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consumers research ceii hild

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MERRI OK

SEE ESG ATTACK

~ CLIMATE LAWSUITS

SEE LEO

alec 2024

merri ok

see tppf

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AN PP 4 26

Across the country, Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.

The effort is unfolding as courts are weighing more than 30 significant lawsuits by states, counties and municipalities accusing fossil fuel companies of misrepresenting the risks their products posed to consumers and seeking to recoup the costs of disasters and other climate impacts like wildfire losses or coastal flooding that their products helped cause. A goal of the legislation is to block these cases from going forward and prevent new ones from being filed.

The strategy to establish state laws that will make it all but impossible to sue oil and gas companies was laid out in detail by a group of lobbyists and political operatives in December, during a panel presentation at the annual States and Nation Policy Summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council — the influential organization that brings together state lawmakers, corporate leaders and conservative activists to draft and promote legislation.

During the session, one of the panelists, Will Hild, the executive director of a nonprofit called Consumers’ Research, described the climate cases as a liberal effort to use the judicial system to exact a new tax on energy companies in the form of civil judgments. Another panelist, Oramel H. Skinner, the former solicitor general for Arizona and the executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for Consumers, warned that those judgments will trickle down to make citizens’ lives less affordable and ultimately make many of their choices — whether to own pickup trucks or purchase a side of beef — illegal.

ProPublica reviewed an audio recording of the event obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group Documented.

Hild and Skinner had come to the session with a ready-made fix: a set of pre-written bills and plenty of funding.

Consumers’ Research and the Alliance for Consumers are both funded by organizations connected to Leo. ProPublica examined lobbying records across 25 states, federal tax disclosures for more than a dozen organizations and notes from other closed-door strategy sessions among ALEC members and found that several Leo-supported groups are part of a national strategy to give legal immunity to companies for their climate emissions.

Since 2021, Leo has been deploying a $1.6 billion gift through a series of nonprofits and other organizations that obscure the source and the recipients of donations — so-called dark money groups. Much of that money has been routed through a nonprofit judicial advocacy group Leo founded — now called The 85 Fund — which both receives and disseminates Leo’s funding. Many of these nonprofits are increasingly focused on issues related to climate change.

The panel session’s moderator, Michael Thompson, is a senior vice president at CRC Advisors, Leo’s for-profit Virginia-based political and corporate consulting firm. He also sits on ALEC’s Private Enterprise Advisory Council. Hild’s organization, Consumers’ Research, received more than 65% of its funding in 2024 through a dark money group called Donors Trust. The 85 Fund contributed more than $67 million to Donors Trust in 2024. Consumers’ Research also works closely with — and contracted more than $670,000 of work in 2024 to — CRC Advisors. Another panelist, Paul N. Watkins, was a legal fellow at Consumers’ Research. According to tax filings, his law firm received more than $2.2 million in 2024 from the group. As recently as 2024, Skinner was also counsel for Leo’s 85 Fund, according to the nonprofit’s tax filings.

= POWELL MEMO BS

“For decades, the left has leveraged immense resources to capture the institutions that shape our society — the legal system, universities, medical and scientific bodies, the entertainment industry, and our biggest corporations,” Leo wrote to ProPublica in a text message. “That takeover resulted in a radically woke culture that does not reflect the will of the American people, or the pillars of limited constitutional government that made our country great. That is why our enterprise supports organizations that are committed to crushing liberal dominance and restoring balance in the institutions that shape society.”

At the ALEC session, Skinner presented a model bill that would effectively bar cities and towns from bringing public nuisance lawsuits against corporations and others when the issue is a broad public harm like climate change. In several cases, plaintiffs have argued that the impacts of climate change — the buckling of a road from extreme swings in temperature, for example — are a “nuisance” caused by fossil fuel companies.

Nuisance claims are common in the American legal system, giving individuals, companies or communities a way to sue when someone else’s actions damage their property, degrade the health or safety of the environment around them or interfere with their rights. Under these laws, parties can ask for financial compensation or seek court orders to remedy problems, such as pollution. Skinner, however, argues that nuisance laws should only be used to address local, easily fixable problems, like excessive noise from a bar. His bill would curtail the use of public nuisance suits in climate cases by limiting liability for manufacturers and other businesses and giving state attorneys general the sole authority to bring them.

“Think really hard about every lever you have in your states to shut off the ability for this woke lawfare machine to churn,” Skinner told the audience. “The left’s goal is to reshape society around you using the courtroom.”

The second draft law, called the Energy Freedom Act, was produced by the policy nonprofit associated with Hild’s organization. It would, among many provisions, shield businesses from liability related to emissions of greenhouse gases if those releases did not violate the federal Clean Air Act.

