Inside the World of Fossil Fuel Philanthropy

Chuck Collins, Helen Flannery and Bella DeVaan

 October 9, 2024
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Oil refineries in Ashland, Kentucky. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

For years, the fossil fuel industry has laundered false claims and junk science through allied think tanks and the media in an effort to slow public action on climate change. That scandal has attracted more and more attention over the years. But less well documented is how the funders of these efforts have used U.S. laws to make taxpayers subsidize this damaging misinformation: Through our philanthropy system.

Our new report with the Climate Accountability Research Project outlines how wealthy donors are funneling billions into climate disinformation organizations, both into charities directly or through private foundations and identity-masking donor-advised funds. They receive enormous, publicly subsidized tax benefits for doing so.

Many of these donors have a vested interest in ensuring the world’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels. They benefit from how funds directed to fossil fuel industry-friendly think tanks and policy groups help turn disinformation into accepted truth and sow doubt about science. Then, these ideas get turned into action — or, more often, inaction — by the policy brass of lawmakers and presidential administrations.

The Stand Together Network, a Koch-led cluster of organizations that brought in more than $873 million in donations over the last three years, celebrated “progress on many regulatory priorities” they’d “championed for years” after the first year of the Trump administration, the Intercept reported.

Or take the  Competitive Enterprise Institute, or CEI, which received $21 million in charitable contributions from 2020 to 2022. It bills itself as “instrumental” both in blocking ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and in pressuring former President Trump to withdraw from the 2016 Paris Agreement.

Then there’s the notorious Heritage Foundation, which received $236 million in contributions over the same three years. This money allowed Heritage to write Project 2025, a policy blueprint overseen by several former Trump administration appointees, which proposes changes to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency that would be disastrous for our climate.

Donors were able to deduct much of the $257 million in donations that went to CEI and Heritage from 2020 to 2022 from their tax bills — and these deductions were subsidized by everyday taxpayers. It is high time for the American public to understand just how much charitable money is funding climate change disinformation and to recognize the key individuals behind this effort.

The charities behind climate science denial are well-funded, interconnected, and have influence at the highest levels of government. Many of them are tracked by activist websites, science-based nonprofits, and journals such as DeSmog, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Climate Investigations Center.

We analyzed these sources along with the tax returns of the 501(c)(3) charities most directly involved in climate disinformation and denial, as well as those of the private foundations and donor-advised funds that furnish these organizations with the most donations.

Our complete findings — with sources, methodology, and more detail — are available in full version of our report.

The Charitable Funding of Climate Disinformation

137 separate climate disinformation organizations received charitable donations from 2020 to 2022.

Six of these are largely or entirely focused on climate issues — organizations where all or nearly all the funding is likely being used to promote climate disinformation. These organizations alone received $219 million in contributions from 2020 to 2022.

Together, all 137 climate disinformation organizations received $5.8 billion in contributions over the three years we analyzed. Most are multi-issue research organizations. This means the total amount spent on climate disinformation could range anywhere from a conservative $219 million into the billions of dollars.

From 2020 to 2022, 16 percent of the funding for climate disinformation organizations came from donor-advised funds, while 9 percent came from private foundations.

In this analysis, we look in detail only at donations coming from donor-advised funds and private foundations, because those are the only sources where public information is available. The largest single source of donations — $4.2 billion — is individual and corporate donors for which charitable donations are private.

It is fair to say, therefore, that the funds we are able to track through private foundations and donor-advised funds are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the charitable funding of climate disinformation.

Top Climate Disinformation Recipient Charities

From 2020 to 2022, the three climate disinformation charities that took in the most total contributions were the Seminar Network, the Stand Together Foundation, and Leonard Leo’s 85 Fund.

The Seminar Network and the Stand Together Foundation are both components of fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch’s Stand Together network. Together, these two organizations brought in more than $873 million in donations over these three years.

In 2022, the three climate disinformation charities holding the most in assets were the Charles Koch Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Seminar Network.

The first and third of these organizations are both part of Charles Koch’s Stand Together network. Together, the two organizations hold more than $783 million in assets.

Top Climate Disinformation Funders

From 2020 to 2022, the top three donor-advised fund (DAF) sponsors funding these climate disinformation organizations were the National Philanthropic Trust, the Schwab Charitable Fund (recently rebranded as DAFGiving360), and DonorsTrust. Because DAFs have a near-complete lack of donor and grantee reporting requirements, they allow for a high level of secrecy in donating funds.

