Manhattan Institute

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research

NO MERRI

33 TAgs 4 26

capt 719

lots of legal fuckery?

see bak

===

neglected? faded for while? bradley also brought back gmi

promote primary exon knew tort reform?

---

2025

https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1743&context=lawreview

Uncharitable Think Tanks 207

Institution—also led in the earlier one, with only slight shifts otherwise.229 • From 2010 on, the top funders were Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, and the Scaife, Bradley, and Koch family foundations. The Devos family foundations rose to join the ranks of the top ten. • Grants channeled through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund accounted for 13.7% of the total. • 74% of all contributions came from completely unidentified sources. • }:}:

After AEI, Heritage and Hoover, the largest recipients were Cato, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Acton Institute, the State Policy Network, the Reason Foundation, Heartland, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. From 2003 to 2018, Brulle and his co-authors tallied total gifts to this cohort of $9.77 billion 230—a sum that refutes the mistaken notion that charitable giving is small dollars, and influential only at the margin. Now for the thought experiment.

ah an 4 23 1 of 2

On April 6, ProPublica published a bombshell report saying that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thomas had, for "over 20 years," been "treated to luxury vacations by Republican donor Harlan Crow" and failed to report it. Thomas' allies were quick to rush to his defense. And some of those defenders, according to The Lever's Andrew Perez, are Crow associates themselves.

One of them is The Manhattan Institute's Ilya Shapiro.

READ MORE: How Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion suggests other rights may be vulnerable after Roe: analysis

Perez also notes that conservative journalist Jonah Goldberg, formerly of the National Review and now editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, has been defending Crow vigorously. On April 8, Goldberg tweeted, "Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person. He's not the strawman Thomas haters are trying to make him."

According to Perez, "As The Dispatch separately noted in a news article covering Crow's gifts to Thomas, 'Harlan Crow is a minority investor in The Dispatch and a friend of the founders.' Goldberg is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank where Crow serves on the board of trustees. Previously, Goldberg was a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, the nonprofit affiliated with the conservative National Review magazine."

READ MORE: Democrats must do all they can to expose 'corrupt' Clarence Thomas and 'destroy his reputation': journalist

Read The Lever’s full article at this link.

links

on April 6, ProPublica published a bombshell report saying that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thomas had, for "over 20 years," been "treated to luxury vacations by Republican donor Harlan Crow" and failed to report it. Thomas' allies were quick to rush to his defense. And some of those defenders, according to The Lever's Andrew Perez, are Crow associates themselves.

One of them is The Manhattan Institute's Ilya Shapiro.

Perez, in an article published by The Lever on April 11, explains, "Hours after ProPublica dropped its report on Thomas, Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank Manhattan Institute, tweeted, 'Unless Harlan Crow has some business before the Court, the @propublica report about Justice Thomas is a big breathless nothingburger.' Unmentioned: The Manhattan Institute, where Shapiro leads an amicus brief filing program lobbying the Supreme Court to rule certain ways on issues like student debt cancellation and corporate taxation, boasts Crow's wife Kathy on its board of trustees and has been called 'wonderful' by Crow himself." READ MORE: https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/clarence-thomas-2657559336...How Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion suggests other rights may be vulnerable after Roe: analysis ttt Perez also notes that conservative journalist Jonah Goldberg, formerly of the National Review and now editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, has been defending Crow vigorously. On April 8, , "Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person. He's not the strawman Thomas haters are trying to make him."

https://www.levernews.com/the-paid-pundits-defending-clarence-thomas-and-his-billionaire-benefactor/

an maya 1 23

For nearly half a century, billionaire Charles Koch has quietly _{funded, initiated, and supported}_ efforts to _{dismantle democracy}_ in the United States, two professors wrote for Progressive Magazine.

Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe distinguished professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and Lisa Graves, executive director of _{True North Research}_ and a co-creator of the websites Koch Exposed and Koch Docs, detailed a seemingly never-ending list of ways one of the richest people in the world and his wealthy allies continue to “divide the American electorate.”

The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has long been funded by Koch and his late brother, David, has strategized on ways to enforce voter suppression efforts by passing voter ID laws – which began when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.

Last year, the Center for Media and Democracy, for which Graves sits on the board, found that a handful of Koch-backed groups collectively _{spent more than $1 billion}_ on the 2020 election.

One of the organizations, Americans for Prosperity, spent around $70 million leading up to the 2022 midterms, involving itself in over 450 races on efforts that heavily targeted swing voters.

Soon after the election, Koch released *Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World*, a book in which he claimed he was ready for “a final act building bridges across political divides.” No more political involvement. MacLean and Graves noted that a few days prior to the book release, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.”

The book even contained phrases like, “Boy, did we screw up.” “What a mess!” “This is crazy! Are we going to have a civil war?” He had convinced the public that his time toying with democracy was over.

But, MacLean and Graves said that “mainstream news editors seemed to forget that” they were reporting on “a specialist in strategic disinformation, who had perfected the practice of deceiving the public during his network’s three decades of climate change denial” – a mastermind of finesse.

Even with that, what Maclean and Graves call Koch’s “most diabolical” move thus far, is how he bandwagoned the “white supremacist” reaction to nationwide civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, by initiating a campaign that geared fear-mongering language towards the idea of teaching race in schools – also known as critical race theory.

The Koch network proceeded to fund organizations that actively fought against CRT, although a spokesperson from a Koch-funded group claims that is untrue.

Two examples of Kock-backed anti-CRT initiatives include ALEC’s financial support of a workshop titled “Against Critical Theory’s Onslaught,” featuring the main figurehead of anti-CRT rhetoric, Christopher Rufo in 2020; and when a coalition of Koch-funded groups including the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation advocated against the idea of teaching race in schools in a published letter.

Aside from funding organizations that promote anti-CRT language, Koch also funds Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), which work in tandem to promote anti-trans language. For example, the groups created a “Women’s Bill of Rights” which asserts that trans women are not women.

MacLean and Graves wrote, “Just as Koch-funded operations weaponize and intensify racism to secure political power, they also exploit and escalate misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia by any means to boost Republican power.”

Despite his claim that he was removing himself from politics two years ago, it’s clear that with the success of a majority conservative Supreme Court, the continued push to control the bodies of women; anti-CRT, anti-trans, and other discriminatory laws that Koch’s behind-the-scenes funding and staunch support of those who can bring he and his allies' vision of a fully dismantled democracy to life presses on.

alec big in crt, 15 states have bills?

...Some people are treating it like a gold rush,” O’Brien said. “This is a new area where people think they can either become famous or make money on the issue, and they’re probably right.”

O’Brien later joined a coalition of attorneys focused on this cause, organized byChristopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Rufo, who said he was in touch with then-President Donald Trump’s staff before he issued an executive order last September banning critical race theory’s use by federal agencies, promised in a March tweet to make critical race theory “toxic” in the public imagination. Rufo declined an interview request.

“The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Shared connections, shared strategies...

last week, President Biden _{signed an Executive Order}_ encouraging U.S. leadership in the clean car sector with a goal of half of all new car sales in the U.S. being zero-emission by 2030. It took them a few days, but deniers seem to have assembled their response by cobbling together a mix of old lies, new misrepresentations, and bizarre logical fallacies.

For example, a response that in any sane outlet might be praise for Biden’s plan was published in the Koch-funded RealClearEnergy as an attack: _{President Biden’s Electric Car Future is Union Made}_. Bruce Yandle, a fellow at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is upset that Biden invited three major U.S. car companies to attend the announcement because they were the largest employers of workers in the United Auto Workers union, and didn’t invite non-American companies with non-union workers to his event promoting good American jobs.}:

By Climate Denier Roundup

Obviously, it’s no surprise that a Koch crony is anti-union and anti-EV, unless you confuse organized labor with organized denial.

Speaking of organized denial, while the _{once-Koch-funded}_ Daily Caller has since _{basically given up}_ on regular climate denial reporting, and its IPCC story was _{a straightforward rip-off}_ of the _{AP’s “code red” coverage}_ (sans any Koch-network denial quote, because no-pay, no-play, we assume). The Caller still occasionally publishes guest opinion pieces and _{ran one from Charlotte Whelan}_ of the (_{pro-Covid}_) Independent Women’s Forum andSteamboat Institute (which is hosting _{Marc Morano and a slate of other rightwing pseudostars at an upcoming festival}_).

Whelan is also upset the White House invited union workers to its pro-union-jobs event, and adds (with a deliberately misleading citation) the claim that “it could take more than 15 years to recoup the upfront extra costs in fuel savings. The average American certainly can’t wait that long to ‘make back’ the additional upfront cost” But the work cited (_{an NRDC post}_ based on _{a peer-reviewed study}_) doesn’t even measure how long it would take to recoup the upfront cost of an EV with cheaper charging and a more efficient propulsion system. The study did, however, use 15 years as the unit of measurement for a car’s life. So the calculations show that over an average 15-year lifespan of ownership, it can be almost $15,000 cheaper to go with an electric car.

Over at theKoch-funded Heritage foundation’s media arm, their policy analyst _{Katie Tubb makes a similar claim}_ about EVs being for rich people, which we’ve addressed before as part of _{their propaganda campaigns}_, as well as the _{old racist dog whistle about China}_.

Finally, we get to a new name to us, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who wrote that Biden’s move was “costly and counterproductive” in the _{industry-funded}_ Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

After a column _{defending the auto industry from 5G in January}_, and another in March with the phrase “nothing beats personal vehicles for social distancing.” Furchtgott-Roth makes similar points to the other professional disinformers in her most recent City Journal piece, but she also _{a:{dds a particularly baffling claim:(style="background-color:#ffff33;"):}:}_ that because “the United States has achieved energy security by becoming a net exporter of oil and natural gas,” then “mandating sales of electric vehicles would weaken that security.”

But if exporting oil makes us stronger (by her logic) then wouldn’t having more of it to export because our own cars are using less of it be a good thing, that would make us stronger?

Why would someone write something so inane and illogical, despite a byline that includes “former deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation” and “adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University?” Those are both legitimate organizations, not industry-funded disinformation operations!

Well it turns out that the DOT appointment was made by notoriously-bad-hiring-manager Donald Trump, and prior to that, _{Furchtgott-Roth was an economist for the American Petroleum Institute}_, _{proving once again}_ that _{when someone says something stupid about EVs}_, it’s _{probably on purpose}_.

(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)

621 aha // to deficit bogeyman to prevent spending $ on ppl, infra, social safety net. educ see 2 santas BS

https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclair-infrastructure-coverage-centers-corporate-front-groups-pushing

zach p

Sinclair Broadcast Group has in recent days aired misleading criticism of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals from organizations that are corporate front groups or push an anti-spending austerity agenda. But the facts and commentary from economists and other experts show that much of this criticism is disingenuous.

Sinclair sought commentary from pro-austerity organizations funded by corporations and right-wing donors

On March 30, Sinclair’s morning program The National Desk -- which airs on 68 Sinclair-owned or -operated local television stations -- interviewed Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Riedl, who opposed spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure and was critical of including spending to combat climate change. Anchor Jan Jeffcoat chose not to disclose the Manhattan Institute’s funding from the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests.

Greenpeace has tallied more than $3 million in donations from Koch foundations to the Manhattan Institute between 1997 and 2017.
The Manhattan Institute received millions of dollars from oil interests, including at least $800,000 from ExxonMobil and $1.9 million from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which was one of the family foundations of the oil billionaire Koch brothers.
The Manhattan Institute employed a senior fellow named Robert Bryce who used his perch often to publicly question the reality of climate change.

Also on March 30, Sinclair chief political correspondent Scott Thuman included commentary in his report from Elaine Parker, chief communications officer of the Job Creators Network, which aired on dozens of Sinclair TV stationsbefore re-airing on The National Desk the next morning. Thuman failed to disclose that Job Creators Network is a conservative organization and a corporate front group for wealthy donors.

