[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 203 (Wednesday, December 2, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7165-S7167]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today is my 276th climate speech, and 
my increasingly battered graphic is showing its wear, but for the first 
time in a really, really long time, there is real hope for climate 
action in America.
  The light of science will shine in a Biden administration. Our U.S. 
Government will heed actual data. Agencies will act on facts. The White 
House

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will care about the harm carbon pollution does right now across the 
country. President Biden will restore the EPA to its role of 
safeguarding our air and water and will task the State Department to 
surge climate policy abroad. Every Department--from Transportation to 
the USDA, to HUD, to the SEC--will have a role in turning this ship 
around before catastrophe.
  At last, the Biden administration will cleanse America's government 
of its grimy infestation of polluter lackeys, stooges, and hangers-on 
and will shut off the disastrous handouts to fossil fuel industry 
donors. A flood of cleansing executive actions will wash away the 
grime. The American Presidency, with its great power, will shake free 
of the polluters' grip, but the Presidency alone cannot spare us.
  Congress must pass a comprehensive climate bill, stop rewarding 
polluters from polluting, and clean up our energy market so it is not 
corrupted by or for the fossil fuel industry--for instance, putting a 
real price on carbon to pay for the fossil fuel damage. We have to 
invest in new, green infrastructure to create millions of jobs. We need 
to prepare communities along our coasts for rising seas, others for 
higher temperatures, and other climate dangers. We need to address the 
dangerous systemic financial risks fossil fuel presents to our economic 
system. There is work to be done, and it is overdue.
  So what has been stopping us?
  Four years ago, Senate Democrats came to the Senate floor and here 
exposed this web of denial and obstruction that had been built by the 
fossil fuel industry to prevent meaningful action on climate change. 
This evil web is a front for billionaire polluters like the Kochs and 
fossil fuel pushers like ExxonMobil and Marathon Petroleum. To hide its 
funders, this web uses creepy identity-scrubbing groups like Donors 
Trust and Donors Capital. They move money and people around in the web 
in a Whac-A-Mole array of disposable groups with misleadingly wholesome 
names like the Heartland Institute and the Franklin Center for 
Government and Public Integrity. Benjamin Franklin would vomit at this 
abuse of his name.
  Following Big Tobacco's playbook, this web of denial kept the 
polluters' fingerprints off the dirty work of sowing doubt about 
climate science, just as the tobacco industry fraudulently stood up 
front groups to dispense denial of the harms of tobacco. This polluter 
web of denial also kept the Republican Party in line by spending 
stunning amounts of money in American politics
  Dr. Robert Brulle, now at Brown University, created this graphic off 
of his research, and it gives you a sense of how big and how complex 
this web of denial is that the fossil fuel industry stood up, and it is 
funded by huge amounts of dark money by anonymous funders.
  When we exposed this web back in 2016, fossil fuel giants like 
ExxonMobil said it was out of the climate denial and obstruction 
business. Exxon claimed it had not funded the Heartland Institutes of 
the world for a decade. Fossil fuel executives said they knew climate 
change was a threat, and they claimed to have turned the page on this 
nonsense.
  Well, that just ain't so. The network of phony front groups, 
identity-laundering outfits, and bogus PR campaigns is alive and well. 
Like any threatened crooked enterprise, it morphs to hide in its 
surroundings, but we just caught another glimpse of it through a New 
York Times expose of the corporate PR firm FTI Consulting. FTI started 
40 years ago as a hired gun for parties in litigation and now offers 
virtually any nasty service a corporation could need. According to the 
Times, the fossil fuel industry employs FTI for a lot of dirty work.
  One thing FTI does is to stand up fake front groups. The New York 
Times chronicles how organizations like Citizens to Protect PA Jobs, 
New Mexicans for Economic Prosperity, and the Liberty Energy Project 
actually all trace back to FTI through common employees, internet 
domain registrations, and other ties. Each of these pop-up groups 
suggests that it is a broad coalition of regular Americans. Each sports 
a flashy website, like this one, with neighborly looking folk in scenic 
vistas, and, of course, they all make the fossil fuel case for cutting 
corporate taxes and slashing environmental protections. We call these 
fake environmental grassroots groups ``Astroturf''--a product 
manufactured by big, powerful special interests to look like grassroots 
support.
  This one is a classic--Texans for Natural Gas. The Times writes about 
this outfit:

