TPPF 2 texas
SEE 3 LIFE POWERED
pow mofo
MERRI OK
SEE KEVIN RONERTS PJT 2025
prez --> heritage, evil on NEPA lawsuit ~ wind
see jason issac
11/17 maybe premature, big swamp things
poster, not sure for what 10'18 on brooke rollins (harnet white fail thx god]
html $249,999
see chip roy, pow
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Alarm at rightwing push to reverse clean-energy success in Texas and beyond
Supporters of clean energy say they expect further battles ahead to prevent state’s progress in solar and wind from being unwound
guardian.org
About this content
Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor
Thu 8 Jun 2023
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In the scramble before the end of Texas’s legislative session last week,a must-pass bill was amended to impose new costs upon renewable energy.This came amid a barrage of anti-solar and wind power measures pushed forward by Republicans to reshape a state that has become the US’s powerhouse of clean energy.
But the conservative lawmakers had help.
Sections of the bill that impose new burdens upon clean energy providers were directly crafted and edited by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (or TPPF), a conservative group that has led the backlash to renewables and to make what it calls “the moral case for fossil fuels”, according to a copy of the draft language seen by the Guardian.
Several dozen edits were made to the bill’s amendments by Brent Bennett, a TPPF policy staffer, the document shows, and Texas lawmakers subsequently passed parts of this language along with the key TPPF desires – to impose new transmission costs on renewables and require them to source fossil fuel “backup” power when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing.
The passage of the bill, which funds the ongoing operation of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, was the flagship victory for TPPF even as a raft of other Republican bills that would have “shut down the renewable energy industry in Texas”, as energy analyst Doug Lewin put it, faltered.
The burgeoning influence of TPPF, an organization substantially funded by fossil fuel interests and publicly lauded by Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, is the catalyst to a rightwing attempt to crimp the stunning progress of renewable energy in the state, whichnow produces more than a quarter of all wind-powered electricity in the US.
The group’s agenda is now extending far beyond Texas, bankrolling efforts to halt offshore wind turbines in Massachusetts and to prop up coal power on native American land in Arizona while spearheading efforts to crack down on sustainable finance in energy-producing states like West Virginia.
“We are very influential, we are meeting with policymakers to share recommendations and we’re having success around the country,” said Jason Isaac, a former state representative and now director of TPPF’s energy initiatives. Isaac said that TPFF regularly helped craft “certain aspects” of bills in Texas related to the state’s electricity grid or environmental, social, and corporate governance (or ESG) issues.
“I think conservatives are slowly but surely moving away from variable generation and towards reliable generation,” he said of the group’s quest against renewables. Isaac claimed renewables have been unfairly propped up by a “cult-like fascination” among politicians who have pursued what he called a “dangerous and deadly” agenda to reduce planet-heating emissions.
The aggressive push against renewables in Texas has alarmed environmentalists who fret it will undermine the state’s nation-leading wind industry and threaten the revenues solar and wind generates for local communities and farmers. More broadly, the template used by TPPF in Texas could hobble efforts by Joe Biden’s administration to tackle the climate crisis.
“We are seeing a rush of these bills attempting to wind the clock back on renewables and TPPF really are at the point of the spear on this,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. “They are transparent advocates for the fossil fuel industry and I think they pose an incredible threat to renewables. TPPF have gained incredible traction, they really are shifting the narrative in Texas.
“They’ve won over the top politicians in the state, which is very dangerous. Texas is going to be critical if the US going to get to net zero emissions, so we should take this threat seriously.”
TPPF’s impact can now be found thousands of miles from its base in Austin, Texas, with the group filing a lawsuit in 2021 on behalf of six east coast fishing businesses – collectively calledNantucket Residents Against Turbines – targeting a major windfarm currently under construction off the coast of Massachusetts. Slated to come online by the end of the year, Vineyard Wind will be the first major offshore wind project to be built off the US east coast.
The lawsuit claimed federal agencies did not sufficiently analyze how the project, which is set to deliver enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, would affect wildlife – specifically the endangered North Atlantic right whale – and thereby violated the Endangered Species Act and slew of other environmental policies.
Meghan Lapp, a seafood dealer and longtime offshore wind critic who was a plaintiff in the suit, told Reuters in 2021 that TPPF got involved in the suit at her request. As it announced its involvement in the case, the thinktank also took the unusual step of releasing a trailer called “A Heavy Wind”.
The case was ultimately unsuccessful after a federal judge dismissed it last month, but the idea that wind turbines kill whales has been seized upon by conservatives, especially since December, when dozens of whales began washing up on the Atlantic coast in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) calls an “unusual mortality event”.
Noaa has said there is no evidence that offshore wind power is killing off whales, with fishing practices, boat strikes and the climate crisis among the primary dangers to marine mammals, but congressional Republicans have called on the White House to pause offshore wind development, while Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News, aired a critical series of segments called “The Biden Whale Extinction”.
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The assault on renewables by TPPF and its Republican allies has stunned conservatives who remain supportive of the longstanding bipartisan enthusiasm for clean energy.
The reversal has been particularly stark for Texas which, blessed with the capacious, flat terrain and amenable climate for abundantwind and solar energy, was championed as a bastion for renewables by previous Republican governors George W Bush and Rick Perry, even as they embraced the ubiquitous oil industry.
More than 40% of Texas’s electricity came from carbon-free sources last year, with the state now producing more wind and solar than the next three states – California, Iowa and Oklahoma – combined. This imperious status now seems uncertain.
“I don’t recognize the state sometimes any more from our elected leaders. It’s like we are in a twilight zone where up is down and day is night,” said Matt Welch, state director of Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation.
“I fear we’re losing our lead in the nation and the world as the source for clean energy advancement. It’s just amazing we’ve rolled up the welcome mat and told wind and solar operators they’re just not welcome here any more.”
The Texas Public Policy Foundation was founded in 1989 by James R Leininger, a San Antonio-based physician who made his fortune selling hospital beds, and initially focused on the issue of charter schools before branching out into other topics such as energy. The thinktank is a member of theState Policy Network, a network of far-right non-profits across the country that fight climate-focused legislation.
In 2021, the most recent year for which records are available, donations for the thinktank totaled $25.6m. Publicly available data shows that – like many State Policy Network affiliates – its largest known funder isCharles Koch, the billionaire industrialist who made his fortune from fossil fuels. Entities tied to Koch have contributed at least $8.8m to the group since 2012, according to an analysis by researcher Connor Gibson.
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Tax filings show that the group has received donations from fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, but, as a non-profit, the full extent of TPPF’s fossil fuel funding is unknown.
Issac said, however, it has been “many years” since large oil firms such as Exxon have donated to TPPF as these companies now ostensibly support decarbonization and environmentally responsible corporate governance, which conflicts with the foundation. He insisted that the foundation is committed to “free enterprise and individual liberty” and the eradication of “market distorting” subsidies, not just for renewables but also fossil fuels.
But Welch said that Republican lawmakers, backed by TPPF, have ditched any ideological consistency by heaping onerous restrictions on renewable energy development on private property, in some cases attempting to impose requirements absent from oil and gas drilling, and trying to slash subsidies for the industry at the same time as offering state support for the buildout of new gas plants.
One proposed bill that didn’t get sufficient backing in the latest Texas legislative session would have placed stringent new rules for wind and solar projects, including written permissions from neighboring property owners and setbacks of up to half a mile from the edge of a property for wind turbines. Another would have cut all subsidies for renewable energy.
“On a Tuesday these lawmakers will be adamantly for private property rights, but on a Thursday they will want to stop the growth of renewable energy even though it’s on somebody’s private land,” Welch said, adding thatTPPF was once full of “mini Milton Friedmans for years until recently, and now all of a sudden they throw that out the window.
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“It’s been a shocker. It’s so hypocritical,” he said. “I used to be an acolyte of TPPF but they are now driven by oil and gas billionaires who want to stop alternative forms of energy to benefit their own bottom line. They’ve sold their soul to the almighty dollar.”
Renewable energy remains broadly popular with the Texas public for delivering cheap, clean power along with an injection of cash for entities such as school districts, but affection has somewhat curdled among some of the state’s Republican leadership. A devastating winter storm in 2021, which left millions of Texans without power and led to several hundred deaths, was a major accelerant of this trend.
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In the days following the crippling event, known as winter storm Uri, Abbott and other leading Republicans pushed the blame for the power blackouts upon renewable energy, with misleading pictures of frozen wind turbines from Europe quickly circulating social media as the supposed cause of the grid’s breakdown.
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Subsequent studies have made clear the primary cause of the blackouts were frozen gas pipelines and a lack of infrastructure resiliency to extreme weather, rather than renewables per se, but the perception of faulty wind and solar has stuck, eagerly fanned by TPPF.
“I still believe [renewables] deserve a lot of the blame,” said Isaac. “The storm was helpful in educating people who just assumed when they flip a switch the lights come on that there are issues with grid reliability, that solar panels covered in snow don’t produce electricity.”