Critics of the bills say they subvert the rights of local communities. They send the message that “you can pollute with impunity,” said Carly Phillips, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s really a thumb in the eye of places that are affected by climate change.”

The push to block climate suits across the states comes as several of the cases against the oil industry approach, or have already entered, the perilous legal phases of discovery, when plaintiffs will have the opportunity to seek confidential industry documents and depose oil executives. The stakes for oil companies are enormous. By some estimates more than $10 trillion in damages can be attributed to U.S. emissions.

:{:{There’s a reason why state and local governments have increasingly brought these suits. The frequency and cost of climate-influenced disasters, including severe storms, drought and flooding, continues to mount — between $350 billion and $450 billion in each of the last three years — stretching government budgets.}:

Significantly, the science that makes it possible to attribute how much any one disaster was influenced by climate change has steadily advanced. To cite one example, the March heat waves across the U.S. would have been virtually impossible without the emissions that have caused climate change, according to the European science group World Weather Attribution, and were about four times as likely to happen as they were a decade ago.}:

Boulder, Colorado, is among the places facing increasing droughts, more extreme precipitation and larger wildfires — all of which are significantly propelled by climate change linked to the emissions from the use of fossil fuels. The state has estimated the costs of these perils will run into the many hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2018, Boulder County sued Exxon Mobil and the Canadian oil company Suncor Energy, accusing the companies of “intentional, reckless and negligent conduct.”

Among its claims, the county alleged the oil companies engaged in a conspiracy to mislead the public and violated consumer protection rules by mischaracterizing the dangers of their products. They accused the oil companies of creating a public nuisance by altering the environment and leaving the county to pay to abate growing hazards such as the flooding that tests roads and bridges. Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy have never filed a response in Colorado but asked for the case to be dismissed.

Ever since, the lawsuit has been mired in a dispute over whether Colorado courts were the correct venue, with the state Supreme Court ultimately ruling last May that they were. Suncor filed to the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider, and this fall it will weigh the company’s petition asking whether federal environmental law preempts the state law.

:{:{The high-profile national court case is just one facet in an increasingly tense fight over liability for the fossil fuel industry. In January, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest fossil fuel industry group in the United States, said fighting the climate liability lawsuits was one of its top priorities in 2026. Lobbying records for the group from last year show that it advocated for legislation to protect oil producers from climate lawsuits at the state level. }:

The Trump administration; other industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce; and several of the nonprofit advocacy groups associated with Leo have argued that state courts are the wrong venue for claims that ultimately concern emissions that drift widely across borders, and they wish to see other cases moved or dismissed. They say that because the federal government already has the authority to regulate those emissions, the federal courts, not the states, should hear the claims.}:

In an interview, Hild told ProPublica that he sees the suits as an illegitimate effort to enact policy through the courts and to “regulate the entire U.S. economy from a single state.”

In an email, Skinner wrote: “Our effort is not one focused on climate change. But it is true that left-wing activists and their dark money donors have put vast sums of money and years of groundwork into pushing a coast-to-coast campaign of climate-focused public nuisance lawsuits.”

Neither Watkins nor Thompson responded to requests for comment.

When Skinner and Hild finished their presentation at ALEC they made a QR code available to download the language of the model bills and directed the audience to a woman named Catherine Gunsalus, who was in the back of the room. She would be able to answer any questions, they said.

Gunsalus until recently worked for the Heritage Action Fund, the political and lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, the Trump-aligned think tank that is most recently known for promoting the Project 2025 agenda. Records show that Gunsalus has also lobbied in collaboration with another Leo-affiliated group, Americans for Public Trust.

In April 2025, she formed a lobbying firm called Varidon Strategies and began registering in states almost immediately afterward, according to records. By mid-summer, Varidon was representing Alliance for Consumers Action Fund; Consumers’ Research; The Honest Election Project, an affiliate of The 85 Fund; as well as other Leo entities in 25 states. In the majority of those filings, Varidon used an email address at the domain of Holtzman Vogel, a Virginia-based law firm that is often retained by Leo’s organizations.

Gunsalus did not reply to a detailed list of questions.

In the four months since the ALEC summit, there has been substantial activity in the states where Varidon has registered. On Jan. 5, representatives in Missouri introduced the loosely related Eliminate Criminal Profiteering Act, which could stop revenues flowing to law firms from settlements in the sort of nuisance suits often used in climate cases. Two days later, legislators took up the Public Nuisance Reform Act, which proposes narrowing the definition of what could be considered a nuisance.