       Acting as Texans for Natural Gas representatives, FTI 
     employees have launched pro-industry petitions, produced 
     videos and reports on the importance of the Permian Basin oil 
     field, and written opinion pieces for local newspapers 
     supporting fossil fuels. The site features testimonials from 
     three women--

  I am quoting still--

     two of whom are represented with stock photos--

  Let me interrupt the quote for a minute because you know you can go 
to the internet and find stock photos of people you can use. So these 
aren't real testimonials. These are fake FTI testimonials with stock 
photos to make it look like it is credible. OK, I will go back to the 
quote:

     and one with a photo used without permission from the Flickr 
     page of a photographer in the Philippines.

  Classy, huh? This bag of polluter tricks is pretty familiar to those 
who have studied the web of denial here, but FTI is also pulling some 
new tricks.
  One new target is fossil fuel's own investors. A new challenge for 
oil and gas companies is their own shareholders--even their biggest 
institutional investors--calling on them to identify and address 
climate risks. For instance, last spring, BlackRock, the largest 
institutional investor in the world, voted at a shareholder meeting to 
remove two Exxon directors and install an independent Exxon chairman, 
all to improve this oil giant's ``insufficient progress'' in addressing 
its business risk from climate change. That kind of warning shot sends 
shivers down the spine of a big polluter.
  So there is FTI, which popped up a group in 2018 called Main Street 
Investors, which commissioned studies arguing that activist 
shareholders harm shareholder value, and it launched a website, 
divestmentfacts.com, to argue against big university endowments, 
pension funds, and other big investors divesting from fossil fuels. The 
Times notes about this scheme: ``At least six academic papers published 
on this website were by professors who, in addition to their university 
jobs, were also working for Compass Lexecon, [an] FTI subsidiary.''
  Neat trick using shareholder money to fool shareholders.
  Who paid FTI to set up Main Street Investors? The National 
Association of Manufacturers, which the watchdog group Influence Map 
has called the worst climate obstructor in America. So it is no 
surprise that they are paying for this phony nonsense. The question is, 
Who paid the National Association of Manufacturers to set this up? They 
won't say. So we have to take a guess.
  There is more that FTI is up to. Don't like your news coverage? FTI 
can build you your own news site. The Times found FTI lurking behind 
Energy In Depth and Western Wire--two sites that churn out pro-fossil 
fuel articles and spread them around the internet. With mass extinction 
of real local newspapers underway, FTI is busy setting up polluter news 
pages to fill the void. It is clever, if repulsive.
  Of course, FTI does dirty work on social media. After New York City 
filed a climate lawsuit against Exxon, FTI launched a social media 
attack on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. In a pantomime twofer, FTI 
used content from its phony Energy In Depth news site in its paid-for 
social media attack. Who paid? They won't say. Take a guess.
  Another FTI campaign bought social media ads to steer people to 
another FTI front group, the Arctic Energy Center, which promotes--
guess what--drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off the 
Alaskan coast.
  In yet another campaign, FTI's shadowy special strategic 
communications unit set up a phony Facebook profile to secretly track 
environmental protesters. It did this for Apache Energy, which wanted 
to drill for fossil fuel next to a State park in Texas. See the 
pattern?
  But wait. It gets even creepier than this, if you can believe it. FTI 
has a menu that it offers to its clients of fake personas.