DonorsTrust received $303 million in incoming contributions from 2020 to 2022, including an estimated $116 million in grants from private foundations, which get to count those disbursements toward their annual payout.

From 2020 to 2022, the top three private foundation funders of these climate disinformation organizations were the combined Scaife Foundations, the Searle Freedom Trust, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

The Scaife Foundations consist of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Scaife Family Foundation. All three foundations were founded by members of the Scaife family, heirs to the Mellon family oil and banking fortune.

Chuck Collins, Bella DeVaan, and Helen Flannery are members of the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies. Thanks to Peter Certo and Olivia Alperstein for additional contributions.

Will the Democratic Party Stop Genocide and Champion Winning Domestic Issues in Time for November?

Ralph Nader

 October 7, 2024
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Image by Kamran Abdullayev.

With little more than four weeks to go before the November elections, polls show the Trump/Harris race as “too close to call.” Winning should be a breeze for Harris and the other Democratic candidates. The GOP’s Congressional votes and policies are bad for women, children, and workers. The GOP doesn’t recognize and act against climate violence, it protects the corporate-favorable tax code, it is soft on corporate crooks, it scuttles regulatory protections for the peoples’ health, safety, and economic wellbeing and mocks the dire necessity of preparedness for future pandemics. (The military Empire with its violent war crimes and runaway budget-busting drain on our domestic necessities is supported by both Parties and not in electoral contention.)

Why so close, then? Because for years, the Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP. It has hired corporate-conflicted political consulting firms that control campaign messages, strategies and has excluded access by citizen groups to candidates, generally preferring corporatism over democracy, regardless of its rhetoric.

It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country – the red states – and surrender them to the Republicans. The mountain states and North and South Dakota used to have Democrats representing them in the Senate. Failing to compete in these low population states concedes about ten Senate seats at the outset.

Most telling in these last remaining days is the refusal for Kamala Harris and most Congressional candidates to have front and center proven and proper vote-getting agendas reflecting the New Deal.

To begin with I’m referring to raising the GOP frozen federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour from its present $7.25. Democrats need more than a throwaway line on wages.  They need to pour some of the billions of dollars raised into media and groundgame campaigns around the slogan “go vote for a raise, you’ve long earned and been denied by the Republicans.” That, authentically conveyed by thousands of Democratic candidates will get the attention of 25 million underpaid and struggling workers, who make our real economy run daily. Why aren’t the Dems ringing that bell?

Another winner for 65 million elderly voters is to pledge with full throttle to increase Social Security benefits frozen for half a century and to raise the Social Security tax on the wealthy to pay for it. Astonishingly, Kamala Harris and her handlers are not championing the “Social Security 2100 Act” which had 200 sponsors in the Congress, led by Congressman John Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal. The throwaway line is that they “will protect social security” as it deficiently exists. Talk is not enough. The Democrats need to organize and communicate to drive this message.

Third, they should be championing government-paid child care, maternal and family sick leave and the child tax credit – all opposed by the Wall Street GOP. Paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy – this issue is an 85 percent poll winner. Instead, Harris and the Dems mumble with some general rhetoric that nobody really believes. Western countries have long had such social safety net protections for families and children.

Get-out-the-vote efforts are still inadequate. The Party has trouble listening to Rev. William Barber who argues that just a ten to fifteen percent increase in low-wage voter turnout from 2020 would win the November elections. Instead of scapegoating the Green Party and spending money to block Third Party ballot access, the Democrats should try harder to tap into the 80 to 90 million non-voters who stay home, many of whom don’t see anything benefiting them coming from bloviating, hypocritical politicians.

If readers want more ideas for ways to get more votes, such as midnight shift campaigning, and cracking down on corporate crooks, they can obtain my usable new book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” and go to winningamerica.net.

Are you wondering why Tim Walz didn’t do better against J.D. Vance in the VP debate? Vance managed to normalize criminal felon Trump with his serial lies and law violations, corruption, abuse of women, awful presidential record (recall his lethal mocking of the early Covid-19 pandemic), because Walz was muzzled by the Harris campaign operatives. He was told what not to speak about and to hew to the narrow Party line. That kind of advice may sink the genocidal Democratic Party with its insular cowardliness in November.

Will these observations get the attention of the tiny number of ruling Democratic Party operatives who make most of the major decisions for their rank and file? Probably not. But similar advice from loyal party columnists like Dana Milbank, Michelle Goldberg, Eugene Robinson, Charles Blow, E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, among others, may breach the upper deck’s aloofness.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!