webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

State Farm

NO MERRI

DEFECTOR HEARTLAND

exxon, edelman

Congressional**Black Caucus Foundation**$445,000 API

JANATA 2025

...

Protecting the Fossil Fuel Industry

Just as the tobacco industry once acted to deny the link between tobacco products and cancer in order to protect its business, climate change skeptics have been doing the same to protect the fossil fuel industry. Looking at the organizations created to deny climate change, it becomes clear that their main function is to financially support industry-friendly experts, conceal information from the public to secure corporate profits, and deny the industry’s role in harming public health.

In 2009, ahead of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, hackers broke into the emails of climate researchers at the University of East Anglia. Out of thousands of emails, skeptics selectively picked a few that were taken out of context. The aim was to convince the public that the researchers had manipulated data to mislead them about the reality of climate change. The incident became known as the “Climategate” scandal.

The matter was covered in the U.S. media for months, particularly in conservative outlets. Later, multiple independent investigations found no wrongdoing in the scientists’ research. However, the results of these investigations were barely publicized, leading to a decline in public trust in climate science.

A few years ago, a scientist leaked several documents revealing the names of financial backers of the Heartland Institute, a leading organization attacking climate science. After activists increased pressure, corporations such as State Farm Insurance and General Motors cut ties with the influential Heartland Institute. Several other corporations decided they would no longer publicly align themselves with climate change denial.

Presidential Elections and the Fossil Fuel Lobby

---

bailed heartland

COMPANIES ENDING HEARTLAND INSTITUTE FUNDING
due to climate change denial campaigns:

Heartland's entire Finance, Insurance and Real Estate program (now the R Street Institute), including:

Farmer's Insurance and Nationwide Insurance have also confirmed (E&E News ClimateWire) they will not support the Heartland Institute. Microsoft** has stated that "the Heartland Institute’s position on climate change is diametrically opposed to Microsoft’s position. And we completely disagree with the group’s inflammatory and distasteful advertising campaign."

SEE FORECAST THE FACTS FOR A FULL LOOK AT CORPORATE FUNDERS WHO HAVE LEFT OR STAYED WITH THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE'S CLIMATE SCIENCE DENIAL

==

andy kroll mojo

Two years later, the US Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of an aggressive new president named Tom Donohue, picked up on Rove’s strategy.  Pledging to “play hardball” against “frivolous” lawsuits, the Chamber spent $10 million on judicial races in 2000 alone. It pumped $4.4 million into Ohio’s Supreme Court election—the largest expenditure from a single source on a court race in US history. In the following years, the Chamber injected tens of millions into races in Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, and Wisconsin. Corporate America had grasped the potential to install friendly judges who could crack down on costly class actions and neutralize the efforts of consumer advocates. “We’re clearly engaged in hand-to-hand combat,” as Donohue put it, “and we’ve got to step it up if we’re going to survive.”

Unions spent millions on these races as well—particularly across the Upper Midwest, as labor leaders recognized they could get a great return on investment by backing justices sympathetic to workers’ rights. As an official with the Ohio AFL-CIO once said: “We figured out a long time ago that it’s easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.”

A major showdown came in 2004, in West Virginia’s Supreme Court election.Don Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy, donated $3 million to Republican candidate Brent Benjamin. Meanwhile, a nonprofit funded primarily by Massey Energy ran TV ads accusing incumbent Justice Warren McGraw of getting a child rapist out of prison and into a job at a high school. After Benjamin won, the investment paid off big time: He later cast the deciding vote to overturn a lower court’s $50 million verdict against Massey Energy. Two years later, the US Supreme Court ruled that Benjamin should have recused himself. It overturned the decision and sent the case back to West Virginia. (Massey Energy ultimately prevailed in state court.)

