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Meet the ‘dead industrialists’ funding climate denialism
:{:{By Scott Waldman | 06/26/2020}:
Some of the most prolific funders of today’s climate science denial groups died decades before the general public knew climate change was transforming the planet.
Sarah Mellon Scaife and Daniel C. Searle. University of Pittsburgh/Historic Pittsburgh (Scaife); Searle Freedom Trust
Some of the most prolific funders of today’s climate science denial groups died decades before the general public knew climate change was transforming the planet.
While much of the attention on opposition to mainstream climate science has focused in recent years on funding from fossil fuel companies, there’s growing support for foes of carbon regulation from conservative foundations that are not widely known.
Foundations formed by now-dead industrialists have been instrumental in promoting rollbacks of regulations that protect the public from deadly air pollution and spreading misinformation around climate science.
Fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, the foundations have supported groups that worked with the Trump White House to roll back vehicle emissions standards and to ease restrictions on power plant pollution and water protections, public tax filings show. They have quietly funded presidential advisers who worked to conduct a hostile White House review of climate science and to restrict EPA’s use of scientific research when crafting public health protections.
Among the foundations, which operate independently but bankroll many of the same groups, are the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.
Robert Brulle, a Drexel University sociologist who studies and tracks climate denial funding, said such foundations have been quietly shaping public life for decades. They offer a way, he said, for "dead industrialists" to transfer economic power into cultural and political power that can last in perpetuity. The power of such foundations lies in their ability to operate for generations without any check on their power, he said.
"These foundations are totally unaccountable to anybody," he said. "A foundation can pretty much do whatever the hell it wants regardless of the consequences. Foundations have undemocratic and plutocratic power."
None of the foundations responded to requests for comment.
The foundations fuel more than just climate policy battles. They also support media organizations that promote misleading climate information and create confusion around climate science. That includes the conservative Daily Caller News Foundation as well as the Prager University Foundation.
The Daily Caller News Foundation provides articles for the Daily Caller, the conservative website founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. A Prager University video series has featured climate deniers saying that global warming concerns are overblown and that NASA, NOAA and the world’s major science agencies are wrong.
They have pumped millions of dollars into groups that have worked closely with the Trump administration and Congress to weaken climate policy and create confusion around climate science, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), CO2 Coalition, Heritage Foundation, Heartland Institute, Cato Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation.
And the foundations have been a source of "baseload" funding for organizations that have battled the government for the last 40 years, said Kert Davies, director of the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center.
Even before fossil fuel companies and the Koch brothers began pumping money into organizations that oppose climate regulations, the foundations were quietly supporting such work, he said. And as the fossil fuel industry faces increasing scrutiny over its role in climate misinformation and has backed away from some public funding, the foundations have continued their support, Davies noted.
"They don’t have any material interest in fossil fuels, but they are fundamentalists about hating the government, hating regulation and trying to stop any progress on things like climate change because they see it as almost a step toward communism, it’s almost that stark," he said.
To be sure, not all foundations linked to dead industrialists oppose climate science. The fortune of John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil is now funding climate action. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund spends more than $10 million annually supporting climate causes and funding groups that promote regulation of fossil fuel.
3 big donors
One of the largest donors to anti-climate policy causes is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has spent millions of dollars annually on groups that try to sow doubt about climate change and that work to weaken climate regulations.
Public tax filings show that the Wisconsin-based foundation has assets of about $1 billion and was named for two brothers — Lynde, who died in 1942, and Harry, a member of the far-right John Birch Society, who died in 1965. The family made its fortune in electronic controls.
The foundation was expanded into a conservative powerhouse in 1985, when a sale of the family company expanded the foundation’s assets to $290 million.
In recent years, the foundation has pumped millions of dollars into groups that worked closely with the Trump White House to roll back most of the Obama administration’s climate policy; to increase the voice of industry researchers in order to diminish air pollution regulations; and to steer federal agencies such as the Interior Department, EPA and the Department of Energy toward the interests of fossil fuel companies.
