[Senate Hearing 118-83]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                                                     S. Hrg. 118-83

               DOLLARS AND DEGREES: INVESTIGATING FOSSIL
                 FUEL DARK MONEY'S SYSTEMIC THREATS TO
                     CLIMATE AND THE FEDERAL BUDGET

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                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                        COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET
                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               ----------                              

                             June 21, 2023

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           Printed for the use of the Committee on the Budget
           
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                             www.govinfo.gov
                               __________

                                
                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
53-230                       WASHINGTON : 2023                    
          
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                        COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET

               SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island, Chairman
PATTY MURRAY, Washington             CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa
RON WYDEN, Oregon                    MIKE CRAPO, Idaho
DEBBIE STABENOW, Michigan            LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina
BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont             RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
MARK R. WARNER, Virginia             MITT ROMNEY, Utah
JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon                 ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
TIM KAINE, Virginia                  MIKE BRAUN, Indiana
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland           JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
BEN RAY LUJAN, New Mexico            RICK SCOTT, Florida
ALEX PADILLA, California             MIKE LEE, Utah

                   Dan Dudis, Majority Staff Director
        Kolan Davis, Republican Staff Director and Chief Counsel
                   Mallory B. Nersesian, Chief Clerk 
                  Alexander C. Scioscia, Hearing Clerk
                            
                            
                            C O N T E N T S

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                        WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 2023
                OPENING STATEMENTS BY COMMITTEE MEMBERS

                                                                   Page
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Chairman.............................     1
    Prepared Statement...........................................    30
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Ranking Member......................     4
    Prepared Statement...........................................    33

                    STATEMENTS BY COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Senator Debbie Stabenow..........................................    17
Senator Ron Johnson..............................................    19
Senator Jeff Merkley.............................................    22
Senator John Kennedy.............................................    23
Senator Tim Kaine................................................    26

                               WITNESSES

Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of 
  Science, Harvard University....................................     6
    Prepared Statement...........................................    35
Ms. Christine Arena, Founder and Producer, Generous Films........     8
    Prepared Statement...........................................    64
Mr. Richard Painter, S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law, 
  University of Minnesota Law School.............................     9
    Prepared Statement...........................................    96
Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., Professor of Environmental Studies, 
  University of Colorado Boulder.................................    11
    Prepared Statement...........................................   106
Mr. Scott Walter, President, Capital Research Center.............    12
    Prepared Statement...........................................   115

                                APPENDIX

Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record
    Dr. Pielke...................................................   124
    Mr. Walter...................................................   129
Documents submitted to the Record by Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse.   140
Statement submitted to the Record by Senator Ron Johnson.........  1137

 
                   DOLLARS AND DEGREES: INVESTIGATING
                   FOSSIL FUEL DARK MONEY'S SYSTEMIC
                       THREATS TO CLIMATE AND THE
                             FEDERAL BUDGET

                              ----------                              


                        WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 2023

                                           Committee on the Budget,
                                                       U.S. Senate,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The hearing was convened, pursuant to notice, at 10:02 
a.m., in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Sheldon 
Whitehouse, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
    Present: Senators Whitehouse, Stabenow, Merkley, Kaine, Van 
Hollen, Grassley, Johnson, Marshall, Braun, Kennedy, and R. 
Scott.
    Also present: Democratic staff: Dan Dudis, Majority Staff 
Director; Jonathan Misk, Director of Oversight and Senior 
Counsel; Dan Ruboss, Senior Tax and Economic Advisor and Member 
Outreach Director; Aria Kovalovich, Researcher.
    Republican staff: Chris Conlin, Deputy Staff Director; 
Krisann Pearce, General Council; Jordan Pakula, Professional 
Staff Member.
    Witnesses:
    Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the 
History of Science Harvard University
    Ms. Christine Arena, Founder and Producer Generous Films
    Mr. Richard Painter, S. Walter Richey Professor of 
Corporate Law, University of Minnesota Law School
    Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., Professor of Environmental Studies 
University of Colorado Boulder
    Mr. Scott Walter, President, Capital Research Center

          OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN WHITEHOUSE \1\
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    \1\ Prepared statement of Senator Whitehouse appears in the 
appendix on page 30.
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    Chairman Whitehouse. Good morning everyone. Let me call 
this hearing of the Budget Committee to order. Before we get to 
our opening statements from me and from Ranking Member 
Grassley, I'd like to take a moment to correct the record from 
previous hearings regarding the International Monetary Fund's 
2021 working paper showing trillions of dollars in global 
fossil fuel subsidies.
    At two previous hearings of this Committee, Minority 
witnesses challenged that report and its estimate that fossil 
fuel subsidy in the United States is over $600 billion per 
year. One Republican witness called the report garbage and 
challenged the legitimacy of including indirect subsidies. This 
obviously suits the fossil fuel industry, but it is not correct 
market theory.
    Economist as conservative as Milton Freidman and Republican 
witnesses in these hearings have recognized that negative 
externalities should be in the price of a product and that to 
shift that cost to the public is a subsidy.
    A second witness claimed that the IMF paper, and I'm 
quoting her here, ``Did not represent the view of the IMF.'' 
And she asserted that it had not been peer reviewed. She 
perhaps did not know that we had a briefing scheduled with 
Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the IMF. All members of the 
Committee were invited to that briefing. No Republicans 
attended, so I will report.
    We asked Ms. Georgieva whether the report represented the 
official view of the IMF, including with respect to its 
inclusion of externalities in the subsidy figure. She said, 
yes, of course it was. We asked about peer review. She told us 
that the methodology of these reports out of the IMF, which 
occur regularly, the methodology of these reports was peer 
reviewed and that it made no sense to re-peer review each 
regular report that was prepared using the peer reviewed 
methodology.
    So to be clear, the IMF report is considered official by 
the IMF and was prepared using peer-reviewed methodology. I 
will leave it to members to reach their own conclusions as to 
the honesty of testimony that the IMF reports were unofficial 
and not peer reviewed. With that cleared up, I turn to my 
opening statement.
    Ranking Member Grassley, members of the Committee, welcome 
to the 14th hearing of the Senate Budget Committee. In previous 
hearings we have addressed multiple, serious systematic risks 
to our economy and to the federal budget caused by carbon 
pollution. Many of our first 13 hearings made up a series on 
the economic toll of a changing climate.
    Today we explore the insidious role that secretive fossil 
fuel money has played in exposing us to those forecast, 
economic, and budgetary catastrophes. Decades of climate 
disinformation and obstruction kept the fossil fuel industry 
benefiting from its $600 billion plus annual subsidy and it 
drove up climate-related costs to the federal budget and to the 
broader economy. The dangers that responsible experts have to 
come to this Committee to warn about are actually occurring. 
Sea levels are rising and wildfires are intensifying as we saw 
with the smoke a couple of weeks ago. Insurers are fleeing high 
risk coastal and wildfire areas as predicted.
    The fossil fuel industries disinformation campaign has 
penetrated right into this Committee Room by witnesses from 
organizations like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, 
the American Enterprise Institute, and the Competitive 
Institute, which through 2021, have collectively received over 
half a billion dollars--half a billion dollars from fossil fuel 
related interests and that's only the money that we know about.
    We're here today because fossil fuel funded climate 
disinformation and obstruction is directly causing systemic 
financial risks to the economy and to the federal budget. Our 
witnesses will help us better understand how the fossil fuel 
industry has corrupted public and legislative understanding of 
climate change and poisoned our ability to head off these 
enumerated dangers. There is actually a scientific field of 
study examining this climate denial phenomenon.
    We will hear from a professor who has literally written the 
book on it. From a former PR executive turned documentary film 
producer who can speak directly to the tactics of 
disinformation and from a Bush Administration ethics lawyer who 
has first-hand experience with the effects of corporate money 
on governance.
    Fossil fuel disinformation is nothing new. The industry has 
been at it for decades. Beginning as early as the 1950s, 
industry scientists became aware of climate change, measuring 
and predicting it decades before it became a public issue. They 
knew their products were responsible for it. In 1977, Exxon 
senior scientist, James Black, told Exxon's Management 
Committee, and I quote, ``There is general scientific agreement 
that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the 
global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the 
burning of fossil fuels.'' That's Exxon's senior scientist to 
Exxon's management.
    But industry management and CEOs spent decades promoting 
climate misinformation. By the late 1980s and 1990s when the 
general public first became aware of the looming climate 
threat, Congress pursued bipartisan legislation that would've 
addressed climate change. The late Senator John McCain ran for 
president as a Republican on a strong climate platform. Big oil 
and gas responded with billions of dollars in fossil fuel 
funded disinformation lobbying and election spending.
    I lived this. I worked on bipartisan climate legislation 
from 2007 through 2009 until in January 2010 the Citizens 
United Decision set loose unlimited political spending by the 
fossil fuel industry. Worse, the decision allowed that spending 
to be anonymous. The fossil fuel industry was ready, not only 
with unlimited dark money, but also with the secret threats and 
promises that unlimited dark money permits and it immediately 
snuffed out bipartisanship on serious climate legislation.
    It's been a big operation. Collectively, fossil fuel 
aligned trade organizations and dark money groups have spent 
tens of billions of dollars, again, just that we know of, on 
ads, lobbying, campaign contributions, and dark money front 
groups. The delay in action that those billions bought directly 
caused the economic perils that our hearings have spotlighted. 
Fossil fuel spending has done direct damage to our nation's 
fiscal future, not just to our environment.
    Lawsuits abound against major oil and gas corporations for 
deceiving the public about the climate damages that they knew 
their products would cause. The House Oversight Committee 
started its own investigation into fossil fuel deception, an 
investigation I intend to see through to hold accountable the 
players in industry spreading the disinformation that will rock 
the very foundations of our economic wellbeing. We will pay a 
terrible economic and human price if the campaign is not 
exposed and disabled.
    With that, I'll turn this over to my distinguished Ranking 
Member, Senator Grassley for his opening remarks. And I went a 
minute over, so feel free to go a minute over, Senator 
Grassley.

           OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR GRASSLEY \2\
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    \2\ Prepared statement of Senator Grassley appears in the appendix 
on page 33.
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    Senator Grassley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today marks the 
10th hearing on climate change at the Budget Committee and our 
14th missed opportunity to work together on a responsible 
budget all for the sake of the American people. We're once 
again here to discuss an alleged scheme involving fossil fuel 
overlords, from the banks to the insurance companies to those 
they call friends on my side of the aisle.
    Democrats accuse those they disagree with of wrongdoing. 
They equate a simple difference of opinion to collusion and of 
course to corruption. This is not the type of discussion that 
encourages bipartisanship or promotes the development of 
valuable legislation. It's a perfect example of why Congress 
has deteriorated since I came here many years ago and it's 
contributed to the extreme division within our society today.
    Throughout these climate hearings Democrats have claimed 
that climate change will cause catastrophic economic collapse 
due to devastating natural disasters. They've also attributed a 
Republican rejection of extreme climate policy to an alleged 
fossil fuel disinformation conspiracy to defraud the pubic. 
This premise either insults the integrity or the intelligence 
of Republican legislators that diligently served their 
constituents as well as our constituents.
    Not only does it assume catastrophe without clear 
scientific backing, but also it ignores the simple fact that 
most Americans don't want expensive and burdensome climate 
regulations, but Democrats think that you're too dumb to think 
for yourselves. They somehow think that all knowledge resides 
here in Washington, D.C., when, in fact, Washington is an 
island surrounded by reality. Democrats argue that Americans 
only despise top-down climate policy because of disinformation. 
They think Americans have been easily fooled into rejecting the 
Democrat narrative of climate destruction. I don't agree and 
most American don't either.
    Iowans can clearly see that President Biden's war on fossil 
fuels has been disastrous for our economy and terrible for 
consumers. Remember $5 gas last year. I've always said that 
sunlight is the best disinfectant when it comes to the people's 
business, but for sunlight to work it needs to shine more than 
in just politically convenient places. We've heard apocalyptic 
claims and alarming statistics in these climate hearings, but 
we've yet to have a real conversation about the source of these 
assertions because it doesn't help the Democrat agenda.
    The Congress has had multiple hearings regarding so-called 
dark money, but I've yet to hear a clear definition of what 
dark money is since Democrats receive much more secret or dark 
money than Republicans it's clearly a partisan definition.
    So we get to today. I'm looking to forward to hearing Mr. 
Walters' explanation of this Democratic disinformation 
strategy. He's been the president of Capital Research Center 
for seven years, an investigative think tank that connects the 
dots between left-wing politicians, lobbying groups, labor 
unions, foundations, and other nonprofits. If we're going to 
discuss climate disinformation, it seems to me that we should 
take a balanced and analytical approach. This means we must 
first affirm the validity of information. What the science 
actually says before making a claim of disinformation.
    Objective climate scientists are best suited to do this, 
which is why I'm excited to welcome Dr. Pielke, the only 
climate scientist on the panel. Dr. Pielke is a professor of 
environmental studies at the University of Colorado teaching 
and writing on the intersection of climate and politics. Prior 
to his 22 years at Colorado, he was a scientist at the National 
Center for Atmospheric Research. I'm confident that he will 
shed much needed science-driven light upon real climate 
disinformation.
    I would also like to welcome the Democratic witnesses who 
come from a diverse array of non-climate science backgrounds to 
testify on climate disinformation. One is a filmmaker, another 
a historian, and the latter a Democratic-Farmer-Labor 
politician. I look forward to listening to their testimonies 
and hope that they'll be even-handed in their assessments and 
forthright about their professional relationships with dark 
money groups.
    We've seen Democratic witnesses who've been receiving 
funding from secret dark money groups. It would behoove all of 
us to be honest about the prevalence of so-called dark money on 
both sides of the aisle. I yield.
    Chairman Whitehouse. We have five witnesses today. First, 
we have Dr. Naomi Oreskes. She is the Henry Charles Lea 
Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of 
Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Dr. Oreskes 
is the author or co-author of nine books and over 150 articles, 
essays, and opinion pieces and her best-selling book Merchants 
of Doubt studied how and to what extent large industries 
manufacture doubt about the state of the science for their own 
benefit. Dr. Oreskes, thank you for being here.
    Our second witness is Christine Arena. She is the Founder 
and Producer at Generous Films, an award-winning production 
company that brings cinematic storytelling to the social impact 
space. Before that, however, she was a 20-year veteran of the 
Communications industry and served as Executive Vice President 
at the public relations firm Edelman. Thank you, Ms. Arena, for 
bringing that experience here to share today.
    Next, we have Richard Painter, the S. Walter Richey 
Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota Law 
School and former associate counsel to the President in the 
White House's Counsel's Office as the Chief Ethics lawyer to 
President George W. Bush. He was previously a board member and 
vice-chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in 
Washington, as well as a founding board member of Take Back Our 
Republic, a campaign finance reform organization. Mr. Painter, 
we welcome you as well.
    Our fourth witness is Dr. Roger Pielke. He's been on the 
faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder since 2001 where 
he teaches and writes on a diverse range of policy and 
governance issues related to science, technology, environment, 
innovation, and sports. He has served as a science and 
economics advisor to Environmental Progress--that's a 
capitalized, proper name--since 2019. Thank you for being here.
    Finally, we have Scott Walter, the president of Capital 
Research Center. He previously served in the George W. Bush 
Administration as special assistant to the President for 
Domestic Policy. I wonder if you guys ever ran into each other 
in the Bush White House. He was a senior fellow at the Beckett 
Fund for Religious Liberty and he was senior editor of the 
American Enterprise Institute's flagship publication. Thank you 
also for being here.
    And Dr. Oreskes, if we may begin with your testimony, you 
each have five minutes to make your statements and your 
complete testimony will be made a part of the record of this 
hearing.

  STATEMENT OF DR. NAOMI ORESKES, PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF 
                SCIENCE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY \3\
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    \3\ Prepared statement of Dr. Oreskes appears in the appendix on 
page 35.
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    Dr. Oreskes. Thank you very much. Thank you, Senator and 
thank you members. It's an honor to be with you here today.
    In March 1969, the U.S. Senator from Washington State, 
Henry Scoop Jackson, received a letter from an angry 
constituent. The man had watched an episode of a popular 
television show where the beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, told the 
alarming story of planetary demise. Ginsberg claimed that ``the 
current rate of air pollution brought about by automobiles 
could cause a rapid buildup of heat on Earth which would melt 
the polar icecaps causing a flooding of the greater part of the 
globe.''
    The constituent wanted the Senator the kooky poet from 
spouting such irresponsible nonsense. After all, he wrote, 
quite a few million people watch this show. Senator Jackson 
forwarded the letter to Richard Nixon's Science Advisor, Lee 
DuBridge, asking for clarification. DuBridge replied with a 
long letter affirming that Ginsberg was basically correct. We 
were indeed filling the atmosphere with a great many gases and 
in very large quantities from the burning of fossil fuels, he 
wrote, which could indeed warm the planet and melt the icecaps.
    Were the scientists who raised this concern being 
alarmists? DuBridge didn't think so. ``I don't like to be a 
calamity howler he said, but sometimes it takes a few calamity 
howlers to arouse people to the point where they are willing to 
do something. I think we are at that point now.''
    Over the next decade, scientists faced little resistance as 
they published scores of scientific papers and reports on the 
threat of manmade climate change. Things changed, however, in 
the 1980s when a scientific consensus began to emerge that 
anthropogenic climate change was no longer a prediction, but a 
fact. When Vice President George H. W. Bush ran for President 
in 1988, he promised that if elected president he would bring 
the proper of the White House effect to fight the greenhouse 
effect.
    In 1992, world leaders, including President Bush convened 
in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to sign the United Nations framework 
convention on climate change, promising to prevent dangerous 
anthropogenic interference with the climate system. We had a 
scientific consensus. We had political will. The year was 1992, 
so why didn't we act?
    A major part of the answer is I have documented now in 
numerous books, papers, and reports involves the role of Exxon 
Mobile Corporation in disparaging climate science and the 
border role of corporate America in denying market failure. I'd 
like to bring your attention to this illustration. In the late 
1980s, Exxon Mobile turned from information to disinformation. 
In various venues the company claimed or insinuated that there 
was no consensus among scientific experts and that the 
underlying science was too uncertain to warrant action.
    The graph shown here presents an analysis undertaken by 
Exxon's own scientists in 1982 in which they forecast future 
levels of atmospheric CO2 and the mean global temperature that 
would ensue from that. The black lines are Exxon Mobile's 
projections. The red and blue lines we have added to show what 
actually happened in the real world. And you can see that the 
Exxon projections were extremely accurate. In fact, they 
actually thought it would be slightly worse than it's turned 
out to be. Exxon knew what would happen.
    But in public, starting in the 1990s and continuing for 
decades, company executives disparaged climate science, 
particularly climate models. In 2015, for example, CEO Rex 
Tillerson said we do not really know what the climate effects 
of 600 parts per million versus 400 parts per million would be. 
But if we look at my second diagram here, we've added these 
arrows to highlight what, in fact, Exxon Mobile's own 
projections showed and we see that 600 parts per million 
produces 1.3 degrees centigrade, so more than 2 degrees 
Fahrenheit, more warming than 400 degrees and it pushes the 
total warming well above the 2-degree threshold that climate 
scientists had concluded would be dangerous interference.
    Now Exxon Mobile's disparagement of climate science was 
part of a larger corporate narrative which I don't have time to 
discuss in detail today, but which are Eric Connelly and I have 
documented in our new book The Big Myth that denied the reality 
of market failure. The reality is that markets do fail and 
climate change is a massive market failure.
    As you heard from The Chair, the International Monetary 
Fund estimates that the unpaid damages from using fossil fuels 
are ``a staggering $5.2 trillion or 6.5 percent of global GDP 
every year.'' Now these costs are not just measured in money. 
They're measured in illness, in suffering, and above all, in 
lives.
    According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2021, 
the heat dome that affected the U.S. Pacific Northwest caused 
over 250 deaths in Oregon, in Idaho, in Washington, and in 
Alaska. Scientists have concluded that the occurrence of the 
heatwave of that severity in that region was ``virtually 
impossible without human cause claim.''
    54 years have passed since Presidential Science Advisor Lee 
DuBridge explained the greenhouse effect to Senator Henry 
Jackson. During that time the fossil fuel industry and its 
allies have spent billions of dollars in false advertising, 
misleading marketing, and lobbying designed to confuse the 
American people about the scientific facts of climate change 
and to prevent the adoption of meaningful solution. Their lies 
have cost trillions of dollars in damages. Their lies have cost 
lives. Thank you.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Ms. Arena, please proceed with your 
statement.