Corporate interests also reaped a huge return on investment in the 2004 Supreme Court election in Illinois. Five years earlier, a jury had handed down a $1.19 billion penalty to the insurance company State Farm for requiring millions of claimants to accept subpar replacement auto parts. State Farm and its employees—working through the US Chamber, the Illinois Republican Party, and an Illinois-based tort reform group—steered $4 million to elect a sympathetic judge named Lloyd Karmeier to the Supreme Court, which was considering State Farm’s appeal of the auto parts verdict. Karmeier, his opponent, and various outside groups spent a record $9.3 million on the race. Karmeier, who would later acknowledge that the sum was “obscene,” won easily. And the millions State Farm spent were a pittance compared with what it gained: The next year, Karmeier cast the deciding vote to overturn the more than $1 billion verdict against State Farm.

Up to this point, the big spenders were mostly targeting contested judicial elections—ones in which a candidate challenged a sitting justice. Then came the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Varnum v. Brien, in which the seven justices unanimously ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the state constitution. Social-conservative groups leapt into action, targeting three of the seven justices who were up for retention election—ones where voters only check “yes” or “no.” The National Organization for Marriage and its allies spent nearly $1 million and defeated all three. “They wanted to make sure we were punished for our decision and that other judges witnessed that so they wouldn’t do it either,” former Justice Marsha Ternus told me.

The strategy of turning sleepy retention elections into political showdowns has been spreading. In Florida’s 2012 retention elections, theKoch-backed Americans for Prosperityand the Republican Party of Florida spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to unseat three sitting justices. A group called Defend Justice From Politics spent $3.1 million on the justices’ behalf, helping them prevail. In Michigan in 2012, two anonymously funded nonprofits, the Judicial Crisis Network and Americans for Job Security, poured $2.1 million into attack ads against five judges on Michigan’s 6th Circuit Court, though the judges won out. And earlier this year,Tennessee’s lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, took it upon himself to spearhead an effort to unseat three sitting state Supreme Court justices—and, along with them, the attorney general, who is appointed by the court. Ramsey’s PAC pumped $425,000 into a group running negative ads that blasted the three justices as “liberal on crime”and for “helping advance Obamacare.”Funds were also contributed by Americans for Prosperity and the GOP’s State Government Leadership Foundation, which said it planned to spend an additional $5 million in 2014 on judicial races in North Carolina, Tennessee, and elsewhere.

Though the three Tennessee justices prevailed in the end, one of them, Connie Clark, told me she’s concerned about the precedent set by the fight. “As long as there are no limits on outside money,” she says, “then this will become the new normal.”

The transformation of judicial campaigns has alarmed another veteran of the court system. “Judicial elections pose a serious threat,” former US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told Mother Jones. “If judicial decisions are in fact not fair and impartial—or even if they are perceived as being biased—the basis of support for our courts crumbles.”

==

Corporate interests also reaped a huge return on investment in the 2004 Supreme Court election in Illinois. Five years earlier, a jury had handed down a $1.19 billion penalty [12] to the insurance company State Farm for requiring millions of claimants to accept subpar replacement auto parts. State Farm and its employees—working through the US Chamber, the Illinois Republican Party, and an Illinois-based tort reform group—steered $4 million to elect a sympathetic judge named Lloyd Karmeier to the Supreme Court, which was considering State Farm's appeal of the auto parts verdict. Karmeier, his opponent, and various outside groups spent a record $9.3 million on the race. Karmeier, who would later acknowledge that the sum was "obscene," won easily. And the millions State Farm spent were a pittance compared with what it gained: The next year, Karmeier cast the deciding vote to overturn the more than $1 billion verdict against State Farm.

==

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20141023/us-insurers-meet-climate-risk-deeply-troubling-silence

Even though insurers are in the business of protecting others from risk, a new report shows that most major United States players are turning a blind eye to a serious threat to their own bottom line—climate change.

"It's shocking...most of the industry continues to be far behind where they need to be in terms of understanding and articulating [climate risk]," said study author Cynthia McHale, insurance program director at the Boston-based nonprofit Ceres.

