[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 1532-1534]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, investigative author Jane Mayer

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has written an important piece of journalism--her new book, ``Dark 
Money''--about the secret but massive influence-buying rightwing 
billionaires led by the infamous Koch brothers. Jane Mayer's book 
catalogs the rise and the expansion into a vast array of front groups 
of this operation and the role in it of two of America's more shameless 
villains: Charles and David Koch. Some have called this beast they have 
created the Kochtopus because it has so many tentacles.
  The Presiding Officer may be wondering why I am talking about secret 
influence-buying in my climate speech. The reason is that the story of 
dark money and the story of climate change denial are the same story--
two sides of the same coin, as it were.
  Two strategies of that Koch-led, influence-buying operation 
particularly bear on climate change. Indeed, they are probably the 
major reason we don't have a comprehensive climate bill in Congress and 
instead have this present little mouse of a bipartisan energy 
efficiency bill. ``Oh, there goes Whitehouse,'' I am sure some 
listeners are saying, ``off his rocker, trying to connect the Koch 
brothers to this climate change.'' Well, it is not just something I am 
saying; it is what the Koch brothers' own operatives say when they are 
crowing about their influence-buying success.
  I will get to that later, but first the two strategies. One strategy 
is to mimic real science with phony science. Real science wants to find 
the truth. This phony science has no interest whatsoever in the truth. 
It wants to look like science, sure, but it is perfectly content to be 
wrong. There is an apparatus, a whole array of front groups through 
which this phony science is perpetrated. This machinery of phony 
science has been wrong over and over. It was wrong about tobacco, wrong 
about lead paint, wrong about ozone, wrong about mercury, and now it is 
wrong about climate change. They are the same organizations, the same 
strategies, the same funding sources, even in some cases the same 
people--always wrong. You would think that if they cared a hoot about 
right from wrong, they would change their methodology after such an 
unblemished record of being wrong every time. But they don't care. 
Truth is not their object; truth is actually their adversary.
  This isn't science; it is public relations dressed up in a lab coat. 
It masquerades as science. But, as a visiting university president from 
Rhode Island recently said to me, ``it uses the language of science, 
but its purpose is to undermine actual science.'' To pull off this 
masquerade, you have to trick people. You have to do what Ms. Mayer 
describes a Koch brothers associate saying as this whole scheme was 
being developed. It is perhaps the most telling quote in her book. Here 
is what the man said. ``It would be necessary,'' he said, to ``use 
ambiguous and misleading names, obscure the true agenda, and conceal 
the means of control.''
  The next quote in her book is this: ``This is the method that Charles 
Koch would soon practice in his charitable giving, and later in his 
political actions.''
  Did he ever. Misleading names. How about the John Locke Foundation, 
the Ethan Allen Institute. The pages listening will know these names 
from history: the James Madison Institute for Public Policy; the Thomas 
Jefferson Institute; the Franklin Center for Government & Public 
Integrity, with a little profile of old Ben Franklin on its letterhead; 
the George C. Marshall Institute, named after the hero of World War II 
and the European recovery that followed. None of them have a thing to 
do with their illustrious namesakes; they just took the famous names to 
put on a veneer of legitimacy.
  The George C. Marshall Institute--it sounds impressive. You might 
fool the occasional editorial page editor. Who does that? Maybe someone 
trying to hide something, ``obscure the true agenda.''
  Take the Mercatus Center, which the Washington Post described as a 
``staunchly anti-regulatory center funded largely by Koch Industries 
Inc.'' In ``Dark Money,'' journalist Jane Mayer wrote that Clayton 
Coppin, a professor at George Mason who reviewed Bill Koch's political 
activities, concluded Mercatus to be ``a lobbying group disguised as a 
disinterested academic program.'' And conceal the means of control--a 
large portion of the funding behind this special interest apparatus is 
simply not traceable. Why? Because money is funneled through 
organizations that exist to conceal donor identity. That is their 
purpose. The biggest identity-laundering shops are Donors Trust and 
Donors Capital Fund. Indeed, they are by far the biggest sources of 
funding in the web of climate-change front groups that have been stood 
up.
  Dr. Robert Brulle of Drexel University, who studies the network of 
fossil fuel-backed climate denial, reports the Donors Trust and Donors 
Capital Fund operations are the ``central component'' and ``predominant 
funder'' of the denier apparatus; and at the same time he continues it 
is the ``black box that conceals the identity of contributors.''
  Jane Mayer reports in her book: ``Between 1999 and 2015, Donors Trust 
redistributed some $750 million from the pooled contributions to myriad 
conservative causes under its own name.'' There were $750 million 
laundered into anonymity with no telltale fossil fuel fingerprints.
  This is no small operation. There are over 100 groups involved, all 
beholden to the same master: the fossil fuel industry. Setting up or 
supporting over 100 front groups may seem unduly complicated, but 
remember, an internal combustion engine has more than 500 parts, and we 
are totally comfortable with that mechanism.
  According to the International Monetary Fund, this apparatus is 
defending a $700 billion--billion with a ``b''--effective subsidy, just 
in the United States of America, every year. How much work would you 
do--how much complication would you be willing to create--to defend 
$700 billion per year? To use Jane Mayer's telling phrase, this is a 
new device. Put it all together and what do you have? ``The think tank 
as disguised political weapon.'' Who is behind this elaborate scheme? I 
will quote from ``Dark Money.''