 STATEMENT OF CHRISTINA ARENA, FOUNDER AND PRODUCER, GENEROUS 
                           FILMS \4\
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    \4\ Prepared statement of Ms. Arena appears in the appendix on page 
64.
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    Ms. Arena. Thank you. Chairman Whitehouse, Ranking Member 
Grassley and members of the Committee it's an honor to be with 
you today. As Chairman Whitehouse indicated, I have 20 years of 
experience in the Communications industry and I'm also an 
author and researcher on green washing, a tactic I will discuss 
shortly.
    Disinformation is not a matter of differing opinion. It is 
the deliberate dissemination of false or misleading rhetoric 
that is spread for profit or political gain. In the hands of 
industries that make lethal products, including cigarettes, 
opioids, and fossil fuels, disinformation strategies have lead 
to decades of delay on important policy issues and resulted in 
immense costs to society. Modern disinformation campaigns do 
not merely seek to convince people that something true is false 
or that something false is true. Their aim is to erode the very 
basis for discerning between empirical fact, expert knowledge, 
and industry propaganda. They seek to undermine people's 
ability to calculate risks and make informed decisions leading 
to mass confusion and a lack of political will.
    In recent years we have witnessed a striking evolution of 
the methods used to deceive people about the harmful effects of 
fossil fuels. While climate disinformation rhetoric has become 
more manipulative and divisive, it has also become more 
pervasive thanks to the power of digital technology and the 
billions of dollars that fossil fuel interests spend each year 
to ensure that society remains hooked on oil and gas.
    My written statement outlines a series of blatantly 
deceptive and obstructive methods from the mass marketing of 
false climate solutions and net zero commitments to the capture 
of critical climate negotiations like the Conference of the 
Parties (COP). It illustrates how fossil fuel money is linked 
to the deployment of hundreds of front groups across the 
country as well as sophisticated bot networks, fake social 
media accounts and hacking operations targeting climate 
activists.
    It describes the tactics used by fossil fuel corporations 
and trade associations to block climate action, including, 
number one, green washing or the purposeful production of false 
positive perceptions of a company or industry's environmental 
performance. Number two, astroturfing. Those are activities 
creating the illusion of community support for a corporate 
position without concealing who is really paying for them. 
Number three, flooding. That refers to the production of online 
noise and concentrated ad placements to disorient people and 
drown out opposing viewpoints. And number four, infiltration. A 
strategy using financial influence to manipulate, among other 
things, the climate research from renowned academic 
institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology (MIT), among others.
    Collectively, these tactics make it almost impossible for 
legitimate climate scientists to be heard over industry voices, 
for well-intentioned consumers to make informed choices, and 
for concerned lawmakers, including members of this Committee, 
to take the necessary steps to protect their constituents.
    Fossil fuel companies and interests are not engaging in 
disinformation solely in order to sell more products. They are 
using these tactics in bad faith to interfere with matters of 
policy. For this reason, more than any other, the American 
public has a right to know the truth. Citizens deserve to know 
who is organizing and funding astroturf campaigns. Investors 
deserve to know their financial exposure to climate risk. 
Consumers deserve to know the health-related consequences of 
breathing fossil fuel polluted air as well as the economic and 
environmental risks of prolonged fossil fuel reliance.
    They deserve to know that in the absence of accountability 
from the fossil fuel industry, they are the ones who pay for 
climate havoc, whether through rising insurance costs, loss of 
coverage, loss of property, or even loss of life. Without 
complete, candid disclosure there is no freedom of choice. The 
majority of my industry supports the principle outlined by the 
Institute for Advertising Ethics that as professional 
communicators we share a common objective of honesty, 
transparency, and high ethical standards in serving the public. 
In my view, the majority of current fossil fuel industry 
communications do not comply with these standards.
    I will end my testimony by noting that despite ample, 
demonstrative evidence to the contrary, U.S. fossil fuel 
executives maintain and have always maintained that they have 
never deliberately mislead the public. What that tells us is 
that they are not blameless, but that they will never alter 
course without being legally compelled to do so.
    Thank you.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you very much. Mr. Painter, 
please proceed.

 STATEMENT OF RICHARD PAINTER, S. WALTER RICHEY, PROFESSOR OF 
     CORPORATE LAW, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LAW SCHOOL \5\
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    \5\ Prepared statement of Mr. Painter appears in the appendix on 
page 96.
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    Mr. Painter. Thank you very much, Chairman Whitehouse and 
Ranking Member Grassley for inviting me here today.
    I've been in public law school teaching for 30 years, since 
1993 at the University of Oregon, the University of Illinois, 
and since 2007, the University of Minnesota. I was proud to 
serve as the Chief White House Ethics lawyer for President 
George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007.
    I'm a political independent. In Minnesota, we are allowed 
to vote in either Republican or Democratic primary. We do not 
have to register for parties. We're allowed to run for office 
in either party, regardless of our prior or current party 
affiliation. I ran in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party 
primaries in 2018 and again for Congress in 2022 with a strong 
environmental platform, with a strong support of the former 
Republican Governor of Minnesota, Arnie Hedge Carlson. I've 
worked a lot with Arnie Carlson and others of both political 
parties and many independents, such as myself, on clean water 
issues in Minnesota, protecting the environment. This is not a 
partisan issue. This is not about being a Democrat or 
Republican or an Independent. This is about caring and doing 
something about a grave threat to the human race.
    And I'm here to testify about the intersection between two 
calamities. One, climate change which if we do not confront 
will lead to catastrophe. And second, the role of money in 
politics. I am not a climate scientist. I will defer to the 
scientists on this panel and the scientists around the country 
on the question of climate change, the role of fossil fuels and 
CO2 emissions. But I will speak now about the role of money in 
politics, which is very, very relevant to this conversation 
that once again is not a partisan issue.
    I've looked at the role of money in politics going back to 
the time of the American Revolution when the East India company 
corrupted parliament and Tea Party patriots threw the tea in 
the Boston Harbor to let them know what we thought of corporate 
money in politics and taxation without representation of the 
people. I have studied the role of corporate money in politics 
in the United States in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
    I've looked at what happened during the Reagan, Clinton, 
Bush years, through the Obama years, up through the Trump and 
Biden Administrations. Money corrupts our government. This is 
not a partisan issue. It was bad when I was in the Bush White 
House. I saw the influence of campaign contributors in both 
political parties.
    President Bush signed into law the McCain-Feingold Act 
which would try to restrict some of it, however, ineffectively. 
I wrote a book in 2008 called ``Getting the Government America 
Deserves'' on how the campaign money ultimately was undermine 
government ethics across the board and that was before Citizens 
United. When the United States Supreme Court open the 
floodgates of dark money in politics by striking down critical 
portions of the campaign finance reforms in the McCain-Feingold 
Act on a fundamentally flawed assumption, a theory. And I will 
emphasize that in the law nothing has been more pernicious in 
law than abstract theories untethered from reality.
    And the abstract theory underlining the Citizens United 
case is that corporations are people just like the rest of us. 
That transactions, flows of money from one bank account to 
another into an electioneering communication organization, 
whether it's Citizens United or any other and/or Super-
Political Action Committee (SuperPAC), that that's the same 
thing as a citizen standing on a soapbox delivering a speech. 
Completely untethered from reality and the flood of money into 
both political parties is destroying our democracy and, yes, is 
making it much harder for us to fight climate change. To come 
together to come up with solutions to this problem instead of 
calling each other names, instead of always pointing the finger 
at someone else instead of saying what can I do about this 
problem and that's why we're here today.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you very much, Mr. Painter. Dr. 
Pielke.