According to Sludge, a news outlet that reports on lobbying and money in politics, the Job Creators Network is “a front group for the interests of wealthy business executives. The nonprofit is linked to and funded by several wealthy corporate leaders who are also Republican political megadonors and oppose workers’ rights, including collective bargaining.”
Eyes on the Ties, which advocates for more transparency in how corporate power shapes policy, published in 2019 an article titled “The billionaire Trump donors behind the ‘Job Creators Network.’” It listed the right-wing Mercer family, Trump donor Bernie Marcus, and conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz as major donors to the organization. It also described the Job Creators Network as “part of a network of other astroturf groups that all fight tooth-and-nail to defend elite interests against progressive efforts to regulate corporate power.”

On April 1, Sinclair national correspondent James Rosen included commentary from Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in his report on Biden’s infrastructure plan, which also aired on dozens of Sinclair stations before re-airing on The National Desk. But Rosen failed to mention the pro-austerity nature of the organization and its namesake.

Peter G. Peterson, who founded the institute, had a long history of supporting austerity. In 2013, an editorial from The Nation explored Peterson’s Campaign to Fix the Debt, which it described as a “$60 million push to sell corporate America’s ruthless austerity agenda” and his “latest incarnation” of a “long campaign to get Congress and the White House to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.”
As the Center for Media and Democracy’s PRWatch reported in 2013, economists employed by the institute authored an error-riddled study that was used by governments around the world to justify harmful spending cuts and high unemployment.

These pro-corporate Sinclair guests’ commentary on Biden’s infrastructure bill was misleading or lacked full context

The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl claimed the price tag for Biden’s infrastructure plan is “just too big” to pay for and that Biden’s plan to rate the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% “would return us to the highest corporate tax rate in the OECD,” referring to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. He also said: “The bill will simply not be paid for. Like a lot of what we’ve had with the stimulus, a lot of it's just going to go on the national credit card. So whether you think the infrastructure is helpful or not helpful, it’s probably going to be paid for mostly on the national debt if it’s enacted.” But Riedl’s comments are misleading at best and flat-out wrong at worst.

Biden’s planned increase of the corporate tax rate to 28% will keep the U.S. corporate tax rate below numerous other OECD countries, including Australia, France, and Portugal.
Federal revenue from corporations is near record lows according to data from the Tax Policy Center.
A new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy explained that “at least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States. This continues a decades-long trend of corporate tax avoidance by the biggest U.S. corporations.”
The White House said that the proposed corporate tax increases would, over the course of 15 years, fully pay for the proposed spending.
Even if the spending were fully deficit-financed, economists say that the current fiscal environment makes that acceptable. Jason Furman, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said: “Given that interest rates are still too low … $2T in *unpaid for* well-designed investments, some temporary, would be beneficial. As such I don't think this should all or even mostly be paid for.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argued that in the fiscal environment the U.S. is facing, “sustained deficit spending on investment is actually good.”

Job Creators Network’s Elaine Parker hid the context of the business tax deduction she warned about removing when she said: “This is actually going to hit right at the heart of small businesses with that repeal of that 20% tax deduction. … That is the very tax deduction that helps the smallest of the small businesses, the heart of the middle class, and the employees who work for them.”

Parker didn’t specify what tax deduction she was talking about, but it appears to be one that didn’t exist until Trump’s tax cut, which mostly benefited corporations and the wealthy. CNBC’s reporting suggested many business owners were not even aware of the tax deduction until recently.
CNBC’s reporting also explained that tax deduction was temporary and is currently set to expire in 2025.

And the Peterson Institute’s Adam Posen left out necessary context when he warned: “This is the first truly credible inflation threat in decades.” But senior economists have pushed back against this kind of fearmongering over inflation.

As Business Insider reported, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said in a February speech that “inflation has been much lower and more stable over the past three decades than in earlier times.”
San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly told Axios that Biden’s infrastructure plan is unlikely to lead to what Axios termed “out-of-control price increases.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz also told Axios he supported Biden’s infrastructure proposal. Axios summed up Sitglitz’s view as that the plan “could break the U.S. out of the low-growth, low-inflation environment that has existed for the past 20 years.”

Economists and other experts agree Biden’s infrastructure spending plan is needed and beneficial

The fact is, massive investments in infrastructure are badly needed. An April 2 New York Times article explained: “Roadways and bridges are still in use decades after the end of their projected life spans. Sewer and water systems are aged and decaying. And a changing climate threatens to worsen old vulnerabilities and expose new ones.”

Reuters reported that the American Society of Civil Engineers said that “surface transportation, water systems, and schools are the most in need of help,” and that the U.S. “needs to spend $2.59 trillion in the next 10 years to fix existing infrastructure.” Biden’s infrastructure plan includes money for both existing and new infrastructure, such as energy and housing.

Economists from financial analysis firms have predicted that Biden’s infrastructure plan will create millions of jobs over a period of several years. Axios reported that S&P Global “predicts Biden's infrastructure plan will create 2.3 million jobs by 2024” and “raise per-capita income by $2,400.” And as USA Today reported, Moody’s Analytics expects Biden’s infrastructure plan to be more beneficial in the long term:

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, says the projects won't begin in earnest until 2023. He expects the economy to grow just 1.3% from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the fourth quarter of 2022, with the Biden plan adding nothing to the gains.

…

Over a longer period, Biden’s plan would be a big positive, economists say. Zandi expects it to add about half a percentage point to growth in 2023 and 1.6 percentage points the following year. The blueprint, he reckons, would add about 1.4 million jobs in 2024 and 1 million jobs in 2025.

By 2030, the economy would be about $700 billion, or nearly 3%, larger than it would be without the upgrades and an additional 2.7 million Americans would be working, Moody's figures show.

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/06/exxon-mobil-progressive-policy-institute-climate/

kate a

PROGRESSIVE POLICY Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank that grew out of the party’s pro-business wing in the 1980s and ’90s, received $50,000 from Exxon Mobil in 2018 via its parent organization, the Third Way Foundation, according to the oil giant’s 2018 Worldwide Giving Report.

Exxon Mobil did not return The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment. In an email, PPI Executive Director Lindsay Lewis said the money was used for general support and that “we only accept general support funding from corporate interests, we do not do paid for work/research or have any donor run programs.”

Lewis also confirmed that this is the first time Exxon Mobil has donated to the Third Way Foundation.

Though it’s a first, PPI’s new donor isn’t so dramatic a shift from its fundraising record. The Intercept’s Akela Lacy has also found that PhRMA — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — has annually donated between $25,000 and $75,000 to the Third Way Foundation since 2009, upping its donation to $265,000 in 2016 — the same year that Medicare for All, which the trade group and PPI both oppose, entered the national spotlight. Donations dipped back to normal levels in 2017, although documents were not yet available for 2018 when the piece was published in late April.

PhRMA Is Funding a Democratic Think Tank Trying to Derail Medicare for All

In the last couple years, Exxon has taken up softer messaging on climate than either the Koch brothers or the Mercer family. With business all over the world, Exxon — like every other multinational oil company — is well-accustomed to operating in environments where denying the reality of the climate emergency outright is politically unthinkable. As climate concerns spike around the U.S., the company is still plenty opposed to environmental regulations and the lawsuits being lobbed its way from climate-vulnerable communities and attorneys general, who are each calling into question Exxon’s rule in fueling both the climate crisis and misinformation campaigns about it. Rather than paying people to say that there’s no problem at all, it can rebrand as a good-faith actor in the climate fight with paeans to carbon capture technology, low-carbon fuels (algae!), and carbon taxes that also conveniently exempt it from some of the lawsuits and regulations it’s most worried about. The decades of climate denial Exxon helped fund — and now the Trump administration — have dragged the national debate on climate change so far into the gutter that there are influential liberals willing to give the company credit simply for not denying the science.

This all dovetails well with a centrist approach to climate politics that’s long sought common ground with industry and harbors both temperamental and ideological opposition to big, confrontational proposals like the Green New Deal. The upshot is that they’ve started to sound a lot alike. Carbon capture, R&D, and carbon pricing — while not mutually exclusive with the Green New Deal framework that the Sunrise Movement, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others have begun to flesh out — have reliably been wielded as a cudgel by establishment types against calls for more sweeping action.

Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center, noted that the report indicates the money PPI received was through a “corporate” grant, rather than through the ExxonMobil Foundation. “We have never sussed how thesetwo black boxes of money are managed or dolled out. So if you grab the ExxonMobil Foundation 990s, there are sometimes different descriptions or breakdowns of the funding, but this grant won’t be there,” he wrote in an email. “There is no need for public accounting of such grants. No obligation. But they have seemed compelled to disclosed them through the years.”

Of course, $50,000 is not an enormous amount of money either for PPI or Exxon Mobil. But it may well signal a shift in the fossil fuel industry’s relationship to climate politics.

In March, [who?] Goldberg co-authored a reportfor the industry front group Grow America’s Infrastructure Now on how to bring legal action against anti-pipeline organizers. “Allowing vigilante regulation to go unchecked undermines our democracy. We honor civil protests in this country, but we should not have to accept improper efforts to overturn the rule of law,” Goldberg said in a press release. “People who violate the law by improperly interfering with legitimate business activities, even to advance a political or public policy preference, can be held accountable for their actions through civil litigation.”

While not disclosed on the group’s website, GAIN spokesperson Craig Stevensis a partner at the DCI Group, which specializes in astroturf campaigns that have fought everything from anti-smoking laws to climate legislation. From 2005 through 2016, Exxon Mobil was a DCI client. In another detail not mentioned on the GAIN site, the group’s strategic adviser is James “Spider” Marks,who as of 2017 was the advisory board chair of the security firm TigerSwan, which — as The Intercept has documented extensively — engaged in “military-style counterterrorism measures” against anti-pipeline protesters.

For years, Exxon Mobil prolifically funded climate denier groups like the Heartland Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute. Under pressure, the company pledged to stop funding deniers in 2007, although it kept bankrolling politicians who deny the reality of the climate crisis. Exxon also still support right-wing think tanks like theManhattan Institute, which received $970,200 from Exxon between 2008 and 2018. As recently as 2011, MI Senior Fellow Robert Bryce said “the science is not settled” on climate change. Another MI Senior Fellow,Oren Cass,last year — the year after three of the five most expensive hurricanes to have ever hit the Atlantic — authored a report arguing that the potential costs of climate change are overblown, suggesting that many people prefer warmer temperatures and could adapt easily to global warming. In addition to Exxon, MI is — like other flagrant denier groups — funded by the Mercer Family Foundation; Rebekah Mercer,a key financier of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, runs the foundation and sits on the MI board. Exxon also continues to give large donations the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and remains a member of the American Petroleum Institute, each of which has fought hard against environmental regulations and climate measures. The oil company only left the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council in 2017, four years after it pushed model legislation in Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona that described global warming as a “theory.”

Itai Vardi reported at DeSmog this summer that Phil Goldberg, director of PPI’s Center for Civil Justice, has come out swinging against climate lawsuits being brought by cities and states against fossil fuel companies. The law firm at which Goldberg is a partner — Shook, Hardy & Bacon — defended the tobacco industry**for decades** and was the inspiration for the fictional firm Smoot, Hawking in the 2005 film “Thank You For Smoking.” As a slew of lawsuits has begun to call into question fossil fuel companies’ role in fueling and spreading misinformation about the climate crisis, the industry has stepped into high gear to fight off litigation.

Goldberg is a former lobbyist for the coal company Peabody Energywho was brought on as special counsel by the National Association of Manufacturers in January as part of its Manufacturers Accountability Project, founded in 2017 to take on “activist litigation” against big oil companies; Exxon Mobil is a NAM member, and the MAP project has been among the most active bodies fighting off climate-related legal action. Both Peabody and NAM have also donated generously to climate denial groups over the years. Both, for instance, were members of the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition, which through the 1990s sought to undermine U.N. climate negotiations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Goldberg has also been an adviser for ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force. In addition to the model legislation on global warming, ALEC has vigorously opposed climate and clean energy legislation around the country.