That same month, similar bills were introduced in Indiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. In February, eight more followed in Oklahoma, Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Louisiana and Kansas. Skinner, who is registered to lobby in Kansas, was invited to testify in a hearing about that state’s bill and launched a new “End the Lawfare” website targeting the “left-wing” agenda. As of April 2, versions of the model legislation offered at the ALEC meeting have been introduced across 11 states altogether. In Utah, the governor has signed two related bills into law, and in Tennessee and Indiana, bills are awaiting their governors’ signature.

The more states there are with some sort of waiver in place, the narrower the pathway for cities and states to seek redress as environmental conditions worsen, and the costs continue to rise. Hild and Skinner and the Leo network’s bills also serve another purpose: teeing up a conflict that pits states against one another, a conflict that only the Supreme Court or Congress can finally resolve.

As Hild put it at the ALEC gathering, “This is economic civil war.”

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Exclusive: Circuit Court Ruling on Biden DOE's Appliance Regulation 'a Win' for Americans

PJ Media

Climate Depot's Marc Morano called the DOE's revoked regulations “a complete bypassing of democracy through the unelected regulatory state” and ...

Exclusive: Circuit Court Ruling on Biden DOE’s Appliance Regulation ‘a Win’ for Americans

CATHERINE SALGADO | 6:52 PM ON JANUARY 09, 2024

The Biden Department of Energy (DOE) just lost a case on its heavy and damaging regulation of laundry and dishwashing machines, and a consumer advocate is celebrating the move as “a win” for Americans’ “consumer choice.”

Fifth Circuit Court judges Clement, Wilson, and Oldham ruled on Jan. 8: “In 2022, the Department of Energy tightened the regulatory regime surrounding America’s dishwashers and laundry machines. Petitioners sued. The Department’s actions were arbitrary and capricious. So we grant the petition and remand to the Department.”

The Biden administration has been attempting to wage a war on appliances on multiple occasions and fronts, partly due to its radical and unscientific climate alarmist agenda.

Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild is one expert who sees the court ruling as a victory. Consumers’ Research is a consumer advocacy organization that says it is “focused on educating consumers on the policies, products, and services of concern to them and to promote the freedom to act on that knowledge and understanding.”

This new ruling against the DOE appears to be pro-freedom and pro-consumer. “This is a fantastic ruling for American consumers,” Hild said in exclusive comments to PJ Media.

Hild explained that the DOE appliance regulations came out of the Biden administration’s Environmental, Social, and Governance goals (ESG, or woke standards poisoning our government and businesses). “These regulations were part of Biden’s ESG agenda, that was more about pushing a radical environmentalist agenda than protecting and serving consumers, and today is a win for consumer choice and our standard of living,” Hild said.

*For Our VIPs:I’m So Glad I Have a Gas Stove Right Now

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2023/06/16/leonard-leo-bankrolls-former-lieutenant-to-challenge-gop-incumbent-in-missouris-2024-race-for-ag

Trump’s “judge whisperer” Leonard Leo, the Christian conservative largely responsible for moving the federal court system to the far right in the past decade, is deploying his powerful network to get a friend and former employee elected as Missouri’s next attorney general.

Will Scharf, a former federal prosecutor who worked briefly as a vice president at Leo’s public relations firm CRC Advisors, is challenging sitting Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) in the August 2024 GOP primary—and leaping ahead of him in campaign cash. 

Missouri Gov. Mike Parsons (R) appointed Bailey to replace former Attorney General Eric Schmitt (R), who was elected to the U.S. Senate last November. But the new attorney general has seen an exodus of key Schmitt staffers since taking office in January, one of whom told the National Review that, “Bailey is not going to be the conservative fighter that Eric Schmitt was.” Given his more “business-friendly” approach, conservative activists are concerned that he won’t have Schmitt’s “appetite for pushing back against critical race theory in schools” or going after “woke” corporations, the National Review reported.

Widely known for his tremendous influence in reshaping the U.S. Supreme Court and moving the federal judiciary to the right, Leo is now aiming to “counter what he sees as an increasing leftward tilt in society,” according to The New York Times.

InJanuary 2020, Leo told *Axios* that he was stepping down from running the right-wing Federalist Society to lead CRC Advisors with communications executive Greg Mueller, starting with a “minimum $10 million issue advocacy campaign focusing on judges in the 2020 cycle.” Still, Leo remains closely involved with the Federalist Society as co-chair of its board of directors.

Scharf, who served as president of a Federalist Society chapter as a law student at Harvard from 2008–11, also reportedly worked as a consultant for Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network (JCN)—since rebranded The Concord Fund—where he was “actively involved” in getting Brett Kavanaugh confirmed as one of Trump’s picks for the Supreme Court.

Both Leo and Mueller, along with Mueller’s wife Charmaine, have maxed out their individual contributions to their hand-picked candidate’s campaign, according to Citizens for Scharf’s January filing. That month, the candidate told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he considers Leo “a dear friend and mentor.”