Isaac said the foundation accepts that the climate is changing but disputes that this is harmful to people,claiming that the benefits of burning of fossil fuels “far outweighs” any negatives, including deadly air pollution, which he asserts isn’t an issue for the US and its “near natural” air quality. Scientists have, in fact, found that the climate crisis poses huge and growing risks to humanity, with airborne pollutants from burning coal, oil and gas linked to an array of different health problems.
While the most severe of the anti-renewables bills pushed forward in Texas didn’t pass the legislature this year, Isaac said that TPPF remains undaunted and will continue to agitate against what he called “the false panacea of variable power”. Supporters of clean energy said they expect further battles ahead to prevent Texas’s progress in solar and wind from being unwound.
“With the growth trajectory of renewable energy, TPPF can either get on the train or lay down in front of the tracks,” said Welch. “I suspect they won’t rest on their laurels. They’re going to come for renewables again and again and again.”
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Over the past several days Fox networks have aired numerous segments insinuating that the recent deaths of whales across New York and New Jersey beaches are due to the development of offshore wind turbines.
There is no evidence to back up these claims.
NOAA Fisheries, the office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration responsible for the management of marine life, specifically addressed the question on January 24. NOAA stated that the recent whale deaths are “not related to offshore wind development.” The agency further wrote, “Of the whales examined, about 40 percent had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement. Vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the greatest human threats to large whales.” Indeed, nearly 3,000 ships passed through the Port of New York and New Jersey, near where whale deaths are occurring, in the last year — “a figure that vastly undercounts all the ocean traffic in the region and dwarfs the number of vessels that have anything to do with offshore wind.”
Importantly, NOAA Fisheries noted climate change as a contributing factor in the whale deaths. The world’s oceans are rapidly warming, with temperatures reaching a record high in 2022. This is forcing a change in the migration patterns of marine life, including whales, and “can lead to increased interactions with humans as some whales move closer to near shore habitats,” the agency writes.
Additionally, there aren’t even any wind turbines off of the coast of New Jersey. The whale deaths have also been happening at an increased rate since at least 2016, the NOAA reports, which long predates any offshore wind development in the region.
This is not stopping Fox from promulgating claims that offshore wind is killing these whales
On the January 30 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tucker Carlson sarcastically mocked a Politico article which stated that “there is no evidence the wind work and whale deaths are linked.”
“We have no idea why a dozen whales just turned up dead on the beaches of New Jersey,” Carlson said. “Does it have anything to do with the construction of wind turbines off the coast? ‘That's speculation,’ Politico reported. ‘Probably climate change.’ So the story was ridiculous, but what we didn’t get at first was that Politico was paid to run it.”
Carlson took issue with the fact that the article was featured in a newsletter sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council, later calling Politico “prostitutes” for publishing another article sponsored by offshore wind turbine manufacturers. In reality, Politico’s energy newsletters are typically sponsored by energy companies, not environmental groups — with the vast majority of these sponsorships coming from fossil fuel companies.
The next night, Carlson stated that “so-called green NGOs, supported of course by the people they give money to in the Biden administration, are backing the construction of massive offshore wind turbines that appear to bekilling large numbers of whales.” Carlson then hosted a local Republican politician from Nassau County, New York, who called “going all-electric” a “danger to our America,” and stated that “there will always be fossil fuels, at least in my lifetime.”
Carlson’s two recent segments follow a January 13 segment detailing “The Biden whale extinction.” (Another chyron during that episode read “Green New Deal wind farms are killing whales.”)
Questions about offshore wind development were also raised on Fox during the January 31 editions of both America’s Newsroom, with reporter Alexis McAdams stating, “As the whale deaths continue, some lawmakers and activists are calling for a hold on the preparations for offshore wind projects,” and The Story, with guest anchor Trace Gallagher stating, “It's the eighth whale to die along the shore of New Jersey and New York in the last two months, fueling the debate about whether the deaths are natural or maybe related to nearby offshore wind projects and the push to go green.”
Several more such segments covering the whale deaths ran on February 1. On Fox Business’ Varney & Co., correspondent Madison Alworth discussed the costs of offshore wind development without noting the massive economic benefits to local and state communities before stating, “All of this is the cost of this clean energy, but as you heard these conservationists saying it's costing our environment even more, and we're already seeing that expense.”
“Not in my backyard,” concluded host Stuart Varney.
Another segment on The Story began with Gallagher stating that, “The mayors of a dozen New Jersey towns [are] now calling for an immediate halt on plans to build thousands of offshore wind turbines as coastal communities raise concerns about the number of whales washing up dead on nearby beaches and soaring financial costs threaten the push to go green.”
Later, Alworth began a segment on Special Report with Bret Baier by claiming “conservationists say that offshore wind turbines are far from clean and may be doing more harm than good for the environment.” She ended the report by again mentioning the economic costs associated with wind turbines and none of the financial benefits.
Finally, Jesse Watters Primetime ran two segments linking offshore wind development to the whale deaths. In one, Alworth cited “conservationists” concerned with whale deaths saying “this clean energy might not be clean at all,” and she again brought up the economic costs of wind turbines without mentioning their benefits. In the second, host Jesse Watters interviewed ex-Greenpeace Canada member Patrick Moore to rail against renewable energy and complain that Greenpeace has been compromised by wind companies. Watters ended the segment by stating that wind turbines are “not good for the Jersey shore, for the Atlantic Ocean, and, as you said, it's not great for consumers either.”
Fox’s guests are not scientists — they have fossil fuel connections and an interest in blocking renewable energy development
Moore is a climate science denier who has consulted for polluting companies. He also (falsely) claims that he is a founder of Greenpeace, which allows Fox to paint him as a credible guest on climate, energy, and environmental issues.
Watters also tried this trick — obfuscating the credibility of an environmental advocate — in an earlier segment on offshore wind and whale deaths. On January 11, Mike Dean of Protect Our Coast NJ was labeled as an “ocean advocate,” and Dean went on to baselessly blame wind development for whale deaths, declaring, “The harms with these projects and the costs are limitless, and it’s really hard to find any benefits at all.” Fox did not note that Dean’s group appears to be backed by the Caesar Rodney Institute, a libertarian think tank with a history of hostility toward climate and environmental policies. The institute has also received funding from the fossil fuel industry, which has a long history of blocking renewable energy projects.
On the January 13 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson hostedMeghan Lapp, a fisheries liaison for the fishing company Seafreeze. Lapp claimed, without evidence, thatoffshore wind development means “essentially carpet bombing the ocean floor with intense sound.” In fact, Lapp has been appearing on Fox News since at least 2019 insinuating that offshore wind development is killing whales. She even appeared in Carlson’s 2021 anti-wind documentary which was chock full of misinformation and debunked talking points.
What has not been mentioned on Fox, and what has been excellently reported on by climate writer Michael Thomas, is that Lapp is a fossil fuel industry ally. Her campaign to stop offshore wind development has beenbankrolled by T:(style="background-color:#ff9900ff"):}::{exas Public Policy Foundatio**n, a fossil fuel-funded think tank that has fought climate policies tooth and nail. TPPF, of course, has spent decades advocating for offshore oil drilling — choosing to downplay the horrific environmental impacts of that practice while embellishing the impacts of offshore wind development.
Finally, Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association appeared on the aforementioned Varney & Co., The Story, and Special Report segments on February 1. Brady, like Lapp, is being backed by TPPFin her campaign to stop offshore wind development. Last year, both Lapp and Brady appeared in a TPPF film entitled “A Heavy Wind: The Threat to an American Heritage,” which detailed commercial fishermen fighting offshore wind projects.
One recent Fox segment interspersed with their offshore wind coverage illustrates the complete hypocrisy of Fox’s climate-related programming
During Fox’s fearmongering about offshore wind development on February 1, America Reports ran a segment with Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) that sang the praises of the Willow Project, a major oil and gas drilling project in Alaska’s national petroleum reserve. Sullivan called the project “actually really good for our environment,” while Fox anchor John Roberts noted some benefits of the project, including billions in revenue and hundreds of jobs created.
While Roberts did ask a question about climate advocates not wanting to lock the U.S. into more fossil fuel extraction, this segment did not mention the massive environmental costs associated with the project. Environmental advocate and journalist Bill McKibben noted in a recent article on the project that Alaska is “already warming faster than almost any place on the planet.Warming so fast that taxpayers are already having to pony up huge sums of money to relocate coastal villages inland. Emissions from the Willow project’s oil would cause $19.8 billion in climate damages; it would generate $3.4 billion in federal tax revenue, which is…a lot less.”
McKibben also cited a Center for American Progress analysis of the project which found that “allowing the Willow project to proceed would result in double the carbon pollution that all renewable progress on public lands and waters would save by 2030.”
Contrast Fox’s fawning coverage of an oil drilling project with its dismissive, conspiracy theory-laden, and climate denial-infused coverage of offshore wind, and you get a perfect sense of why Fox cannot be trusted on climate and environmental issues. While it’s true that there are valid concerns with offshore wind’s impacts on the environment and local marine life — something that has been taken into consideration by government authorities in reviewing previous offshore wind projects —the reality is that fossil fuel projects are significantly more detrimental to the environment and climate than renewable projects.
You will rarely if ever hear these facts reported on Fox, as the network has time and again proved to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry, and its offshore wind coverage cannot be taken seriously.