...

ucs 2018

...

Manhattan Institute: Propaganda masquerading as news

Another free-market think tank, the Manhattan Institute, received $115,200 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, it has received $1.25 million. Like Zycher and Thiessen at AEI, Manhattan Institute fellows oppose a carbon tax and the Paris accord.

Earlier this year, the New York City-based organization hired longtime TV newsman John Stossel, former host of Fox Business Network’s “Stossel” and ABC’s “20/20,” to interview Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass for a slickly produced, 4-minute YouTube segment titled “The Overheated Costs of Climate Change.”

Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, told Stossel that the Paris climate agreement “was somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” Stossel wholeheartedly agreed. “The Earth is warming,” Stossel intoned in his wrap-up. “Man may well be increasing that. But the solution isn’t to waste billions by forcing emissions cuts here while other countries do nothing. Well, pretend to make cuts. Trump was right to repudiate this phony treaty.”

Waste billions while other countries do nothing? Besides the fact that it is now cheaper to produce electricity from utility-scale solar and wind energy in the United States than nuclear, coal and even natural gas, as of last November — a year after the Paris agreement officially went into effect — China, India and other major carbon emitters were already making significant progress in meeting their Paris accord commitments.

The other glaring problem with the segment is it’s a prime example of fake news. With a former network news show host playing anchor, viewers could easily mistake the piece as a clip from of a legitimate newscast. At least one member of the conservative echo chamber treated it that way.The Washington Free Beacon, an online news organization funded by GOP megadonor Paul Singer, ran a news story about the Stossel-Cass interview on March 19.

https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/:{2018/12/10:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:/ny-attorney-general-underwood-exxon-ethics/

Karen Savage

A nonprofit with ties to the fossil fuel industry has filed an ethics complaint against the New York attorney general’s office, alleging that Attorney General Barbara Underwood and two special assistant attorneys general are violating state ethics laws in their climate-related litigation against Exxon.

The Government Justice Center, led by board members who work for organizations that have received funding from oil industry and climate denial groups, alleges that Underwood is “accepting funding from an entity to conduct litigation by New York State on that entity’s behalf.”

The complaint alleges that Matthew Eisenson and Gavin McCabe, two special assistant attorneys general working on the office’s securities fraud case against Exxon as well as other work, are violating state law because they are paid through the NYU School of Law’s:{State Energy & Environment Impact Center:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:.

Known as the State Impact Center, it wasestablished last year with funding fromBloomberg Philanthropies, a nonprofit founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to support state attorneys general in “defending and promoting clean energy, climate and environmental laws and policies.”

Eisenson and McCabe were both hired by the New York attorney general’s office through the State Impact Center’s fellows program. According to the Center’s website the Center “has offered all state attorneys general the opportunity to hire NYU Law Fellows to work under their direction as special assistant attorney generals on clean energy, climate change, and environmental issues.”

The Government Justice Center contends that Underwood’s office hired Eisenson and McCabe specifically to “help pursue a private party’s political and litigation agenda.” The Center says the use of the NYU fellows program also violates the law by giving the impression that Underwood’s office can be improperly influenced by Bloomberg.

The attorney general’s office said the arrangement violates no ethics laws and has been cleared by the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics.

The Government Justice Center said the alleged violations stem from Eisenson’s and McCabe’s names being included in signature blocks of recent climate change-related litigation, including Underwood’ssuit against Exxon for securities fraud, and a friend-of-the-court brief supporting New York City’s climate liability suit against five major oil companies.

“The presence of the special assistants in those cases, funded by Mr. Bloomberg, raises questions regarding whether Mr. Bloomberg and the Center are unduly influencing decision-making and litigation,” wrote Cameron J. Macdonald, executive director and general counsel for the Government Justice Center, who wrote the complaint.

Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University who studies state attorneys general and their role in national policy making, said it is common for attorneys general to tap into the expertise of various interest groups.

“Overall I don’t see it [the complaint] as a particularly strong argument, in part because this type of arrangement has been very common amongst AGs for quite some time and that includes situations where AGs have worked with private class actionattorneys on a contingency fee basis, which has also raised ethics concerns, but generally speaking, courts across the country have allowed that arrangement to occur,” Nolette said.

“Clearly the [State Impact] Center has an agenda of ‘we want to fight climate change’ but that alone is not particularly unusual or what I would consider unethical,” he said.

“We don’t hide anything that we do,” said Christopher Gray, communications director for the State Impact Center. “We are not securities lawyers, we work on environmental policy. The idea that we’re directly involved in a meaningful way, doesn’t meet the facts.”

“This is another attempt by what appears to be a dark money group to de-legitimize the ExxonMobil investigation, which pre-existed the founding of the State Impact Center and which we don’t have any oversight or influence over,” Gray said.

According to its charity registration statement, the Government Justice Centerwas founded in 2016 to provide “public interest litigation focused on government waste, negligence, misappropriation and other improper actions.”

The organization’s board members include director James Copeland, a senior fellow and director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute. Exxon gave $115,200 to the Manhattan Institute in 2017 for public information and policy research. The group posted a Youtube video in March that was made to look like a real news story titled “The ‘Overheated’ Costs of Climate Change.” It featured former TV newscaster John Stossel, who interviewed senior fellow Oren Cass, who maintains that the costs of the climate crisis are overestimated.

Treasurer for the Government Justice Center is Brandon Muir, who is also the executive director ofReclaim New York, an organization**chaired**by Rebekah Mercer.Since at least 2015, the Mercer Family Foundation:{ has :(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::{funded:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:numerous organizations known for:{promoting:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: climate denial, including the Manhattan Institute and the Heartland Institute.

Tim Hoefer is president of the Government Justice Center and director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, which was a:{project:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: of the Manhattan Institute.

Government Justice Center director and retired judge Robert S. Smith, spent more than 25 years as:{partner:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the firm hired by Exxon to defend itself against a growing number of climate change-related lawsuits, including Underwood’s securities fraud case.

The ethics complaint echoes a report published earlier this year by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which relied on public records requests to allege that attorneys general are involved in a coordinated scheme by private interests to persuade elected officials to hold oil giants responsible for climate change. That alleged conspiracy includes Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who is also investigating Exxon for possible fraud.

“This seems to me to be just one additional part of this massive brawl between the New York attorney general’s office, the Massachusetts attorney general and ExxonMobil. I’m not terribly surprised that they filed this ethics complaint, but it doesn’t strike me as something that’s really going to go anywhere,” Nolette said.

koch Industries is calling for the elimination of tax credits for electric vehicles (EVs), all while claiming that it does not oppose plug-in cars and inviting the elimination of oil and gas subsidies that the petroleum conglomerate and its industry peers receive.

Koch Industries is calling for the elimination of tax credits for electric vehicles (EVs), all while claiming that it does not oppose plug-in cars and inviting the elimination of oil and gas subsidies that the petroleum conglomerate and its industry peers receive.

Outgoing Nevada Republican Senator Dean Heller introduced a bill in September that would lift the sales cap on electric vehicles eligible for a federal tax credit, and replace the cap with a deadline that would dictate when the credit would start being phased out.

Under the current tax credit for EVs, once a manufacturer sells 200,000 EVs in the U.S. the amount of the credit gets slashed in half, then halved again. The full credit amount is $7,500. Tesla has already hit the 200,000 cap and GM will soon reach it, so both companies would benefit from a tax credit extension via eliminating the sales cap. Heller’s bill lifts the 200,000 vehicle limit and substitutes a phase-out period starting in 2022.

But the conservative senator’s bill is facing opposition from the conservative billionaire Koch brothers.

In a letter to senators dated October 24, Koch Industries lobbyist Philip Ellender urges opposition to the expansion of EV tax credits through 2022. Ellender claims that the tax credits primarily benefit wealthy consumers and that subsidization interferes with “innovation and consumer choice.”

The letter cites two studies, each by a right-wing think tank. One study comes from the Pacific Research Institute, which has received fossil fuel funding – including over $1.7 million from Koch-related foundations and $615,000 from ExxonMobil. The PRI study, titled “Costly Subsidies for the Rich: Quantifying the Subsidies Offered to Battery Electric Powered Cars,” emphasizes that “the majority of the dollar benefits from energy and electric car subsidies are paid to tax filers in the higher income tax brackets.”

The other study is from the Manhattan Institute, another “free market think tank” that takes in money from the Koch network and Exxon. The study paints a misleading picture of EVs and their subsidies.

In addition to citing biased studies by groups tied to Koch money, Ellender claims in the letter that “We do not oppose electric vehicles.”

This sentiment echoes the company's 2016 advertorial, in which Koch Industries claimed to be “all for electric vehicles.”

Ellender also claims that Koch Industries is against any and all energy subsidies, even ones that benefit the company. According to the letter:

Instead of expanding this subsidy for wealthy EV owners, Congress should eliminate it along with all other energy incentives – including eliminating any incentives given to us and our competitors where we may participate. We are focused on long-term value creation, not short-term windfalls.

In reality, while Koch Industries is claiming publicly to support ending fossil fuel subsidies (along with EV and clean energy incentives), Koch lobbyists have long worked to ensure that the petroleum industry continues to get subsidized.

As Koch vs. Clean previously pointed out, “In a detailed 2011 report on Koch Industries, the Center for Public Integrity wrote: ‘Oil is the core of the Koch business empire, and the company’s lobbyists and officials have successfully fought to preserve the industry’s tax breaks and credits.’ The report documented that Koch lobbyists have worked to preserve billions of dollars in oil industry subsidies, including the Section 199 manufacturing tax deduction and the ‘last-in, first out’ accounting rule.”

In fact, according to the International Business Times, Koch Industries has itself directly secured subsidies totaling more than $195 million.

The Koch network also lobbied for the Trump tax cuts that became law late last year. The corporate tax cut is not specific to energy, but it benefits giant corporations including Big Oil and Koch Industries nonetheless. Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that theKochs would save over $1 billion just this year from the tax cut—a significant windfall for a corporate behemoth that claims, “We are focused on long-term value creation, not short-term windfalls.”

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/07/12/bradley-foundation-funds-web-climate-change-deniers/

Armiak

Bradley Foundation internal documents reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reveal a concerted effort by the organization to delegitimize climate science, while promoting fossil fuel energy development in the United States.

An analysis of Bradley’s climate-related activities shows that the foundation has made significant grants to support energy policy think tanks, attack-dog groups that target environmentalists, and efforts to discredit climate science.

A 2013 internal foundation document details how Bradley “instructed staff to explore options…to make more energy-related grants.” The document also notes that the Board gave a “terminal grant” of $263,591 to the Sand County Foundation (SCF), which previously administered the Bradley Fund for the Environment.

The documents do not reveal Bradley’s motivation in splitting from SCF, but they do outline a serious effort to promote fossil fuel industry interests at the expense of the environment.

CENTERS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL AND FOSSIL FUEL DEVELOPMENT

As part of its push to support studies and public relations to cast doubt on mounting scientific evidence on climate change, Bradley has focused its resources on “Energy Policy Centers,” many of which are housed in “Bradley-supported” State Policy Network (SPN) “think tanks.” SPN is a web of 156 right-wing groups in 49 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Canada, and the UK that receives funding from the billionaire Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation, and the Roe Foundation, as well as many multi-national corporations.