STATEMENT OF DR. ROGER PIELKE, JR., PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL 
          STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER \6\
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    \6\ Prepared statement of Dr. Pielke appears in the appendix on 
page 106.
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    Dr. Pielke. Thank you Senator Whitehouse, Senator Grassley. 
It's a privilege to testify today. In 2015, following testimony 
I delivered before the House and the Senate summarizing the 
consensus conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change, or IPCC, a member of Congress demanded that I be 
investigated by my university. He suggested that I may have 
been receiving undisclosed funding from fossil fuel companies.
    My university complied. The results of the Investigation 
were, of course, not surprising to me. I was not the recipient 
of any fossil fuel funding from any fossil fuel interest and 
never had been. However, the very public accusation was enough 
to derail my work and upend my career in ways that continue 
today.
    One important role of us experts is to call things as we 
see them. Sometimes research results are inconvenient or 
uncomfortable to certain interests and that includes political 
interests. Please know that I call things like I see them. No 
one is paying me to express certain views. My written testimony 
discusses four take-home points, which I will briefly 
summarize.
    First, human-caused climate change is real. It poses 
significant risks to society and the environment and both 
mitigation and adaptation policies are necessary and make good 
sense. Second, the best and likely the only antidote to 
misinformation is accurate information. Successfully producing, 
communicating, legitimizing, and trusting accurate information 
to inform policy requires upholding standards of scientific 
integrity.
    Today there is general agreement that our current media 
environment and political discourse are rife with 
misinformation. In my areas of expertise this is certainly the 
case. The U.S. Congress has long recognized the importance of 
scientific integrity. On climate in 1990, Congress established 
an advisory mechanism in the form of a national climate 
assessment. However, locating the national climate assessment 
within the Executive Office of the President has made it a 
tempting target for political meddling under both Democratic 
and Republic presidents. Third, in important areas of climate 
science the self-correcting function of science has short-
circuited. The persistent misuse of climate scenarios, one area 
where I research, is perhaps the most pervasive and 
consequential example of climate misinformation today.
    If there's just one sentence you take from my testimony 
today is this. You are currently being misinformed. Scenarios 
are inputs to projections of future changes in climate, its 
impacts on society and the environment, and the consequences 
and costs of alternative policy actions. However, the scenarios 
that are currently prioritized in climate research assessment 
and policy are badly outdated.
    Carbon dioxide emissions in the real world are already at a 
level far less than projected in the most commonly used climate 
scenarios. And that gap between scenario assumptions and 
reality is only getting wider. Specifically, the most commonly 
used climate scenario is called Representative Concentration 
Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5), which according to the IPCC represents a 
global temperature increase in 2100 of 4.8 degrees Celsius.
    RCP8.5 projects that all global energy consumption will 
come from coal. That is obviously wrong. The real world is 
actually tracking below what is called an RCP4.5 scenario, 
which represents a 2100 global temperature increase of 2.9 
degrees Celsius. This matters because important policy guidance 
relies on these outdated scenarios. For example, the 2022 
Whitehouse Paper titled ``Climate Risk Exposure: An Assessment 
of the Federal Government's Financial Risk to Climate Change'' 
used the RCP8.5 scenario to represent where we're heading, the 
RCP4.5 scenario to represent successful climate policy, and the 
difference between the two to represent the benefits of 
mitigation. All of this is wrong. Eliminating misinformation is 
difficult. For instance, a widely cited 2020 paper defending 
the use of the most extreme RCP8.5 climate scenario is notable 
because its authors failed to disclose a financial conflict of 
interest. They were funded by a major global consultancy that 
relies heavily on RCP8.5 in its business promotion and 
services.
    So far, in 2023, about dozen studies are published every 
single day using the outdated RCP8.5 scenario according to 
Google Scholar. Misinformation has powerful momentum.
    Fourth and finally, concerns expressed about misinformation 
are sometimes weaponized. One reason for this is that climate 
change is now big business. That means it is essential that 
everyone follow well-established standards of scientific 
integrity and this includes those funded by fossil fuel 
interests, renewable energy interests, and in fact, all 
financial interests.
    Partisans may believe that the rules apply only to their 
opponents. They may argue over which side is worse. However, 
bring accurate information into the policy process means that 
principles of scientific integrity must be applied to everyone. 
Congress has an important role to play in ensuring the 
integrity of science. Effective policymaking depends on it. 
Thank you and I look forward to your questions.
    Chairman Whitehouse.. Thank you, Professor. We'll now turn 
to Mr. Walter.

