With Climate Lawfare Failing, Rockefellers Try A Different Tact

The organization pulling the strings behind the climate litigation campaign is now using its political power to convince government leaders to write legislation that targets U.S. energy companies while giving a free pass to large state-owned companies overseas.

After several stinging defeats in the courtroom, the Rockefellers have debuted a new strategy to undermine American energy security, this time working with a group of U.S. senators to propose a tax that would have a few energy companies pay for climate change impacts, The New York Times reported on Wednesday:

“‘These oil companies and their executives are by far the most responsible parties for the climate crisis,’ said Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a philanthropic group that helped develop the proposed legislation.” (emphasis added)

Old Dogs, New Tricks

It’s clear that the Rockefellers are desperately searching for a new angle.

Over the past decade, Rockefeller Family Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors have spent tens of millions of dollars to support various activist groups, media outlets, plaintiffs’ attorneys, and academics all in the pursuit of pushing climate lawsuits.

The result? Winless in all three cases that have been decided on the merits.

In 2018, the lawsuits from San Francisco and Oakland, and New York City were decisively defeated by federal court judges. In 2019, the New York Attorney General’s case was knocked down.

So, the Rockefellers are now leveraging their enormous wealth and influence to try to undermine energy companies in a different way, and they’re relying on an old ally.

The Times article referenced the attribution science research of Richard Heede, a board member of the Climate Accountability Institute, to determine which energy companies should pay the tax based on his very flawed attempt to assign a certain amount of carbon emissions to specific energy companies.

This inclusion was presumably done at the behest of the Rockefellers, as Heede’s work was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and his organization was the host of the infamous La Jolla gathering in 2012, where the entire legal and PR playbook for the climate litigation campaign was devised.

In fact, it was at La Jolla where activists, plaintiffs’ attorneys, and academics discussed how to use this so-called “research” to support their political goals:

“Several participants agreed to work together on some of the attribution work already under way, including efforts to help publicize attribution findings in a way that will be easy for the general public to understand, and build an advocacy component around those findings.” (emphasis added)

Heede has even stated himself that his research was done for the sole purpose of supporting the campaign against energy companies. He wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian in 2019:

“The Climate Accountability Institute was formed in 2011 to confront fossil fuel companies. … We work with investigators, human rights commissioners, advocates and lawyers in an effort to curb the carbon industry’s enthusiasm for unabated fossil fuel development.” (emphasis added)

A Deeply Unserious Proposal

Beyond the fact that this proposed legislation is really the brainchild of the Rockefellers and designed to support their campaign against energy companies, the proposal is grounded in dubious constitutional authority.

As Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research told the Times:

“‘It’s laughable,’ he said. Mr. Pyle said he was stunned by the idea of singling out individual companies to tax, adding ‘I can’t imagine any court of law that this would stand up in.’”

Furthermore, as the Times reports, under the proposed plan, “the tax would be applied to U.S. companies and foreign companies with American subsidiaries.”

That means it will single out publicly-listed companies like Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil while ignoring state-owned entities like Russia’s Gazprom and National Iranian Oil, which allegedly contributed 59 percent of emissions since 1988, as acknowledged by Heede’s research.

As demonstrated in California, undermining domestic energy production does nothing to drive down demand. Instead, it just makes the United States more reliant on imports from companies like Aramco and Gazprom, which creates jobs in those countries and not here in America.

Axios also recently highlighted the climate risks posed by that challenge:

“Cutting oil production before we cut our demand for oil could undermine much of the progress that needs to be made on climate change.”

It’s unclear which country would benefit most from this Rockefeller-backed proposal circulating in Congress, but it’s definitely not the United States.

Read more at EID Climate