Last year alone, the Bradley Foundation spent more than $2 million funding CEI, the Cato Institute, the CO2 Coalition, the Heritage Foundation, FreedomWorks, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Former employees of those groups have served in senior positions at the White House, Interior, DOE and EPA, and on President Trump’s transition teams for those agencies.
Millions of dollars to the same groups has also flowed from the Searle Freedom Trust, public tax filings show. The trust was founded by Daniel C. Searle, who died in 2007 and was a fourth-generation CEO of a family pharmaceutical company that was sold to Monsanto.
In 2018 alone, tax filings show, the Searle trust gave more than $2 million to groups that worked with the Trump administration to roll back environmental regulations, including the CO2 Coalition, CEI, Cato and the Heritage Foundation.
In addition to policy support, the foundation funds public outreach for climate denialism. In 2018 alone, it spent more than $300,000 on groups that publish and promote climate misinformation, including the Daily Caller News Foundation and the Prager University Foundation, tax filings show.
The work of the Bradley Foundation and Searle trust is complemented by funding from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is named after Sarah Mellon Scaife, an heiress to the fortune of her father, Richard Mellon, a banker and industrialist.
Scaife, who died in 1965, focused her support on funding for hospitals, disability and poverty issues, and environmental causes. Her money was even used to fund the University of Pittsburgh laboratory where the polio vaccine was developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in the early 1950s.
After Scaife’s death, her son, Richard Mellon Scaife, turned the foundation into a powerhouse for conservative issues, spending tens of millions of dollars on the Heritage Foundation alone before his death in 2014. Scaife steered the family’s fortune toward conservative causes so thoroughly that Hillary Clinton once pinpointed him as the figurehead of a "vast right-wing conspiracy."
The Sarah Scaife Foundation now funnels millions to groups that oppose environmental regulations and that attack climate science. That includes more than $3 million in its most recent filing, including to Cato, CEI, the CO2 Coalition, FreedomWorks, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, according to tax filings.
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POLITICO E AND E
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Internal emails reveal Interior’s Empire Wind deliberations
:{:{By Ian M. Stevenson, Benjamin Storrow | 08/28/2025}:
The messages show the Trump administration included offshore wind foes in the push to cancel permitted projects.
Turbines operate off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island. Julia Nikhinson/AP
When NOAA scrutinized a wind project off the coast of New York this spring, it turned to a new hire who had spent years criticizing offshore wind.
Annie Hawkins — who helmed a fishing industry group opposed to coastal wind projects before joining NOAA as its top lawyer — was one of several senior officials included in a planning email in the days leading up to an Interior Department order that halted construction on Empire Wind, according to emails obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News.
The emails — obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request — provide a glimpse into President Donald Trump’s sustained attack on the wind industry. They show that administration officials moved quickly in April to assemble findings that would later be cited by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as the rationale for halting construction of the 54-turbine project.
It is unclear what role Hawkins played in deliberations over the Empire Wind stoppage, which was later reversed. The documents indicate she was included on one email and later removed. NOAA, which is part of the Commerce Department, declined to comment. Interior and its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore wind, did not respond to requests for comment. Hawkins referred questions to NOAA.
But Hawkins’ presence on the email chain is likely to raise questions among offshore wind supporters.
The emails also show that senior officials at Interior received detailed recommendations from Green Oceans, a Rhode Island group opposed to offshore wind, for how to cancel leases granted to offshore wind developers. Interior issued a stop work order last week to Revolution Wind, a project off Connecticut and Rhode Island.
The administration’s deliberations around Empire Wind came shortly after the project developer, Equinor, began offshore construction and amid a public campaign from congressional Republicans and offshore wind opponents to have the project stopped.
Matthew Giacona, who was then deputy director at BOEM, thanked officials at NOAA in an email dated April 11 for their “engagement this week” and invited them to assist in Burgum’s review of offshore wind leases and permits. On the first day of his second term in January, Trump halted all new wind permits and ordered a review of existing leases.