Of the $575,000 raised by Defend Missouri, the political action committee supporting Scharf’s run, $500,000 has come from Leo’s Concord Fund, according to the PAC’s April filing. 

If Scharf defeats Bailey and wins in the general election, he will likely join the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a cash-for-influence operation that coordinates the official actions of Republican state attorneys general and sells its corporate funders access to them and their staff.

The Concord Fund is on record as the largest donor to RAGA in 2020, 2021, and 2022, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has reported, giving $4 million last year alone. In 2019, RAGA presented Leo with a “special award” for helping to “shape the trajectory of RAGA and the conservative legal movement more than anyone else.”

RAGA also pays Leo’s Creative Response Concepts—now known as CRC Advisors—$7,500 per month for “consulting,” according to 2022 IRS filings.

In 2022, RAGA Executive Director Peter Bisbee and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey spurned Bailey, their RAGA colleague, and contributed $250 and $2,000, respectively, to Scharf instead.

Disclosures reveal that in addition to Leo and Mueller, other executives at CRC Advisors have also supported Scharf’s campaign, with CFO Neil Corkery and his wife Ann each contributing $1,000, President Jonathan Bunch and his wife Amanda each giving $2,650, and Senior Executive Maria Marshall donating $1,000.

For years, the Corkerys have served at the center of Leo’s dark money network. Ann is listed in the filing as an attorney for The 85 Fund, one of Leo’s right-wing funding vehicles, and earns $256,000 per year as a counsel for The Concord Fund. In addition to his role at CRC Advisors, Neil has worked for Leo as treasurer of the JCN, president of the Judicial Education Project (as it was known before being renamed The 85 Fund), treasurer of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, and president of the now-shuttered Wellspring Committee.

Other Leo operatives who lead organizations at the center of the Right’s culture wars have also contributed to Scharf’s campaign. Will Hild, executive director of the Leo-funded group Consumers’ Research that is on the frontlines in the attacks on so-called “woke capitalism;” and Nicole Neily, president of the nonprofitParents Defending Education that is purportedly fighting for parents’ rights, both contributed smaller amounts—in the hundreds—to Bailey’s challenger.

Donor at the Center of the Supreme Court Ethics Scandal Backs Scharf

Real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and his wife Kathy, close friends of Leo and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, maxed out contributions at $2,650 each to Scharf, according to his April campaign filing.

In April, ProPublicareported that Thomas has been accepting luxury trips and lavish gifts from Crow for over 20 years without disclosing them. The story featured a painting—unearthed by True North Research— hanging in Crow’s private resort that depicts him, Thomas, Leo, and others “discussing the law” and illustrates the extremely tight relationship between these men.

Another close associate of Leo’s, the right-wing philanthropist Roger Hertog, gave  https://www.mec.mo.gov/CampaignFinanceReports/Generator.aspx?Keys=B2G41dEVPKgI8cDcdGFsgJsm99XwPL2GsUCWbUlfMr0QoUFTilTH3rvZPcTKwORHP6frqbjz1kQ%2bQsn%2fLxrZKI7CJPRcva8W" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: inherit; background: 0px 0px; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; color: rgb(0, 156, 244); text-decoration-line: none;">

$50,000, the second largest donation made to Defend Missouri. He and Leo have been working together in similar activist circles since at least 2005....Rounding out the leading contributions to Defend Missouri are right-wing donors IsaacPerlmutter, chairman of Marvel Entertainment, and his wife Laura,who together gave $25,000. Perlmutter has emerged as a major GOP donor since Trump’s first presidential run in 2016.

According to Scharf’s January and April filings, other major GOP donors who have jumped in early to support his campaign committee include:

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https://podtail.com/en/podcast/drilled/the-anti-esg-campaign-gets-a-boost-from-raga/

no lnx

The Anti-ESG Campaign Gets a Boost from RAGA - Transcripts

June 13, 2023

Ever since the Securities and Exchange Commission announced its intention to make Environmental Social and Governance metrics actually mean something to investors, polluting industries have suddenly turned on ESG. Now that fight has a legal strategy, being carried out by the Republican Attorneys General Association.

Transcript: https://www.steno.ai/drilled/the-anti-esg-campaign-gets-a-boost-from-raga

Hello and welcome back to Drilled, I'm Amy Westervelt. We've talked before on this show about the growing backlash against taking environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, factors into consideration when it comes to investing. The watchdog group Documented first revealed last year that state treasurers were getting in on the action, kicking woke investment firms likeBlackRock out of their states. Back then I wondered when the attorneys general would show up to join the fray, and now sure enough, they are here. The Republican Attorneys General Association, RAGA, our old favorite, has come to play in the anti-ESG space. But first, a quick reminder, why all this upset about ESG all of a sudden in the first place? Good question. For a really long time, oil companies actually kind of loved ESG. It was all very loose and self-reported, and it gave them a way to unlock so-called green capital. But in 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, looked around and went, huh, there are all these different SEG ratings, and some of them seem a little scammy, and no one knows what these disclosures even really mean. These are the kinds of things it's our job to clean up. So we are going to provide formal guidance on climate risk disclosure.

