Obama, Climate Change, and Money

Left-Wing Foundations Dictate Obama's Misplaced Priority

By DAVID HOROWITZ AND JACOB LAKSIN
Posted 06/19/2012

President Obama recently outlined his policy priorities for his second term, but if you think it's anything as practical as jobs or the economy, you are greatly mistaken. Instead, according to the New Yorker, Obama believes that "the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change."

This choice of focus might seem bizarre, especially when one recalls that the so-called scientific consensus on manmade global warming and climate change was fatally shaken by the 2009 "Climategate" scandal that revealed the world's leading climatologists had conspired to cover up data and research that undermined warming dogma.

Persistently high unemployment and sluggish economic growth also suggest more critical policy prerogatives.

But as we report in our new book, "The New Leviathan," what seems like a case of stunningly misplaced priorities becomes explicable, if not defensible, once one understands the outsize influence that environmental groups and their sponsors in progressive foundations have in dictating the focus and content of our public policy on environmental issues, all the way up to the White House.

To see how that's possible, follow the money.

Left-wing foundations are the place to start. Though ostensibly apolitical, these tax-free charities have spent millions of dollars promoting environmental causes, most notably the dubious threat of global warming and climate change.

In 2007, for example, the New York-based Doris Duke Foundation created an ambitious $100 million program to fight the threat of global warming. That investment was nearly matched in 2010, when the the Ford Foundation committed $85 million over five years to "combating climate change."

That the president now prioritizes climate change policy — despite tenuous scientific evidence of a problem and at the expense of more urgent economic concerns — is a testament to the effectiveness of the foundations' campaigns.

More broadly, it is a tribute to the green army of environmental groups that left-wing foundations' funds helped create and whose collective activism has elevated climate change from a marginal issue into a national agenda.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Ford Foundation almost alone created the modern environmental movement.

For instance, the environmental powerhouse National Resources Defense Council had no members in the early years of its existence in the '70s and subsisted entirely on Ford funding. Ford's early support paved the way for contributions from other major foundations like Heinz Endowments and the Turner and MacArthur foundations.

Fueled by millions from these mega-rich charities, NRDC today is the country's largest environmental group, with annual revenues of $97 million and an influence rivaling that of the government's own environmental agency — a reality reflected in the NRDC's self-embraced honorific: the "shadow EPA."

As the NRDC's Ford-funded rise to prominence suggests, grants from left-wing foundations have given environmental groups a tremendous advantage in setting the country's political agenda — even when the science is not on their side.

Our investigation reveals that the net assets of the 553 left-wing environmental groups total $9.5 billion. That is substantially more than the EPA's 2011 federal budget of $8.7 billion.

By contrast, there are 32 free-market and moderate environmental groups, and their net assets total $38.2 million. The environmental left's assets are 249 times larger.

If that didn't tip the scales enough, the federal government annually provides nearly $569 million in grant money to 247 progressive environmental groups.

Flush with foundations' cash and enjoying an incestuous relationship with the government, it's not surprising that environmental groups have succeeded in making their priorities and the president's one and the same. In this context, Obama's pledge to make climate change his top policy aim is neither startling nor even new.

Within a week of Obama's victory in the 2008 election, environmental groups like Earth Justice and the NRDC were demanding that the president take the unprecedented step of regulating carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, even if it meant bypassing congressional approval. In February 2009, the administration moved to do just that.

Later the administration showed its deference to environmental groups by backing a doomed cap-and-trade scheme and funding "green jobs" through the stimulus bill.

It speaks to the power of the environmental movement that Obama is making climate change a top policy pursuit at a time when the need for greenhouse gas emission regulation has never been less urgent. Recently released EPA data shows that astounding strides have been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, all without the regulations like cap-and-trade.

On a per capita basis, greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. have declined by 16% over the last decade, with the result that the U.S. has reduced its emissions output to levels of the mid-1990. That reduction is almost 50% better than what the 15 richest nations in Europe achieved in the same time frame, even though Europe had a cap-and-trade program in place.

Evidence of environmental progress, coupled with anxiety over the economy, helps explain why the public is not on board with Obama's climate change agenda. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly consider jobs and the economy the most pressing issues, with global warming ranking dead last in importance.

Still, it's less odd than it may seem that Obama sees it in reverse. Environmental groups and their million-dollar funders have ensured that their voice is heard louder than the public's.

• Horowitz, a conservative activist, and Laksin are the authors of "The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future." (Crown Forum).