The examined documents show that the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment (CEPE) at the **Manhattan Institute**for Policy Research (MIPR), a member of SPN, received a total of $500,000 for its Center, with another $200,000 distributed in 2016. (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research GPR, February 23, 2016) CEPE works to promote fossil fuel development despite the devastating effects of climate change. A background document on CEPE states its goal clearly: “The Center’s research and public education activity aims at demonstrating that the United States is poised to reap substantial economic benefits in the form of job creation, lower gasoline and electricity prices, and increased productivity provided public policies allow companies to access valuable energy resources and distribute them at home and abroad.”

A recommendation by Bradley staff on the Manhattan Institute’s 2016 grant proposal specifically states that CEPE is worth funding because, “They have succeeded in identifying and publicizing so many of the falsehoods that surround energy and the environment.” (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research GPR, February 23, 2016) An example of this “success” can be found in the work of CEPEsenior fellow Mark Mills, who is recognized as originating the idea that North America can surpass the Middle East as the largest energy supplier in the world. (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research GPR, November 12, 2013)

The Energy Policy Center (EPC) at another SPN “think tank”, the Independence Institute, received $195,000 from the Bradley Foundation between 2012 and 2016.

Bradley documents examined show that EPC’s purpose is to “consciously counter-balance former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s environmental think tank” at Colorado State University, which promotes a “New Energy Economy.”

Bradley considers EPC to be highly successful in fighting local and federal environmental initiatives. The Bradley documents note that EPC was a “key coalition partner” in preempting local bans on fracking in Colorado, and that it “has developed a toolkit for policymakers, attorneys general, and other conservative state think tanks to help them push back against U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.” (Independence Institute GPR, June 2, 2015)

In addition to these two centers, Bradley has funded the Center for Energy and Environment (CEE) at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), an “associate member” of SPN, and the Center for Energy Innovation and Independence at Consumers’ Research.

CEE is led by the prominent climate change denier Myron Ebell, who steered Trump’s EPA transition team. Ebell also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, which brings together right-wing activists and scholars for monthly meetings. The coalition was established on May 6, 1997, “to dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis.”

CEI was long tied to tobacco disinformation campaigns, but is now a leading organization in the movement to discredit climate science.

Bradley does not mention how much of its funding to CEI was designated for CEE operations. Between 1986 and 2015, Bradley Foundation gave $2.2 million to CEI, the majority of which was “to support general operations.” (Competitive Enterprise Institute GPR, June 2, 2015).

The Center for Energy Innovation and Independence received $250,000 from Bradley in 2013 to get the new group off the ground. According to a background document, the group “will closely monitor federal environmental regulations and potentially lay the foundation for multi-state litigation against them, similar to those actions in the Obamacare and Dodd-Frank lawsuits, of which aggressive (Scott) Pruitt was and is a part.” Pruitt is the former AG of Oklahoma and recently resigned as the EPA Administrator under Trump.

SMEAR CAMPAIGNS AND FUNDING EFFORTS TO DISCREDIT CLIMATE SCIENCE

At the same time Bradley rolled out funding for “Energy Policy Centers,” it was doling out cash to discredit environmental organizations and climate change science.

A grant proposal record for the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a front group created by the close Bradley ally Rick Berman, details an organized effort to weaken the credibility of well-respected, national environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, and Food and Water Watch. (The Center for Consumer Freedom GPR, November 12, 2013) Berman also founded Berman and Company, a notorious Washington, D.C.-based corporate lobbying and PR company known for creating numerous corporate “front groups” and astroturf propaganda campaigns.

Berman’s anti-environmental project at CCF was called Big Green Radicals and was seeded with a $150,000 “public education” grant from Bradley in 2013.

According to Bradley’s background document, the Big Green Radicals project would include the following components:

[N]ew, updated research profiles for NRDC, Food and Water Watch, and Sierra Club; standalone websites for all three organizations; a Facebook group seeded with several thousand fans to provide a base for the message; the production of two online videos to explain the real agenda of the environmental left; and Google keyword advertising for members of the media and the public searching for information about one of the targeted groups.

In addition to providing the start-up funding for Big Green Radicals, Bradley gave $85,000 to the Capital Research Center (CRC), a group led by former Berman and Company employee Scott Walter. The grant was designated for “general operations,” but it may have been used to support the publication Green Watch. A background document on CRC states that, “Green Watch tracks the money flow to environmental nonprofits and critiques their positions, and those of their allies, including their policymaking ones.” (Capital Research Center GPR, August 19, 2014)

Since 2014, the Bradley Foundation has distributed numerous grants to discredit the vast amount of scientific research demonstrating the harmful effects of climate change. In 2014, it gave $65,000 to the George C. Marshall Institute (GMI), a right-wing front group largely funded by oil and gas interests. Newsweek called GMI “a central cog in the denial machine” in 2007.

GMI folded in late 2015,so Bradley recommended $50,000 in “seed funding” the following year for its “successor organization,” the CO2 Coalition. The coalition is led by a Dr. William Happer, a well-known climate change denier. “We’re doing our best to try and counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. It’s not a pollutant at all,” Happer said at a Heritage Foundation event on energy and climate.

Another $10,000 Bradley grant in 2014 for the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (CSCDGC) went to support its Science & Public Policy Institute (SPPI). A staff recommendation notes that SPPI “has helped demonstrate that no real-world data confirms that floods, draughts [sic], or hurricanes are becoming more frequent or severe, as global-warming alarmists allege. Neither is there any real-world data that sea levels are about to rise precipitously, inundating the world’s coasted [sic] lowlands, as is also often alleged.” (Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change GPR, June 17, 2014)

ENERGY ROUNDTABLES

Documents show that, beginning in 2013, Bradley provided funding to the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, also an SPN member, to host and organize two “energy roundtables” a year — one before the Heritage Foundation’s annual Resource Bank meeting, and the other before SPN’s annual fall meeting. (Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy GPR, November 10, 2015)

The $50,000-per-year grant from Bradley for the meetings was matched “by staff arrangement” by the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), a front group for the energy industry that promotes fossil fuel development and opposes efforts to regulate its activities.

“Planned and put on in close cooperation with the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), the roundtables allow state think tanks to better promote free-market energy and environmental policies,” one document states. (Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy GPR, November 12, 2013)

Attendance has been high at the roundtables, with as many as “67 SPN leaders” attending the event in Denver in September 2014. The agenda for that meeting details presentations from a number of fossil fuel lovers including: Artic Power, Consumer Energy Alliance, Vital for Colorado, Devon Energy, GOPAC (a political action committee that backs and trains Republican candidates), and Freedom Partners. Freedom Partners, a funding conduit for the billionaire Koch brothers, delivered a talk on “Messaging and State Action.” (Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy GPR, November 11, 2014)

BRADLEY GRANTEES WORKED TOGETHER TO DEFEAT LOCAL REGULATIONS ON FRACKING IN COLORADO

In 2014, the Independence Institute and Berman’s Big Green Radicals worked in lockstep in Colorado to defeat local fracking bans, such as the one that passed by ballot measure in Longmont in November of 2013. A 2015 Bradley backgrounder on the Independence Institute praises the anti-fracking work of Independence Institute’s Energy Policy Center, saying, “It has also been a key coalition partner in the movement to stop local and statewide bans on hydraulic fracturing. Last year, current Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper crafted a delicately balanced compromise on local control of oil and gas drilling that removed all initiatives on the issue from the state ballot.”

Berman’s Big Green Radicals rolled out an attack campaign to discredit anti-fracking efforts in the state in May of 2014. Big Green Radicals assertedthat “extreme groups, mostly based far from Colorado in San Francisco, New York, or Washington D.C., are spending millions and spreading their anti-science message to scare voters into approving ballot measures in November to send the oil and gas industry (and the jobs and affordable energy it provides) packing from the Centennial State.”

The efforts by these two groups were successful in overturning local fracking bans. Bradley agreed and decreased its funding recommendation for EPC to $25,000 in 2016, saying, “it is unlikely that there will be any significant developments for EPC in the upcoming months, and therefore staff believes this reduced award is important.”

It is uncertain where the next battleground for energy development will be for Bradley, but the documents demonstrate that they have the funds to bankroll infrastructure in place to discredit climate science and smear the opposition.

OTHER NOTABLE BRADLEY GRANTS

Other significant Bradley grants to support fossil fuel development or dispute climate science in recent years include:

$150,000 to Opportunity Ohio for “program activities.” (2016)
$100,000 to Energy and Environment Legal Institute for “transparency practice general.” (2016) HORNER SCHNARE
$20,000 to Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment for “general operations.” (2016)
$200,000 to Competitive Enterprise Institute for “general operations” and “litigation.” (2013, 2015)
$100,000 toThe Sand County Foundation for “energy resource development.” (2014)
$100,000 to National Center for Policy Analysis for “general operations.” (2014)
$20,000 to Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment for “general operations.” (2014)

kept promise not to run for 3rd, rev door:

NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Manhattan Institute is proud to announce former U.S. Sen. and physician Dr. Tom Coburn as a senior fellow in health policy. Dr. Coburn's role will expand his work as an advisor to the Institute's Project FDA, an initiative promoting reforms to assist the FDA in meeting 21st century health care challenges.

Dr. Coburn's career includes two terms in the U.S. Senate representing the state of Oklahoma from 2005 to 2015, where he was a ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security. He also served three terms in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001.

Dr. Coburn practiced as an obstetrician after graduating from the University of Oklahoma Medical School. He is a three-time cancer survivor, having been previously diagnosed with melanoma, prostate and colon cancer.

"It is an honor for us to welcome Dr. Coburn as a senior fellow with the Institute," said Larry Mone, President of the Manhattan Institute. "For decades, he has worked tirelessly and selflessly on behalf of patients, and has been a leading advocate for bringing innovative ideas to health care. Together with Dr. Coburn, the Manhattan Institute's Project FDA will continue to focus on blue-sky reform efforts that bring faster, safer cures to patients."

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/paul-howard

FDA Reform: A Prescription for More and Better Drugs and Medical ...

www.heritage.org/node/10579/print-display

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

by A Abbott - ‎Cited by 1

[3] When they do bring forth pharmaceutical treatments, drug companies must ..... An “FDA Report Card” commissioned by the Manhattan Institute[45] finds wide ...

Pharma companies return to the White House - POLITICO

www.politico.com/tipsheets/.../pharma-companies-return-to-the-white-house-220191

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{May 8, 2017 - Gottlieb gets his Senate vote for :{FDA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: commisioner — User fee markup ... she covered all angles of :{pharmaceutical:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: policy from clinical trials to .... :{PhRMA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ROLLS OUT NEW MEMBERSHIP CRITERIA — The :{PhRMA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: board convenes in ... He heard from the American Action Forum, the:{Manhattan Institute:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, the ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

:{[PDF]:(style="font-weight:bold;cursor:auto;margin:0px 3px 0px 0px;float:left"):}:P FD AR - Manhattan Institute

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/fda_05.pdf

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:{Published by :{Manhattan Institute:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... are required for :{FDA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: approval of most :{drugs:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. ... contrast. We find that the current Phase III trial system forces :{pharmaceutical:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and .... Source: :{PhRMA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Annual Member Survey, 2011; DiMasi et al., J Health Econ ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

POLICY-PAPER FDA-UNIVERSAL-SYMBOL Search Results | PhRMA

www.phrma.org/search?incmode=keywordsearch&keyword...paper%20fda...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{If you have questions or concerns about a :{pharmaceutical:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: product, please ... Howard joined the:{Manhattan Institute:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: in 2000, working as deputy director of the ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

BIOGRAPHY PAUL-HOWARD-PH-D Search Results | PhRMA

www.phrma.org/biography/paul-howard-ph-d

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{... Disease, Economic Impact, :{FDA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, Insurance Coverage, Intellectual Property, International ... She does this with the help of her Medicare Part D prescription :{drug:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... Hughes Medical :{Institute:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: investigator, advancing to professor of :{Medicine:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, and ... at the :{Pharmaceutical:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Research and Manufacturers of America (:{PhRMA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:).:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

PhRMA companies push hard on House bill to ease testing of new drugs

https://www.opensecrets.org/.../phrma-companies-push-hard-on-house-bill-to-ease-tes...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Jun 16, 2015 - :{Pharmaceutical:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: interests are pushing hard in favor of a bill that could speed up Food and:{Drug:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Administration (:{FDA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:) approval of new :{drugs:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. ... along with :{Manhattan Institute:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: scholar Paul Howard, wrote in support of the bill in ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

agwatch defunct?

report:

http://www.bcnys.org/inside/legalreform/2010/ATRA-Report-Beyond-Reproach.pdf

dl AGwatch

OCTOBER 31, 2011 8:15 AM

Tiger Joyce

Kudos to Jim Copland and all our allies at the Manhattan Institute's Center for Legal Policy. Their latest edition of Trial Lawyers Inc. (TLI) appropriately turns up the heat on certain state attorneys general (AGs), whose mutually beneficial relationships with private sector personal injury lawyers raise serious ethical questions and blur the line between self-interest and the public interest.