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  These fake personas use fake social media and message board accounts 
to interfere in internet debate--say by harassing local citizens who 
are concerned about pollution and who may be criticizing FTI's clients, 
so they will bomb into the internet debate around that, offering fake 
personas as the phony voice to disrupt that debate.
  This is actually their menu. You have what they call ``the 
Derailleur.'' ``The Derailleur seizes on a seemingly innocuous section 
of the otherwise negative narrative and attempts to pull the comment 
thread into a discursive discussion around that detailed non-issue.''
  They offer next the ``Drunken Conspiracy Theorist Uncle.'' ``The 
Drunken Conspiracy Theorist Uncle agrees with the negative commenter 
but conflates other unrelated and offensive issues into it, lumping it 
all together into an unpalatable whole.''
  They also offer the ``Semantic Nitpicker,'' who ``asks an endless 
series of questions seeking clarification or pointing out minor flaws 
in the way the argument is constructed. This can be played both 
friendly and oppositionally, but by different stacks of kids.''
  On it goes through the ``Skeptical Capitalist,'' the ``Patronizing 
Voice of Reason,'' the ``Confused Time Traveler,'' the ``Concerned 
Hipster,'' and believe it or not, here is a real beauty--the ``Dog 
Typing on a Keyboard.'' You can pay FTI to send somebody real behind a 
fake persona to go interfere anonymously in somebody else's 
conversation--in this case, claiming a dog typing on a keyboard. ``The 
dog typing on a keyboard chimes in with very poor grammar, spelling, 
and punctuation, and posts frequently to clutter up the thread and make 
it very hard to read''--basically packing the debate with so much 
nonsense that everybody has to tune out.
  These are actually services offered to the fossil fuel industry 
clients that they pay for. They pay to disrupt legitimate internet 
debate using phony, paid-for personas that come in occupying these 
characteristics, I guess you would call them. It is unbelievably 
disgusting behavior for any corporation to engage in, which is probably 
why they hide the money.
  You may ask, why? Why on Earth would fossil fuel companies spend big 
money on all this fancy, fake activity--from phony Astroturf groups to 
fake attack campaigns, to the dog typing on the keyboard? Why would the 
fossil fuel industry go through all these complex, phony schemes? Won't 
they ultimately get caught?
  Well, the answer is simple, and it is a number--$650 billion. Six 
hundred and fifty billion dollars is the subsidy for fossil fuel in the 
United States of America every year. Every year, $650 billion. Another 
year, another $650 billion, according to the International Monetary 
Fund, which is kind of a technical bean counter organization that is 
not an environmental group by any stretch.
  So let's say you are getting that $650 billion subsidy every year. 
Even if all this fakery ends up exposed, if in the meantime you have 
disrupted the opposition and kept your business scheme going, you have 
reaped another year of multi-hundred-billion-dollar subsidies.
  I mention in this web of denial the identity-laundering group called 
Donors Trust, and I will come back to them right now because I have 
called them out over and over.
  Donors Trust just put a letter to the editor into my home State 
newspaper to assure its readers that Donors Trust is just as pure as 
the driven snow. Of all the newspapers in the world, Donors Trust just 
happened to pick mine. I appreciate the attention. But let's get the 
facts straight because here is Donors Trust, right in the middle of the 
web of denial. It has been called ``the dark-money ATM of the right,'' 
behind ``the right's assault on labor unions, climate scientists, 
public schools, [and] economic regulations.'' It has been called ``the 
Right's favorite dark-money conduit, [which] allows the identities of 
wealthy conservative donors to stay hidden.'' It has been called 
``Donors Trust, the Right-Wing Secret Money Machine.'' And it is smack 
in the middle of this dirty, dark fossil fuel web that has propagated 
and funded the lie--the lie of climate denial.
  From FTI and all of its schemes and its typing dogs to Donors Trust, 
the sleaze and the scale of the fossil fuel scheming is itself a signal 
of the mischief afoot. You don't put up a phony-baloney operation of 
this magnitude unless you have some real nasty stuff that you are 
trying to defend and mislead people about. Well, for $650 billion a 
year, you can crank up a lot of sleazy mischief.
  Here in Congress, we can't keep dancing to the tune of this crowd. We 
still don't know which party will control this Chamber next year, but 
we do know that the Senate is out of excuses on climate change. It is 
time for a strong climate bill that can be signed into law by a new 
President, swept into office with the most votes in history on a strong 
commitment to climate action.
  It is on us. It is on us whether this web of denial will hold us back 
or whether we will break free at last of its corrupting influence and 
do, for once--for once--our duty instead of its bidding.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I always appreciate the persistence and 
integrity and intellectual vigor of Senator Whitehouse's comments on 
the floor talking about climate and talking about the corruption of big 
money and climate politics and climate decision making.
  So to Senator Whitehouse, thank you.