If NOAA “has any reports or analyses that can be provided to inform the Secretary’s comprehensive assessment, these inputs would be extremely helpful as we ensure the Secretary has full information available as he continues his review,” Giacona wrote in the April 11 message.
Erik Noble, NOAA’s principal deputy assistant secretary for oceans and atmosphere, replied: “Message received. We will be in touch.”
Included on Noble’s email were officials such as Hawkins, Interior policy adviser Brittany Kelm, Interior Deputy Solicitor Damon Hagan, Interior Associate Solicitor Karen Hawbecker and BOEM chief of staff Jennafer Foreman. Hawkins was later removed from the email chain, according to the documents.
BOEM officials appear to have begun drafting the stop work order before they received the report from NOAA. Bureau officials shared a draft of an order to Equinor to shut down construction on Empire Wind on the morning of April 15.
In a separate reply 20 minutes before noon on April 15, Noble replied to Hawbecker, Hagan, Kelm and other administration officials with a “technical screening analysis” of the Empire Wind project.
Hawbecker promptly forwarded the report to BOEM’s then-acting Director Walter Cruickshank and James Anderson, BOEM’s associate director of the Office of Budget & Administration.
“FYI — here’s NOAA’s document,” Hawbecker wrote. “I’m assessing it now.”
Less than three hours later, Cruickshank sent an email with a draft of the order to two BOEM officials. “This is close hold until it’s sent. No word yet on when that will be, as the Secretary’s Order needs to come first,” he wrote.
‘Flawed science’
That NOAA report became the administration’s justification for taking the rare step to halt construction. In an email April 17, Anderson called the report “the basis of” another memo from Burgum ordering the construction halt. Burgum himself posted on social media that NOAA scientists had “revealed” the project’s approval was “built on bad & flawed science.”
But Interior has not released the contents of the report. In response to a prior records request from E&E News, the department blacked out all 27 pages of its findings.
Interior’s deliberations came as offshore wind opponents called for the Trump administration to stop Empire Wind.
Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, sent Burgum a letter in late March calling on Interior to halt the project. The leader of a fishing group penned an opinion piece in the New York Poston April 10 warning of ecological destruction if the Trump administration allowed Empire Wind to move forward.
Steve Milloy, a conservative activist who questions climate science, followed with an opinion piece in the Daily Caller saying Interior needed to stop construction of offshore wind projects underway to satisfy the intent of Trump’s Day 1 executive order.
Trump lifted the work stoppage in May after claiming to strike a deal with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to permit two pipelines in the state. Hochul rejected that claim, but said she was open to permitting pipelines that complied with state law.
The order nevertheless represented a massive setback for Equinor, which has estimated it cost the company more than $200 million. It also raised issues for other offshore wind developers like Ørsted, which suddenly found itself unable to sell a share of a nearby project under construction at an attractive price.
Equinor declined to comment on the emails.
Matt Walker, a regional campaign manager at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, called the administration’s stop-work orders “reckless, rushed and entirely unjustified.”
“According to email records, the administration apparently needed no more than a few hours to assess information about the Empire Wind project before putting a stop-work order in place,” he said by email.
Hawkins was one of the leading critics of offshore wind before joining NOAA, regularly criticizing the industry as the head of the Responsible Offshore Development Association.
RODA, as the group is commonly known, repeatedly criticized the Biden administration’s for moving too quickly to permit offshore wind projects. In 2020, before Biden took office, the group called for a five-year moratorium on new offshore wind leasing. It later filed an unsuccessful legal challenge to Vineyard Wind, a 62-turbine development being built off the coast of Massachusetts.
Hawkins previously worked as an attorney representing the Fisheries Survival Fund, an industry group for the scallop industry that unsuccessfully challenged Empire Wind’s lease in court.
