07 September 19
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 07 September 19 It's Live on the HomePage Now: Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation!
FOCUS: Exxon Mobil Is Funding Centrist Democratic Think Tank, Disclosures Reveal
 Kate Aronoff, The Intercept Aronoff writes: "The Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank that grew out of the party's pro-business wing in the 1980s and '90s, received $50,000 from Exxon Mobil in 2018 via its parent organization, the Third Way Foundation, according to the oil giant's 2018 Worldwide Giving Report."
EXCERPT:
Though it’s a first, PPI’s new donor isn’t so dramatic a shift from its fundraising record. The Intercept’s Akela Lacy has also found that PhRMA — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — has annually donated between $25,000 and $75,000 to the Third Way Foundation since 2009, upping its donation to $265,000 in 2016 — the same year that Medicare for All, which the trade group and PPI both oppose, entered the national spotlight. Donations dipped back to normal levels in 2017, although documents were not yet available for 2018 when the piece was published in late April.
In the last couple years, Exxon has taken up softer messaging on climate than either the Koch brothers or the Mercer family. With business all over the world, Exxon — like every other multinational oil company — is well-accustomed to operating in environments where denying the reality of the climate emergency outright is politically unthinkable. As climate concerns spike around the U.S., the company is still plenty opposed to environmental regulations and the lawsuits being lobbed its way from climate-vulnerable communities and attorneys general, who are each calling into question Exxon’s rule in fueling both the climate crisis and misinformation campaigns about it. Rather than paying people to say that there’s no problem at all, it can rebrand as a good-faith actor in the climate fight with paeans to carbon capture technology, low-carbon fuels (algae!), and carbon taxes that also conveniently exempt it from some of the lawsuits and regulations it’s most worried about. The decades of climate denial Exxon helped fund — and now the Trump administration — have dragged the national debate on climate change so far into the gutter that there are influential liberals willing to give the company credit simply for not denying the science.
For years, Exxon Mobil prolifically funded climate denier groups like the Heartland Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute. Under pressure, the company pledged to stop funding deniers in 2007, although it kept bankrolling politicians who deny the reality of the climate crisis. Exxon also still support right-wing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, which received $970,200 from Exxon between 2008 and 2018. As recently as 2011, MI Senior Fellow Robert Bryce said “the science is not settled” on climate change. Another MI Senior Fellow, Oren Cass, last year — the year after three of the five most expensive hurricanes to have ever hit the Atlantic — authored a report arguing that the potential costs of climate change are overblown, suggesting that many people prefer warmer temperatures and could adapt easily to global warming. In addition to Exxon, MI is — like other flagrant denier groups — funded by the Mercer Family Foundation; Rebekah Mercer, a key financier of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, runs the foundation and sits on the MI board. Exxon also continues to give large donations the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and remains a member of the American Petroleum Institute, each of which has fought hard against environmental regulations and climate measures. The oil company only left the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council in 2017, four years after it pushed model legislation in Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona that described global warming as a “theory.”
Throughout the 2020 campaign cycle, PPI strategic adviser and Clinton White House insider Paul Bledsoe has commented frequently about the dangers of candidates being too hard on fossil fuels. “[Joe] Biden and other moderate candidates must emphasize that the market is already phasing out coal over time, but that their climate policies still allow a role for natural gas as a low-carbon transition fuel for some time,” he told the Washington Examiner in August. “This distinction is crucial to success in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.” In a New York Times piece about Biden’s critics on the left, Bledsoe said, “Indulging in ideological purity is great until you actually want to solve the problem.”
“Happily,” he wrote in a February Forbes op-ed attacking the Green New Deal, “there is no need to eliminate fossil fuels in the next decade or require only renewable energy or guarantee public sector jobs to meet our climate goals.” We might never find out what Exxon Mobil’s money got up to at PPI last year. If its experts keep sounding like Bledsoe and Goldberg, though, it’ll probably keep coming.
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