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Religious leaders and environmental justice activists in Richmond, Virginia are “pushing back” against the Koch-funded Fueling U.S. Forward campaign’s efforts to target minority communities while promoting the “importance of domestic oil and natural gas to making people’s lives better.” Continue reading “Minority Communities in Richmond “Push Back on Koch Brothers,” Call Fueling U.S. Forward a “Distasteful Effort””

President Donald Trump’s top energy aid—who has worked as a Koch Industries lobbyist—spent the early years of his career peddling climate change denial in conservative newspapers like Human Events and Evans-Novak Political Report. Continue reading “Before Becoming Trump’s Top Energy Aide, Mike Catanzaro Peddled Climate Change Denial as a Writer”

The fossil fuel industry’s effort to “start winning hearts and minds” arrived at a Baptist church in North Carolina recently in the form of three $1,500 scholarships for local high school students and a talk by Hubbel Relat, a Fueling US Forward representative, at a summit hosted by the Roanoke Valley Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Continue reading “Fueling US Forward Presents Scholarships to Black Youth in North Carolina, Recalling Kochs’ Troubling History on Education and Race”

Back in August at the Red State Gathering in Denver, Fueling U.S. Forward President Charles Drevna revealed that one of the campaign’s major strategies would involve targeting minority communities. A remarkable article just published by The New York Times reveals how the group is enacting this strategy, hosting and supporting events in minority communities while promoting the “importance of domestic oil and natural gas to making people’s lives better,” as Drevna put it.

Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, called the Fueling U.S. Forward campaign “an exploitative, sad and borderline racist strategy.” Continue reading “New York Times Examines Fueling U.S. Forward, the Koch-Funded “Exploitative, Sad and Borderline Racist” Campaign”

The energy agenda of the incoming Trump administration just got a lot clearer. A memo sent by Thomas Pyle, President of the Koch-funded Institute for Energy Research (IER) and head of the Trump transition’s energy team, laid out “The Trump Administration’s Energy Plan.”

The memo, which was received and published by the Center for Media and Democracy, was sent by Pyle to a private email list just days before the Trump team announced that it would replace a Koch lobbyist with Pyle, a Koch-funded former lobbyist, to lead the Department of Energy transition team efforts.

Pyle is the President of both IER and its sister advocacy organization, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), which are both heavily funded by the Koch brothers and their affiliates. Last year, IER and AEA received $3 million from the Koch donor network. Charles Koch was one of the original founders and board members of IER. Pyle’s Koch connections run even deeper, having served as Director of Federal Affairs for Koch Industries from 2001-2005.

The “Trump Administration’s Energy Plan” reads like a fossil fuel industry wish list, including 14 policy proposals such as:

• Withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Climate agreement;
• Increasing federal oil and natural gas leasing;
• Lifting the coal lease moratorium;
• Eliminating the Clean Power Plan;
• Expediting approvals of LNG export terminals;
• Moving forward with pipeline projects including the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline;
• Rolling back federal fuel economy standards;
• Ending the use of the social cost of carbon in agency rulemaking; and
• Reconsidering the “endangerment finding” that found greenhouse gases to be a threat to public health and welfare.

The memo from Pyle was echoed in a blog post on the AEA website published on Friday, December 2, which lays out “A Blueprint for America’s Comeback” and includes many of the same policy proposals, similarly worded. The entirety of original memo is uploaded on the ExposedByCMD blog.

This is a guest post by ClimateDenierRoundup

Despite the fact that Trump campaigned against special interests and suggested his primary opponents who begged for Koch cash were puppets, he now seems to be happy to #StaffTheSwamp with Koch operatives.

Beyond Myron Ebell and David Schnare on his environment team, news broke last week that Trump picked Steven Groves to lead the Department of State “landing team.” Groves is an international policy wonk at the Koch (and Exxon, and Korean gov’t) funded Heritage Foundation, and just last week, he wrote an article advocating for a pull-out of the UNFCCC as a way to exit the Paris agreement.

As the negotiating framework for the UN’s climate efforts and the underlying basis for the Paris agreement, if the US were to leave the UNFCCC, it would remove us from the negotiating table altogether.

Not only would this “lead to political consequences with our allies,” as Groves admitted in a House Science hearing last April, but it would also mean that Trump wouldn’t be able to negotiate an amazing new treaty on climate, as the US would no longer be part of the negotiating framework.

But contradictory advice is nothing new to the Heritage Foundation, which during the Farm Bill fight in 2013 told the GOP to split the bill into two parts. When Republicans did as they were told, Heritage still wasn’t happy. Republican Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina said that “Heritage was now scoring against Republicans for doing exactly what Heritage had been espousing only a month before.” Because of this stunt, as well as their push for 2013’s government shutdown, former House speaker Boehner said that groups like Heritage had “lost all credibility.”

Unfortunately, from the top of the Trump administration down, a distinct lack of credibility seems to be the unifying factor. But it is ironic that despite the Koch network’s distinct lack of effort to Trump get elected, they are nonetheless filling Trump’s administration with their operatives, from VP Pence to CIA chief Pompeo to Ebell, Schnare and Groves. And on the Energy Department front, it’s been reported by E&E that Thomas Pyle of Koch-funded American Energy Alliance is running the transition, while the Interior is being led by Doug Domenech, of Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation. And according to PoliticoPRO, on the Treasury team are Heritage-affiliated Bill Walton and Curtis Dubay.

The question is: does Trump even know the Kochs are pulling his strings? Or does he really think he’s “No puppet”?