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After years of lagging behind other countries, the United States is on the cusp of developing a real offshore wind industry. This is good news for the climate, as offshore wind is critical to effectively tackling dangerous warming.
What’s good for the climate, however, is usually bad for fossil fuels. So it’s no surprise that a fossil fuel industry-funded group is leading a combined legal and public relations effort to stop offshore wind development in its tracks.
More surprising may be the argument the group is using. In a lawsuit seeking to stop all ongoing U.S. offshore wind development, The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF)–which has long advocated against climate and environmental policy–says the renewable energy projects should be stopped because they harm the environment.
TPPF has also launched a public relations effort to promote the lawsuit’s claims, including a dramatic three and a half minute “mini-documentary” on “the environmental impact of offshore wind
[vid]
there are, of course, legitimate ongoing conversations about the environmental impacts of offshore wind and how to mitigate them. But these aren’t the conversations TPPF is promoting.
With this effort, TPPF is attempting to trick environmentally-conscious voters into supporting a pro-fossil fuel agenda by co-opting the language of the progressive climate movement. The effort disguises anti-climate extremism as pro-environmentalism, using a common climate disinformation tactic called “woke-washing,” which experts say is on the rise.
TPPF’s long anti-environment history
tPPF is part of the State Policy Network (SPN), a group of conservative nonprofits that fight climate policies across the country. Its primary goal in the climate space is shifting public opinion to reject mainstream climate science and be more supportive of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels, in turn, give TPPF a lot of support. Like many SPN affiliates, TPPF’s largest known donor is Charles Koch. The fossil fuel billionaire has given at least $7.6 million to TPPF, including a $1.3 million donation in 2020 and a $1.5 million donation in 2019. TPPF has also received money from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Luminant, and other smaller fossil fuel companies.
These donors likely only scratch the surface of TPPF’s fossil fuel funding. In 2021, researchers at Brown University published a paper showing that between 2003 and 2018, 75 percent of donations to anti-climate nonprofits like TPPF came from undisclosed grants. “We literally know nothing about where that money came from. It's completely dark,” said Galen Hall, one of the authors of the paper.
Still, the group’s long history of extreme anti-climate rhetoric speaks for itself. TPPF has called the fight against climate change “deluded and illegitimate;” has decried climate science as “alarmism,” and likened decarbonization to a “crusade.” Last year, the group released an op-ed titled “Why Nobody’s Kids Need to be Scared of Climate Change,” which dismissed the dangers of warming while also arguing that nothing can be done to stop it. Many of former President Trump’s environmental appointees came from TPPF; according to E&E News, those officials “overwhelmingly reject climate science, promote more fossil fuel consumption and have run campaigns downplaying the value of renewable energy subsidies.”
TPPF has also long been critical of environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act. In 2018, TPPF attacked "far-left environmental groups" over efforts to protect the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard in the Permian basin. "That this humble lizard could jeopardize what may be the greatest energy enrichment in human history is absurdly chilling,” TPPF’s Kathleen Hartnett White wrote.
In 2017, TPPF attorney Robert Henneke wrote an op-ed for The Hill titled, "The Endangered Species Act is an ineffective regulatory burden." In that article, he quoted a biologist who said, "'We don’t need to save endangered species' because'extinction is part of evolution.'”
Now, however, that same lawyer is using the Endangered Species Act to argue that all U.S. offshore wind development should be killed.
A disingenuous “pro-environment” lawsuit
Filed in December of last year, TPPF’s lawsuit targets the Vineyard Wind project, an 800-megawatt wind farm currently under construction off the coast of southern New England, which could cut 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. It uses allegations against that project to call for pausing all wind farm construction currently happening under the federal “Smart From The Start” program–which is essentially all ongoing wind development in the U.S..
Though it was filed on behalf of commercial fishing groups who argue the project would harm their businesses, TPPF’s lawsuit largely focuses on claims of environmental harm and inadequate environmental review. It asserts violations of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.
TPPF’s lawsuit says the Vineyard Wind project would “likely kill, displace, or disturb local species,” would “likely result in massive devastation of the marine environment,” In particular, TPPF’s lawyers seem concerned about one endangered species: the North Atlantic right whale.
On the surface, these are legitimate concerns. According to the World Wildlife Foundation Fund (WWF), right whales are “one of the most endangered of all large whales,” largely due to commercial whaling operations that pushed them to the brink of extinction in the 19th century. Today, the remaining 350 North Atlantic right whales are mostly threatened by rope entanglements and vessel strikes, which could increase during offshore wind construction and operation.
Environmental groups like the NRDC and the Conservation Law Foundation warn that offshore wind energy, if not developed carefully, could harm or kill the few remaining right whales. But unlike TPPF, they believe it’s possible to build offshore wind turbines and protect endangered species at the same time.
In June 2022, National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Conservation Law Foundation signed a deal to support an offshore wind project off the coast of New York, so long as the developers engage in protective measures for the whales. The groups did this because climate change threatens whales and other endangered marine species, too.
“Development of renewable energy resources is vitally important to the health of the planet, and it's vitally important to addressing climate change,” said the Conservation Law Center’s Priscilla Brooks, who signed the agreement. “We can do this and we can do it responsibly in the ocean.”
TPPF’s real goal: turning public opinion against clean energy
TPPF doesn’t actually care about protecting endangered species. It cares about protecting the oil and gas industry–which is also a massive threat to many species, including humans.
By disguising their motive as pro-environment, the group is engaging in a form of disinformation called “woke-washing,” said Jennie King, a climate disinformation tracker at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
Woke-washing occurs when individuals or organizations use progressive or “woke” language to trick people into supporting fundamentally conservative outcomes. To do this, conservative woke-washers weaponize legitimate progressive concerns to discredit progressive solutions.
“The co-option of progressive language by those who oppose climate action is a big problem for the climate sector,” said King, who is part of a global coalition tracking climate disinformation online. That group recently found that woke-washing is on the rise–particularly from pro-fossil fuel groups trying to discredit clean energy solutions as anti-environment.
“We had case studies where we saw that posts from progressive green groups looked almost identical to dedicated anti-climate groups,” she said. “The only difference would be at the end, where the progressive group’s would say ‘And this is why we need to hold the sector to higher account,’ and the anti-climate group’s would say, ‘And this is why it’s a joke to pretend we can use anything but fossil fuels.’”
Woke-washing may not be a winning legal strategy, at least in TPPF’s case. “Winning any National Environmental Policy Act lawsuit is difficult,”said Michael Burger, the executive director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center. “I don't think that this is a strong lawsuit.”
But winning the lawsuit against offshore wind may not be TPPF’s ultimate goal.
“It's possible that a lawsuit that doesn't have a high likelihood of success on the merits might be brought in order to have indirect effects,'' Burger said. “If a think tank or an organization has as part of its mission to support the continued development of fossil fuels, then simply throwing monkey wrenches into the works of a large scale renewable energy project is a worthwhile project.”
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this is not even part of planning the coup so much as aa PR ploy to counter original story that got a good bit of coverage (not sure how broad)
how is TPPF so central?
omg yikes
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/trump-2655520362/
no lnx
'Barely concealed bloodlust': Claremont Institute laid out detailed plan for using cops to overturn Trump’s election loss
Travis Gettys and Raw Story November 08, 2021
The right-wing Claremont Institute published a report in mid-October 2020 that gamed out a scenario where Donald Trump would remain in office through an alliance between law enforcement and militant extremists.
The report was prepared by attorney John Eastman, who authored a memo laying out another strategy for keeping Trump in office, and former Trump deputy national security advisor K.T. McFarland, as well as Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, alt-right figure Jeff Giesea and right-wing blogger Charles Haywood, reported The Bulwark.
"Despite the authors' pretensions to scholarship and rigor — 'for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism' — the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right," writes columnist Christian Vanderbrouk. "Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government — aided by citizen 'posses' of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office."
Most of the predictions in the report, titled "79 Days to Inauguration," did not come to fruition, such as the authors' belief that some states' voting results would be fatally tainted by cyber attacks and suspicious fires, and left-wing mobs did not converge on Washington, D.C., to incite violence, and police did not execute antifa/Black Lives Matter leaders as part of a federal operation.
"A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report," Vanderbrouk writes. "This isn't a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries."
The report was produced in response to the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project's (TIP) exercise on "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition," which considered the prospect of Trump refusing to concede an election loss and made recommendations for avoiding a crisis -- which seems to be the opposite intent of the Claremont Institute's exercise.
"To the extent that the Claremont-TPPF report offers recommendations, they are mostly focused on how to emerge victorious from the chaos, including preparation 'for destructive urban unrest [with] potential targets includ[ing] ballot counting facilities, government buildings, especially state capitols and city halls, as well as television and radio studios,'" Vanderbrouk writes. "The Claremont task force seems either resigned to—or perhaps energized by—the view that 'prudent steps are likely to be spun as preparations for a military takeover or coup and may result in negative consequences either way.'"
"Either way. It's as if they're steering into the violence instead of trying to avoid it," he adds. "The message is clear:do whatever it takes to crush your opponents and all will be forgiven in the second Trump term."