‘We’ll talk soon’
But Hawkins has not always been critical of Empire Wind. In 2021, she hailed negotiations between Equinor and fishermen over Empire Wind’s turbine placement as a model for collaboration between the fishing and wind industries.
“Is it a solution to all the problems, and if we do this there are no impacts? Absolutely not. Is it a potentially good, effective way to minimize some of the impacts? Yes,” Hawkins told E&E News at the time. “It does highlight that there are things we can do working together to minimize the impacts.”
The records also show how one anti-wind nonprofit, Green Oceans, shared detailed recommendations with Interior for how to revoke offshore wind leases and scored a meeting with a senior Interior official in May.
In emails to Burgum and acting Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals Management Adam Suess, the organization shared a 68-page report called “Cancelling Offshore Wind Leases.”
The report includes detailed analyses of relevant laws and regulations, pointing out potential law violations for wind projects off the coasts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It was written by Maureen Koetz, president of Planet A* Strategies, who previously worked at the Nuclear Energy Institute and as aide to former Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican.
One of the potential issues the report flagged was national security.
BOEM and the Department of Defense “still do not have an adequate analysis or evaluation of the cumulative impacts to national security” of the projects in New England, the report stated.
The Green Oceans group sent the report to Suess on May 2 — two weeks after the Empire Wind stop-work order — along with a reminder about a meeting scheduled the following week.
“I appreciate it,” Suess wrote back to the group. “We’ll talk soon.”
Last week, BOEM halted work on Revolution Wind, a 65-turbine project off of Rhode Island that is 80 percent completed. BOEM said in a letter to Ørsted that the stoppage was needed to address “national security interests of the United States.”
Green Oceans, which was founded in 2023 by a group of property owners, has emerged as one of the leading offshore wind opponents in New England.
Elizabeth Knight, a co-founder of Green Oceans, could not be reached for comment.
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/meet-the-lawyers-teeing-up-the-supreme-court-climate-showdown/
1/22
as arguments approach in the most significant Supreme Court environment battle of the decade, teams of lawyers are already making their case for how the justices should view EPA’s climate authority.
When the justices take the bench on Feb. 28 to hear arguments in West Virginia v. EPA,they will arrive armed with information from reams of briefs prepared by some of the nation’s leading environmental lawyers.
Those attorneys’ arguments will lay the groundwork in a high-stakes case that has the potential to upend EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants — one of the nation’s largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions.
the challenge — brought by Republican-led states and coal companies — asks the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that struck down a Trump-era EPA rule gutting the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.
The 2015 Obama rule invoked EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set systemwide requirements for power plant emissions reductions.
After the D.C. Circuit ruling, President Biden’s EPA had a clean slate to craft its own rule. The agency had said it would not return to the Clean Power Plan, whose goals have already been met by the power sector, even though the regulation never took effect.
The justices then took the unusual step of agreeing to hear a dispute over a regulation that does not technically exist.
Their ruling in the case, which is expected by next summer, could not only constrain EPA from issuing a comprehensive new carbon rule but also prevent Congress from handing off broad regulatory authority to federal agencies.
Here are some of the lawyers to know in this year’s high court climate slugfest:
Lindsay See
Leading the briefs for West Virginia is Lindsay See, the state’s solicitor general.
The coal-rich state, joined by 18 others, filed the first plea for the Supreme Court to weigh in on EPA’s climate authority. It was followed by three other petitions, which are now consolidated in one massive case.
See has served as West Virginia’s leading litigator since 2017 and previously worked as an associate atGibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, a firm with a prominent Supreme Court practice.
She has appeared once before the nation’s highest bench, in a 2018 case related to a discrimination challenge against an exemption in West Virginia tax law that protected state and local — but not federal — employees from having their pension benefits taxed. West Virginia lost the case.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) and other state lawyers said the D.C. Circuit should not have allowed EPA to regulate power plant emissions under a “rarely used, ancillary provision of the Clean Air Act.” They referred to Section 111(d) of the statute, which served as the basis for the carbon rule.
