by Jane Mayer
The George W. Bush years, meanwhile, proved a bonanza for the fossil fuel industry, which had thrown its weight behind his election. The coal industry in particular had played a major role in delivering West Virginia’s five electoral votes to Bush in 2000, sealing a victory that would have gone to Al Gore had he carried the formerly Democratic state instead. “State political veterans and top White House staffers concur that it was basically a coal-fired victory,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. The industry was lavishly rewarded. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of the oil-field equipment and services company Halliburton, personally took charge of energy policy. Bush had vowed during the campaign to act on climate change by limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but once in office Cheney countermanded him. In what Cheney’s biographer Barton Gellman describes as a “case study in managing an errant boss,” Cheney shifted the administration’s position to arguing that the science on global warming was “inconclusive,” requiring “more scientific inquiry.”
The 2005 energy bill, which Hillary Clinton dubbed at the time the “Dick Cheney Lobbyist Energy Bill,” offered enormous subsidies and tax breaks for fossil-fuel-intensive companies. The Bush administration weakened regulations, for instance, on coal-fired power plants. Taking a position that was eventually overturned by the courts, it exempted mercury emissions from regulation under the Clean Air Act, reversing the position taken by the Clinton administration. Fracking got a boost too. Cheney used his influence to exempt it from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, over objections from the Environmental Protection Agency. The fracking industry boomed. Within five years, Devon Energy, Larry Nichols’s company, would rank as the fourth-largest producer of natural gas in the United States. Harold Hamm would become a multibillionaire. Cheney’s former company Halliburton also became a major player in the fracking industry, illustrating that free-market advocates greatly benefited from government favors.
In all, the Bush energy act contained some $6 billion in oil and gas subsidies and $9 billion in coal subsidies. The Kochs routinely cast themselves as libertarians who deplored government taxes, regulations, and subsidies, but records show they took full advantage of the special tax credits and subsidies available to the oil, ethanol, and pipeline business, among other areas of commerce in which they were engaged. In many cases, their lobbyists fought hard to protect these perks. In addition, their companies benefited from nearly $100 million in government contracts in the decade after 2000, according to a study by Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group.
When Barack Obama took office, the fossil fuel industry was not only eager to preserve its perks but also more militant in its opposition to climate change science than ever. Skocpol notes that 2007 had been a turning point in the fight. That year, Al Gore was awarded both a Nobel Peace Prize and featured in an Academy Award–winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. The film featured Mann’s hockey stick graph. Gore’s acclaim and Mann’s simple chart helped raise concern about global warming to a new peak, with 41 percent of the American public saying it worried them “a great deal.”
“At this critical juncture—when Americans in general might have been persuaded of the urgency of dealing with global warming,” Skocpol notes, opponents fought back with new vigor. The whole ideological assembly line that Richard Fink and Charles Koch had envisioned decades earlier, including the entire conservative media sphere, was enlisted in the fight. Fox Television and conservative talk radio hosts gave saturation coverage to the issue, portraying climate scientists as swindlers pushing a radical, partisan, and anti-American agenda. Allied think tanks pumped out books and position papers, whose authors testified in Congress and appeared on a whirlwind tour of talk shows. “Climate denial got disseminated deliberately and rapidly from think tank tomes to the daily media fare of about thirty to forty percent of the U.S. populace,” Skocpol estimates.
Climate contrarians also recruited conservative evangelical Christian leaders, who distrusted government in general and had impressive political and communications clout. One by-product of this pact was an organization in the Washington suburbs called the Cornwall Alliance, which released a hit film in evangelical circles called Resisting the Green Dragon that equated environmentalism with worship of a false god. It described global warming as “one of the greatest deceptions of our day.” Climate change became such a hot-button issue for Christian fundamentalists that Richard Cizik, a vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who was considered among the most powerful leaders in the movement, was forced to resign in late 2008 after publicly endorsing climate change science.
Before long, public opinion polls showed that concern about climate change among all but hard-core liberals had collapsed. As the 2008 presidential campaign played out, the issue grew increasingly polarized. Just before the election, with the economy in tumult, John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, reiterated that the climate problem was real. He also said that green jobs would lead the way to economic recovery. But his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, one of whose mantras was “Drill, Baby, Drill,” indicated just how influential the voice of climate extremism was becoming within the Republican Party.