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...Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman—lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden’s win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors—and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.
Other participants includeKevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, “a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes,” and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”
The distinguished wargamers.....
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Fani Willis:
On Tuesday,subpoenas were served to seven Trump World confederates:Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who also phoned Raffensperger on behalf of the brooding soon-to-be-ex-commander in chief; Trump's television attorney Rudy Giuliani and his associate Jenna Ellis; coup architectJohn Eastman (who was behind the coordinated campaign to send fraudulent slates of electors to Washington from multiple swing states that Trump lost); as well as three lesser-known lawyers – Jacki Pick Deason, Kenneth Chesebro, and Cleta Mitchell – the latter of whom was present for Trump's clandestine chat with Raffensperger.
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https://www.climateofdenial.org/rep-chip-roy-r-tx-21st-district/
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX, 21) represents a gerrymandered district where both income and education are about 20% higher than Texas state averages. Elected in 2018, he is known for his attempt to block the $19.1 billion disaster relief bill providing aid for devastated communities in Texas and Puerto Rico after hurricanes Harvey and Maria, storms which owed their increased intensity to climate change.
Chip Roy on Climate Climate Change
In the San Antonio Express he refers to: “the hysteria around climate change” and said there is an abundance of “misinformation out there about the extent of man’s impact on temperatures on the Earth.”
“I don’t know,” Roy said when asked if he believes there’s any link between human activity and climate change. “What I know is that our lives are made so immeasurably better by the availability of affordable, abundant energy.”
In the same article he goes on to say that, “Of course there is climate change going on,” Roy said. “There has been since the beginning of time. But as the climate has changed,the question is how can humans adapt to it? Energy is the very thing that allows us to adapt to it, to be able to have climate-controlled places in which to live and operate.”
Chip Roy and Friends
President Donald Trump, a climate change denier
Scott Pruitt, former head of the EPA, a climate change denier
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)—Roy was Cruz’s chief of staff during the government shutdown in 2013
Current Secretary of Energy and former Texas Governor Rick Perry
Former congressman Lamar Smith, a climate change denier
Chip Roy’sBackground
Vice President of Strategy for the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF)
Director for the Center for**Tenth Amendment Action**at the TPPF
Investment banking analyst for NationsBanc Capital Markets
Counsel in the Oil & Gas industry
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desmog
Life:Powered
Background
Life:Powered (LifePowered.org) is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) designed to “ensure that Americans continue to benefit from abundant, reliable, safe, and clean energy” and to “reframe the discussion about energy sources” including fossil fuels. [1]
In February 2018, TPPF brought onBernard McNamee to lead the Life:Powered project and also to head TPPF’s Center for Tenth Amendment Action. According to its 2017 annual report, Life:Powered was originally TPPF’s “Fueling Freedom” project, which launched in 2015 “to combat the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.” [2], [3]
McNamee most recently worked as deputy general counsel for energy policy under Secretary Rick Perry at the Department of Energy and has also advised Texas senator Ted Cruz. [2]
“In 2018, we’ll be taking the project to a new level, expanding it to cover every aspect of the policies that promote abundant, reliable, and affordable energy to power modern life,” the report’s message from the President and the Chair noted. [3]
TPPF’sKathleen Hartnett-White was director of the Fueling Freedom project and co-authored the same-titled book with Heritage Foundationeconomist Stephen Moore. White is a senior fellow of the Life:Powered project. [4]
Stance on Climate Change
May 4, 2018
Life:Powered promotes articles critical of a carbon tax as a solution to climate change, generally linking to research done by TPPF. One example is an article by Vance Ginn that links to research byJohn Cristyto suggest “there’s little conclusive evidence to prove that carbon dioxide emissions cause environmental harm.” [5]
The Life:Powered article concludes: [5]
“Finally, perhaps most importantly, there is little to no evidence that there is a need to reduce carbon emissions in this country. For all of these reasons, and many more, the proposed carbon tax should be whole-heartedly rejected.”
2018
“Human flourishing depends on energy use, often in invisible and unnoticed ways. A reliable energy supply can feed the hungry, take care of the sick, and ensure a prosperous economic future for society. It promotes freedom and independence around the world and right here at home,” the Life:Powered websitereads. [6]
The Texas Public Policy Foundation features a“Life:Powered”playlist in its YouTube channel that promotes “The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels” by Alex Epstein, as well as a panel presentation by the CO2 Coalition promoting the supposed benefits of boosting atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. View the playlist below:..[vid] docs]
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The following funding values are for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the parent organization of Life:Powered.
View the attached spreadsheet for more details on the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s funding by year (.xlsx). [7]
Donor and Year Total
Pew Charitable Trusts $5,488,454
Donors Capital Fund $3,530,848
DonorsTrust $1,369,616
Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation $1,137,624
Albert and Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation $980,000
Searle Freedom Trust $645,000
Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation $548,500
Jaquelin Hume Foundation $490,001
State Policy Network $378,900
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation $315,000
The Roe Foundation $287,000
The Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation $275,000
Armstrong Foundation $160,000
Castle RockFoundation $125,000
William H. Donner Foundation $110,000
JM Foundation $105,000
Cato Institute $100,000
Exxon Mobil $100,000
Heartland Institute $100,000
Friedman Foundation For Educational Choice $62,000
Charles Koch Institute $47,623
The Robertson-Finley Foundation $42,500
PhRMA $35,000
National Christian Charitable Foundation $27,500
Walton FamilyFoundation $25,000
Americans for Tax Reform Foundation $25,000
The Vernon K. Krieble Foundation $11,000
Atlas Economic Research Foundation $9,500
Grand Total $16,531,066
990 Forms]
key People
- Michael Nasi — Reportedly heading the Life-Powered effort, as of August 2018.[8]
Michael Nasiis General Counsel of Balanced Energy for Texas, a “coalition of energy consumers, producers, and providers” that includes major coal and energy companies, related advocacy groups, and groups supplying the energy industry such as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), American Electric Power, Arch Coal, Peabody Energy, andUnion Pacific Railroad. [9]
When President Donald Trump issued an executive order to revise or rescind the Clean Power Plan, Nasi described itas “a crucial win for Texas and the nation.” He is also a partner of the law firm Jackson Walker LLP where he founded the firm’s “Climate Change and Carbon Management group.” [10], [11]
Former State Representative for Hays and Blanco counties in the Texas Hill Country. According to SourceWatch, Isaac received $2,000 fromKochPACto his Jason Isaac Campaign in 2018.[20]
- Bernard McNamee — Initially listed as project lead until moving to a position at DOE. [2]
Bernard L. McNamee was initially listed as project lead for the Life:Powered project in February 2018, however according to his LinkedIn he left that position in May 2018 to become Executive Director at the Office of Policy for the Department of Energy (DOE). McNamee worked for the DOE as Deputy General Counsel for Energy Policy since May 2017, and as Senior Counsel to the law firm McGuireWoods LLP before that. [12]
Kathleen Hartnett-White is the distinguished senior fellow-in-residence and director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Hartnett White previously worked as Chairman and Commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Prior to 2001, she served as then-Governor George W. Bush’s appointee to the Texas Water Development Board, where she sat until appointed to TCEQ. [13]
Hartnett-White was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2017to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), and also served on Trump’s “economic advisory team” in 2016. White’s nomination was withdrawn after it was sent back to the White House at the end of 2017. [14], [15], [16]
- Jacki Pick — Senior Fellow, Life:Powered
:{Jacki Pick:{formerly served as the executive vice president and CEO of the}::{National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a corporate-funded group that has promoted supposed uncertainties around climate science. She also hosts The Jacki Daily Show at TheBlaze.com.[:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:17]}:
- Mandy Gunasekara — Senior Fellow, Life:Powered [28]
Gunasekara is a Republican “climate and energy strategist” and thefounder of the “pro-Trump nonprofit” Energy 45 Fund.As of February 2020, Gunasekara was reportedly set to return as the EPA‘s chief of staff according to The Washington Post. [24], [25]
She is a a memberof the CO2 Coalition, a group directed by climate change denier William Happer that portrays carbon dioxide as “a nutrient vital for life” and advocates for more of it in the atmosphere. Her CO2 Coalition profile describes Gunasekara as “the chief architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan” while working for Trump at the EPA as principal deputy assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation. [26], [27]
Other People
As of August 2018, TPPF was actively hiring for positions including “Project Coordinator” and “Policy Analyst” for the Life:Powered project. [18]
Actions
April 6, 2020
Life:Powered, represented by Jason Isaac, was signatory to an American Energy Alliance letter to President Donald Trump supporting the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule which would scrap federal fuel economy mandates under the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program. [31]