“Save for a few general factors EPA was to take into account, the lower court told EPA it has ‘no limits’ on the emission-related measures it can impose — on any economic sector or almost any actor,” says the states’ most recent brief, which was signed off on by See.
See is a Harvard Law School graduate and clerked for former D.C. Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith.
Paul Seby
One other state has echoed West Virginia’s arguments in a petition and brief led by a lawyer who has been involved in the EPA carbon rule battle since the Clean Power Plan days.
Paul Seby, a shareholder at the firm Greenberg Traurig LLP and special assistant to North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem (R), signed off on a brief that said the D.C. Circuit ruling “undermines the cooperative federalism framework carefully crafted by Congress” by finding that EPA — rather than states — can set power plant performance standards.
North Dakota v. EPA is one of the four petitions in the consolidated Supreme Court case.
Seby has argued against EPA carbon regulations before, back when the Clean Power Plan was before the D.C. Circuit. The court held a marathon argument over the regulation in 2016 but never reached a ruling.
Earlier that year, the Supreme Court had blocked the rule from taking effect, which allowed the Trump administration to dismantle it.
Seby holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of San Diego and a law degree from Lewis & Clark College.
Andrew Grossman
One of the other lead petitioners in the climate case, Westmoreland Mining Holdings LLC, hired Andrew Grossman to make its case to the high court.
Grossman leads BakerHostetler’s appellate practice and is a frequent conservative commentator on wide range of administrative and constitutional issues.
Grossman is an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and a former legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation. He’s also a familiar face on Capitol Hill, having testified several times before the House and Senate Judiciary committees.
In Westmoreland’s petition, Grossman raised what some environmental advocates referred to as a killer question: whether EPA may use Section 111(d) to create performance standards for existing stationary sources under the provision’s “hazardous air pollutants” program.
The justices granted the petition alongside others, but they said they would only consider the second question posed by Westmoreland’s petition: whether EPA’s carbon rule violated the major questions doctrine, which restricts federal agencies from deciding issues of “vast economic and political significance.”
Grossman attended Dartmouth College and theGeorge Mason University’s SCALIA School of Law.
Yaakow Roth
The fourth petition in the consolidated case comes from North American Coal Corp., represented byJones Daypartner Yaakov Roth.
Like the other challengers, the coal company argues that EPA and the D.C. Circuit have taken far too broad a view of federal climate authority under the Clean Air Act.
Roth comes to the EPA climate case with lots of experience before the Supreme Court. He was the brainchild behind an argument that led the Supreme Court to overturn convictions in the New Jersey “Bridgegate” scandal.
He has also fought to preserve restrictive voting laws in Arizona and to dismantle the Obama-era Affordable Care Act.
Roth has clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a federal appeals court judge.
He is a graduate of Harvard University and York University.
Elizabeth Prelogar
Before the Supreme Court agreed to hear West Virginia v. EPA, Elizabeth Prelogar had argued on behalf of the federal agency that it was too early for the justices to get involved.
The solicitor general noted in a brief filed in August that Biden’s EPA has not yet written a new carbon rule and has no plans to revive the Obama plan.
EPA instead intends to issue a new rule “after taking into account all relevant considerations, including changes to the electricity sector that have occurred during the last several years,” she wrote.
Prelogar, who was confirmed in late October, has already made several appearances before the Supreme Court, including in one case in which she argued on behalf of the federal government against abortion laws in Mississippi and Texas.
Since her appointment as acting solicitor general in January, Prelogar has also led Supreme Court briefs in several environmental cases, including one in which the Biden administration backed efforts by the developer of the PennEast natural gas pipeline to acquire state-owned land in New Jersey (Energywire, March 10, 2021). The pipeline company won its case, but the project was eventually canceled.