And that is when you start to see corporate interests, fossil fuel companies, and right-wing politicians lose their minds over ESG. Because all of a sudden, they couldn't just write whatever they wanted to in a report, they might have to actually disclose what their real climate risks are.

Speaker 5  00:02:16

Here is Jesse Coleman withDocumented. I think that a lot of this, both the legislative side, this legal strategy, the strategy of using state treasurers to pressure asset managers into attack climate disclosure, all of this is really mostly aimed at SEC scope three emissions disclosure requirements coming, you know, supposedly coming soon

Speaker 4  00:02:43

in the next couple of months, even. Wait, sorry, I'm gonna pause to define scope three. That means how your product's actually being used, not how you're making it, which is a big deal for especially heavy polluting industries

Speaker 5  00:02:58

like oil and gas companies, for example. Yeah, yeah, it's a really big deal. Whereas ESG, having a non-standardized ESG disclosure is no big deal to a major company. The SEC coming and saying, how much carbon emissions are you really responsible for? Not just, you know, what you're claiming you're responsible for, but if you're an oil company, for example, how much carbon are you actually putting in the atmosphere from everything that you've gotten from underground? What is your real impact? And that is a really big deal. It's probably one of the biggest climate policy issues in play right now. So, you know, in my opinion, a lot of this anti-ESG stuff, which doesn't make a lot of sense on its face, you know, these state bills that have passed in some states and been introduced in a ton of states, the actual thing that those bills are gonna do, they're not gonna have a really big impact. And sort of this antitrust stuff is very similar in the sense that, you know, the claims are kind of weak and it's hard to say exactly what the impact is gonna be specifically. But at the same time, it's building up all of this pressure and it's building up all of this political inertia that is all aimed at opposing, disclosing climate emissions. And that's what this SEC rule would do when it comes out, is that it would require publicly traded companies to disclose those emissions.

So, you know, in my opinion,

that's the real goal, is to keep that from happening. You may have heard Jesse mention there the words antitrust. That is where the Republican Attorney's General Association comes into the picture. Back in June, 2021, a guy named Jason Isaac, who spearheads the Texas Public Policy Foundation's work on energy, went to a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, with an idea for a legal strategy that he thought could take ESG down.

Speaker 7  00:05:04

Documented shared audio from that meeting with us. Yes, so earlier, a couple months ago,our state affairs committee voted nine to nothing. So, broad bipartisan support, every single member voted in support to give the committee subpoena authority.

Speaker 6  00:05:16

So, they have sent out a couple months ago,

our state some paper documents to find out where this collusion is happening. We anticipate truckloads of documents being delivered. And so, we look forward to the Texas Public Policy Foundation to going through those meticulously, because we believe that there is, and we actually partner with C. Boyden Gray, Boyden Gray Associates law firm out of Washington, D.C. Corporate collusion, liability risk for the ESG agenda to charge higher fees and rig the market. We believe that there's antitrust violations. This is really kind of geared towards our attorneys general to lay the foundation for antitrust violations on this corporate collusion. Find out the connections with the Glasgow Financial Alliance for net zero, which has over, I think, $100 trillion under managed assets in there. And there are the connections with the glad zero, this Paris Accord, which is net zero. So, I hope our committee gets a ton of paper back

Speaker 1  00:06:23

from these large financial institutions.

Speaker 7  00:06:28

Hope our committee gets in the courts and our attorneys generalaround the country filed antitrust violations.

Speaker 4  00:06:34

So, yeah, cartels colluding for decarbonization.What the hell is he talking about here?We're gonna try to answer that question right after this quick break. And we're back. So, after COP26 in Glasgow, insurers and asset managers, both formed groups focused on ESG. In both cases, these firms were saying, look, all sorts of environmental and social factors can impact our bottom line, and we would like to know what those risks might be so we can factor that into our decision-making around what to ensure and what to invest in. But according to Isaac, these firms talking to each other, issuing joint statements about what kind of information they'd like to see from companies, that's colluding to rig the market. In the wake of that 2021 ALEC meeting you heard Isaac talking at before, not only did Texas continue with the investigation Isaac mentioned, but Arizona Attorney General, Mark Bernovich, opened an investigation into ESG investing. And Raga coordinated a letter to various asset managers and politicians with more than a dozen attorneys general signed on, stating their concern that ESG investing might actually be an antitrust violation.

