The Dead Billionaire’s Club That Runs the Environmental Movement

A new report from the minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works shows just how a handful of left-leaning foundations have taken control of the once-grassroots environmental movement. These foundations both shape the environmental agenda and help put people in power in the Environmental Protection Agency and other bureaucracies.


Click image to download the 2.3-MB report.

The report uses the unfortunate term “Billionaire’s Club” to describe the funders who give groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club Foundation millions of dollars a year. In fact, in most cases it would be more accurate to describe it as the “Dead Billionaire’s Club,” as most of the money comes from foundations set up by wealthy people who were often fairly conservative, but their foundations are now run by their liberal children and/or left-wing staffs.

One curious exception is a funder called the Sea Change Foundation. This foundation, which has remarkably little to say for itself on its web page, is run by Nathaniel Simons, a hedge-fund manager and son of a billionaire, and it gives more than $40 million per year to environmental groups, mostly for climate change issues. For some reason, he funnels much of his money through a phony Bermuda company that then donates it to the Sea Change Foundation. Whether this is because he is motivated by environmental idealism or because he is also an investor in companies that will benefit from restrictions on fossil fuel production is difficult to say.


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Aside from the unfortunate Billionaire’s Club name, the new report is very believable to anyone familiar with the environmental movement today. The Antiplanner worked as a consultant to the nation’s leading environmental groups from 1974 to about 1993. For most of those years, a Republican was in the White House, and environmental groups funded themselves by sending out direct mailings saying, “Send us money and we’ll save the environment from James Watt” or whoever was the Republican demon of the year.

One benefit of this system was that the wide variety of environmental groups had a wide variety of funding sources, and this diversity led them to use a wide variety of tactics and take often conflicting positions on various issues. For example, the Antiplanner’s book, Reforming the Forest Service, which recommended that federal land management be turned over to market forces, was controversial within the movement but was generally well received by many national forest activists.

Everything changed when Bill Clinton was elected president. With a self-proclaimed environmentalist in the White House, donations to major environmental groups dropped dramatically. Meanwhile, a variety of foundations that had previously ignored environmental issues began taking an interest in funding environmental groups. Moreover, the foundations let it be known that they would only give to groups that had mutually agreed-upon goals and strategies, leading the movement to lose the diversity that made it strong and the tolerance for new ideas that led to better solutions to environmental problems.

I left the movement at that time and for those reasons, and it appears that it has only gotten even more dependent on foundations since then. It also gets lots of government money. The new report documents how environmental staffers get themselves appointed to positions in the Environmental Protection Agency and then use those positions to give government grants to the environmental groups they once worked for.

The report also detailed one case where a Dead Billionaire’s Foundation paid someone to work in the White House in order to lobby for more EPA regulations. Ironically, the foundation in this case was originally funded by the Rockefellers, yet the oil industry that earned their millions is now the chief target of the groups funded by their foundation.

When I hear that there is a “scientific consensus” on some issue or that there is strong grassroots support for some regulation, it now appears more likely that the consensus and support are found only among a narrow group of foundations and the environmental groups they fund. I know there are real environmental problems, but the problems they identify are often imaginary and the solutions they promote will almost always do more harm than good.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

10 Responses to The Dead Billionaire’s Club That Runs the Environmental Movement

  1. bennett says:

    Is today’s post not a microcosm of how every agency and political office operates today? I would be surprised to learn of any federal agency or elected office that isn’t run, overtly or covertly, by the interests of a select group of wealthy donors.

    Of course the fact that this is a “Senate Minority Report” will elicit the inevitable, “Hello pot, meet kettle,” comments and deservedly so. The irony of a bunch of Senate staffers calling out a government agency for being usurped by the interest of billionaires is pretty thick.

  2. JOHN1000 says:

    Like many others, I am a former member of the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Foundation.
    Together with other “environmental” groups, they once were the solution – now they are the problem. They are basically another form of crony capitalism – there’s a lot of money to be made in non-profits.

  3. irandom says:

    $400 million Calpirg fund to keep California messed-up.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R46X3J7ZFuk

  4. MJ says:

    The new report documents how environmental staffers get themselves appointed to positions in the Environmental Protection Agency and then use those positions to give government grants to the environmental groups they once worked for.

    Yes, this is one unsavory outcome that results from these foundations’ activities. Another related type of activity that has more recently been been exposed to the light of day is the strategy of sue and settle. This disturbing practice has become a favorite of well-heeled and highly litigious groups like the Sierra Club and the Conservation Law Foundation. Congress has only recently begun to look into the practice, but has so far made little headway in reforming it.

  5. Dan says:

    When we vote in America, we now vote for the billionaires that align with our interests – we don’t vote democratically for our guy.