 STATEMENT OF SCOTT WALTER, PRESIDENT, CAPITAL RESEARCH CENTER 
                              \7\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    \7\ Prepared statement of Mr. Walter appears in the appendix on 
page 115.
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    Mr. Walter. Chairman Whitehouse, Ranking Member Grassley, 
distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for the honor 
of testifying. I'm president of the Capital Research Center and 
we've studied political money debates for decades, including, 
of course, Mr. Chairman, your speeches and writings.
    Dark money isn't really mysterious, unless you count that 
rumor that Leonard Leo invented dark money in a lab in Wuhan. 
No, to say that a group uses dark money is like saying the 
group uses telephones. It's a universal technology. Oddly, the 
people who most often use the term never define it with legal 
precision, even when they're speaking in a Judiciary Committee 
Hearing or a Senate Finance Hearing where that would seem 
necessary. But if you're trying to scare others with the boogey 
man, it's best to keep the monster's outline shady.
    Now if dark money be a monster, it's not a large one. The 
biggest number I can find is OpenSecrets' $1 billion in 2020, 
which sounds big until you see OpenSecrets' numbers for the 
hard dollars disclosed to the Federal Election Commission 
(FEC), which makes the dark money boogey money about 7 percent 
of election spending. So dark money is universal in politics 
and not a large part of politics, but dark money is not 
equally--or if I were a man of the left, I would say fairly--
distributed. It tilts strongly toward the Democratic party. A 
few simple stats. OpenSecrets' totals for dark money in the 
2020 election show almost a 2.5 to 1 advantage for the 
Democrats.
    In just the presidential race, Mr. Biden enjoyed six times 
the dark money of his opponent. The Democrats had a dark money 
advantage in the 2022 cycle, 2020, 2018. Here's another 
example. Chairman Whitehouse, the conservative judicial 
activists you especially target received in 2021 a $1.65 
billion donation to a 510(c)(4)(C4) dark money group. But just 
weeks after that story broke, a left-wing billionaire gave 
about twice that amount to a dark money group on the left.
    A better comparison for that 1.65 billion is the money 
raked in by the left's biggest nonprofit network, the Empire 
run by Arabella Advisors. It raised almost exactly the same 
amount the same year. The year before it raised $1.7 billion. 
So what the Chairman's special target enjoyed as a once in a 
lifetime windfall is just the yearly take for Arabella. Again, 
I'm arguing C4 dark money is not a big deal in American 
politics. But if anyone insists it pollutes our politics, then 
the big polluter is the Democratic Party, and the strongest 
drivers of big pollution are environmentalists.
    For instance, the Arabella Network was founded by 
environmentalist Eric Kessler, who's deeply tied as well to the 
dark money League of Conservation Voters, which is both the 
biggest source of campaign contributions to the Chairman and 
also ``a dark money heavyweight'' says the Center for Public 
Integrity. Another strong environmentalist tie at Arabella: the 
Sierra Club helped launch Arabella's 1630 Fund, ``the 
indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money,'' says the 
Atlantic.
    Arabella's environmentalist ties do have an unusual and 
especially disturbing feature: foreign dark money. One of 
Arabella's top donors for two decades is the environmentalist, 
Hansjoerg Wyss, a foreign national who's admitted violating 
bans on foreign money in American politics in the past and now 
funds Arabella's network to influence our politics. Still, dark 
money and all money in politics is simple. People who believe 
in causes raise money for those causes, start groups for those 
causes, collaborate with each other, buy ads to persuade the 
public, support their champions, criticize their opponents.
    When the Chairman takes money from the League of 
Conservation Voters, that doesn't mean the League has captured 
him. It means they agree with him. The people on the other side 
of the issues operate the same way, using the same kind of, but 
a lot less of, various types of political money. So to act 
outraged that somebody is using dark money reveals the real 
definition of dark money: Support for speech the left wants to 
silence.
    Trying to silence one's opponents is the opposite of 
democracy, but it's understandable given how unpopular some of 
the left's, especially environmentalists', agenda items are. 
The Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) 
movement, for example, funded with millions from billionaires 
like George Soros and millions from the Arabella network is 
currently trying to have banks stop loans to any company 
related to fossil fuels, which would mean Americans couldn't 
buy gas for their cars and trucks and might have an effect on 
the federal budget.
    Trying to stifle speech with the boogey man of dark money 
drives debate away from the substance of issues to issues of 
money. I urge the Committee instead to focus on the substance 
of issues like climate change. Thank you.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thanks very much. The Ranking Member 
has stepped out for a second, but I'm going to go ahead and 
proceed with my questions.
    Ms. Oreskes, let me go back to the quote about the threat 
of climate change that you used in your testimony. ``Sometimes 
it takes a few calamity howlers to wake people up to the fact 
that there are serious problems and to arouse people to the 
point to where they're willing to do something about it. I 
think we are at that point now.'' Again, who said that?
    Ms. Oreskes. Lee DuBridge, the science advisor to President 
Richard Nixon in 1969.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you. You are involved in the 
study of the fossil fuel disinformation campaign and have been 
for many years. You are not alone. Could you describe for us 
the academic study of the fossil fuel disinformation operation, 
how roughly many scientists are engaged in it, how robust the 
science is on this subject, and--well, why don't you answer 
that first and then I'll ask you another question.
    Dr. Oreskes. Thank you and thank you for that question. 
Thank you also for the opportunity to set the record straight 
about my own qualifications. So I'm trained as an Earth 
scientist. I have a Ph.D. from the School of Earth Sciences at 
Stanford University. As you noted at the outset, I'm also an 
Affiliate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard 
University and I've published numerous in peer-reviewed 
scientific journals on climate science, particularly on the 
statistics of temperature records because I have formal 
training in statistics.
    Today I am employed, like Roger, as a social scientist, but 
I consider that to be a form of science and so I didn't start 
out to work in this area. My work is the history of science. 
I'm interested in the development of scientific knowledge and I 
was studying the development of climate science knowledge as a 
scientific question and I was doing that work in the early 
2000s when there was not really a scientific field of studying 
this question of disinformation.
    It became clear to me from my historical research that the 
scientific evidence for the reality and potential severity of 
manmade climate change was very deep, that it went back----
    Chairman Whitehouse. My question is more about the 
disinformation.
    Dr. Oreskes. Yes. Sure.
    Chairman Whitehouse. So if you could focus on that in the 
short time I have.
    Dr. Oreskes. I'll try. Thank you. Sorry for that. So I 
published a paper in 2004 called The Scientific Consensus on 
Climate Change where I documented this consensus. As a result 
of that paper I became a target of the disinformation campaign. 
I started getting hate mail. I had people file complaints 
against me at my university and went through some unpleasant 
experiences as well.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And you're not alone in that. People 
like Michael Mann have also been the subject of----
    Dr. Oreskes. Correct. What I learned as I started to 
investigate was that I was not alone. And that, in fact, there 
was a network of people who were attacking climate scientists 
like Ben Santer, like Michael Mann, and like myself. And so 
that experience of being attacked lead me to try to understand 
what these attacks were, who was funding them, who was behind 
them, and why they were doing it.
    Chairman Whitehouse. As a scientist, how would you describe 
the state of the science that looks at the climate 
disinformation campaign as a phenomenon? Is it just in its 
nascence stage, is it fairly robust, is there scientific 
consensus, is it passing peer review? What are the markers of 
how real it all is?
    Dr. Oreskes. I would say the field was nature now. So it 
was nascent in the early 2000s. It's been around for about 20 
years now. We're academics. We mostly publish in peer reviewed 
scientific literature, although we also publish books and 
opinion pieces. I'd say it's a well-developed network now of 
academics, both in the United States and elsewhere and there 
are now many scores of academic researchers who study this as 
an empirical problem, as a scientific problem.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Let me shift to Ms. Arena for a 
moment. Your testimony makes comparisons between the tobacco 
industries' campaign of fraud and what the fossil fuel industry 
is doing these days. Could you elaborate a little bit on that 
comparison between the tobacco campaign to deny the dangers of 
its product and the fossil fuel campaign to deny the dangers of 
its product?
    Ms. Arena. Sure. There are many parallels. First and 
foremost, the denial that the products in question are 
dangerous to people. The denial of the science. For the tobacco 
industry, as Dr. Oreskes knows better than I, that was a 50-
year campaign. For fossil fuels it took a very long time before 
corporations acknowledged the reality of climate change, let 
alone acknowledged that it was human driven, let alone 
acknowledged that it was burning fossil fuels that is primary 
responsible for that climate change.
    Second, tobacco companies really took advantage of the 
opportunity to market filtered and light cigarettes, almost 
seizing the lung cancer link as a business opportunity. And we 
do see fossil fuel companies doing something very similar with 
carbon capture technology, with other green solutions that they 
tried to market in a sense defending their core business model.
    Now I'm not saying carbon capture should not be scaled. It 
absolutely should, but really we still----
    Chairman Whitehouse. You're talking as an expert on 
marketing and you're talking about the marketing campaign.
    Ms. Arena. Exactly. And so we see a similar marketing 
tactic and a similar denial approach, attacking science, then 
questioning the science, then hiring their own experts, and 
then really taking advantage of market opportunities.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Ranking Member Grassley.
    Senator Grassley. I have point of personal privilege before 
I start my questioning. I want you to know that Senator Johnson 
and I were accused of spreading Russian disinformation for two 
and a half years and everybody now knows that we were not 
spreading Russian disinformation on an investigation that we 
were doing.
    Dr. Pielke, you were fired from your position at 538. 
WikiLeaks later revealed an explicit campaign against you. The 
editor of Think Progress, a website that's part of the lobbying 
arm of a far left-wing Center for American Progress wrote the 
following in an email to billionaire dark money, Democrat donor 
Tom Steyer, ``I think it's fair to say that without climate 
progress the environmental arm of Think Progress Pielke would 
still be writing on climate change for 538.'' Why do you 
believe you were fired from 538 and smeared in the media?
    Dr. Pielke. Yes. Thank you. I had written a piece--I was 
hired by Nate Silver to write for 538 and since climate change 
was so contested, I said, well, if you let me write something 
about sports I'll also write about climate change. My first 
piece was to summarize an IPCC report. In 2012, the IPCC 
released a special report on extreme events and it was straight 
up IPCC consensus science that I wrote about. What I said in 
that piece was that disaster costs are increasing, but they're 
increasing because we have more stuff, more property, more 
buildings in harm's way. That's what the IPCC concluded.
    There was an organized campaign released years later--you 
never know where you'll find yourself. I was in the WikiLeaks 
and it was organized by Center for American Progress, along 
with a climate scientist named Michael Mann and they were very 
explicit why they wanted me to be removed. My message, even 
though it was consensus science was not politically comfortable 
or acceptable. So it was very clear reason why I was attacked. 
My only regret is that the editors at 538 didn't stand firm and 
say we're going to support strong science.
    Senator Grassley. Mr. Walter, witnesses called to testify 
before this Committee this year by the Majority work for 
organizations that have received dark money from Arabella 
Advisors. The president of the Niskanen Center even admitted on 
the record to receiving funding from anonymous donors in the 
past. But in 10 climate hearings, Democrats have never asked a 
single one of their witnesses about their receipts of dark 
money, let along attempted to impugn their integrity or accuse 
them of conspiracy. Why do you think that is and how does 
Arabella Advisors influence Democratic legislators and why is 
the Democratic dark money conveniently ignored by the left?
    Mr. Walter. Thanks for the question, Senator. I can't 
explain exactly why your colleagues aren't willing to look at 
the dark money ties of their own witnesses because of course 
they're very extensive and Influence Watch.org, our website, 
would provide lots of information on that.
    Arabella is stunningly powerful. It affects the Executive 
Branch. It affects regulations. It affects legislation with, as 
I said, billions of dollars a year. Some of it from foreign 
donors. Now one of my favorite examples of this would be that 
almost the entire Biden regulatory agenda has been shaped by an 
especially dark bit of Arabella called Governing for Impact. 
And interestingly that has ties to a witness that appeared at 
the last hearing where I had the honor of testifying to 
Chairman Whitehouse.
    Senator Grassley. Are any Democratic witnesses on this 
panel liked to a web of liberal dark money donations?
    Mr. Walter. Yes. Just today you have a witness, for 
instance, who spent years at the group called Citizens for 
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which is tied 
to the dark money of empire of David Brock and other dark 
money. You have a witness who's connected to a nonprofit that 
receives money from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which is one 
of the donors tied into the Arabella network.
    Senator Grassley. Dr. Oreskes, the environmental law firm 
Sher Edling receives funding by way of the Resource Legal Fund 
and Arabella Advisors New Adventure Fund from foreign and 
domestic elites to promote progressive climate policies. 
Democratic dark money giant George Soros and Leonardo DiCaprio 
are among their donors. Are you currently or have you ever been 
retained by the Environmental Law Firm Sher Edling?
    Dr. Oreskes. Yes, I have I welcome the opportunity to talk 
about the case that I consulted on, San Mateo vs. Chevron where 
the people of San Mateo County have sued for redress because of 
the damages that that county and the State of California is 
experiencing from sea level rise caused by climate change 
caused by their product, oil and gas.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Senator Stabenow.