With increasing regularity, some AGs are hiring personal injury lawyers - often by way of a cozy, no-bid agreement ? to prosecute lawsuits on behalf of their states against deep-pocketed defendants. Resulting contingency fees can sometimes be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds. TLI continues the important work of documenting these arrangements, which the Wall Street Journal and others have characterized as "pay to play," wherein outside counsel express their thanks for the lucrative legal work with generous campaign contributions to the AGs who hired them.

My organization, the American Tort Reform Association also seeks to educate policymakers and the taxpaying public about these unsavory AG-outside counsel relationships and the need for standards of public accountability. In 2007, ATRA published its Transparency Code for AGs, comprising the following good-government principles:

exxon knew 8/1//16

In any case, according to its own figures posted last week, ExxonMobil spent $1.96 million on 16 denier and obstructionist groups last year. Ten of them, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Federalist Society and Hoover Institution, were among those listed in the 2007 UCS report.

So what is ExxonMobil getting for its money? Let's take a look at a handful of last year's grantees to find out.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

Half of ExxonMobil's 2015 denier donations—$1 million—went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the same amount it gave the Chamber in 2014.

The chamber acknowledges that climate change is happening, but discounts the prevailing scientific consensus that it is largely due to human activity, mainly burning fossil fuels. When pressed about the Chamber's position during a March 2014 Senate hearing, Karen Harbert, head of the Chamber's Institute for 21st Century Energy, replied that there is a "robust debate" over what is causing climate change. "It is caused by a lot of things," she insisted.[tobacco scam]

Harbert's scientifically indefensible comment was not surprising. The Chamber has a long history of disputing climate science and that has alienated some of its members. In 2009, Apple, Exelon, Nike, PNM Resources and PG&E, for example, cancelled their memberships after Chamber Vice President William Kovacs demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) convene a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" on climate science with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge ruling on the reality of global warming. "It would be evolution versus creationism," Kovacs explained. "It will be climate change science on trial."

Those high-profile defections apparently had little impact on the Chamber's position. In May 2014, just days before the EPA announced its draft Clean Power Plan to reduce power plant carbon pollution, the Chamber released a grossly misleading report attacking the proposed rule. The report, which was also sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, was denounced not only by the EPA, but also by PolitiFact.com and the Washington Post. Among its many faults, the report wildly inflated the cost of the rule and failed to consider the benefits of cutting carbon emissions.

Last October, the Chamber and 14 other business associations filed a lawsuit against the EPA, arguing that the Clean Power Plan exceeds the agency's authority to regulate the energy sector and the Chamber's priorities for 2016 include opposing EPA efforts to curb carbon emissions as well as the agency's science-based finding that global warming endangers public health and the environment.

Manhattan Institute:

ExxonMobil gave the Manhattan Institute $200,000 in 2015, boosting the company's total donations to the self-described free-market think tank to $1 million since 1998. In turn, the institute has been cranking out papers and articles denouncing efforts to cut carbon and maligning renewable energy technologies.

Last summer, for example, Manhattan Institute Senior FellowOren Cass dismissed the idea of a carbon tax—ExxonMobil's supposed preferred policy—as a "shell game" in an article he wrote for National Affairs. He followed up that essay in October with a white paper calling the impending UN climate negotiations in Paris a "farce." What did Cass propose as a better solution? He urged policymakers to "abandon fruitless negotiations and focus instead on the realistic option of promoting innovation and preparing for any future adaptation that may be necessary."

The institute's longtime point man on energy,Robert Bryce—who previously worked for the ExxonMobil-funded Institute for Energy Research—says he's "agnostic" about climate change. Over the years he has written numerous columns for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications praising oil, natural gas and coal and disparaging wind and solar. A recent Bryce column in the National Review, for instance, denounced tax breaks and subsidies for the wind industry but ignored the fact that, since 1918,federal oil and gas industry subsidies have averaged $4.85 billion a year in today's dollars.

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC):

ALEC, a secretive lobby group that drafts sample corporate-friendly legislation for state lawmakers, has received $1.79 million from ExxonMobil since 1998 and that investment is still paying dividends. At ALEC's annual meeting last July, for example, corporate and legislator members collaborated on bills and resolutions that would inhibit state implementation of the Clean Power Plan, hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to homes and businesses and undermine state renewable energy standards by restricting investment in wind and solar.

One of the keynote speakers at that meeting, Stephen Moore—founder of the Club for Growth and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation—declared at a plenary session that the "biggest scam of the last 100 years is global warming." ALEC's official position on climate change is only slightly more nuanced, leaving open the question of the role human activity plays. "Climate change is a historical phenomenon," its website states "and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions."

With that scientifically challenged position, it's no wonder ALEC invites speakers for its conferences from such notorious climate science denier groups as the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the Heartland Institute and, of course, the Heritage Foundation—all former ExxonMobil grantees.

While ExxonMobil and other major carbon producers Chevron and Peabody Energy remain steadfast ALEC members, more than 100 corporations have severed ties with the organization for a variety of reasons, including its stance on climate change. Those companies include a number of heavy hitters in the energy sector, including American Electric Power, BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell.

National Black Chamber of Commerce:

From 2002 through last year, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) received $1.1 million from ExxonMobil and the organization's president, Harry C. Alford, is unapologetic about taking fossil fuel industry money. "Of course we do and it is only natural," Alford states on the NBCC website. "The legacy of Blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil fuel ... [F]ossil fuels have been our economic friend."

Last summer, NBCC published a report that falsely claimed the Clean Power Plan would pose "economic hardship" on poor and minority Americans. A UCS analysis found that the report was based on fraudulent claims from previously published studies, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's anti-Clean Power Plan report from 2014. In fact, unchecked climate change would likely hurt poor and minority communities most.

More recently, Alford wrote an opinion piece attacking the Clean Power Plan for The Hill, a Washington political trade publication. Like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's bogus 2014 report, Alford's June 29 column vastly exaggerated the cost of the proposed rule and did not factor in the billions of dollars in health and economic benefits that would result from cutting carbon pollution.

ExxonMobil's Pretzel Logic

Last fall, UCS and reporters at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Exxon's own scientists had warned the company decades ago about the potential for climate catastrophe. The new revelations also showed that the company responded to that bad news by downplaying climate risks and helping establish the climate science denial network.

A number of journalists did follow-up stories, pressing ExxonMobil officials about the company's longtime support for denier groups. They didn't always get the same answer.

During an interview last September with Richard Keil, ExxonMobil's senior media relations advisor, WNYC's On the Media host Bob Garfield pushed Keil for an explanation. "Please clarify this for me: Are not funding or did not fund them?" Garfield asked. Keil's response was unequivocal. "We are not funding," he said.

When asked the same question by the New York Times in early November, then-Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Kenneth Cohen likewise said no. "We stopped funding them in the middle part of the last decade because a handful of them were making the uncertainty of the science their focal point," he said. "Frankly, we made the call that we needed to back away from supporting the groups that were undercutting the actual risk" of global warming.

Cohen's response wasn't a surprise. He made the same disingenuous claim back in February 2007, a few weeks after UCS disclosed that ExxonMobil had been spending millions of dollars on climate science denier groups. Greenwire, a trade news organization, reported that Cohen said the company "has stopped funding them."

The surprise came on November 9, three days after the New York Times story ran, when PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff asked Cohen if ExxonMobil has been funding denier groups. This time he took a different tack.

"Well, the answer is yes," replied Cohen, who retired from the company in January. "And I will let those organizations respond for themselves."

But before anyone declares a victory for corporate transparency, it turns out that Cohen's moment of candor was, well, momentary.

On December 1, a Washington Post story quoted yet another ExxonMobil spokesperson who qualified Cohen's remark. Alan Jeffers, a media relations manager, said the company "rejects the premise" that it has been funding climate science denial.

"We were engaged with funding public policy groups on policy issues, not on science," Jeffers explained. "We made our position known on some climate policies that made us unpopular with environmental activists and they tried to position that as us funding climate denial. And that's just not accurate."

Not accurate? As Jeffers, Keil and their former boss, Cohen, surely know, the think tanks, advocacy groups and associations ExxonMobil has been sponsoring all these years lie about the science to strengthen the argument against doing anything to address climate change. After all, if people believe climate science is a fraud—or at least "far from settled"—they will see no reason to support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade system or any other climate policy. And that line of reasoning, which protects the status quo, seems to suit ExxonMobil just fine.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists

from asbestos guy swetonic

Tort Reform and Toxic Torts

- "Torts" are civil liability claims, and "reform" was a euphemism for restricting the public liability (ie "toxic tort" problems) through various means. The support came from companies with poisoning and polluting problems. "Toxic torts" are product liability claims for noxious substances.

In this area, Swetonic also associated himself with the Manhattan Institute (specifically with Peter Huber and Walter Olson), a think-tank which was funded by the same industries that funded TIEQ. The role of Huber and Olson were to circulate dubious and highly-exaggerated product-liability stories (e.g. A woman got $3 m for spilling hot coffee, etc.) [34]. They did this through books, newspaper and magazine articles, radio and TV, and Olson also ran the http://overlawyered.com website which was modelled on Milloy's http://www.junkscience.com operation [35].

The manufacture of these legal-urban legends; the exaggeration of claims about plaintiff lawyer greed; and the exaggerated claims of product liability costs were all part of a well-designed coalition strategy designed to support "tort reform" [36]. The sensationalist nature of the stories appealed to the press.

The "tort reform" promoters established a fake legal-services grassroots organization called the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), which had a number of associated CALA branches (Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse) in various states, well funded by tobacco and other industries. The purpose was to:

limit damages (especially punitive damages),
attack "plaintiff attorneys",
restrict the expert evidence available in the courts, and
block most class actions [37].

Junk-man Steve Milloy of TASSC (controlled through APCO) who ran one of the main science lobby group for the tobacco industry, was also a close associate in the tort reform movement. APCO actually run ATRA and the various CALAs under contract, and Milloy also ran the Junk Science web site: http://www.junkscience.com.

Swetonic also utilized the services of Michael Fumento of Investors Business Daily (a pro-industry health-journalist, available for hire) who's column he arranged to have syndicated around the country. This group of lobbyists all had close associations with the ABC TV journalist John Stossel who pushed the "junk science" angle.[38] [39]

By this time Swetonic had joined the Dilenschneider Group and was on a temporary retainer from Tom Borelli at Philip Morris (who later became Steve Milloy's partner) [[40]].

Vulture Singer on Bd:

billionaire “vulture capitalist” and major backer of the US Republican Party is a major funder of the think tank of Danish climate science contrarian and fossil fuels advocate Bjørn Lomborg, DeSmogBlog has found.

New York-based hedge fund manager Paul Singer’s charitable foundation gave $200,000 to Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC) in 2013, latest US tax disclosures reveal.