Describing CAFE, the letter contends: “Those families and individuals who prefer or need trucks, SUVs, and crossovers pay more to subsidize those who buy smaller vehicles or electric vehicles under the existing mandate. This significant, needless, and unjust cost is a very real regressive tax on American families that has made our country worse off.” [31]
March 23, 2020
As reported at DeSmog, Life:Powered sent a letter to Congresscritical of the COVID-19 stimulus package for including “tax incentives and spending for unreliable ‘green’ energy
The letter concludes:
“This is no time for political games. Climate change is not an immediate threat to humanity. Climate-related deaths have declined 98.9% in the last century, and humanity is growing more and more resilient thanks to the availability of affordable, reliable energy. On behalf of all Americans, we urge you to oppose any stimulus proposals that carve out special treatment for or bail out any energy companies and focus instead on stopping COVID-19.” [30]
Signatories included: [30]
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Name Title Organization STINKTANKS
Jason Isaac Senior Manager & Distinguished Fellow Life:Powered/Texas Public Policy Foundation
Myron Ebell Director, Center for Energy and Environment Competitive Enterprise Institute
Bette Grande CEO Roughrider Policy Center
Ellen Weaver President & CEO Palmetto Promise Institute
Isaac Orr Policy Fellow Center of the American Experiment
Bethany Marcum Executive Director Alaska Policy Forum
David T. Stevenson Director, Center for Energy and Environment Caesar Rodney Institute
Donald van der Vaart Senior Fellow John Locke Foundation
Jason Hayes Director of Environmental Policy Mackinac Center for Public Policy
John Droz, Jr. Founder Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions
George K. Rasley, Jr. Managing Editor ConservativeHQ.com
Becky Norton Dunlop Former Secretary of Natural Resources Commonwealth of Virginia
James L. Martin Founder/Chairman 60 Plus Association
Saulius “Saul” Anuzis President 60 Plus Association
Ken Blackwell Senior Fellow Family Research Council
Eunie Smith President Eagle Forum
Jenny Beth Martin Honorary Chairman Tea Party Patriots Action
Jon Caldara President Independence Institute
L. Brent Bozell, III Founder and President Media Research Center
Jason Pye Vice President of Legislative Affairs FreedomWorks
Jameson Taylor Vice President for Policy Mississippi Center for Public Policy
Carol Platt Liebau President Yankee Institute
Mike Stenhouse CEO Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity
Daniel Erspamer CEO Pelican Institute for Public Policy
Christian N. Braunlich President Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy
Todd Myers Environmental Director Washington Policy Center
june 14, 2019
Speaking to the American-Statesman, senior manager Jason Isaac said that the mission of Life:Powered was to “raise America’s energy IQ,” adding: [22]
“We’re making the connection between prosperity we enjoy here in the United States and access to energy in all forms, all abundant, affordable reliable, all forms and all of the above.” [22]
:{:{A 2018 TPPF video }::{promoting the continued operation of a coal-fired power plant on the Arizona Navajo reservation has been rebranded with the Life:Powered name. The video showed images of smokestacks with a voiceover by a young Navajo girl saying, “Papa says it’s the heart of the land. I can hear it beating.”}::{ [22:(style="background-color:#ff9966ff"):}:]}:
The video’s closing text reads:
“Extreme environmentalist politics will eliminate jobs, destroy families, and spike electric bills in the Navajo Nation and across America. The Navajo don’t need to be told what to do. They’ve been protecting the environment for centuries.” [22 [vid]
Local environmental groups responded with claims that the plant’s consumption of billions of gallons of groundwater has led to contamination and depletion of the reservation’s water supply. The executive director of a Navajo non-profit organization told the Statesman: [22]
“The pro-coal supporters have made it all about jobs. There’s more to it than that. What’s happening on Black Mesashows that jobs and revenues is not all that it’s made out to be. When you lose your own potable water source, that’s life or death right there.” [22]
Peabody Energy, a TPPF donor, operates the Navajo Generating Station, which will be shuttered at the end of 2019. [22]
Another TPPF }
on the topic of “Energy Poverty” featured Caleb Rossiter of the :{CO2}: Foundation :{:{promoting wider adoption of fossil fuel-generated electricity in the developing world. }:[22]
Life:Powered plans to target future messaging in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and Alaska in opposition to renewable energy and carbon reduction initiatives. [22]
February 8, 2019
Life:Powered posted a critique of the Green New Dealon its website, written by The:{Honorable Jason Isaac, describing it as a “massive new tax” and claiming the threats to the planet of continued fossil fuel use have “no scientific evidence to back it up.” [21]}:
“… if U.S. emissions were completely eliminated by 2020, global temperatures would only be 0.077°C lower in 2050. That doesn’t exactly do much to prevent the End of Days in the next 12 years,” the article claims. “Here is something a little closer to scientific certainty: we are not going to figure out how to generate all the power we need and use in America from wind and solar in the next decade. We’re not even going to get close.” [21]
In conclusion: “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez predicts catastrophe in 12 years if we do nothing to fight climate change. The real catastrophe would be enacting her plan to do that.” [21]
August 7, 2018
S&P Global reportedthat Life:Powered screened two videos at the American Coal Council’s Coal Market Strategies conference in New Mexico that would be part of an upcoming campaign. [8]
Michael Nasi, who is reportedly leading the effort, said the videos “aim to educate an ‘extremely under-informed’ public on fossil fuels.” [8]
“We have failed as both a coal industry, a power industry and obviously other fossil industries and the nuclear industry because we have failed to get together to message together,” said Nasi. [8]
Also speaking at the conference, Luke Popovich, former spokesman for the National Mining Association, discussed industry tactics with regards to climate change: [8]
“It’s too late for denial when your customers, the ratepayers, the banks, and regulators already believe climate change is real,” Popovich said. “Accepting that climate change is real merely opens the discussion with the public.”
Rather, a message on how fossil fuels could be a “humanitarian tool”— so-called “energy poverty” has long been a talking point of industry — would be a primary focus of the Life:Powered videos. [8]
“Over 1 billion people do not have any electricity,” retired Penn State University Professor Frank Clemente said in one of the videos. “That’s only the tip of the iceberg. About 2.5 billion people only have limited access to electric power. You’re closing on almost half of the population of the world are living in energy poverty and that’s why I say it is the leading problem facing mankind today.” [8] Clemente has regularly consulted for the energy industry, and has said he has “written, spoken and testified quite a bit on coal’s importance to the quality of life around the world.”
Related Organizations
- Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) — Life:Powered describes itself as a project of TPPF. [1]
- Fueling Freedom — According to TPPF’s 2017 annual report, Life:Powered was formerly the Fueling Freedom project. [3]
Contact & Address
The Life:Powered project shares the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s address. As per the project’s Privacy Policy Page: [19]
https://www.texaspolicy.com/
901 Congress Avenue
Austin, Texas 78701
United States
comms@texaspolicy.com
512) 472-2700
Social Media
- TPPF promotes Life Powered by the #lifepowered hash tag on Twitter.
- Life Powered links to TPPF’s Facebook page @TexasPolicy.
Resources
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12 2016
:{:{}:
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UK’s biggest energy company, Centrica, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to a Texas-based climate denial think tank strongly linked to Donald Trump’s new energy secretary Rick Perry, Unearthedcan reveal.
Centrica, which owns British Gas and is a major investor in UK fracking, has made a number of donations to theTexas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) over the last five years and says it has no plans to stop.
When contacted by Unearthed, Centrica refused to disclose the total sum that it had donated to the group. But a leaked 2010 donor listreveals that itsUS subsidiary, Direct Energy, was among the TPPF’s largest donors that year with a payment of $20,000.
Other donors in 2010 included ExxonMobil, Chevron, the Koch brothers, Devon Energy and a host of other energy companies and climate sceptic funding bodies.
The Austin-based think tank has played a central role in the US climate denial movement, which is now poised to take control of energy and environmental policy under Donald Trump.
Centrica has previously sought to position itself as corporate leader on climate action.
In its last annual report the firm boasted: “We are also making an important contribution to address big issues in society related to energy: from energy pricing and vulnerability to energy security and climate change.”
Responding to the news, Caroline Lucas MP told Unearthed: “For a company that has claimed to be at the forefront of action on climate change, it is simply astounding that Centrica is donating money to climate deniers.”
“Now that these links have come to light, we need a clear commitment from Centrica to end all further donations. It is shameful that one of our largest energy companies is linked to this reckless and irresponsible organisation, and I hope an apology will be issued shortly.”
Ties to Trump
The TPPF holds strong relationships with leading Republican politicians, including former presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who was a senior fellowat the organisation, and new energy secretary Rick Perry.
Leading Republicans Rick Perry and Ted Cruz have strong links to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which aims to stop CO2 being regulated as a pollutant. Photo]
:{:{}:
Perry published his 2010 book,Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, with the TPPF, using his author’s note to praise the think tank for its role in fighting the “perils of environmental policy based on the hysteria of global warming.”}:
The think tank’s ties to the new Trump administration also includeDoug Domenech, who isleading Donald Trump’sdepartment of interior transition team.
Domenech, a former department of interior staffer under George W. Bush, leads the TPPF’s “Fueling Freedom” project, which aims to “end the regulation of CO2 as a pollutant” and collaborates with the Heritage Foundation to organise an annual climate sceptic energy summitin Washington D.C.
This year’s event was attended by prominent sceptics, includingSenator Jim Inhofe,Willie Soonand Professor Will Happer, who was caught in an *Unearthed *undercover sting last year agreeing to hide the fact a fossil fuel company would be funding his research on the benefits of CO2.