                 STATEMENT OF SENATOR STABENOW

    Senator Stabenow. Well, thank you. Good morning and thank 
you very much for this really important hearing. I'd like to 
just do a little history lesson, Mr. Chairman and take you back 
over a hundred years ago when Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were 
building the first automobile and they wanted to build an 
affordable electric car. And in 1914, there was an article in 
the New York Times where they were lamenting the fact that they 
had challenges developing a battery with enough range. That 
sounds familiar.
    Unfortunately, at the same time in Texas they were 
developing oil fields and we saw just two years after this 
article Congress passed a change in the tax law to, in effect, 
provide oil companies interest-free loans. It was the first 
fossil fuel subsidy. Our colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle for those of us that work on battery and solar and wind 
and other clean energies, say we shouldn't pick winners and 
losers, Mr. Chairman, over a hundred years ago we picked a 
winner and they won for a hundred years.
    And so now we move and we look at the fact that it's no 
surprise that Henry Ford chose to focus on the technology of 
the time and developed the internal combustion engine. Now it 
true that my home city of Michigan has been benefited from 
these choices. We put the world on wheels. We are extremely 
proud of our place in history as we move now to cleaner 
technologies as well. But I would also say wouldn't it have 
been better we had understood the issues of carbon pollution at 
the very beginning and had built that into what was happening. 
Imagine the difference. Just imagine if we had incentives at 
the very beginning for battery technology instead of the first 
fossil fuel subsidy and imagine if the oil and gas industry had 
not used their profits and basically every resource to stop 
efforts to recognize and end carbon pollution or even 
acknowledge it. Imagine if all of this, Mr. Chairman, had gone 
into technologies to stop carbon pollution, methane pollution, 
other greenhouse gases. Imagine what a different world we would 
have today if all this dark money had gone into a cleaner 
environment and supporting the realities of science? So the 
reality is that the climate is changing. We have a climate 
crisis hitting us over the head every day. I chair the 
Agriculture Committee. You can't talk to a farmer now that does 
not acknowledge what is happening and their longtime efforts 
and overwhelming financial influence using dark money has cost 
us precious, precious time.
    Just last week we had hail the size of golf balls 
destroying farms and homes in the small town of Howell, 
Michigan and there's story after story of wildfire smoke coming 
at us, droughts and floods and everything else and you can 
tally the total costs in terms of dollars or you can tally it 
in terms of lives.
    Both are at historic levels in terms of loss. 2022 saw 18 
separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters 
inflicting $175 million dollars in damages and costing 475 
people their lives.
    So Dr. Oreskes, in your testimony, you talk about these 
real costs. Can you talk a little bit more about the price 
everyday folks have to pay for this inaction. I would argue a 
hundred years inaction on the climate crisis and can you talk a 
little bit more about the tactics big oil has been using that 
has created this situation?
    Dr. Oreskes. Well, thank you for that question. I'm not an 
economist, but I do follow the work of my economic colleagues 
and we have numerous studies now. This is an area where the 
science really has advanced and changed dramatically in the 
last 20 years. Most of the basic signs of climate change really 
hasn't changed that much in the 20 years I've been working on 
this issue, but the economic analyses and the detection and 
attribution studies have. So detection and attributions 
sometimes called D&A, not DNA, but D&A refers to analyses that 
try to answer the question would this have happened, but for 
climate change or would it have been as bad? And there have 
been major advances in that and we now have scores and scores 
of scientific studies that prove beyond any reasonable doubt 
that numerous extreme weather events--floods, wildfires, 
hurricanes, droughts, hailstorms they're harder, they're 
trickier, but almost certainly hailstorms as well, maybe 
tornadoes. Those are scientifically tricky, but that many, many 
of these events have become worse and in some cases so much 
worse that scientists could say, as they did about the heat 
dome, that this would not have happened, but for climate 
change. And as you know, billions of dollars in losses from 
hurricanes, floods, extreme precipitation events the National 
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tracks these 
data. I don't have them with me, but I could easily find them. 
We've seen huge increases. And with all due respect to my 
colleague, Roger, who I've known for many years, Roger's point 
about people moving to coastal areas is not wrong, but it's 
incomplete. Because, yes, there is more damage in coastal areas 
because more people live there, but in addition sea level is 
rising because of climate change. Storm surge has become worse 
because of climate change. Hurricanes and extreme precipitation 
and these cost billions of dollars to the American people, to 
insurers, to re-insurers, and to the federal government because 
of federal disaster relief. So yes, this is extremely costly 
and, yes, it is caused by climate change. And the point of my 
testimony was to say we have known this science for a long, 
long time. And so if we ask the question why haven't we acted 
on this very robust body of rich, deep, sophisticated 
scientific knowledge, a big part of the answer--it's not the 
only--but a big part of the answer is because the way the 
fossil fuel industry and its allies have deliberately set out 
to undermine our confidence in the science and to make us think 
that the science wasn't strong enough to warrant action.
    Senator Stabenow. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thanks Senator Stabenow. And to your 
urge that we imagine, there's a very specific thing we could 
imagine, which is if the Republican Chafee-Snyder climate 
legislation of 1988 had passed we would be at 282 parts per 
million carbon dioxide as of 2005. Instead we're at 418 parts 
per million today. Senator Johnson.

                  STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHNSON

    Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Painter 
pointed out that money corrupts politics. Mr. Pielke, you 
talked about climate change as big business. Do you believe 
also that money can corrupt research?
    Dr. Pielke. Yes, absolutely. I study science and technology 
policy and matters of financial conflict of interest are a big 
deal in the medical sciences, in energy, across the board and 
it's important to have standards apply to make sure that 
conflicts of interest don't warp science one way or another.
    Senator Johnson. Now I think we've seen certainly with the 
pandemic the fact that big pharma funds these studies. They 
don't release the data. Our federal health agencies aren't 
transparent, so again, I think this hearing shows that there's 
big money on both sides of the equation. There's mass use on 
both sides and it's hard to discern the truth. Mr. Walter, did 
you ever read the book The New Leviathan, David Horwitz 2012.
    Mr. Walter. I certainly did.
    Senator Johnson. So in that book he lays out just talking 
about progressive environmental groups versus conservative 
environmental groups. On the progressive side there's--and this 
is 2012. There are 553 groups that he identified on the 
progressive side, 32 conservative groups. The net assets of the 
progressive groups was $9.53 billion. The net assets of the 
conservative environmental groups was $38.2 million dollars. So 
that's a 249 to 1 advantage in terms of annual grants and this 
was really the main part of his book. The progressive groups, 
whether it's environmental or whatever progressive group they 
utilize their financial wherewithal to impact government to get 
government to spend its money on their causes. Whereas 
conservative groups basically just try to spend money on their 
causes. But the annual grants from progressive groups $554 
million per year spent on progressive--granted to progressive 
environmental groups, $1.2 million for conservative groups. 
That's a 462 to 1 advantage. Is that kind of what you're 
talking about with Arabella and the whole issue of dark money? 
It's really dark money on the left that overwhelms the dark 
money on the right. Correct?
    Mr. Walter. That's absolutely right, Senator. And we did 
our own studies on this at ClimateDollars.org, and you can see 
the enormous left-wing advantage on this. If left-wing policies 
are not succeeding, it is not because there is big money on the 
other side.
    Senator Johnson. And Mr. Chairman, I'd like to enter those 
facts from 2012 into the record if I could and I'll provide 
that information to you.\8\ It is interesting----
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    \8\ Statement submitted by Senator Johnson appears in the appendix 
on page 1137.
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    Chairman Whitehouse. The record will remain open for a 
week.
    Senator Johnson. Okay. Great. Thank you.
    Chairman Whitehouse. You're welcome to add whatever you 
wish.
    Senator Johnson. Yes, it's interesting we have these budget 
hearings and as Ranking Member Grassley points out, we're 
really not talking about the budget. We're talking about 
climate change, which is fine. I'm enjoying them. I've got an 
open mind. I've never denied climate change. I'm just not a 
climate change alarmist because climate has always changed. I 
find it interesting on the majority witnesses there really 
aren't very many scientists. We're bringing a few more 
environmental scientists on the minority side. You can't really 
get into the discussion on climate change. But I think it's 
interesting that Dr. Oreskes, you say you actually are an Earth 
scientist or something, so here's the questions I have that 
remain unanswered.
    Are you familiar with the Vostok Ice Core Sample?
    Dr. Oreskes. Yes. Absolutely.
    Senator Johnson. That's 400 and something--the most famous 
ice core about 400 and some thousand years of climate history 
showing temperatures. You know average global temperatures at 
that spot. CO2 concentration methane. Do you realize 
we're in about our fifth cycle, temperature variation of 22.7 
degrees? Also if you take a look at the sea level rise in the 
Bay of San Francisco, 390 feet over the last 10-20,000 years. 
What caused that?
    Dr. Oreskes. Well, the claim that climate has always 
changed is a claim that we hear all the time from people who 
are skeptical about climate change.
    Senator Johnson. Do you----
    Dr. Oreskes. So let me answer the question. So yes, of 
course, the climate has always changed. And Earth scientists 
have studied this for literally centuries, but the key point 
about anthropogenic climate change is that it's different from 
natural variability. And Lee DuBridge even said that in 1969. 
How do we know it's different? Because scientists have studied 
things like the ice cores and we know----
    Senator Johnson. You're not answering. What caused----
    Dr. Oreskes. Oh, what caused the natural variability?
    Senator Johnson. What caused the 32.7 degree--you know 
those five cycles.
    Dr. Oreskes. The natural variability of most----
    Senator Johnson. A sea level rise of 390 feet in the Bay of 
San Francisco, what caused that?
    Dr. Oreskes. Natural variability is mostly caused by 
changes in the Earths' orbit. These have been well documented 
scientifically.
    Senator Johnson. Did that change?
    Dr. Oreskes. Yes. It changed because----
    Senator Johnson. Has that stopped?
    Dr. Oreskes. Yes. It has changed----
    Senator Johnson. I mean have those--have those phenomena 
stopped?
    Dr. Oreskes. It has changed because the human contribution 
has been added on top of it. Think about it this way.
    Senator Johnson. Do you realize the CO2 
concentration is a lagging indicator in the Vostok ice core 
samples?
    Dr. Oreskes. Right. Because we didn't have people putting 
CO2 into the atmosphere until the last 100 or 150 years.
    Senator Johnson. CO2----
    Dr. Oreskes. Think of it this way----
    Senator Johnson. CO2 rise actually lagged 
temperature rise----
    Dr. Oreskes. I'm trying to answer your question, Mr. 
Johnson. Natural variability is like a sine curve. It's like a 
radio wave. It goes up and down. The human forcing function is 
a linear curve that goes up, up, and up. So if you impose one 
on the other what you get is something that looks like this. So 
the natural variability still exists. The Earth continues to 
have orbital variations, but in addition we have added another 
component and that component is the human forcing from 
greenhouse gases mostly produced by a burning of fossil fuels 
and deforestation and this has been documented in chapter in 
verse in numerous peer-reviewed science----
    Senator Johnson. So is India and China going to stop using 
fossil fuels?
    Dr. Oreskes. I'm sorry. What?
    Senator Johnson. Will India and China stop using fossil 
fuels, quite honestly will the U.S.
    Dr. Oreskes. Well, now you've changed the subject, but 
that----
    Senator Johnson. The answer is they won't and there's 
nothing we can do about this.
    Dr. Oreskes. They would have if we had followed the UN 
Framework Convention that President Bush signed in 1992. The 
whole point of that Convention was to bring all the countries 
in the world onboard, but that got derailed because the United 
States refused----
    Senator Johnson. According to testimony in this committee, 
we spent over $6 trillion combating climate change, probably 
haven't made a dent in it. We won't make a dent in it. This is 
a fool's errand we're on and we're destroying our ability to 
have the resources to adapt to the climate change that's going 
to happen whether we do anything or not.
    Dr. Oreskes. Well, I'm sorry you feel that way because I 
think it's a fool's errand to think you can ignore what has 
happened and not see serious consequences for the American 
people and the American taxpayer.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Senator Merkley.