Speaker 5  00:08:13

Here's Jesse Coleman again. We started to see some of the bright lights of the Republican Attorneys General Association file various kinds of legal attacks on ESG issues, whether that's going directly after asset managers and asking them questions about their net zero commitments, or that's going directly after ratings agencies

Speaker 4  00:08:38

and saying that you're boycotting fossil fuels. And they seem to have coalesced around this idea of painting ESG as some sort of corporate collusion, you know, building an antitrust case. Can you explain what the thinking is there,

what they're trying to prove?

The allegation is that a lot of large asset managers get together in a shadowy cabal and they plan to collude to reduce carbon emissions. The reason these groups are alleging antitrust violations is that antitrust violations are very scary to companies. If a jury finds you guilty of an antitrust violation, it's very expensive. And it's a pretty hard bar to meet. And most experts are saying that the antitrust allegations that are coming from these people that are opposing climate policy, they probably don't have a leg to stand on, but a lot like slap suits and other kinds of legal tools that are used to silence people, just defending against the antitrust allegation is very, very expensive. So, you know, you see companies really backing away from participation in these kind of global groups that are trying to address climate emissions and trying to address investment

10:08

in the fossil fuel industry by large asset managers. In 2022, Alec once again held a meeting with a session on how to handle ESG at the state level. And again, the antitrust strategy was front and center. This time, Isaac was in the room cheering on new proponents of the strategy, including Will Hild with Consumers Research, which is funded by former Federalist Society President Leonard Leo, Paul Watkins, who used to work in the Arizona Attorney General's office and now runs an outfit called Fusion Law, advising on these sorts of strategies. Andy Puzder, former CEO of the Food Conglomerate that is home to Wendy's and Hardee's, and Catherine Gonzalez with the Heritage Foundation. Puzder kicked things off by comparing ESG investors

11:03

to, not kidding here, the Nazis. I wanna tell you, ESG investing is socialism in sheep's clothing. I mean, this is the challenge of your generation. My father's generation's challenge was the Nazis, who, by the way, were, of course, very proud socialists. The challenge of my generation was the communists, who were, of course, very committed socialists. The challenge of your generation is ESG investing, and it's more insidious than communism or the Nazis. It's the thing they're doing it. So ESG, Environmental Social and Governance. Like, how bad could that be, right? It sounds so innocuous, but it's a ruse. It's a ruse to conceal the fact that it's a direct threat to our founding principles.

11:53

It's a threat to our democracy. How bad could that be, right?

Speaker 4  00:11:55

It's a threat to our democracy.

Speaker 6  00:12:02

Hild and Watkins kept it focused on the litigation strategy. They get in rooms and they talk about they're gonna set a policy across the market. Now, it's been a while since I was in law school,

but when I was there, that was antitrust 101. And that's why you see U.S. senators saying this is potentially criminal antitrust liability.

Speaker 4  00:12:22

You see AG saying that they're going to investigate. And again,I have yet to speak with a single legal expert who thinks that this strategy could actually win in court. But like we said before, that is not necessarily the point. It's already having a chilling effect on investment firms and insurance companies in these net zero groups. And now that Republicans have control of the House, it's the focus of a series of oversight committee hearings too. The first one happened back in May and featured the attorneys general of Utah and Alabama as witnesses.

Speaker 1  00:13:00

Here'sSean Reyes, attorney general of Utah. But ever since the signing of the Paris Agreement, there's been anopen conspiracy to bypass Congress using the power of horizontal agreements by key players in our financial system. Some of these groups are Climate Action 100, the Glasgow Alliance for Net Zero, which include the largest asset managers, banks and insurance companies globally. These horizontal organizations seek to use their collective market power over tens of trillions in assets

to force burdensome changes on American companies.

amy: The Democrats witnessed during this hearing, Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs gave a great and completely non-climate related example

of where ESG can safeguard profits. The more data we as investors have, the better informed our decisions are when selecting investments over the long term. ESG is about looking at a wider range of risks and value opportunities that could have a material financial impact on investment performance. For example, if you're investing in apharmaceutical company, it's thinking about whether that company has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic. Our approach is to integrate material ESG factors into investment decisions along with many other considerations. We are not ignoring traditional financial factors like profitability and credit worthiness. We are integrating more data into our decisions

to give us a better idea of risk and growth prospects. Frerichs also pointed out that limiting the information investors can get about the companies they're investing in

is the exact opposite of a free market idea. This pushback is anti-free market and anti-investor. It is misleading and it is harmful. It harms retirement savers, pensioners, working people, businesses, and it harms America. This coordinated campaign is focused on ESG investing. Most people don't know what ESG is. ESG is data. ESG is simply additional information that investment professionals use to assess risk and return prospects. It is about value, not about values. In order to maximize returns, an investor must be able to manage and mitigate risk. The more data we as investors have, the better informed our decisions are when selecting investments over the long term. ESG is about looking at a wider range of risks and value opportunities.