Centrica’s donations
Centrica has refused to disclose how much it has donated to the TPPF but admitted that it continues to do so and has no plans to stop the payments.
According to the Guardian guk,the company’s most recent donation was of a similar size to the $20,000 payment in 2010.
A Centrica spokesperson told Unearthed: “Centrica has a clear position on climate change and we believe in the need to take material action to reduce the effect of fossil fuels on climate change.”
“The TPPF is a non-profit research organization and cannot by law lobby the Texas government or any governmental institution. [guffaw] We share some of their views on the benefits of a well-structured retail electricity market to help consumers get the best possible price and product, fair tax policy for families and businesses, strong schools, quality health care and safe neighborhoods for our customers and employees.”
When asked if Centrica felt it had been a mistake to donate core funding to a think tank so at odds with its views on climate change, the spokesperson said: “We do not make contributions to any organization to advocate specifically for a position on the environment. We believe the science on climate change is absolutely clear.”
Nick Surgey, Director of Research at the Center for Media and Democracy in the US, told Unearthed:
“For decades, the U.S. climate change denial movement has been backed by millions of dollars in secret funding from the fossil fuel industry. Over the past eight years climate denial had been fading in the mainstream, increasingly pushed into the shadows of US politics. But fossil fuel funding for groups like TPPF had continued, mostly in secret, and they are now moving into a position of power and influence.”
“With the election of Trump, the deniers are finding themselves with greater access to the incoming administration than they have had for years, possibly more than they have ever had. TPPF presents itself as an independent quasi-academic think tank. It is actually one of the more extreme climate change denial groups in the United States, promoting disinformation about the threat of climate change to the benefit of its corporate funders.”
The Texas Public Policy Foundation failed to respond to a request for comment.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/26/state-policy-network-oil-transportation-climate-initiative-northeast
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Last month New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu announced the state would not be participating in the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI), a regional cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing carbon emissions from vehicles. The program is still in early stages of development, but groups tied to petroleum interests and conservative networks funded by the Koch empire are already fighting it with opposition campaigns.
These campaigns are active in multiple states throughout the Northeast, featuring public events to sway legislators, public letters co-signed by various free market groups, and at least one study produced by a Koch- and oil-industry funded think tank based in Texas.
Public Health and Sustainability Benefits
Supporters of the program describe TCI as an important step towards cleaning up the transportation sector and say it will improve public health and community sustainability. A draft Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was released in December, along with initial projections of potential economic and public health benefits.
According to the TCI website, “Preliminary modeling estimates that by 2032, the proposed program could yield monetized annual public health benefits of as much as $10 billion, including over 1,000 fewer premature deaths, and over 1,300 fewer asthma symptoms annually region-wide, among other safety and health benefits.”
In his comments announcing New Hampshire’s withdrawal from the 12-state coalition, Governor Sununu cited an estimate for fuel price increase.“New Hampshire is already taking substantial steps to curb our carbon emissions, and this initiative, if enacted, would institute a new gas tax by up to 17 cents per gallon while only achieving minimal results,” Sununu said.
Around the same time as Sununu's announcement, a coalition of 18 conservative think tanks released an open letter in opposition to TCI. The groups claim the initiative is “a carbon dioxide tax being implemented through a gas tax.” According to the letter, “Citizens in TCI states can expect to be hit with higher personal costs, higher costs for goods and services, and higher taxes.” The language in the letter appears similar to Sununu’s description of TCI as a “gas tax” and a “financial boondoggle.”
The Republican governor of New Hampshire is the brother of James Sununu, board chairman of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy — one of the groups behind that open letter.
The Bartlett Center is a member of the State Policy Network, a Koch-funded network of think tanks based in states across the country that advocate against climate and clean energy policies and other initiatives deemed in opposition to “economic freedom.” This New Hampshire think tank also lists former Governor John H. Sununu — Chris Sununu’s father — as an emeritus board member. The organization has led the opposition to TCI in the Granite State.
With New Hampshire now backing out, pressure is mounting in other states to follow suit, as conservative think tanks continue to raise alarm at the proposal to rein in transportation-sector emissions.
'Biased' Surveys and Oil-Funded Studies Deployed in Connecticut and Virginia
When asked about the TCI in a recent radio interview, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont did not give a definitive position, but he did say that a “gas tax” is “probably not the way to go.” Several newspapers picked up on this remark, including the conservative Boston Herald in Massachusetts and the Middletown Press in Connecticut.
The Yankee Institute for Public Policy,one of the think tanks that signed the opposition letter to TCI, posted a link to the Middletown Press article on its Facebook page with the caption, “good.” The Yankee Institute is Connecticut’s prominent conservative, free market think tank and another member of the State Policy Network. In December last year, the group posted on its blog in response to the TCI’s draft MOU release. The blog post labels the TCI as a “regional gasoline tax” and quotes from the oppositional open letter that the Yankee Institute signed.
More recently, the Yankee Institute attacked TCI in a blog post by claiming that modeling shows the program would have no effect on climate change.
“But the overall effect on the climate is too small to be measurable, according to climate modeling conducted by Brent Bennett, PhD, of Life: Powered — the energy policy division of the Texas Public Policy Foundation,” the blog post states. That climate modeling is meant to measure the impact of policy changes on global temperature, and is often used by conservative groups opposed to climate action — like the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) — to claim that a single policy will do nothing to alleviate global warming on a global scale.
“This modeling is flawed in that it’s an effort of focus on local costs and then change the scope of impact to global impacts. Demanding that any specific reductions making a difference on total pollution levels has been a polluter mantra for decades,” David Littell, senior advisor at the Regulatory Assistance Project, told DeSmog. “If we require any specific reduction in greenhouse gases to reduce global warming noticeably we will never do anything. No single reduction will move the dial, we need to transform our energy and transportation systems as a whole to address global warming and climate change.”
In Virginia, the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy is ramping up criticism of TCI though an opposition campaign that includes questionable polling and research. The Jefferson Institute is another conservative think tank, a member of the State Policy Network, and signatory of the TCI opposition letter.
The Jefferson Institute is promoting a new report, conducted by one of its own staff members, filled with misleading information about the expected impacts of TCI.
For example, the report claims that TCI will have no health benefits, will prevent no deaths, and will have no environmental benefits, citing dubious sources including the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation and notorious climate science denier Steve Milloy. The report points to the same TPPF climate modeling cited by the Yankee Institute, examining the impact that TCI would have on global temperature.
Jefferson Institute for Public Policy's report on the Transportation and Climate Initiative
Jefferson Institute for Public Policy's report on the Transportation and Climate Initiative posted on its website.
The author of the report, titled “The Transportation and Climate Initiative — All Pain and No Gain,” is David Schnare, an attorney who was embroiled in a legal dispute over finances with his business partner and who has sued universities to obtain climate scientists’ emails. Schnare is now the director of the Jefferson Institute’s Center for Environmental Stewardship.
The Jefferson Institute is also touting results of a poll indicating a majority of Virginians would oppose TCI if it meant a tax increase of at least 18 cents per gallon of gas. The same poll found that 61 percent would support TCI given benefits like reducing carbon emissions and developing the clean energy economy. The two questions yielding these results were added at the request of the Jefferson Institute to a more general poll on political and legislative topics.
According to one expert in polling and strategic communication, the way in which the two questions were posed was intended to generate these results.
“The approach used in this survey strikes me as biased in a more subtle way,” Ed Maibach, of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, told DeSmog. “The first question specifies the benefits only — which are benefits that most people value — and then assesses support for the [TCI] proposal. The second question states the costs only, and then assesses support for the proposal, but participants in the survey may or may not remember the benefits stated in the prior question,” Maibach explained. “A better (i.e., fairer) way to assess support for the proposal would be to present the benefits and costs — in a fair and balanced manner — in the same question.”
TCI Opponents Gather in Boston
The Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, a free market conservative think tank, is leading the opposition to TCI in the Bay State. The group is lobbying the state legislature and pushing for a bill that would prohibit participation in TCI without legislative approval.
Last week the alliance and other conservative think tanks convened a press conference in Boston voicing their opposition to TCI.
Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance spokesman Paul Craney told reporters that multiple governors have expressed concerns about the initiative and that momentum to squash it was on their side. “Things are going in our direction for the taxpayers and consumers,” Craney said.
“What we once saw as maybe a regional approach seems to be falling apart,” added Chris Carlozzi, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business for Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Groups represented at the press conference, according to MassLive, included Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, the Vermont chapter of Americans for Prosperity, Maine Heritage Policy Center, Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity, and Connecticut’s Yankee Institute for Public Policy. Most of these groups are members of the Koch-funded State Policy Network.
TCI Moves Forward
Mass. Gov. Charlie Baker
Governor Charlie Baker, Lt. Governor Karyn Polito, MassDOT Secretary and CEO Stephanie Pollack and Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Kathleen Theoharides at the Massachusetts Transportation and Climate Initiative Business Summit in December 2019. Credit: Gov. Charlie Baker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Despite the criticisms and opposition campaigns, the initiative to introduce a regional cap on transportation sector emissions is moving ahead. The program is accepting public comments on the draft MOU through the end of February. A final MOU is expected later this spring, and the program could become operational by 2022.