                  STATEMENT OF SENATOR MERKLEY

    Senator Merkley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    We've had this discussion about dark money and my 
colleagues have pointed out there's a lot more dark money on 
the left than the right. What I find interesting that if you 
take the assumption that disclosure is--and I think the 
Chairman used the sunlight is the best disinfectant, then we 
should simply have all political money be disclosed, where it 
comes from and the citizens can decide on what impact that has. 
And we have legislation like that. The Chairman has sponsored. 
We voted on it three times and I would invite my colleagues 
across the aisle to join us in ending dark money on both sides. 
It's quite interesting that if, in fact, there's more dark 
money on the left that it's only one side of the aisle that 
wants to end dark money. That sounds like a pretty principled 
position to me in betterment of the integrity of our campaign 
system.
    Now Dr. Oreskes, my understanding is that Exxon worked with 
public relations firms to have strategies like saying it's 
committed to the depth and breadth of climate solutions. That 
it wanted to reframe itself as an energy company rather than a 
gasoline or fossil fuel company. That that increased its 
favorability by 10 percent, that it put forward that it 
strongly aligned with Paris, all of which is a way of saying, 
hey folks, don't pay attention to our massive fossil fuel 
undertaking. We're somehow a good guy. Is this the basic 
strategy of Exxon and other major fossil fuel companies?
    Dr. Oreskes. Yes, it is. And it's what we've sometimes 
referred to as misdirection to try to distract attention away 
from the basic facts into some distracting issue. So it is true 
that Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, and other companies--other oil and 
gas companies have sometimes spent small amounts of money on 
renewable energy. Most estimates show that it's less than 2 
percent, but in their advertisements, for example, they're 
often very much focused on renewable energy, even though 98 
percent of their commitment is to continue development of oil 
and gas. And we know that the work that's been done by the IPCC 
and others--the IPCC and scientists have introduced the notion 
of a carbon budget. It's the idea that there's a certain amount 
of oil and gas that we can use without essentially derailing 
the planetary climate. But nearly all of these groups, 
including the IMF, by the way, have said--and the International 
Energy Agency that this would require not developing new 
resources of oil and gas. We can use a fair amount of what's 
still existing, but not searching for new oil and gas. And yet, 
Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, and all of the major oil and gas 
companies are continuing to explore for and develop new oil and 
gas reserves that will commit us to burning fossil fuels for 50 
more years.
    Senator Merkley. I want to turn that carbon budget idea. 
The idea is this is how much we can burn before we hit 1.5 
degrees and we're already here, pretty close to it, but there 
is some space left. But the last analysis I saw said that the 
amount of carbon already in kind of the affirmed assets of 
petroleum companies is 200 percent more than what will take us 
from here to 1.5 degrees and it's 40 percent more than what 
would take us to 2 degrees. In other words, if we bring out of 
the ground everything that has already been identified in the 
reserves, we shoot past 1.4, we shoot past 2 degrees, is that 
fairly accurate presentation?
    Dr. Oreskes. Yes, that's correct. That's correct.
    Senator Merkley. And if we keep developing new sources then 
essentially what we're doing is we're committing ourselves to a 
path of warming that goes on for the generations to come to be 
much more than 1.5 or 2 or even 3 degrees. You know I come from 
a state that's burning up with forest fires. We've lost our 
average snowpack by 20 feet over 90 years and it's kind of a 
striking decade-by-decade drop analysis.
    Our farmers are really hurting as a result of loss of 
groundwater, which isn't recharged as fast, less spring melt 
off, so there's less water, less rain, severe drought. And so I 
know that for many of my colleagues who say, well, you know 
these are speculative studies about what will happen 50 years 
from now or something, but the farming, the fishing, and the 
forestry are being severely impacted in my state right now just 
within my lifetime, really within the last 20 years. How urgent 
is it that we really have to get pass the kind of the 
greenwashing or the political messages and act now?
    Dr. Oreskes. Well, I think it's absolutely urgent. And as I 
think we've already said today, we've lost 30 years. I mean 
President Bush signed the UN Frame Convention on climate change 
in 1992 and that's a long time. If we had started working 
seriously on this problem at that time, we would have developed 
many of the large-scale energy infrastructures for solar, for 
wind, for storage, for demand response pricing, many of these 
solutions that we know work.
    Senator Merkley. And if the U.S. keeps doing new fossil 
projects doesn't that essentially give the rest of the world a 
free pass to say, hey, you're already burned must of the carbon 
budget that has been burned already. Why should we stop our 
coal or our fossil methane gas or our oil if the U.S. is still 
doing new infrastructure.
    Dr. Oreskes. Well, exactly. And that's exactly what China 
and India are saying.
    Senator Merkley. Thank you.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Senator Kennedy is next.
    Senator Kennedy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and thanks----
    Chairman Whitehouse. Then Senator Kaine.

                  STATEMENT OF SENATOR KENNEDY

    Senator Kennedy. Okay. Thanks Mr. Chairman and thank to all 
of our witnesses here today. Professor Painter, on May 5th of 
this year you put out a tweet. You said--I'm gonna quote. 
``There are some things money can't buy. For everything else 
there is the Supreme Court.'' Would you tell me which members 
of the Supreme Court you believe are bought?
    Mr. Painter. I was particularly concerned at that point 
when I posted that tweet about----
    Senator Kennedy. I understand, but if you could--I've 
gotten really limited time and I apologize for interrupting. 
Just tell me which members of the Court you are----
    Mr. Painter. I did not think that Justice Clarence Thomas 
should be failing to disclose his trips on a billionaire's 
yacht.
    Senator Kennedy. Do you think he's bought?
    Mr. Painter. I believe that there is grave risk that----
    Senator Kennedy. Do you think he's bought?
    Mr. Painter. I said there's grave risk----
    Senator Kennedy. Do you think he's bought?
    Mr. Painter [continuing]. To the confidence of the American 
people in our Supreme Court----
    Senator Kennedy. Well, if you don't think he's bought, why 
did you say it?
    Mr. Painter. I said that there is----
    Senator Kennedy. You said members of the Supreme Court are 
bought. You're here testifying as an expert for my Democratic 
friends and you're saying the members of the Supreme Court are 
bought.
    Mr. Painter. I said the American people feel that way when 
we have Supreme Court Justices on----
    Senator Kennedy. Do you feel that way?
    Mr. Painter [continuing]. Yachts and in planes of 
billionaires and not being disclosed.
    Senator Kennedy. Anybody besides Justice Thomas you think 
is bought on the Supreme Court.
    Mr. Painter. I believe that the Court needs to clean up its 
act.
    Senator Kennedy. Anybody besides Justice Thomas?
    Mr. Painter. I'm not going to go through each Justice.
    Senator Kennedy. I mean you tweeted it.
    Mr. Painter. I tweeted the way the American people feel.
    Senator Kennedy. Did you mean it when you tweeted it?
    Mr. Painter. And I stand by that tweet. This Supreme Court 
of the United States needs to clean up its act.
    Senator Kennedy. Let me ask you a couple others here 
because you've--on September 17, 2020, you tweeted ``it looks 
like Putin's favorite senator could lose,'' referring to 
Senator Lindsey Graham. Could you tell me your evidence for 
saying that Senator Graham is President Putin's favorite 
senator.
    Mr. Painter. I don't recall that tweet and the story----
    Senator Kennedy. I've got it. It's right here.
    Mr. Painter. I'm happy to look at the tweet and I'm happy 
to write you to explain that. I don't know what that has to do 
with climate change or what it has to do with this hearing.
    Senator Kennedy. Well, it has to do with your credibility. 
Did you say--what is your basis for saying that Senator Graham 
is President Putin's--have you ever talked to President Putin?
    Mr. Painter. I have not talked to President Putin and I 
would be happy to go look at the tweet and look at the story 
that I tweeted out and what Senator Graham had said in that 
context. You know this is something I----
    Senator Kennedy. You say all this stuff. For example, in--
you're here as an expert for my Democratic friends and you say 
all this stuff. You called on September 16, 2023, a professor 
at the University of Chicago, a very distinguished professor, 
Brian Lighter. You called him a racist. Can you explain to me 
why you think he's a racist?
    Mr. Painter. I remember a series of tweets with him. He's a 
Marxist who put out a number of statements attacking African 
Americans and women and he was also raising money for someone 
who had called the police on a Black student for sleeping in 
the common room and now he has a Woke KKK.com website attacking 
me.
    Senator Kennedy. That's fair enough.
    Mr. Painter. I will just say one thing. I learned in high 
school debate that when you have no argument you simply change 
the subject.
    Senator Kennedy. All right. On October 15, 2020, you said 
``Lindsey Graham is soliciting cash payments in return for 
voting on a Supreme Court nomination.'' What evidence--that's a 
pretty bold statement, Professor. What evidence do you have for 
alleging that Senator Graham was taking cash in return for one 
of his votes?
    Mr. Painter. I don't recall that specific tweet, but I----
    Senator Kennedy. Here it is right here.
    Mr. Painter [continuing]. But I do.
    Senator Kennedy. Here it is.
    Mr. Painter. I do recall and I----
    Senator Kennedy. Do you think he was taking cash for one of 
his votes?
    Mr. Painter. I have received campaign----
    Senator Kennedy. Do you think he was taking cash for one of 
his votes?
    Mr. Painter. I'm answering your question, Senator. I have 
received solicitations from both political parties.
    Senator Kennedy. Do you think Lindsey Graham----
    Mr. Painter [continuing]. Confirmation hearings for 
Justice----
    Senator Kennedy [continuing]. For one of his votes. It's a 
simple question, Professor.
    Mr. Painter. I have received solicitations for cash on my 
email and yes, from both political parties in connection with 
Supreme Court confirmation votes.
    Senator Kennedy. I'm out of time, but let me just say for 
the record.
    Mr. Painter. It's wrong.
    Senator Kennedy. My aunt's Facebook page has more 
credibility than you do. I could spend the rest of the day 
reading your quotes where you make allegations against people 
and you can't defend them.
    Mr. Painter. You've said nothing about climate change.
    You quoted everybody from a Marxist to all sorts of other 
people.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Senator Kaine.
    Mr. Painter. This has absolutely nothing to do with the 
topic of the hearing, Senator.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Senator Kaine is recognized.