It could have a material financial impact

on investment performance. Last week, the House Oversight Committee held its second hearing on this subject,

calling on none other than Jason Isaac himself to testify. I'm Jason Isaac. I'm the director of LifePowered, a national initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation to raise America's energy IQ. And I live a high carbon lifestyle. And I think the rest of the world should too. That's why I refer to the ESG agenda as the China ESG agenda. It does very little to help Americans. It does everything to help the Chinese Communist Party. And again, making energy expensive, scarce and government controlled. This body, the United States Congress has not ratified the Paris Treaty. It is not the law of the land here in the United States, butto force an American entrepreneur to admit that his company will comply with that

is just mind blowing to me.

Whether the committee will hold a third hearing remains to be seen. I'm not sure the anti-ESG bench of experts rolls that deep. Plus, while these ideas might get folks at an ALEC meeting riled up, they're remarkably unpopular with American voters, including the majority of Republican voters. New Mexico rep Melanie Stansberry

made that point at last week's hearing. What I find particularly strange about this conversation is that over 63% of American voters actually oppose, directly oppose, any kind of government interference in investing strategies. And the vast majority of Republicans oppose it as well. And when you look at the bigger picture, when you look at what the American people are actually asking Congress to do, asking businesses in the private sector to do, almost 70% of Americans are in support of actions to address climate change,

to transition to a clean energy economy. Whether the SEC will be swayed by the antitrust argument remains to be seen.

That's it for this week. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. Drilled is an original critical frequency production. Our producer is Sarah Ventre. Sound design, mixing, and mastering are by Peter Duff, who also wrote our original score. Our first amendment attorney is James Wheatman at the First Amendment Project. And the show is reported, written, and hosted by me, Amy Westervelt.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/172636/esg-house-oversight-conspiracy

may 11 no lnx

QANON REBOOT

Republicans Are Truly Losing Their Minds Over ESG

Right-wingers at a House Oversight Committee hearing Tuesday insisted this boring investment strategy is some kind of global conspiracy.

Steve Marshall speaks at a podium in front of the Supreme Court building.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who testified at Tuesday’s hearing on ESG, speaks to members of the press in October 2022.

On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee convened a hearing on environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, investing criteria. For over a year now, Republicans have been trying to turn this obscure three-letter acronym into a full-fledged culture war.So far, the right has expressed its complaints about ESG via a word salad whose components don’t share much of a relationship either to reality or one another. This pattern persisted on Tuesday, when the word “cabal” was used at least three times in reference to allegedly “woke” investors.

ESG criteria, in reality, refer to the broad set of data that investors look at to determine a company’s impact on the world and the impact the world might have on it. In other words, it’s not just about whether a company is “good” according to some abstract set of values. It represents another way of factoring risk exposure into investment—something financiers have been doing for centuries.

“Elites from around the globe have formed alliances to coordinate together to implement woke climate policy.”

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The two witnesses Republicans summoned to this week’s committee hearing weren’t economists or investment professionals, who might be familiar with these criteria or risk assessment in general, but attorneys general from Utah and Alabama, respectively: Sean Reyes and Steve Marshall. Whatever ESG actually means, to them and other anti-ESG crusaders, is mostly irrelevant. For those trying to understand their crusade, the hearing showed that it’s best to think of ESG as a canvas onto which the right projects its own plans and anxieties.

If you’ve heard of Marshall, it may well be because he’s spent considerable time since 2020 trying to overturn the results of that year’s presidential election, and shield other Republicans from accountability for spreading lies about it. Both he and Marshall joined fellow red states attorneys general in filing a brief with the Supreme Court supporting Trump’s claims about election fraud. Marshall, for his part, was serving as head of the Rule of Law Defense Fund that year, which sent out robocalls encouraging Trump supporters to flock to the Capitol on January 6.RLDF—whose donors include the Edison Electric Institution and the Judicial Crisis Network—is also a sister organization of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which Marshall was appointed chair of after continuing to deny, in 2022, that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

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Generous RAGA donors have included Koch Industries, Chevron, Exxon, Fox, andTikTok. ProPublica recently reported that companies that initially withdrew funds from RAGA over its role in the January 6 attack are back, including Amazon, Walmart, and JPMorgan Chase’s PAC. Overall, RAGA revenues jumped 68 percent in 2022.