Massachusetts Governor Charlie Bakerlet TCI critics down when defending the program in his State of the Commonwealth address this week.
“Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation have been on the rise for decades and now represent 40 percent of this state’s total emissions. Unless we take on transportation, we won’t meet our objectives,” Baker said. “RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that our proposal is based on, has worked for 10 years. Power plants have adopted clean energy solutions and funded energy efficiency programs, investing 3.3 billion dollars across the region. Greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector have dropped by nearly 50 percent. Applied to the transportation sector, the same market mechanisms can encourage automakers and fuel suppliers to find efficiencies and deploy cleaner fuels. In addition, the Transportation Climate Initiative will deliver millions of dollars in needed investments in our transportation infrastructure. It’s a critical part in expanding public transportation, transforming our highways and reducing congestion.”
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off bs tppf
FERC
2/08/2018 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 02/08/2018 11:23
TPPF Brings On Bernard McNamee, Former Dept. Of Energy Official, To Lead Tenth Amendment Center, Life:Powered
AUSTIN - Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation announced the hire of Bernard McNamee to lead the Center for Tenth Amendment Action and to serve as director of the Foundation's Life:Powered project. Most recently, McNamee served as deputy general counsel for energy policy under Secretary Rick Perry at the Department of Energy. Previous positions include partner at McGuireWoods, chief of staff to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and as senior advisor to Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
As the head of the Center for Tenth Amendment Action, McNamee will focus on applying the Texas Model of individual liberty, fiscal responsibility and free-market reforms to federal policy, in the areas of health care, taxes, and spending. He will also lead the Life:Powered project, a continuation of TPPF's work on energy policy, to ensure Americans continue to benefit from abundant, reliable, safe and clean energy.
'We are thrilled to have someone with Bernie's experience in the Executive Branch, in Congress, at the state level, and in private practice lead these critical initiatives,' said executive vice president Kevin Roberts. 'His deep knowledge of energy policy, in particular, comes at an important time for Texas and the country as America becomes a leader in energy innovation and development. Bernie will spearhead our effort to maintain energy reliability and a commitment to a clean environment while ensuring our state and national economies continue to grow.'
About Life:Powered:
Life:Powered begins with the principle that human flourishing depends on energy use, often in invisible and unnoticed ways. A reliable energy supply can feed the hungry, take care of the sick, and ensure a prosperous economic future for society. It promotes freedom and independence around the world and right here at home.
The United States, and Texas in particular, has the means to lead the world in energy production. Through American ingenuity and innovation, responsible production of reliable energy will make the world safer, our environment cleaner, and each and every citizen more prosperous.
For more information, please contact Alicia Pierce at**apierce@texaspolicy.com or 512-472-2700.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit free-market research institute based in Austin that aims to foster human flourishing by protecting and promoting liberty, opportunity and personal responsibility.
Primary website: www.TexasPolicy.com
Facebook page: www.Facebook.com/TexasPublicPolicyFoundation
Twitter feed: www.Twitter.com/TPPF
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https://www.alternet.org/environment/trump-enviro-pick-displays-outrageous-level-climate-denial-senate-confirmation-hearing
athleen Hartnett White, President Trump’s pick to chair the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), testified at her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday and, like many Trump nominees to date, showed herself to be an unqualified, polluter-friendly ideologue who rejects mainstream climate science.
“Your positions are so far out of the mainstream, they are not just outliers, they are outrageous,” Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey exclaimed at one point in clear exasperation. “You have a fringe voice that denies science, economics and reality.”
What Markey failed to note, however, is that White has personally experienced climate change-related extreme weather events in her home state of Texas, and scientists say they are only going to get worse.
Unqualified from the Start
White, who Trump previously considered for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, is a cattle rancher and dog breeder who chaired the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ)—the Lone Star State’s version of the EPA—from 2001 to 2007 and was a member of the Environmental Flows Study Commission, the Texas Water Development Board and the Texas Wildlife Association board.
Her qualifications for those positions? None.
White earned her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Humanities and Religion at Stanford, attended Princeton’s comparative religion doctoral program, and completed a year of law school at Texas Tech. It’s not quite the background one would expect for someone serving on environmentally related boards, let alone running the TCEQ. But in Texas, as in Florida and Wisconsin, ideology trumps science credentials, and White holds a politically correct pro-fossil fuels viewpoint.
That bias serves her well in her current job with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a libertarian think tank funded by what Texans for Public Justice characterized as a “Who’s Who of Texas polluters, giant utilities and big insurance companies.” Among TPPF’s benefactors are Chevron, Devon Energy and ExxonMobil; Koch Industries and its family foundations; and Luminant, the largest electric utility in Texas. White, who joined TPPF in January 2008, runs the nonprofit’s energy and environment program and co-heads its Fueling Freedom Project, whose mission is to “push back against the EPA’s onerous regulatory agenda that threatens America’s economy, prosperity and well-being.”
Climate Paranoia Strikes Deep
Recent media coverage of White’s nomination for the CEQ post has shined a light on her lack of scientific understanding — and her paranoia about the rationale for addressing climate change. She falsely claims that climate science is “highly uncertain,” characterizes it as the “dark side of a kind of paganism, the secular elite’s religion,” and argues that the “climate crusade,” if unchecked, would essentially destroy democracy. That’s right. White believes the United Nations and climate scientists are bent on establishing a “one-world state ruled by planetary managers.” Further, she routinely trumpets the benefits of carbon emissions, insisting that carbon dioxide “has none of the characteristics of a pollutant that could harm human health.” Carbon is a good thing, she says, because “the increased atmospheric concentration of man-made CO2 has enhanced plant growth and thus the world’s food supply.” Never mind that farmers and ranchers in her own state have been whipsawed in recent years by devastating heat waves, drought and floods, all linked to climate change.
At her confirmation hearing on Wednesday, White cited reducing ground-level ozone in Houston and Galveston when she chaired the TCEQ as her greatest accomplishment. But according to a recent editorial in the Dallas Morning News, she pushed for weaker ozone standards while she was at the helm of the agency.
“Her record is abominable,” the October 17 editorial stated. “White consistently sided with business interests at the expense of public health as chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. She lobbied for lax ozone standards and, at a time when all but the most ardent fossil fuel apologists understood that coal isn’t the nation’s future, White signed a permit for a lignite-fired power plant, ignoring evidence that emissions from the lignite plant could thwart North Texas’ efforts to meet air quality standards.”
Predictably, White also disparages renewable energy. “In spite of the billions of dollars in subsidies, retail prices for renewables are still far higher than prices for fossil fuels,” she wrote in her 2014 tract, Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case. “At any cost, renewable energy from wind, solar, and biomass remains diffuse, unreliable, and parasitic….” In fact, fossil fuels have received significantly more in federal tax breaks and subsidies for a much longer time than renewables; new wind power is now cheaper than coal, nuclear and natural gas; and the Department of Energy projects that renewable technologies available today have the potential to meet 80 percent of U.S. electricity demand by 2050.
Most of Trump’s nominees for other key science-based positions—notably EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt—agree with White’s twisted take on climate science and renewables. What sets her apart, besides her penchant for calling advocates for combating climate change “pagans,” “Marxists” and “communists,” is her up-close-and-personal experience with climate change-related extreme weather events.Ignoring the Evidence
White and her husband, Beau Brite White, live in Bastrop County, an outlying Austin bedroom community, and own a vast cattle ranch of 118,567 acres—more than 185 square miles—in Presidio County, which sits on the state’s southwest border with Mexico.
Bastrop and Presidio counties are both struggling with drought due to low precipitation and high temperatures and, like the rest of Texas, suffered from an especially extreme drought in 2011. Part of a prolonged period of drought stretching from 2010 to 2015, the one in 2011 was the hottest and driest on record, and climate change likely played a significant role. A 2012 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society found that the high temperatures that contribute to droughts such the one that struck Texas in 2011 are 20 times more probable now than they were 40 to 50 years ago due to human-caused climate change.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment report, released on November 3, agreed. “The absence of moisture during the 2011 Texas/Oklahoma drought and heat wave was found to be an event whose likelihood was enhanced by the La Niña state of the ocean,” the report, authored by scientists at 13 federal agencies, concluded, “but the human interference in the climate system still doubled the chances of reaching such high temperatures [emphasis added].”
The 2011 heat wave was particularly intense in Presidio County. According to Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, a meteorology professor at Texas A&M University, the county “achieved the triple-triple: at least 100 days reaching at least 100 degrees.”
Bastrop County, meanwhile, has become a tinderbox. Wildfires are happening there with greater frequency and intensity for a variety of reasons, including rising temperatures and worsening drought as well as population growth and development. In 2011, the county experienced the worst wildfire in Texas history, which destroyed more than 1,600 homes and caused $325 million in damage. Two years ago, in October 2015, the Hidden Pines Fire torched 7 square miles in the county and burned down 64 buildings.