                   STATEMENT OF SENATOR KAINE

    Senator Kaine. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Two items that I want 
to talk about. One, some good news. Mr. Painter, you challenged 
us at the end of your opening testimony. Hey, don't just be 
fingering pointing at each other. Get something done. And I do 
think we have to say this hearing is within the still recent 
aftermath of two really powerful pieces of legislation that 
Congress has passed to help us battle climate change, to help 
the United States become leaders in the battle against climate 
change. The bipartisan infrastructure bill a number of my 
colleagues worked hard on this bill, makes significant 
investments in all kinds of infrastructure. The nation needs 
it, but including clean energy infrastructure. And then the 
Inflation Reduction Act, which was partisan. It passed by one 
vote in the Senate also really rockets the United States ahead 
in climate leadership by promoting investments in clean energy. 
We've seen the effect of this in Virginia. Virginia was one of 
the worst states in the country in terms of any embrace of wind 
or solar, low carbon energy at the same time we were one of the 
state's most vulnerable to sea level rise. But now in both wind 
deployment offshore Virginia is becoming a leader, not only in 
deploying wind offshore, but also in becoming a hub of 
manufacturing offshore wind components. It's good for economy.
    But also in the solar space Virginia is moving from sort of 
bottom 10 deployment to top 10. So the efforts of 
disinformation is notwithstanding. It's not like Congress has 
just basically accepted the disinformation and gridlocked. 
We've taken action and we can debate too hot, too cold, just 
right, more steps to take. I believe we do need to take more 
steps, but I do think Congress is acting on this and we're 
acting on it in a way that is rocketing ahead great American 
innovation, creating jobs, putting us in a position where we 
can encourage others to do the same, a global leadership 
position and I think that's important.
    And then the other point I wanted to make was with respect 
to something that Mr. Walter said in his testimony because I 
don't want anybody watching this to be confused or disinformed. 
You used a phrase that said the left wants to silence speech it 
doesn't like. We're talking about disclosure. We're not talking 
about silencing anyone.
    Dr. Pielke said it's important to know resources can 
pervert research and those resources could come from the left 
or the right or from anywhere or from foreign sources. It could 
pervert research. And you said it's really important that on 
research you be able to figure out if there's a conflict of 
interest. Resources can pervert campaigns.
    Mr. Painter, you talked about watching it from the George 
W. Bush Administration through and seeing the effect of 
campaign contributions and dark money perverting campaigns. 
Research can pervert the reputation of the Supreme Court when 
people appearing before the Court are hosting members of the 
Court on luxury vacations who then chose not to disclosure it 
there is a possibility that worries Americans that justice is 
being perverted.
    So who would argue that we shouldn't route out conflicts of 
interests? And if we can't eliminate them all, at least we can 
make them transparent so that voters and citizens and 
legislators and journalists can figure out what's going on. 
That's why the American public overwhelming supports the 
Disclose Act. If you look at polling Republican, Independent, 
Democratic, everybody believes they should have the right to 
know who's funding campaigns. Even a person who may never go 
look at the website to determine who's doing it still thinks 
they have the right to it and should they want to that 
information should be there for them. And that's why I'll go 
back to what my colleague, Senator Merkley, was saying. I don't 
believe for an instant that if you added up the total of dark 
money it's a more significant problem on the Democratic side 
than the Republican side because all Democrats are very wanting 
to get rid of dark money because all Democrats support the 
Disclose Act and since Mike Castle was defeated in a Republican 
primary for Senate in Delaware in 2010, I don't think we've had 
a single Republican member of either the House or the Senate 
who's been willing to support the Disclose Act.
    Those who are willing to say let it all be transparent are 
not trying to silence anyone. They're trying to actually 
provide the best information to everyone while those who insist 
upon opacity, insist upon secrecy, resist transparency they got 
something to hide. They got something to hide. And so my hope 
is--I just resonate with what Dr. Pielke said. We ought to be 
able to determine wherever we are--everyday people, 
journalists, elected official, expert, whether there's a 
conflict of interest that could threaten the credibility of 
information that we receive. Everybody ought to be able to 
determine that and we get there by doing things like the 
Disclose Act. And it would be my hope that at some point we 
would be able to get some Republican votes to back that up. 
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you very much and we thank the 
witnesses for a very helpful hearing. I'll make a brief closing 
statement, if I may, to follow up on what Senator Kaine has 
said. Senator Kaine is a very able lawyer and one of the key 
features or subtopics, if you will, of this hearing has been 
the problem of conflicts of interests and how to explore 
conflicts of interests. Exploring conflicts of interest is how 
you distinguish, in part, between a simple difference of 
opinion and motivated opinion, opinion that is paid for and is 
perhaps not even sincerely held. And I think it's important to 
recognize the importance of bias and conflict of interest when 
you're dealing with testimony whether it's in Congress or 
whether it's in courtrooms.
    As Senator Kennedy just said, it has to do with your 
creditability and it's important that that be disclosed because 
the difference between paid for opinion and real research is a 
very important thing. Mr. Pielke has been very good about this, 
if I may quote from a sub-stack.``Experts monetizing their 
expert is one important reason why people become experts, but 
where expertise and financial interest intersect things can get 
complicated.'' That is why there are robust mechanisms in place 
for the disclosure and mitigation of financial conflicts of 
interests. All of this is just common sense here. A doctor 
can't prescribe you drugs from a company that pays him fees. 
You wouldn't think much of a report on smoking and health from 
a researcher supported by the tobacco industry,'' and because 
we're both lawyers, we also have spent some time in courtrooms. 
And one thing I can tell my colleagues about a courtroom is 
that when you have a witness, particularly when you have an 
expert witness one of the things you explore in your cross-
examination of that witness is their bias, is their conflicts 
of interest. It is so normal in courtrooms to challenge 
witnesses on how they're paid and who's paying them that it 
would be error for a court to refuse to allow the lawyer to 
conduct that examination. It is as established a principle of 
trial practice as exists.
    So let's appreciate that if it's essential in a courtroom 
for a jury and a judge to be able to test the credibility of a 
witness by having their conflicts of interest made a matter of 
record for the judge and jury to see, it is also appropriate 
for other hearings as well.
    Thank you, Mr. Pielke. I see you nodding.
    Senator Grassley. Can you give one minute for me?
    Chairman Whitehouse. Of course.
    Senator Grassley. Okay. Thank you.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Of course. Five minutes for a closing 
statement.
    Senator Grassley. I've been listening to this back and 
forth at this hearing. I've come to the following three 
conclusions. Despite attempts to observe the obvious, Democrats 
receive more dark money than Republicans and don't want the 
public to know it. Secondly, the problem of climate change is 
worthy of consideration, but these hearings go past 
consideration. Democrats don't even bring in climate scientists 
to hearings to have conversation about extreme, unrealistic 
modelings. Democrats want Americans to think that you're, as 
Americans, too stupid to think for themselves. Our time would 
clearly be better spent doing budgetary works in this 
Committee, which I'm fully prepared to do.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Senator Johnson is recognized for--
unusually, but I'll give him the courtesy of a one-minute 
closing statement.
    Senator Johnson. Just a real quick point. Listen, I 
certainly want disclosure as well, but I think it should be 
toward candidates and certainly when it comes to scientific 
research, you know, conflicts of interest the issue with the 
disclosure of donors to groups really was settled by the 
Supreme Court in the 50s with Alabama v. the National 
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) where 
Alabama wanted to disclose the donors to the NAACP and we know 
why. That same concern exists today because we've seen 
individuals being doxed. We've seen people being attacked for 
supporting a group that maybe the other side doesn't 
particularly like. So there is a rationale for donors being 
able to donate to a cause that they feel strongly about without 
their donation being disclosed. Okay. So there's a legitimate 
argument on the other side. I would be pleased with unlimited 
campaign contributions, full disclosure within 24 hours, that's 
an appropriate use. Okay. But again, there's funding so many 
different ways, different organizations, union--it's just not. 
Again, I know it's a good sounding bill, but it's misguided.
    Senator Kaine. Mr. Chair, 30 seconds.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Yes, Senator Kaine. Have your minute 
too.
    Senator Kaine. I'll take 30 seconds. I don't think you can 
analogize NAACP members in the Alabama of the 1950s and their 
need for protection from criminal prosecution to wealthy 
individuals who want to support often untrue political ads 
without their name being associated with those untruths. I just 
challenge that analogy.
    Chairman Whitehouse. As do I. And with that, the hearing is 
concluded. The members will have a week to add any questions 
for the record. I would invite Ms. Arena to provide a response 
to Senator Merkley because I thought his questioning was much 
directed to you if you would care to do that. And if Dr. 
Oreskes would like to--I saw you making some comments during 
the testimony of some of the other witnesses. If you'd like to 
elaborate a little bit on that through a question for the 
record, I will invite that as well. Anyone else seeking to put 
question for the record in you've got a week to do it. We'll 
try to turn that around and get them to you as quickly as 
possible so we can get answers back to our members. This has 
been a very helpful and instructive hearing and I thank you all 
for your participation.
    [Whereupon, at 11:36 a.m., Wednesday, June 21, 2023, the 
hearing was adjourned.]
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