    That billionaire group could be the ones that fund ALEC, AFP, Exxon, API, whatever. There is a revolving door into K St and has been for years. The only thing novel about this report is that the authors are stepping up pressure on KXL approval, continued bargain-basement leases and fees on public lands, expanded offshore drilling, delaying the inevitable carbon tax, further erosion of CWA and its navigable waters, etc etc etc.

    DS

  6. Frank says:

    “delaying the inevitable carbon tax”

    Planner Dan Staley has undoubtedly returned to his (mother-in-law’s) massive suburban single-family house from a long trip, a trip that undoubtedly significantly enlarged his carbon footprint.

    Dan advocates for a regressive carbon tax; according to several recent peer-reviewed studies, a carbon tax burden on the low-income group is the highest and thus that a carbon tax can intensify income inequality.” This is just as true in China as it is in Australia, where “[a]ccording to household utility projections, low-income households suffer more from a carbon tax”.

    The fix for this tax’s regressivity? “Compensation policy” and “transfer payments”. Translation: A massive expansion of the nearly bankrupt welfare state.

    (Nevermind that another recent study has found that “reducing CO2 emissions as a precautionary measure will have very little, if any, influence on the timing, direction or extent of climate change.”)

    This is what Planner Dan Staley advocates. From his mother-in-law’s massive suburban single family home.

  7. Frank says:

    Other effects of the carbon tax:

    It benefits large corporations: “implementation of carbon tax policies enlarge the competitive advantage of large enterprises in the industry and compress living space of SMEs [small and medium enterprises].”

    It penalizes energy efficiency: “in order to achieve a certain desired carbon emissions reduction percentage, the carbon emissions tax imposed on the high-efficiency firm should be more than that on the low-efficiency firm.”

    The tax may not actually reduce emissions: “this analysis finds no evidence of a relationship between implementation of the carbon tax policy and the province’s per capita emissions totals.”

    And of course, Dan’s poster child for the carbon tax, Australia, did it all wrong: “Overall, the policy was poorly thought through, badly implemented, and lacked majority public support before it began. Australia’s carbon tax experience is an interesting case study in how not to go about implementing climate change policy.”

    The same study found that Australia’s carbon tax reduced GDP. It increased Australia’s deficit (due largely to those “transfer payments”—welfare).

    And perhaps the best line from this study of Australia’s failed carbon tax: “in a world of government and bureaucratic failure, the presumed superiority of a market mechanism in which government either determines prices or directly controls the supply side of the market is just that: a presumption.”

    Go on Dan. Tell us more about how Australia’s carbon tax is awesome! l0l

  8. Sandy Teal says:

    It is sad how in an internet world with a thousand different media, the reporting is more and more the same.

    We had two genuine populous rebellions in the last few years — the tea party and the occupy movement — but both were covered like they were idiots and extreme fringe groups. They both didn’t have centralized PR departments or a fixed leader or a declaration, but why does every movement have to live to make life easy for the lazy media writers.

  9. Hexagonal says:

    Hi Randal — thanks for posting this. I’ll read the committee report closely. It will be a stretch to extract the objective info in it from the alarmist cast they place on it, but that’s old hat for me. I did my master’s project on foundation funding of groups doing work on national forest issues — I left the field and went to grad school about the same time you left it, in order to step back and think about what I’d been working on. — hope you’re well otherwise. –David James

  10. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    Frank wrote:

    And perhaps the best line from this study of Australia’s failed carbon tax: “in a world of government and bureaucratic failure, the presumed superiority of a market mechanism in which government either determines prices or directly controls the supply side of the market is just that: a presumption.”

    From The Economist comes this recent post about the carbon tax in the province of British Columbia (please understand that I have no position on carbon taxes myself, pro or con).

    British Columbia’s carbon tax: The evidence mounts

    Some quotes:

    UNTIL recently, British Columbians consumed as much fuel per head as their fellow Canadians. Nothing remarkable distinguished their use of fossil fuel until, in 2008, they began paying a carbon tax. Six years later the province remains the only jurisdiction in North America to levy a charge on fossil-fuel consumption.

    BC’s levy started at C$10 ($9) a tonne in 2008 and rose by C$5 each year until it reached C$30 per tonne in 2012. That works out to 7 cents of the C$1.35 per litre Vancouver residents pay at the pump to fill up their vehicles. Because the tax must, by law in BC, be revenue-neutral, the province has cut income and corporate taxes to offset the revenue it gets from taxing carbon. BC now has the lowest personal income tax rate in Canada and one of the lowest corporate rates in North America, too.

    BC’s fuel consumption is also down. Over the past six years, the per-person consumption of fuels has dropped by 16% (although declines levelled off after the last tax increase in 2012). During that same period, per-person consumption in the rest of Canada rose by 3%. “Each year the evidence becomes stronger and stronger that the carbon tax is driving environmental gains,” says Stewart Elgie, an economics professor at University of Ottawa and head of Sustainable Prosperity, a pro-green think-tank. At the same time, BC’s economy has kept pace with the rest of the country.

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