API Now "Favors" Carbon Tax, But Shoveling Money To The Same GOP Asshole Politicians
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But what API’s members are probably interested in is staving off more serious climate policy, like outright caps on pollution or the forced closure of fossil-fuelled power plants. Those kinds of policies would be in line with President Joe Biden’s stated climate goals. But the industry representatives are clearly not interested in phasing out of fossil fuels, which is an urgently necessary step to draw down emissions. There’s an even clearer sign API has not, in fact, been won over by the climate movement: the group’s political donations. Campaign finance data shows that the industry group has given millions to politicians and PACs who are very much not down with the climate cause.
Last year, API poured $US6,000 ($7,680) into Sen. Jim Inhofe’s successful re-election campaign. The Oklahoma Republican is one of the best-known climate deniers in the country. He recently introduced legislation to protect the Keystone XL pipeline from the “the far-left’s war on fossil fuels,” which LOL. He’s also perhaps best known for lobbing a snowball across the Senate floor six years ago in an attempt to “prove” that global warming isn’t real. Dude believes the climate crisis is a hoax, and even confirmed that in a 2015 vote. This is not a man who will line up behind a carbon tax API will reportedly voice its support of.
API also donated $US5 ($6),300 ($6,784) to Rep. Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican who the League of Conservation Voters gave a lifetime score of 4% on a scorecard of his environmental voting record. As of less than a year ago, he wouldn’t say he believes in the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are heating up the planet. Last month on Fox News, Scalise called Biden’s climate policies “devastating” and baselessly said they’d “increase global emissions and crush American jobs.” If anyone’s destroying American jobs, it’s the fossil fuel industry, which has been laying off workers en masse amid crashing fuel prices. And if anything’s devastating about Biden’s climate plan, it’s that it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
In 2020, API also gave a whopping $US5 ($6) million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC that was started in 2015 by allies of Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and is run by his former aides. Last year, the PAC spent half a billion dollars in pursuit of its goal of defending a Senate Republican majority from “Senate Democrats’ far left agenda” — an agenda which includes climate policy. A large part of that, of course, is fending off climate legislation, particularly the Green New Deal, which McConnell himself vowed he would block as though he’s the “Grim Reaper.” As long as the filibuster is in place, it’s likely McConnell can stop climate action even as the Senate’s minority leader.
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https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/03/leaked-big-oil-docs-hint-at-support-for-a-carbon-tax-but-the-money-trail-tells-a-different-story/