Prelogar, a Harvard Law School graduate, has previously served as assistant to the solicitor general and has worked in private practice. During a prior stint at the Justice Department, she served on the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
She clerked for Attorney General Merrick Garland when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.
Prelogar is the second woman to be confirmed as solicitor general. Kagan was the first.
Sean Donahue
Environmental groups that support broad EPA regulatory authority have turned to an experienced Supreme Court litigator to represent them in the case: Sean Donahue.
Donahue has been a go-to lawyer for environmental groups and public health advocates in some of the most high-profile litigation of the last decade, including Clean Air Act and climate cases.
He’s also represented environmentalists in key cases on the social cost of carbon for fuel economy and vehicle emissions standards.
Donahue and his team, including the Environmental Defense Fund’s Vickie Patton, will have a challenging task ahead of them. Several conservative justices have signaled skepticism of doctrines requiring them to defer to agency expertise, and the current case appears to be a coordinated effort to curtail EPA’s regulatory authority broadly.
In an interview, Donahue said once again it may be an environmental case that set an important precedent for administrative law.
"Statutes like the Clean Air Act," he said, "necessarily depend upon expert agencies to apply Congress’ health and environmental directives to complex factual records, developing technologies, about particular industries and pollutants."
Donahue, who works for Donahue, Goldberg & Littleton, clerked for former Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens. He’s also a veteran of the Justice Department. He attended Columbia University and University of Chicago’s Law School.
Beth Brinkmann
Another attorney with Supreme Court experience is making the case for electric utilities that want to preserve the D.C. Circuit decision striking down the Trump-era carbon rule.
Before the justices granted the case,Covington & BurlingLLP partner Beth Brinkmann led a brief on behalf of Consolidated Edison Inc. and other companies that said Supreme Court review of a nonexistent regulation would run the risk of a “ruling untethered to actual circumstances.”
Moreover, she wrote, the red states and coal companies are seeking relief from the justices even as the power industry has achieved the Clean Power Plan’s 2030 emissions reductions targets more than a decade in advance —even though the rule never officially took effect.
“Those changes, which include reductions in the cost of emission-reduction technologies and increasing consumer preferences for clean power, have only accelerated since adoption of the ACE Rule,” she wrote.
Brinkmann has argued more than two dozen times before the Supreme Court. As former deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s civil rights division, for example, she defended the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.
She has also worked in the appellate practice at the firm Morrison & Foerster and as an assistant federal public defender representing indigent criminal defendants.
Brinkmann is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale Law School. She clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.
Elbert Lin
A utility industry group that opposes EPA’s ability to craft rules like the Clean Power Plan has staffed its legal team with an attorney who, at only 43 years old, has already made a significant impact on environmental law at the Supreme Court.
Elbert Lin was the lawyer who secured the unprecedented stay of President Obama’s climate regulatory regime, the Clean Power Plan, in 2016 while he was West Virginia’s solicitor general.
Lin said in an interview that his interest in environmental and administrative law was born out of necessity when he was West Virginia’s solicitor general. It was during Obama’s second term, and the administration was promulgating many major environmental rules, including the Clean Power Plan.
"Environmental regulations were of significant importance of the state," he said.
Now in private practice at the firm Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, Lin is back in the EPA carbon rule litigation, representing America’s Power, a trade association of companies that produce electricity from coal.
Lin, who is the son of Taiwanese immigrants, has also argued key Clean Water Act cases at the high court. He argued on behalf of Maui, Hawaii, in a case over whether a federal permit is required for pollution that is pumped underground but eventually reaches the ocean.
The Supreme Court delivered a new test for determining whether a permit was needed, and a federal judge in Hawaii later sided with environmental groups arguing that Maui should have secured a Clean Water Act approval (Greenwire, Oct. 21, 2021). Legal experts say they are watching to see how other courts apply the Supreme Court’s test.
Lin attended Yale for undergrad and law school, and heclerked for a federal appeals court judge and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Reporters Lesley Clark and Niina H. Farah contributed.
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