The Climate change money machine
By Dr. Jay Lehr
For far too long the public has been deluded into believing that groups whose titles indicate their efforts to protect our environment are the Davids in a battle with the Goliath industrial complex of our nation. They tell a story of protecting our air, our water, our forests and our wild life. In the past 20 years with few exceptions, a central theme on which their fundraising letters and advertisements depend, is the need for money to stop the existential threat that a rising temperature from the carbon dioxide emissions from the use of fossil fuels is causing.
Ron Arnold and Paul Driessen, authors of the 2018 book Cracking Big Green, learned to read IRS form 990 in the annual reports of non-profit organizations. They focused on the readily available year 2012. You can be sure the dollars they found to have been received that year have increased in the more recent years of Climate Change hysteria. Here is what they found to have been the incomes of some of the major well known groups in 2012 alone.
The Sierra Club took in $97,757,678
The Sierra Club Foundation took in $47,163,599
The Environmental Defense Fund took in $111,915,138
Natural Resources Defense Council $98,701,707
National Audubon Society $96,206,883
National Wildlife Federation $84,726,518
Greenpeace USA $32,791,149
National Parks Conservation Association $25,782,975
The Wilderness Society $24,862,909
Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection $19,150,215
But those are the medium sized incomes, here are the biggies:
The Nature Conservancy $949,132,306
Greenpeace International $406,000,000
Wildlife Conservation Society $230,042,654
World Wildlife Fund $208,495,555
The picture the green groups make of the big bad energy companies like Exxon-Mobile and BP is that of gigantic sums of lobbying money to keep the government on its side. This is not true. They do not spend even a small fraction of the sums listed above in an effort not to be driven out of business. These companies and their competitors, rather than battling the Green Ideology, spend money to join them by embracing wind and solar energy, even energy from bacteria as well as efforts to pump CO2 emissions underground.
But the money the above environmental groups take in is not the whole story of their gigantic power. They work their magic through a program of law suits against the government which the government settles rather than going to court and thereby giving the groups success in their goals without reducing the funds in their coffers.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s report “Sue and Settle: Regulating Behind Closed Doors,” shines a long overdue light on the back-room manipulations that are now common between Big Green and the Environmental Protection Agency. It works like this.
A private environmental group sues the EPA to issue new regulations by a date certain. The agency and the environmental group meet behind closed doors. In the typical case, the government agrees to do whatever the activist group wants because for decades the EPA has been peopled by men and women who have long had a relationship with the ideology of the activist groups. There are no messy congressional hearings, no public comment period, no opportunity for parties that will be adversely affected by the deal, to have their day in court. Still better for them, in most cases you the taxpayer paying the litigators legal fees.
In addition, the international banking community is a major part of the green money machine. It has financed the worlds rush to solar and wind projects regardless of their dim future in providing economic energy across the globe. Germany’s Deutsche Bank, Switzerlands Credit Suisse, America’s Morgan Stanley and Goldman Saks and nearly all their competitors are knee deep in the billions of dollars spent by the global warming industry.
William Engdahl, in a perceptive essay titled ‘Climate and the Money Trail’ in the Journal NEO, published on September 25, 2019 said: “the links between the largest financial groups, central banks and global corporations, to the current push for a radical climate strategy to abandon the fossil fuel economy in favor of a vague unexplained Green Economy, it seems, is less about genuine concern to make our planet a clean and healthy environment to live. Rather it is an agenda, intimately tied to the UN Agenda 2030 for “sustainable” economy, and to developing literally trillions of dollars in new wealth for global banks and financial giants who constitute the real powers that be.”
We must recognize that today’s radical environmentalists are not attempting to solve problems but instead are calling for changes in our political system, in the reach of our laws, our methods of agriculture and industry, in the structure of capitalism, the profit system, international relations and definitely in education. They are now working toward these goals with the best financed lobby in our history. Global warming and climate change just turned out to be the very best mechanism to achieve these goals.
Portions of this article were excerpted with permission of the authors and publisher of Cracking Big Green by Ron Arnold and Paul Driessen. It is a stunning expose of the modern environmental movement and its hidden financial masters.
CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books.
From cfact.org