       [T]he director of research at Greenpeace . . . spent months 
     trying to trace the funds flowing into a web of nonprofit 
     organizations and talking heads, all denying the reality of 
     global warming as if working from the same script. What he 
     discovered was that from 2005 to 2008, a single source, the 
     Koch [brother]s, poured almost $25 million into dozens of 
     different organizations fighting climate reform. The sum was 
     staggering. His research showed that Charles and David [Koch] 
     had outspent what was then the world's largest public oil 
     company, ExxonMobil, by a factor of three. In a 2010 report, 
     Greenpeace crowned Koch Industries, a company few had ever 
     heard of at the time, the ``kingpin of climate science 
     denial.''

  By the way, I should say that ExxonMobil has been actively involved 
in this as well, as a lot of very good recent reporting has showed. But 
they were outshone and outdone by the Koch brothers.
  I will quote again from ``Dark Money.''

       The first peer-reviewed academic study on the topic added 
     further detail. Robert Brulle, a Drexel University professor 
     of sociology and environmental science, discovered that 
     between 2003 and 2010 over half a billion dollars was spent 
     on what he described as a massive ``campaign to manipulate 
     and mislead the public about the threat posed by climate 
     change.'' The study examined the tax records of more than a 
     hundred nonprofit organizations engaged in challenging the 
     prevailing science on global warming. What it found was, in 
     essence, a corporate lobbying campaign disguised as a tax-
     exempt, philanthropic endeavor. Some 140 conservative 
     foundations funded the campaign, Brulle found. During the 
     seven-year period he studied, these foundations distributed 
     $558 million in the form of 5,299 grants to ninety-one 
     different nonprofit organizations.

  It is quite a ``Kochtopus.''

       The money went to think tanks, advocacy groups, trade 
     associations, other foundations, and academic and legal 
     programs. Cumulatively, this private network waged a 
     permanent campaign to undermine Americans' faith in climate 
     science to defeat any effort to regulate carbon emissions.

  The bottom line is if your faith in climate science is undermined, 
you have been had by a well-funded, complex, sophisticated scheme of 
disinformation.
  Back to ``Dark Money'' again.

