to the push of a social media button sending politically powerful “educational” alerts that don’t show up on election reports.
Big Oil doesn’t have that, but has to pay for lobbyists, public relations firms and support groups that do show up on reports.
US environmental activists have access to $13 billion?
I’d like to see a detailed breakdown of that. But if we include government funding to activist-scientists, as well as government grants for all forms of emissions reduction and education campaigns, it’s believeable. Compare $13 billion to funding for skeptical scientists. The Heartland Institute are the largest single group usually named as supporting skeptical scientists. Their total budget (for all their projects, which involve a lot more than just the climate) is about $6 – $7m.
“… you do need detailed knowledge to parse Big Green into its constituent parts. I spoke with Washington-based environmental policy analyst Paul Driessen, who said, “U.S. environmental activist groups are a $13-billion-a-year industry — and they’re all about PR and mobilizing the troops.
“Their climate change campaign alone has well over a billion dollars annually, and high-profile battles against drilling, fracking, oil sands and Keystone get a big chunk of that, as demonstrated by the Rockefeller assault.”
Mind-boggling. One hundred billion at their disposal?
Driessen then identified the most-neglected of all money sources in Big Green: “The liberal foundations that give targeted grants to Big Green operations have well over $100 billion at their disposal.”
That figure is confirmed in the Foundation Center database of the Top 100 Foundations. But how much actually gets to environmental groups? The Giving USA Institute’s annual reports show $80,427,810,000 (more than $80 billion) in giving to environmental recipients from 2000 to 2012.
I checked the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and found $147.3 million in assets while environmental donor Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation posted $5.2 billion.
Driessen pointed out another unperceived sector of Big Green: government donors. “Under President Obama, government agencies have poured tens of millions into nonprofit groups for anti-hydrocarbon campaigns.”
RON ARNOLD, a Washington Examiner columnist, is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
h/t to Waxing Gibberish