The grant to Lomborg’s think tank is revealed in the tax form of the Paul E. Singer Foundation covering that foundation’s activities between December 2012 and November 2013.

Singer, described as a “passionate defender of the 1%”, has emerged as a major force in the Republican party in recent years and was a key backer and influencer during Mitt Romney’s failed tilt at the Presidency.

The $200,000 grant represented almost one third of the $621,057 in donations declared by the Copenhagen Consensus Center in 2013.

A spokesperson for the think tank told DeSmogBlog that “not one dollar” of the Singer grant had been spent.

Lomborg, a Danish political scientist, is often cited on lists of the world’s most influential people.

He writes extensively on climate change and energy issues with his columns appearing in many of the world’s biggest news outlets.

The CCC think tank produces reports that consistently argue that cutting greenhouse gas emissions and increasing the roll-out of current renewable energy technologies should be low priorities for policy makers.

Most recently, Lomborg wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal arguing climate change was not the urgent problem that many thought.

He wrote that “the narrative that the world’s climate is changing from bad to worse is unhelpful alarmism”.

Lomborg argues the poorest countries need fossil fuels to lift themselves out of poverty – a position that gained support from the world’s richest man, Bill Gates.

At a G20 side event in Brisbane last year, Lomborg appeared at an event sponsored by the world’s largest private coal company, Peabody Energy, where he again argued that the world’s poor needed fossil fuels.

The CCC’s keystone project is the Post 2015 Consensus that is trying to influence the formulation of the next set of global development goals being discussed by the United Nations. Those goals will replace the millennium development goals.

Lomborg’s CCC think tank was registered as a not-for-profit in the US in 2008 and has attracted almost $5 million in donations since then. In 2013, the CCC paid Lomborg, its founder and president, $200,484 for his work. The previous year Lomborg was paid $775,000.

The think tank has insisted that its funders, most of which are anonymous, do not influence its research. The think tank says it does not accept funding from the fossil fuel industry.

Despite being registered in the US, Lomborg has admitted that all but one of the think tank’s seven staff are based elsewhere. The think tank’s address is a parcel service in Lowell, Massachusetts.

The discovery of support from Paul Singer comes after a DeSmogBlog investigation last year found that CCC’s early funders included conservative think tanks with links to the network of organisations funded by the Koch brothers, who have pushed millions into organisations denying climate science and blocking action to cut fossil fuel emissions.

In the 2014 US political spending cycle, data presented by OpenSecrets shows Singer spent $9.4 million influencing Republicans – the biggest disclosed individual spender on the conservative side of US politics.

Singer, whose Elliott Management hedge fund manages about $25 billion in assets, has been branded a “vulture capitalist” enterprise due to investment strategies employed by his firm that targets foreign economies in trouble.

A 2011 summary of “vulture funds” in The Guardian said Elliott Management’s “principal investment strategy” was “buying distressed debt cheaply and selling it at a profit or suing for full payment”.

Greg Palast, the author of Vulture’s Picnic, documented in The Guardian how Singer’s firm had managed to pocket $1.29 billion from the US Treasury after a “brilliantly complex” financial manoeuvre in 2009 that saw Singer lead a consortium to buy the parts supplier of General Motors and Chrysler before claiming cash from a government bailout of the struggling auto industry.

Singer, who according to Forbes is personally worth $1.8 billion, remains in conflict with the Argentinian government over debt bought by an Elliott affiliate and other investors.

As well as the generosity shown to Bjorn Lomborg’s think tank, Singer’s foundation gave $500,000 to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where Singer is chairman of the board of trustees.

The Manhattan Institute is also known for downplaying the impacts of climate change while promoting fossil fuels.

In October 2014, Manhattan senior fellow Robert Bryce wrote a report Not Beyond Coal arguing that the future for the coal industry was bright and the fossil fuel was “essential” for addressing poverty in developing countries — a position identical to that pushed by Lomborg.

Bryce also attacks the wind industry claiming it cannot cut emissions, describing wind turbines as “climate change scarecrows”. :{In testimony to the }:{ Bryce said wind turbines were “slaughtering wildlife” and killed 600,000 birds every year in the US.}:

A review of studies and data into US bird deaths has found about 600 million birds are killed annually in collisions with windows and buildings, but even this high number was only a quarter of the birds killed annually in the US by feral cats.

Another large donation from Singer’s foundation went to the Moving Picture Institute – an organisation that says it produces films that promote understanding of “individual rights, limited government, and free markets”.

The MPI helped fund the 2004 pro-mining documentary Mine Your Own Business by Irish filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney.

The two would go on to make the 2009 climate science denial film Not Evil Just Wrong, which was partly funded through a grant from DonorsTrust – a fund which stockpiles cash from conservative philanthropists and that has pushed millions into organisations promoting climate science denial while fighting action to cut emissions.

Roland Mathiasson, Executive Vice President at the Copenhagen Consensus Center, told DeSmogBlog: “Not one dollar of this grant has been spent. It's for a potential future project, pending support from a broad range of political perspectives to underline the non-political nature of the project.

“It is a project for the public conversation, so obviously there will be a lot of communication once broad support is secured, and the project is launched.”

Mathiasson declined to provide further details.

DeSmogBlog attempted to contact the Paul E Singer Foundation to ask about their donation to CCC, but email requests went unanswered.

fisher?

big in tort reform

===

newish trend: go after doom:

"Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong"

http://www.booktv.org/Program/15707/Smaller+Faster+Lighter+Denser+Cheaper+How+Innovation+Keeps+Proving+the+Catastrophists+Wrong.aspx

About the Program

Robert Bryce argues that technological innovations have improved the quality of life for humans for centuries and it is completely reasonable to think that we will innovate our way out of the problems we face today. Mr. Bryce spoke at an event hosted by the Manhattan Institute in New York City. [he names his posse, including PR agent]

About the Authors

Robert Bryce

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His books include "Power Hungry," "Gusher of Lies," and "Cronies." For more, visit: robertbryce.com.

[note he no longer denied agw? shills for nuke as answer. trashes wind, solar ok for poor africans off grid.

Major News Outlets Give Fossil-Fuel-Funded Think Tanks a Free Platform

National newspapers publish anti-green-energy articles—without disclosing that the authors work for industry-backed groups, a new study finds.

By Kate Sheppard | Thu Dec. 13, 2012 3:03 AM PST

The fossil fuel industry has long been a source of talking points and "studies" aimed at spreading doubt about climate change, and over the past few years, it has broadened its scope to undermine support for clean energy, as well. Often, this criticism is published in the form of articles in major media outlets—penned by employees of think tanks who don't disclose their groups' industry funding, a new study [1] finds.

The Checks and Balances Project [2], a pro-clean-energy watchdog group, surveyed stories published over the past five years in 60 news outlets, including national and regional newspapers, the Associated Press, and Politico. Researchers found that only 6 percent of the stories disclosed the funding when they cited "experts" from those think tanks. Typically, the stories referred to the groups as "free-market" or "libertarian," without mentioning the dirty-energy support.

Among the most frequent op-ed contributors is Robert Bryce, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute [3], a think tank that has made promoting fossil fuels and downplaying climate change a central focus—and that has received $1.21 million in funding from the likes of ExxonMobil and Claude R. Lambe [4], a Koch-owned charitable organization. Bryce is quite deft at mowing down clean energy, which is probably why he's become a regular in the op-ed pages of theNew York Times and the Wall Street Journal, on TV, and speaking at events.

The Checks and Balances report notes that Manhattan Institute was mentioned 65 times in the papers it surveyed. That count includes pieces like Bryce's April 2010 op-ed in the *Washington Post* [5], "Five Myths About Green Energy," which includes lines like, "[I]n in the electric car's century-long history, failure tailgates failure." The piece describes Bryce as a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute, but doesn't mention the funding. Nor does his Wall Street Journal piece from August 2010, "Wind Power Won't Cool Down the Planet," which claims that increasing the use of wind will actually increase our emissions of carbon dioxide. Bryce also popped up in [6] a Christian Science Monitor piece on lessons from the BP oil spill, arguing that nothing can compete with oil—again, with no indication that his organization has a dog in the fight. (Media Matters also posted a piece in 2011 [7] that noted Bryce had made 39 different media appearances that failed to disclose the fossil fuel ties.)

Fossil-fuel-funded AEI fellow Steven Hayward has penned WSJ op-edswith titles like "No: Alternatives Are Simply Too Expensive."

Other conservative think tanks have jumped in the clean-tech-bashing game, too. Take the American Enterprise Institute, recipient of at least $2.8 million in money from fossil-fuel interests like ExxonMobil since 1998. AEI fellow Steven Hayward has penned Wall Street Journal op-eds with titles like "No: Alternatives Are Simply Too Expensive." [8] Then there's the Institute for Energy Research, an industry aligned [9] nonprofit that has taken money from Exxon and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, one of the Koch family foundations. The institute's president, Thomas Pyle, appeared in a January 2010 *Houston Chronicle* article [10] arguing that the government should not provide tax credits to renewable energy, because it's been proven that they are "not economically viable in the marketplace."...http://www.motherjones.com/print/210806

The Manhattan Institute (MI) is a right-wing 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director.^[1]

The Manhattan Institute is "focused on promoting free-market principles whose mission is to 'develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.'"^[2]

"The Manhattan Institute concerns itself with such things as 'welfare reform' (dismantling social programs), 'faith-based initiatives' (blurring the distinction between church and state), and 'education reform' (destroying public education)," Kurt Nimmo wrote October 10, 2002, in CounterPunch.^[3]

Contents[hide]

Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council

The Manhattan Institute's Senior Fellow and Director of the its Center for Medical Progress, Paul Howard, spoke at the 2011 American Legislative Exchange Council Annual Conference in a Workshop titled "Rationing By Any Other Name: Medicare's Independent Payment Advisory Board." He co-lead the panel with the Pacific Research Institute's Director of Health Care Studies, John Graham.^[4]

ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door. Learn more at ALECexposed.org.

History

The Institute describes its policy agenda over its 25-year history as having spanned "taxes, welfare, crime, the legal system, urban life, race, education, and many other topics. We have won new respect for market-oriented policies and helped make reform a reality."^[5]

In its publication Buying a Movement, People for the American Way describes the Manhattan Institute'sagenda as "The Institute '...advocates privitization of sanitation services and infrastructure maintenance, deregulation in the area of environmental and consumer protection, school vouchers and cuts in governmental spending on social welfare programs; it is a preferred source of information'" for New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.^[6]

They describe their communication strategy as being based around the strength of their "senior fellows". "Their provocative books, reviews, interviews, speeches, articles, and op-ed pieces have been the main vehicle for communicating our message," they state.

"Booksare central to our approach. We make every effort to ensure that our authors are published by respected trade publishers and that their books receive as much review attention and publicity as possible. Nothing allows us to make a sustained, comprehensive argument more effectively," the website states.