White’s Neighbors Know Better
White may refuse to acknowledge what is happening in her own backyard, but most of her neighbors realize that human-caused climate change is indeed a problem, according to polling data released last March by the Yale Program on Climate Communication. The survey, conducted in 2016 in every county nationwide, found that a majority of residents in Bastrop and Presidio counties—67 percent and 78 percent respectively—understand that global warming is happening, while more than half of the respondents in both counties (52 percent in Bastrop and 62 percent in Presidio) know it is mainly caused by human activity.
Majorities in both counties also want something done about it. More than 70 percent want carbon dioxide regulated as a pollutant and at least 65 percent in both counties want states to require utilities to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewables.
Given their responses, White’s neighbors in Bastrop and Presidio counties make it clear that if they were polled on whether she should become the next chair of a little-known but powerful White House office that oversees federal environmental and energy policies, a majority would likely say no—and with good reason: Unlike White, for them, seeing is believing.
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https://www.texasobserver.org/revealed-the-corporations-and-billionaires-that-fund-the-texas-public-policy-foundation/
2012
Texas Public Policy Foundation—an influential right-wing think tank based in Austin with ties to Rick Perry, Ted Cruz and many other powerful politicians—bills itself as a “non-partisan research institute” and brags that it “does not accept government funds or contributions to influence the outcomes of its research.”
It’s easy for the organization to make that claim; as a 501(c)(3) non-profit TPPF doesn’t have to disclose its funding sources. But a list of TPPF’s donors was inadvertently posted on Guidestar.org.
According to the tax filings, TPPF gets a majority of its funding from a relatively small group of major corporations, conservative foundations and wealthy individuals with a financial interest in the type of policies that TPPF promotes. Altogether, the list of donors includes 129 individuals, corporations and foundations and totals $4.7 million in donations.
“Most think tanks work for their funders and TPPF’s donors are a Who’s Who of Texas polluters, giant utilities and big insurance companies,” said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice. “TPPF is thinking the way its donors want it to think.”
That was the charge leveled by a former TPPF executive that Abby Rapoport and I spoke with for a story last year.
Melinda Hasting—who served as the foundation’s vice president from 1996 to 1998 but has since broken with the conservative movement—says one fundraising tactic involved approaching corporations, wealthy businessmen, and corporate-funded foundations with a pitch. Hasting (formerly Melinda Wheatley) describes it: “We think this is beneficial to your industry and would you consider providing us with a non-profit contribution. … Here’s the timeline for the completion of the research; the parameters of the research are this; we expect it will result in some savings or outsourcing.”
TPPF’s response at the time was that the organization no longer, if it ever, operated that way. (The foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time. I will update the post if and when I hear back.) Regardless, there is remarkable confluence between its donors and the positions it stakes out.
Take Energy Future Holdings, for example.
When it became apparent this summer that Texas’ power grid could go dark because of a lack of investment in new power generation, regulators found few tools at their disposal to deal with the problem. Texas, after all, has one of the most deregulated power markets in the world. Big utilities urged the Public Utility Commission to raise the cap on wholesale prices, a measure that would pad their bottom lines but almost certainly cost consumers. In June, the PUC voted 2-0 to raise the cap from $3,000 per megawatt-hour to $4,500. The decision was as much about laissez-faire ideology as practical management of the grid.
Over the last decade of Texas’ electricity deregulation experiment, no organization has proved a bigger apologist for dereg’s failures as TPPF. In a July op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, the organization’s Bill Peacock went so far as to call for the complete elimination of the cap. This was par for the course. In 2007, when TXU (now the nearly-bankrupt Energy Future Holdings) was accused of market abuse and electricity prices were skyrocketing, Peacock rallied to the company’s defense, arguing that “prices are not too high because of problems with the market or TXU.” He’s still on this kick, blasting the PUC for “spurious claims of market power abuse” and calling for the agency to be handcuffed in its ability to punish wrongdoers.
TPPF has also rallied to the defense of coal, in particular Luminant’s fleet of coal- and lignite-fired power plants, which are struggling due to competition from natural gas and stricter EPA limits on mercury, smog and carbon pollution. (Luminant is a unit of Energy Future Holdings.) Luminant and TPPF singled out the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule for sustained legal and rhetorical attack. But TPPF was the most strident, saying it would “eliminate jobs, threaten the reliability of our electricity grid, drive up the cost of electricity, and lower economic growth.” Kathleen Hartnett White, a TPPF energy analyst and former chairwoman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has gone so far as to claim that “There is no environmental crisis. In fact there’s almost no major environmental problems.” Luminant couldn’t get better support if it was paying for it. And maybe it was.
According to the donor list, Luminant and its two sister companies—TXU Energy and Oncor—donated $110,000 to TPPF in 2010. The American Coalition for Clean Coal chipped in $10,000. Other big utility interests were generous too: the Associated Electric Companies of Texas kicked in $43,000; NRG Energy offered $10,000; AEP Texas and AEP SWEPCO contributed $10,000 each; and Direct Energy ponied up $20,000.
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Close observers of how powerful interests control policy in Texas will perhaps not be surprised by the TPPF’s funding sources.
The foundation’s major corporate donors include:
- The Koch Brothers: Koch Industries Inc. ($159,834) & the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation ($69,788.61)
- Verizon ($47,450)
- State Farm Insurance ($25,000)
- Texans for Lawsuit Reform ($30,000)
- ExxonMobil ($10,000)
- Altria ($20,000)
- GEO Group, a private prison company ($15,000)
- TimeWarner Cable ($10,000)
- RJ Reynolds Tobacco ($5,000)
- Texas Association of Manufacturers ($5,000)
- ConocoPhillips ($5,000)
- Farmers Insurance Group ($5,000)
- Chevron ($5,000)
- Boeing ($5,000)
- Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas ($5,000)
- Devon Energy ($5,000)
- AND MANY MORE!
Notably, most of the brand-name corporations donating to TPPF aren’t particularly “political” or ideological. But they do have something in common: They are all subject to oversight by state government and mostly benefit from the pro-deregulation, pro-privatization, “free market” policies favored by TPPF.
“We support TPPF’s mission to promote free enterprise, as this is the best way to expand customer choices and improve customer service,” said Patti Kelly, a spokeswoman for State Farm.
Another major funding source: wealthy businessmen (and they are mostly men). Oil and gas interests, especially independent producers based out of Midland, have an outsized presence:
- Jim Leininger, the founder of TPPF and the so-called Daddy Warbucks of the conservative movement in Texas ($50,000)
- Don Sparks, Discovery Operating Inc., Midland ($48,500)
- Tim Dunn, Crownquest Oil & Gas Inc., major funder also of Empower Texans ($43,000)
- Chaz Neely, San Antonio Steel Co. ($25,000)
- Beaman Floyd, lobbyist for insurance interests and director of Texas Coalition for Affordable Insurance Solutions ($15,000)
- Robert McNair, owner of the Houston Texans ($10,000)
- Red McCombs ($5,000)
- Jim Hornfischer, publisher of Fed Up!, Rick Perry’s anti-government book, the proceeds of which went to TPPF ($94,000)
- George Seay, finance chair for Perry’s disastrous presidential run who ran into campaign-finance trouble ($15,000)
- Harold Simmons, Dallas billionaire and one of the nation’s biggest donors to conservative superPACs ($11,000)
- AND MANY MORE!
Perry-appointed regents for Texas A&M and the University of Texas, a highly-desirable appointment often encouraged with the ample application of dollars into campaign coffers, also are big boosters of TPPF. The regents for both schools have worked closely with TPPF on unpopular schemes to impose market discipline on the systems’ flagship schools:
- Wallace Hall, UT regent ($31,692)
- Phil Adams, insurance company owner, Texas A&M regent ($15,000)
- Brenda Pejovich, UT regent and TPPF board member ($10,487)
- Jeff Sandefer, UT regent and TPPF board member who’s been instrumental in pushing controversial reforms at UT and A&M ($200,495)
Foundations constituted a large share of TPPF’s funding in 2010:
- Entities associated with the State Policy Network, which Mother Jones described as “a little-known umbrella group with deep ties to the national conservative movement.” ($544,306.90)
- The ED Foundation, the family charity of controversial UT System regent & TPPF board member Jeff Sandefer ($200,495)
- The Fickling Family Foundation ($100,000)
- Jacquelin Hume Foundation ($40,000)
- DonorsTrust ($65,300)
- The Amon G. Carter Foundation, a Ft. Worth-based charity that mostly funds the arts ($20,000)
- AND MANY MORE!
Notably, TPPF’s top donors are middle-of-the road foundations. However, the following foundations all earmarked their money specifically for the organization’s criminal justice reform project, which has made common cause with progressives:
- Pew Charitable Trusts ($354,420)
- Chicago Community Foundation ($203,760)
- Public Welfare Foundation ($175,000)
TPPF explicitly advertises access to its board members and executive director on its donation page. Those who give $5,000 to $24,999 receive “priority communications with the President and the Chairman of the Board.” So-called “Liberty Leaders”—those who give $100,000 to $249,999— are invited to “join President or Executive Director at personal one-on-one meeting to discuss Foundation’s focus and strategy”; meanwhile Freedom Stewards ($250,000 or more) are allowed to attend board meetings to “give feedback” and “make suggestions.”
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