In his testimony, Marshall—who chairs a secretive organization pushing a clandestine political agenda through undemocratic means—accused a “cabal of global elites” of being “clearly connected through various alliances” to try to force an ESG agenda onto an unwilling public. Reyes similarly accused “woke investors” like Blackrock of being part of an “organized syndicate of pressure” that is engaged in an “open conspiracy to bypass Congress.” Answering big policy questions like decarbonization, he argued, “is the role of the people’s elected representatives in a democracy—including each of you in Congress, state elected officials, and local leaders—not unelected bureaucrats or foreign governments.”

In other words, someone who’s spent the last several years attempting to overturn the results of a democratic election took to the Capitol on Tuesday to accuse an ill-defined set of actors of trying to sidestep democracy by asking companies if climate-fueled droughts, floods, and fires (for instance) might have some impact on their operations.And while claiming only to want investors to adhere to fiduciary duty, Republicans failed to mention that much of Wall Street’s wariness around investing in new fossil fuel production has nothing to do with a “woke” agenda: Before the pandemic, energy companies on the S&P 500 were underperforming every other sector on that index, and had spent a decade lagging behind as they binged cash on rapid drilling through the shale boom. Its fortunes have changed in recent years, but investors and oil and gas industry managers themselves are urging modesty on exploration and production precisely so that they can make more money.

“People don’t like men. People don’t like people with a European background, that sort of thing.”

“Elites from around the globe have formed alliances to coordinate together to implement woke climate policy,” Marshall said in his opening statement. “These schemes undermine our system of government because unelected elites are making policy decisions outside of democratic processes.” The footnote on that sentence in his pre-written testimony references Consumers Research, which is funded by millions of dollars in undisclosed donations and advised by right-wing legal guru Leonard Leo.

Republicans on the committee responded enthusiastically to this opening salvo. Wisconsin Republican Glenn Grothman asked Marshall whether “ESG” might influence decisions over who companies hire or put on corporate boards. “Right now there’s certain disfavored groups in our society,” Grothman mused. “People don’t like men. People don’t like people with a European background, that sort of thing. Could this be something where you’re encouraging businesses not to hire or promote people from certain unfavored groups.” In a moment dripping with irony, Texas Representative Pete Sessions decried “activist government making decisions on behalf of free people” in service of his larger point, supporting efforts to limit financial institutions’ decision-making power—and even what kind of data can be made available to them—in order to curb the spread of ESG.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to find much coherence in the right’s screeds against supposedly woke investors—who don’t really seem to exist. But today’s Oversight hearing might have accidentally illustrateda good rule of thumb: Whatever Republicans accuse the “ESG movement” of doing is something they’re probably already doing themselves.

Kate Aronoff @KateAronoff

Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic.

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https://redgreenandblue.org/2022/11/17/rightwing-disinformation-machine-goes-war-esg/

no grf lnx

over the weekend, a special edition of COP, Look, Listen featured network analysis from Graphika, which showed that the anti-environmental, social, and governance (ESG) campaign has become a meeting ground for general rightwing twitter posters, and the climate disinfo-specific actors.

Graphika’s map of 13,000 accounts who tweeted about ESG in October.

By Climate Denier Roundup

While their advanced network mapping of followers and content consumption used to showed that the climate disinformation group was a distinct sub-set of conservative accounts, now “computationally speaking, climate denialists in our analysis are no longer defined as distinct from right-wing culture wars influencers.”

Graphika found that “influencers in this group do the work of framing and amplifying climate topics as a culture wars issue, making it more palatable for a broader right-wing audience, beyond the usual climate denial community.”

The top-performing ESG post, out of 13,000 tweets in October mentioning the acronym, was from Consumers Research, a group funded by conservative activist Leonard A. Leo as part of his billion-dollar “anti-woke” campaign.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the financial resources at their disposal, right-leaning actors got more engagement, by far, than the International Environmental Community network.

Despite the fact that environmentalists tweeted way more content about ESG investing, Graphika found that “engagement from ideologically driven accounts far outweighs more consistent, reliable messaging on sustainable investing. It’s not the topic, but rather the divisive framing that wins attention and engagement.”

Which means “the climate community needs to double down on support for campaigns to keep greenwashing out of ESG, as companies look for opportunities to backslide on commitments to appease critics. Because social media algorithms amplify salacious content over quality, those spreading outlandish disinformation are rewarded while those posting the (sometimes dry or technical) truth are shouted over.”

With their billion-dollar backing and an assist from Big Tech, the Infowars Investors are dominating the digital discussion of ESG issues, and in the course of doing so, have managed to fully merge climate disinfo-specific and general rightwing audiences.

It’s the epic crossover event absolutely no one wanted.

(Originally appeared at DailyKos)

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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) Anexample of this “success” can be found in the work of CEPE senior 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 Independencereceived $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 C:{onsumer 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:

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