This stands in stark contrast to other big businesses, from carmaker General Motors to candymaker Mars Inc., that are increasingly taking a public stand on climate change and devoting resources to combat it.

The heads of insurance departments in five states—California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York and Washington—required large insurers to fill out climate risk disclosure surveys in 2013. The states wanted to know how the companies regard climate change, and what they might do in the face of it.

Ceres, which works with investors and businesses on issues concerning the environment and sustainability, organized, analyzed and ranked the responses,which are publicly available.

The participating 330 companies make up 87 percent of the American insurance industry. They are mostly U.S.-based and include both insurers and reinsurers, companies that cover against other insurers' losses. All companies fall under three large umbrellas of business: property, life or health.

According to the report "Insurer Climate Risk Disclosure Survey Report & Scorecard" released this week, around 90 percent of participating companies have yet to issue a public statement on their approach to climate change. To this point, the report said: "This near total silence on climate change is deeply troubling and is thwarting constructive public engagement on appropriate responses."

American-based Allstate and Europe's Zurich are the only two major companies that have issued such statements from America's top 10 list of property insurers.

State Farm, the country's No. 1 property insurer, has remained silent. So have Berkshire Hathaway Group and Nationwide, two other companies in the top 10. These three companies are also among a majority of property insurers whose top executives don't publicly acknowledge the issue.

The situation is more grave for life and health insurers.

Despite increasing evidence that changes in climate, such as longer and more intense heat waves, are likely to affect human health and lifespan, the report said these "insurers show widespread indifference to climate risk, both in regard to their core business" and their investments.

But it's not all bad news. Nine companies have emerged as clear leaders in the industry and 50 more are taking steps in the right direction.

The nine top companies include four American companies (ACE, The Hartford, Prudential and XL Group) and five international companies (Allianz, Munich Re, Sompo Japan, Swiss Re and Zurich Insurance).

McHale told InsideClimate News, "When you do have a breakaway group like that...industry competition kicks in and it can sort of create a bit of a tipping point.

"We [at Ceres] are of the mind that competition rather than science is going to move this industry at the end of the day and motivate insurers to take visible action on climate."

One of those leaders is Swiss Re, a major reinsurer based in Zurich. The company started tracking the issue closely 25 years ago when it considered protecting insurers against extreme weather events.

The company's mindset is "anything that can potentially make [extreme weather] worse is something we need to understand," and climate change fit the bill, said Mark Way, head of Swiss Re's sustainability department.

"We spend a lot of time peering over the horizon to see what new risks are coming," Way said.

Franklin Nutter, president of the industry trade group Reinsurance Association of America, points out that European reinsurers like Swiss Re have a corporate culture that's more open to "forward thinking" on emerging risks like climate change than many American counterparts.

Some of the risks bring new business opportunities. An example is the property insurer The Hartford, based in Hartford, Conn. Another Ceres-named leader, Hartford's leadership on the issue includes offering insurance coverage to renewable energy companies.

These two companies also have initiatives to limit their own carbon footprints.

In fact, so do many of the companies surveyed. But unlike Hartford and Swiss Re, these other companies often said their plans were motivated to save money and don't acknowledge the climate implications.

"It's quite hypocritical," said study author McHale. "It really begs the question: Why would you care if [you say] climate change isn't real and matters?"

Spreading the Blame

Next year, insurers operating in Illinois, and possibly New Mexico and Maryland, will be required to fill out the climate risk disclosure survey.

Every time a new state signs on, it's a sign that their insurance leaders "are really looking at this and thinking about this and publicly coming forward saying climate risk is really relevant to the insurance industry," said McHale.

The fact that only a handful of the 50 states require this survey suggests regulators are not yet fully committed to addressing climate change.

Nutter hinted at this when he explained that an American insurer who doesn't consider climate change as a risk to a business customer might simply blame the regulators.