Charles Murray was one author who was based at the Manhattan Institute while writing the book Losing Ground. Murray is "a far right ideologue who wrote The Bell Curve in 1984, a book that essentially argues black people are genetically and intellectually inferior to white people."^[1]

Tobacco issues

Tobacco industry documents reveal relationships between the Manhattan Institute and tobacco companies. The Institute sought funding from tobacco companies, including Brown & Williamson.[1] The Institute has received funding from R.J. Reynolds.[2] In 1991, Lorillard, Inc. budgeted a $4,000 contribution of the Manhattan Institute[3] and the same amount in 1996.[4] Philip Morris budgeted $25,000 for the Instutite in 1995. [5]

A 1997 R.J. Reynolds memo reveals RJR's intent to use the Manhattan Institute as a third party to help the company reduce the public's perception of danger from exposure to secondhand smoke:

"Devise ways to educate the public about epidemiology and put risk in perspective. For example, work with Steven J. Milloy, Michael Fumento, CEI Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute and others to put together a 1/2-hour or 1-hour TV show explaining epi[demiology] and risk. Create an epi/risk website to educate the general public, maybe working with the Harvard School of Public Health. Do the same for journalists." [6]

War on terrorism: axis of evil

In 2001, David Frum left the Manhattan Institute "to join the Bush administration as a speechwriter. It was there that he coined the term 'axis of evil' to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea. This became the signature phrase of President George W. Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech and shorthand for Bush's war on terrorism."^[7]

Immigration: covering all the bases

"In the think-tank world, a leading advocate of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is Tamar Jacoby..., an expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute. One of the most implacable voices against any such 'amnesty' is Heather Mac Donald - also of the Manhattan Institute."^[8]

Manhattan Institute Board of Trustees

The following are members of the Board of Trustees:^[9]

Dietrich Weismann, Chairman of the Board; Neuberger & Berman, Weismann Associates^[10]
Byron R. Wien, Vice Chairman; Morgan Stanley& Co.
Roger Hertog, Chairman Emeritus; Alliance Capital Management
Charles H. Brunie, Chairman Emeritus; Brunie Associates
Richard Gilder, Chairman Emeritus; Gilder, Gagnon, and Howe & Co.
Lawrence Mone, President
Robert J. Appel, Appel Associates
Eugene D. Brody, Picanet Partners
Christopher H. Browne, Tweedy, Browne Inc.
Andrew Cader
Timothy G. Dalton, Jr., Dalton Enterprises
Michael J. Fedak
Peter M. Flanigan, UBS Warburg
Mark Gerson, Gerson Lehrman Group
William B. Ginsberg
Maurice R. Greenberg, American International Group
Fleur Harlan
John W. Holman, Jr., Hintz, Holman & Robillard
Bruce Kovner, Caxton Corporation
William Kristol, Editor of the Weekly Standard
Frank J. Macchiarola, St. Francis College
Rodney W. Nichols
Edward J. Nicoll, Instinet Group Inc.
Peggy Noonan
Joseph H. Reich, Beginning With Children Foundation
Richard Reiss, Jr., Georgica Advisors LLC
Joseph L. Rice, III, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, Inc.
Frank E. Richardson, F.E. Richardson & Co., Inc.
Robert Rosenkranz, Delphi Financial Group
Nathan E. Saint-Amand, MD
Andrew M. Saul, Saul Partners
Paul E. Singer, Elliott Associates, L.P.
Robert Skidelsky
Thomas W. Smith, Prescott Investors
William K. Tell, Jr.
Thomas J. Tisch, FLF Associates
Donald G. Tober, Sugar Foods Corporation
Bruce G. Wilcox, Cumberland Associates, LLC
Kathryn S. Wylde, The Partnership for New York City

Financiers of neo-conservatism

The "financing of neoconservatism doesn't come from D.C.", Mark Gerson is quoted as saying in the April 27, 2003, New York Observer.^[11]

"Instead, said Mr. Gerson, it comes from New York moneymen like Bruce Kovner, chairman of the Caxton Corporation, and Roger Hertog, the vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management. Last year, both financiers helped fund a new newspaper, The New York Sun, now fighting its anti-liberal battle with its New York Times –counterprogrammed slogan, 'A Different Point of View.' Both Mr. Kovner and Mr. Hertog also chipped in to join neoliberal Martin Peretz as co-owners of The New Republic. Mr. Kovner and Mr. Hertog, as enlightened neoconservative businessmen-intellectuals, are also on the board [of trustees] of the Manhattan Institute, where Mr. Gerson and William Kristol are also trustees, as well as the Washington, D.C.–based American Enterprise Institute."^[11]

Funding

Between 1985 and 2005, the Institute received $20,629,883 (unadjusted for inflation) in a total of 296 grants from only nine foundations:^{[10]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research#cite_note-9)

Armstrong Foundation
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation^{[11]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research#cite_note-10)
Brady Education Foundation, Inc.
Castle Rock Foundation
Earhart Foundation
F.M. Kirby Foundation
Gilder Foundation
Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation
Hickory Foundation
Jaquelin Hume Foundation
John Templeton Foundation
John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
JM Foundation
Koch Family Foundations (Claude R. Lambe Foundation)
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Randolph Foundation^{[12]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research#cite_note-11)
Roe Foundation
Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation
Scaife Foundations (Sarah Mellon Scaife, Carthage^{[13]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research#cite_note-12))
Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
Smith Richardson Foundation
Walton Family Foundation
William E. Simon Foundation
William H. Donner Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research

Funding sources

The Manhattan Institute received $19,470,416 in grants from 1985-2005, from foundations such as the Koch Family Foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, Inc., the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.^{[^^60]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research#cite_note-59) The Manhattan Institute does not disclose its corporate funding, but the Capital Research Center listed its contributors as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Exxon Mobil, Chase Manhattan, CIGNA, Sprint, Reliant Energy, Lincoln Financial Group Foundation, and Merrill Lynch.^{[^^61]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research#cite_note-60)

MANHATTAN INST

According to its website, the Manhattan Institute produces ideas that are both literally and figuratively outside the Beltway. We have cultivated a staff of senior fellows and writers whose provocative books, essays, reviews, interviews, speeches, and op-ed pieces communicate our message and influence the debate. These fellows work in the Institute's nine policy centers, which study and promote reform in areas ranging from health care, higher education, legal policy, and urban development to race relations, immigration, energy, and counterterrorism.

Among other ideals of neoconservatism, MI supports increased privatization of civil services (such as sanitation, transportation maintenance, and welfare), deregulation of environmental protections, and school vouchers. Notable personalities connected with the Manhattan Institute include Betsy McCaughey, Peggy Noonan, and Bill Kristol. Chester E. Finn

MANY CONNECTIONS INCL HUDSON, CATO AEI, Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies 0 0 20 20

Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy Landmark Legal Foundation 0 0 18 18

Media Research Center

Reason Foundation http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research/connections

http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/10/07/who-is-robert-bryce/181888

Bryce Works For The Manhattan Institute, An Industry-Funded Think Tank

Robert Bryce Is A Senior Fellow At The Manhattan Institute. Bryce is "a senior fellow with the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment at the Manhattan Institute." The center "seeks to influence today's energy policy debate by developing and advancing ideas rooted in free-market economic principles" and disseminates its message "through research papers, op-eds and interviews." According to The Manhattan Insitute's 2009 990 form, accessed through GuideStar.org, the center had expenses of $496,692. Manhattan Institute, accessed [10/6/11]

Manhattan Institute Is Funded By ExxonMobil. According to ExxonSecrets.org, the Manhattan Institute has received $385,000 from Exxon since 1998, including $50,000 in 2010. Exxonsecrets.org, accessed [9/13/11]

Manhattan Institute Has Received Funding From The Koch Family Foundations. The Manhattan Institute has received over $1.3 million total from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation and the David H. Koch Foundation over the years, both of which are associated with Koch Industries, an oil, gas and chemical corporation. From 2001 to 2009 (the most recent year for which data is available), the Lambe Foundation gave The Manhattan Institute $200,000 annually. The Lambe Foundation's board of directors is "comprised entirely of Koch family members, senior Koch executives, and staff who serve Koch foundations," including the CEO of Koch Industries Charles G. Koch, according to Greenpeace. Greenpeace, [accessed 10/7/11]

Manhattan Institute Obscures The Science Supporting Manmade Climate Change. In a 2007 report, the Manhattan Institute stated:

To what degree are human-induced greenhouse gases responsible for warming the atmosphere? The answer is unclear. Despite the certitude with which the media and politicians treat the issue, the science remains muddled. Temperatures fluctuate: they go up in some regions, down in others, and may be affected by naturally occurring phenomena, such as El Niño. Manhattan Institute, accessed [10/6/11]

In a second edition of the report, the Manhattan Institute stated in 2009:

Both the Earth's average temperature and global carbon-dioxide emissions increased during the twentieth century.But what should we make of research showing recent warming on Mars and Pluto, planets without power plants or automobiles? Is planetary warming simply a natural phenomenon? A better understanding of the issues surrounding these and similar questions is needed, if policymakers intend to craft prudent energy policies. Manhattan Institute, [April 2009]

Manhattan Institute Was Previously Funded By Tobacco Industry. In a 1990 memo, tobacco company RJ Reynolds said: "For the past few years, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company has been a corporate sponsor of the Manhattan Institute," which "has done much to stimulate thought at policy-making levels about the ramifications on American life of the product liability situation." The Manhattan Institute also received money from other tobacco companies. A 1997 RJ Reynolds strategy memo brainstorming ways to improve the image of the tobacco industry proposed working with the Manhattan Institute to "educate the public about epidemiology and put risk in perspective." Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, [10/19/90, 12/10/90, 4/11/95, 10/19/95, 10/25/95, 1/14/97, 2/4/97]

Manhattan Institute Worked With Philip Morris On Piece Criticizing Clinton Health Care Plan. A Philip Morris memo revealed that the tobacco company "worked off-the-record" with the Manhattan Institute's Betsy McCaughey on her "three-part expose in The New Republic on what the Clinton plan means to you." The plan included an increase on tobacco taxes. *The Atlantic*, [9/28/09]

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=51

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Manhattan_Institute

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow withe the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment at the Robert BryceManhattan Institute, a conservative U.S. think tank. A biographical note states that he has "has written about the energy business for two decades" and that since 2005 "he has served as the managing editor of Energy Tribune, an online publication that focuses on the global energy sector."^[1]

Contents[hide]

Critic of Carbon Capture and Storage

In an opinion column in the New York Times, Bryce criticized the inclusion of $2 billion in an energy bill proposed by John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman on top of $2.4 billion included in the 2009 economic stimulus package. "That’s a lot of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move the newly captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering. Lawmakers should stop perpetuating the hope that the technology can help make huge cuts in the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions," he wrote.^[2]

He also argued that, since analysts estimate that CCS would cut power output by as much as 28 percent, "it’s hard to believe that the United States, or any other country that relies on coal-fired generation, will agree to reduce the output of its coal-fired plants by almost a third in order to attempt carbon capture and sequestration." He also noted that the public would probably end up footing the cost of pipeline infrastructure but doubted that the storage capacity actually existed.^[2]

Bryce also foreshadowed public opposition to the living next to a carbon dioxide dump. "There will also be considerable public resistance to carbon dioxide pipelines and sequestration projects — local outcry has already stalled proposed carbon capture projects in Germany and Denmark. The fact is, few landowners are eager to have pipelines built across their property. And because of the possibility of deadly leaks, few people will to want to live near a pipeline or an underground storage cavern. This leads to the obvious question: which members of the House and Senate are going to volunteer their states to be dumping grounds for all that carbon dioxide?," he wrote.^[2]

Articles and resources

References

↑ "Robert Bryce", Manhattan Institute website, accessed May 2010.
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 Robert Bryce, "A Bad Bet on Carbon", New York Times, May 12, 2010.

External resources

External articles

Sarah Forbes, "NYTimes: A Bad Bet On Carbon? Another View on CCS", World Resources Institute, May 14, 2010.
George Peridas, "Bryce's turn to get it wrong on CCS", Switchboard (Blog), May 21, 2010. (Perides is a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.)

thinkprogress:

One could devote a lifetime to debunking Robert Bryce’s new book“Power Hungry.” Fortunately, we have A. Siegel of GetEnergySmartNow! on the job in this repost.

On reading the opening paragraphs of Robert Bryce’s author’s note, I felt a kindred soul:

.. just how lucky I am. There is no more complex or fascinating topic than energy. “¦ the scale of energy use and the complexity and the importance of the energy business are unmatched by any industry. The study of energy includes physics, geology, chemistry, engineering, metallurgy “¦ the list goes on and on. “¦ no matter how much I study it, I still feel like a rank amateur. And, yet, if we are to make wise choices about energy policy, it is essential for all of us “” as voters, as owners and managers of businesses, and as policymakers “” to understand what energy is, what power is, how they are measured, and which forms of eneryg and power production make the most sense environmentally and economically.