As Obama took office, America derived over 85 percent of its total energy from oil, gas, and coal. The business was enormous, with profits and influence to match.
Conventional wisdom nonetheless held that Obama’s election portended well for environmentalists. Mann, too, was optimistic, but he worried about what he regarded as a “troubling complacency” among his colleagues. He knew that the Obama administration posed two huge threats to the fossil fuel industry, and he doubted the industry would just roll over. The first threat was Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency. Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator, announced that she intended to treat greenhouse gas emissions as hazardous pollutants, regulating them for the first time under the Clean Air Act. It was an authority that the Supreme Court had upheld in 2007. But no previous administration had tried to take on the industry so frontally. The second was the Democrats’ plan to introduce the long-incubating cap-and-trade bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
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Even before Obama was inaugurated, Americans for Prosperity had begun taking aim at the cap-and-trade idea, circulating a pledge requiring elected officials to oppose new spending to fight climate change. Koch Industries, meanwhile, began lobbying against government mandates to reduce carbon emissions. Then, soon after Obama was inaugurated, an odd television ad popped up around the country that seemed strangely off message. While most Americans were transfixed by the unfolding economic disaster that was preoccupying the Obama administration in its first few months, out of nowhere, it seemed, was a discordant television spot about a spoiled slacker named Carlton.
“Hey there,” said a louche-looking young man, plucking away at a plate of canapés. “I’m Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite. I inherited my money and attended fancy schools. I own three homes and five cars, but always talk with my rich friends about saving the planet. And I want Congress to spend billions on programs in the name of global warming and green energy, even if it causes massive unemployment, higher energy bills, and digs people like you even deeper into the recession. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even make money off of it!”
“Carlton” was, in fact, the creation of Americans for Prosperity, the nonprofit “social welfare” group founded and heavily funded by David Koch, who of course had inherited hundreds of millions of dollars, attended Deerfield Academy, owned four homes (a ski lodge in Aspen; a Belle Epoque mansion, Villa el Sarmiento, in Palm Beach; a sprawling beach house in the Hamptons; and an eighteen-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue in Manhattan), and drove, among other cars, a Land Rover and a Ferrari.
By creating “Carlton” as a decoy, the Kochs and their allies evidently hoped to convince the public that government action on climate change posed a threat to “people like you” or ordinary Americans’ pocketbooks. But it of course posed a far greater threa
t to their own. With ownership of refineries, pipelines, a coal subsidiary (the C. Reiss Coal Company), coal-fired power plants, fertilizer, petroleum coke manufacturing, timber, and leases on over a million acres of untapped Canadian oil sands, Koch Industries alone routinely released some 300 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year. Any financial penalty that the government placed on carbon pollution would threaten both their immediate profit margins and the long-term value of the enormous investments they had in still-untapped fossil fuel reserves.
The Kochs themselves said little about their views on climate change at the time.
But in one interview, David Koch suggested that if real, it would prove a boon. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he argued. Charles’s thinking was reflected in the company’s in-house newsletter, which featured an article titled “Blowing Smoke.” “Why are such unproven or false claims promoted?” it asked. Rather than fighting global warming, the newsletter suggested, mankind would be better off adapting to it. “Since we can’t control Mother Nature, let’s figure out how to get along with her changes,” it advised. A similar line was subtly argued in the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, which opened in March 2010. The message of the exhibition, funded by his fortune, was that the human race had evolved for the better in response to previous environmental challenges and would adapt in the face of climate change, too. An interactive game suggested that if the climate on earth became intolerable, people might build “underground cities” and develop “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”
Soon the climate issue was creeping into Tea Party rallies, too. As protesters erupted in generalized rage in the spring and summer of 2009, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and the other secretly funded Tea Party groups succeeded to a remarkable extent in channeling the populist anger into the climate fight. At the first big “Tax Day” Tea Party rallies on April 15, 2009, while most protesters were flaying Obama’s bank bailouts and stimulus plan, the staff of Americans for Prosperity handed out free T-shirts and signs protesting what would ordinarily seem to be an arcane issue for most people in the streets, the cap-and-trade bill. “The Obama budget proposes the largest excise tax in history,” the advocacy group’s talking points stressed.
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 CO2 is a pollutant. In fact higher CO2 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 CO2 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.
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sp; 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!”
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The 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.