Climate Action Partnership Top Contribution Recipients - Inhofe, Barton, "Texas Freedom Fund"

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Two years ago, a dozen of the country’s major corporations, including Caterpillar, Duke Energy, and Dow Chemical, banded together with several of the nation’s leading environmental groups to form a group called the United States Climate Action Partnership. According to the group’s Web site, USCAP’s mission is to encourage “the federal government to enact legislation requiring significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.” That’s a nice thought and by signing onto it USCAP’s members got a lot of nice press (including in The New Yorker). But a recent analysis of campaign giving by the non-profit group Clean Air Watch suggests that USCAP’s corporate members do not take USCAP’s goals terribly seriously. In fact, they seem to be devoting considerable resources to undermining them.

Consider, for example, the contributions made in the last election cycle by Caterpillar’s corporate PAC. It contributed ten thousand dollars to Congressman Joe Barton, Republican of Texas and five thousand dollars to Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma. Barton is the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Inhofe is the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee; they are two of Washington’s most vociferous—and, arguably, most dangerous—climate change deniers. (Inhofe famously declared global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”) Meanwhile, in the 2008 election cycle, the Caterpillar PAC made no contributions to the Congressman Henry Waxman, Democrat of California and the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, or Senator Barbara Boxer, another California Democrat and chairwoman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. These are two lawmakers who are pushing for “legislation requiring significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Similarly, in the 2008 cycle, Duke Energy’s PAC contributed eleven thousand and five hundred dollars to Barton—four thousand dollars to his campaign committee and seven thousand and five hundred dollars to his “Texas Freedom Fund”—and seven thousand dollars to Inhofe. Waxman and Boxer each got nothing.

“USCAP has made a lot of noise about, Oh, it’s very progressive; it wants to do this, it wants to do that,” Frank O’Donnell, the president of Clean Air Watch, told me. “So we looked at: what did they give to the perceived leaders in Congress for taking action on global warming and what did they give to the people who are probably most likely to be in opposition to action? And we found that the contributions were substantially higher to the opponents of global warming legislation. This smacks of hypocrisy on a pretty big scale.”

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/03/donating-to-the-denialists.html

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1. These contributions do not completely negate the significance of their taking a position.

But they certainly cast a new light on them.

Not every corporation and energy provider has come out on climate change.

It's a hollow position, perhaps, but a step in the right direction that they even utter the term "climate change".