Sadly, the material that followed this opening shattered the reverie of idyllic bonding.

Masquerading as an unbiased, fact-based look at America’s energy situation and viable paths forward into the future, Robert Bryce’s Power Hungry is a mixed collection of factual material, thought-provoking constructs, selective ‘truthiness’, questionable (if not simply wrong) data crunching, and outright deceptions. This mix of material makes Bryce’s work dangerous reading for those without a serious grounding in energy (related) issues while that same mix calls into question this work’s value for anyone with that more serious background.

Defective calculation or outright deception?

Bryce makes much through the book on renewable energy’s failure in terms of energy density. In the case of solar and wind power, he focuses on electricity with the number of watts produced per square meter. While there are numerable questionable elements in his discussions (such as placing equivalency between a depletable resource, such as a natural gas well, that might produce for just a few years vs a renewable resource (solar or wind) that can produce at that same location indefinitely), his equations simply do not stand up to even cursory scrutiny. Bryce asserts that “the average wind turbine has a power density of about 1.2 watts per square meter” [page 235]. As there are 4000 square meters to an acre, this would mean that an “average” wind turbine would be able to produce, on average, 4800 watts (4.8 kilowatts) .

The planning factor for wind turbine placement – the “a “footprint” of land that has to be taken out of production to provide space for turbine towers, roads, and support structures” – is 0.25 acres per wind turbine. (See herefor details.) This would mean, according to Bryce’s formulation that an “average” wind turbine produces 1200 watts on a constant basis. Using a somewhat low capacity factor of 0.33, this would mean that an average wind turbine would be rated at 3600 watts (3.6 kilowatts) to meet Bryce’s statement of the “average” wind turbines. Translating this to acreage, this would be 14.4 kw/acre of wind-power capacity. Ananalysis of 93 wind projects, with some 14 gigawatts (14,000,000 kilowatts) of wind power capacity found “the average permanent direct impact value” of 0.3 hectares per MW of capacity. As an acre is 0.4047 hectares, this translates to roughly 1.33 MW of capacity per acre or nearly 100 times greater than what Bryce’s formulation suggests. Using that 33% (which, again, is low) utilization factor, this translates to about 110 kilowatts per acre or 110 watts per square meter as opposed to Bryce’s assertion of 1.2 watts per square meter.

As a related element in the energy density question, Bryce does not – in anyway – account for depletable vs renewable. A wind farm could, in theory, produce indefinitely from the same site with a good possibility that production would actual increase over time with improved technology (wind prediction) and turbine upgrades. Fossil fuel resources (coal, oil, natural gas) will deplete. As Bryce points out, shale natural gas wells deplete at a very fast rate: “The new shale gas wells “¦ have steep decline curves, meaning that output from some wells may fall by 80 to 90 percent during the first year of production.” [page 253] Thus, over the life-span of a working wind turbine, the “equivalent” shale natural gas production might actually encompass 10 or more sites which throws another factor

Robert Bryce misleads through selective and distorting citation of material; his work is a classic example of ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’. He is frequently quite selective in presenting/discussing information. As an example, Bryce emphasizes the financial value of mineral rights to landowners (see page 248). He does not, in an equivalent vein, discuss or mention the rental/royalty payments that property owners receive for wind turbines. As an example, the 16 turbine, 24 megawatt Klondike Wind Farm, Phase 1, in Sherman County, Oregon, provided $362,442 in property tax in 2005 (10% of the total property tax base in the county) and the “farmers “¦ receive annual property payments of between $2-$4,000 per year for each turbine sited on their property. For comparison, each turbine sites on only half an acre of land, enough to earn less than $100 per year if used to cultivate wheat.”

Here are a few more examples of distorting the situation, in just one arena, energy efficiency:

Bryce makes claims about how the US is so efficient, pointing to percentage increases in efficiency. He does not, however, ever discuss the absolute terms comparing the U.S. economy with other countries or, even more relevant, comparing US states with each other. In fact, when compared to ‘peers’ (Europe, Japan), the United States is far less efficient in terms of energy used per $GDP.
Betraying his libertarian bent (as a fellow at the libertarian Manhattan Institute), Bryce simply asserts that there doesn’t need to be regulatory or other action to move energy efficiency forward because it will simply happen. The truth is that this is simply false, as has been documented and analyzed in study after study, case after case. There are psychological, cultural, structural, organization, fiscal and other reasons why this is false. Study after study show that a large chunk of US energy (electrical in the example) demand could be carved out (large as 20-30+%) via energy efficiency at the equivalent cost of 4 cents or less per kilowatt hour over the next decade. And, the benefits of energy efficiency could well be much more significant. There are, however, many reasons why, from the utility to the business to the community to the individual household, there are barriers that inhibit these efficiencies from occurring “” which Bryce’s truthiness utterly ignores. (An excellent starting point on this is the 1991 Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) study: Climate: Making Sense and Making Money. Oages 11029 are a table laying out barriers to energy efficiency with suggested paths for overcoming those barriers.)
Bryce attacks regulation, in multiple levels. A poster child for energy efficiency is the refrigerator. In 1973, refrigerators were the largest single use of electricity in the home and the demand had been growing at 9.5% / year since WWII. Energy efficiency had been declining as manufacturers sought to cut costs. Utility planners had, at that time, carved out a 9.5% growth rate in power demand indefinitely. In the face of the oil embargo, California began to drive standards that were followed by five state and national standards (Energy Star as latest round). In 1972, the average refrigerator used about 2000 kilowatt hours / year. Today, with ice makers & water cooling & increased average size & inefficient side-by-side models, the average refrigerator uses under 500 kwh/year. And, by the way, in current dollar terms, the price of refrigerators has dropped per cubic foot in part because the requirements for energy efficiency have led manufacturers to redo production lines & drive improved efficiency in construction. This is a very straightforward example of the power of government regulation to drive reduced energy usage and save consumers money.

This is a very straightforward example of the power of government regulation to drive reduced energy usage and save consumers money. As Secretary of Energy Steve Chu discussed the other day, writing regulation and setting standards are (without exception) the lowest cost move with the highest payoff to the economy that the Department of Energy can pursue. Speaking of libertarians like Bryce, Chu commented that there are economists that will account, as a value, the reduced freedom of choice due to tightening standards. To this, Secretary Chu noted that

Forcing people to save is a cost that I am willing to bear. We’re going to enforce standards

Bryce clearly believes that forcing people to save money through driving greater energy efficiency in appliances through standards is somehow wrong.

The ideological bent

Bryce asserts that he is not ideological and that he is simply seeking facts. Power Hungry’s content proves this false.

Bryce belittles Democratic politicians and attacks (with some legitimacy) the ethical and other questions surrounding carbon offsets such as those at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He makes no such commentary and provides no examination of the ridiculousness of “Drill, Baby, Drill” chants at the Republican National Convention, with no discussion of how little impact that would have on America’s energy future.
When claiming some form of ‘neutrality’ on climate change issues, when it comes to discussing those laying out the scientific case for climate change, Bryce refers to James Hansen as “the high-profile NASA scientist who is closely aligned with former vice president Al Gore”. The skeptics are, however, given strong titling such as the reference to “Richard Lindzen, the climate scientist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology” and serial climate delayer and confuser Roger Pielke, Jr, as “a professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado”.

No, Robert is not biased at all “¦ perhaps that is why the book jacket doesn’t mention the his position at the libertarian Manhattan Institute.

While there is material of interest, “¦

One has to read this book questioning every assertion of fact and every statement. This makes this an extremely difficult book to read since simply accepting his statements as accurate is, as the above demonstrates, absurd since so much of what he writes is questionable on factual basis. Yet, reading 300+ pages with reference book always at hand for checking up on the author is tiresome. This book should never have made it through fact checking and serious review which makes one wonder what Public Affairs’ process is with non-fiction.

And, of course, the problems extend beyond fact into intellectual construct. Putting aside how Bryce’s libertarianism impacted the work, Bryce asserts that we should not be talking of “energy” but, instead, of “power”, because power is what we want. This construct, however, fails to capture the true core issue. When it comes to automobiles, for example, while there are those who are concerned about “power”, caring how many horse power are beneath the hood, most people simply want the ‘energy service’ of a vehicle: that gets them from point A to point B (with some definition of style, comfort, convenience, safety, etc “¦). If the exact same ‘performance’ could be provided with ½ or 1/10th the “power”, the vast majority of people would be perfectly happy. We want a warm house in winter, a cooled office in summer, a cold beer in the evening for drinking while watching the game on our large-screen TV. In other words, Bryce’s assertion that we want “power” and not “energy” is mistaken as what we want are the energy services that we get through systems that use energy and power.

To be honest, this is simply quite frustrating because, as the review opened, this book began with such potential. Bryce could have provided a service to help lower America’s energy illiteracy, with factual and truthful laying out of the situation, highlighting the complexities, and providing his recommended paths forward. Bryce is correct on many points (ethanol is a boondoggle, the energy density of oil is hard to replace, Americans are energy illiterate, “¦), but the factual misrepresentations and semi-hidden ideological bent of the book make this something that should not be on the Energy Bookshelf.

In conclusion “¦

This book is, of course, a darling of the right-wing sound machine circuit (including the pages of The Washington Post). Note the title: Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future. Bryce’s previous book was entitled Gusher of Lies. That seems ever so appropriate as a subtitle for this book.

– A. Siegel, via GetEnergySmartNow!

austin chron review

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Energy Independence'

by Robert Bryce

PublicAffairs, 320 pp., $26.95

The last time energy expert Robert Bryce appeared in the pages of the Chronicle, he sparked a bloody discussion over his doubts about man-made global warming. His latest book, a dissection of the energy market, is even less likely to win him friends. Bryce makes a solid case that energy independence, a totem to both left and right, is not simply unachievable and undesirable but harmful. He depicts himself as the reasonable man facing down a cadre of xenophobes, Luddites, boondogglers, and politicos. He doesn't differentiate between the guilty parties along political lines, laying into Milton Friedman and Al Gore equally. But there are bogus conflations, like saying energy consumption equals wealth and wealth equals low child-mortality rates, even though the Btu-guzzling U.S. has one of the worst infant-death rates of all industrialized nations. And then there's downright audacity, like calling Dubai economically liberal when its ruling family has been accused of human trafficking (with no sense of irony, he later indicts the Brazilian ethanol industry for using slaves).

Bryce is devastating in his attacks on certain industries, like the water-hungry, subsidy-hog ethanol, but others – most especially oil, coal, and natural gas (i.e., the entrenched energy industries) – get a pat on the head. His sole criterion for judging the merits of any energy source seems to be price per watt. His solution, at its core, is to keep burning oil, get ready to burn even more oil, and don't really worry about it. He touts nuclear, using the experience of Austin Energy and the South Texas Project as his positive model but fails to factor in decommissioning costs that could outweigh any savings. Even though he has a chapter on long-term changes in the energy mix, there's a perturbing short-termism in his writing common to free marketeers. (Many oil advocates argue against his plan to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling now, calling it a strategic reserve.) There's also a disturbing amorality, like telling readers to "adapt" to global warming, which seem dismissive of the resulting body count. But for Bryce, price is what counts.

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About the Program

About the Authors

Robert Bryce

Major News Outlets Give Fossil-Fuel-Funded Think Tanks a Free Platform

Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council

History

Tobacco issues

War on terrorism: axis of evil

Immigration: covering all the bases

Manhattan Institute Board of Trustees

Financiers of neo-conservatism

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Bryce Works For The Manhattan Institute, An Industry-Funded Think Tank

Critic of Carbon Capture and Storage

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External articles

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Energy Independence'

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