       The cast of conservative organizations identified by Brulle 
     was familiar to anyone

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     who had followed the funding of the conservative movement. 
     Among those he pinpointed as the largest bankrollers of 
     climate change denial were foundations affiliated with the 
     Koch and Scaife families, both of whose fortunes derived 
     partly from oil. Also heavily involved were the Bradley 
     Foundation and several others associated with hugely wealthy 
     families participating in the Koch donor summits, such as the 
     foundations run by the DeVos Family, Art Pope, the retail 
     magnate from North Carolina, and John Templeton, Jr., a 
     doctor and heir to the fortune of his father John Templeton, 
     Sr., an American mutual fund pioneer who eventually renounced 
     his U.S. citizenship in favor of living in the Bahamas, 
     reportedly saving $100 million on taxes. Brulle found that as 
     the money was dispersed, three-quarters of the funds from 
     these and other sources financing what he called the 
     ``climate change counter-movement'' were untraceable.

  Brulle's conclusion, as reported by Ms. Mayer, is this:

       Powerful funders are supporting the campaign to deny 
     scientific findings about global warming and raise public 
     doubts about the roots and remedies of this massive global 
     threat. At the very least, American voters deserve to know 
     who is behind these efforts.

  But it wasn't enough for the Koch brothers to have the paid-for, 
phony science masquerade. You also had to drive politicians to accept 
the phony science. You had to make politicians willing to participate 
in the masquerade and put on the phony science costume. To do that, 
they turned to the mother's milk of politics: money.
  The money was set loose by five Republican justices on the Supreme 
Court when they decided Citizens United. Citizens United is described 
in ``Dark Money'' as ``the polluters['] triumph.'' Mayer quotes a 
defeated candidate the Kochs went after:

       There was a huge change after Citizens United, when anyone 
     could spend any amount of money, without revealing who they 
     were, by hiding behind amorphous-named organizations, the 
     floodgates opened. The Supreme Court made a huge mistake. 
     There is no accountability. Zero.

  The money got loaded into political organizations like Americans for 
Prosperity, the leading Koch brothers-backed political front group. 
They waved that money around like a club, touting how they were going 
to spend $750 million just in this 2016 election. They told Republicans 
they would be so ``severely disadvantaged'' if they crossed them on 
climate change that they would be in political peril. Do the math. How 
much more obvious could you get?
  Here is how Jane Mayer quotes their own official crowing about their 
victory. Remember what I said earlier? This is not me making wild 
allegations. This is them taking credit for what they did.

       Tim Phillips gladly took credit for the dramatic spike in 
     expressed skepticism. ``If you look at where the situation 
     was three years ago and where it is today, there's been a 
     dramatic turnaround,'' he told the National Journal. . . .
       We've made great headway. What it means for candidates on 
     the Republican side is ``if you . . . buy into green energy 
     or you play footsie on this issue, you do so at your 
     political peril. And that's our influence. Groups like 
     Americans for Prosperity have done it.''

  That is what they say about what they are doing. And don't think we 
don't see that effect in this Chamber. The Koch brothers have had their 
day, doing their dirty work in the dark. I will give them that. It has 
been quite a racket, but the truth will come out. It always does.
  Jane Mayer is not alone. Academic researchers like Robert Brulle at 
Drexel, Riley Dunlap at Oklahoma State University, Justin Farrell at 
Yale University, and Michael Mann at Penn State University are exposing 
the precise dimensions and functions of this denial machine. 
Investigative writers like Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, Naomi Klein, and 
Steve Coll are on the hunt. ``Merchants of Doubt'' is already a movie. 
Jeff Nesbit's forthcoming book, ``Poison Tea,'' about how these big 
money boys suckered the tea party down this road, should be 
illuminating. On the official side, two attorneys general appear to be 
looking into Exxon's role in this climate denial scheme. In short, what 
could well be the biggest scam to hit politics since Teapot Dome and 
Watergate is being unraveled and exposed.
  The dirty fossil fuel money has deliberately polluted our American 
politics, just as their carbon emissions have polluted the atmosphere 
and oceans. Justice cannot come too soon for these people.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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