"The regulatory system will not let [companies] factor in a risk or price rate for climate change," he said. "It's too speculative."

It's not just state regulators, apparently. National politics is also at play. Mark Way, the Swiss Re executive, said, "it would be a lot easier [for other companies to discuss the issue] if the leadership from D.C. was less adversarial on the topic at the policy level." He also called for more formal guidance on ways the industry could and should be approaching climate change.

American insurers and reinsurers often see climate change as a "red flag for energy policy," said McHale. These companies will actively talk about extreme weather and behind closed doors they are even talking about changes to observed extreme weather, said McHale, but they are reluctant to discuss the potential drivers of that weather, namely climate change.

In Europe, "it's such a dichotomy," she said. For example, last year, the insurance and risk think tank Geneva Association put out a statement on climate change that affirmed the latest science. Of the 66 major insurance companies that backed it, less than a handful were from the U.S.

See Also

Big Business Climate Change Movement Grows in Size and Heft

---

==

ALEC's corporate members are a who's-who of companies that face tort liability. Its corporate board, recently renamed by ALEC as the "Private Enterprise Advisory Board," includes representatives of fossil fuel interests (Koch Industries, Peabody Energy, Exxon Mobil, Energy Future Holdings), the pharmaceutical industry (PhRMA, Pfizer), and big tobacco (Altria, formally known as Phillip Morris). It also includes insurance companies like State Farm, which profits from a rigged tort liability system by paying out less in claims (even while raising premiums).

==

Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There (with Bounty Hunters)
In the past year, at least 49 global corporations have dropped their ALEC membership, apparently recognizing that they don't want their brands publicly associated with an organization that pushes anti-union legislation and discriminatory voting laws.

But one of the most surprising hangers-on has been State Farm, an insurance company that has crafted an image as a "good neighbor." But some might say it does not seem very neighborly to bankroll an organization that has promoted "Stand Your Ground" laws that make it easier for self-appointed neighborhood watch vigilantes to get away with murder.

State Farm has not only stuck with ALEC, but it has retained a leadership role in the organization, with a State Farm representative acting as the co-chair for ALEC's Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Force -- the source of ALEC's anti-labor bills and other controversial legislation.

Joining State Farm on that task force is the bail bond industry. Last year, ALEC made a big PR announcement that it was disbanding the controversial Public Safety and Elections Task Force that had been responsible for bills like Stand Your Ground, Voter ID, and prison privatization, but the for-profit bail industry didn't jump ship. The American Bail Coalition President and CEO Bill Carmichael remains on the ALEC corporate board (now called the "Private Enterprise Advisory Council"), and the Surety Insurance Subcommittee -- chaired by the American Bail Coalition's Dennis Bartlett -- is now part of the State Farm-chaired Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Force.

ABC, the for-profit bail bond industry's national organization and lobbying wing, has long been involved with ALEC, calling it the industry's "life preserver."

==

---

This morning in Chicago hundreds of primarily Republican state legislators are getting more indoctrination against doing anything about climate change from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

This year, ALEC has chosen its long-time partner, the Heartland Institute, to help host the session. Heartland is so extreme on the issue of climate change that it sought to equate people who believe the climate is changing with the Unabomber, through a billboard campaign that featured a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski with the line: "I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?" Heartland lost numerous funders in response to a citizens campaign about the ad last year.

Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is Where?

The ad was so controversial that even State Farm Insurance -- which has stood by ALEC through the controversy over its role in pushing Stand Your Ground gun bills into law -- announced last year that it was "ending its association with the Heartland Institute."

State Farm gave Heartland $230,000 in 2011, according to documents posted by DeSmog Blog. It was not Heartland's biggest donor; an unnamed person or corporation anonymously gives it well over $1 million per year for its operations, which include a heavy dose of climate change denial.

State Farm, however, remains on ALEC's board and funds its operations for an undisclosed amount.

Heartland Institute: Global Warming "Would Be Beneficial," if Real