The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s National Crusade Against Climate Action

When a lawsuit was filed to dam the nation’s first main offshore wind farm off the Massachusetts coast, it seemed to be an easy conflict between those that earn their dwelling from the ocean and others who would set up generators and underwater cables that would intrude with the harvesting of squid, fluke and different fish.

The fishing firms difficult federal permits for the Vineyard Wind venture had been from the Bay State in addition to Rhode Island and New York, and a video made by the opponents featured a bearded fisherman with a definite New England accent.

But the monetary muscle behind the combat originated hundreds of miles from the Atlantic Ocean, in dusty oil nation. The group bankrolling the lawsuit filed final yr was the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based nonprofit group backed by oil and gasoline firms and Republican donors.

With affect campaigns, authorized motion and mannequin laws, the group is selling fossil fuels and attempting to stall the American economic system’s transition towards renewable vitality. It is upfront about its opposition to Vineyard Wind and different renewable vitality tasks, making no apologies for its advocacy work.

Even after Democrats in Congress handed the biggest climate law in United States historical past this summer time, the group is undaunted, and its continued efforts spotlight the myriad forces working to maintain oil, gasoline and coal firms in enterprise.

In Arizona, the Texas Public Policy Foundation campaigned to maintain open one of many greatest coal-fired energy vegetation within the West. In Colorado, it known as for looser restrictions on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. And in Texas, the group crafted the primary so-called “energy boycott” regulation to punish monetary establishments that wish to cut back their investments in fossil gasoline tasks, laws adopted by four other states.

At the identical time, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has unfold misinformation about local weather science. With YouTube movies, common appearances on Fox and Friends, and social media campaigns, the group’s executives have sought to persuade lawmakers and the general public {that a} transition away from oil, gasoline and coal would hurt Americans.

They have often seized on present occasions to advertise doubtful narratives, pinning excessive gasoline costs on President Biden’s local weather insurance policies (economists say that’s not the motive force) or claiming the 2021 winter blackout in Texas was the results of unreliable wind vitality (it wasn’t).

They journey the nation encouraging state lawmakers to punish firms that attempt to cut back carbon emissions. And via an initiative known as Life:Powered, the group makes what it calls “the moral case for fossil fuels,” which holds that American prosperity is rooted in an economic system primarily based on oil, gasoline and coal and that poor communities and growing nations deserve the identical alternatives to develop.

“When you look at their advocacy, it is consistently a false choice between being environmentally responsible and enjoying economic prosperity,” mentioned Jeff Clark, chief govt of Advanced Power Alliance, an Austin-based commerce group for renewable vitality firms. “They’re against offshore wind, yet they spent decades advocating for offshore oil drilling. They are against subsidies, but only when it applies to renewables. They’re for looser restrictions on fracking and drilling, but greater restrictions for solar and wind. This organization exists to defend fossil fuels from any threat to their market share.”

On Thanksgiving, Jason Isaac, an govt on the group, tweeted “Today, I’m thankful to live a high-carbon lifestyle and wish the rest of the world could too. Energy poverty = poverty. #decarbonization is dangerous and deadly.”

Mr. Isaac mentioned that the advantages of oil, gasoline and coal outweigh the dangers, and that whereas emissions could also be warming the planet, the adjustments are modest and people can adapt.

“Absolutely, man is having an impact, I just disagree with the argument that it’s dangerous,” Mr. Isaac mentioned in an interview.

Mr. Isaac’s remarks run counter to the overwhelming scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is already making climate extra excessive, and if not rapidly and sharply abated will result in more and more catastrophic floods, warmth, storms, drought and social unrest.

“Just as the tobacco industry had front groups and the opioid industry had front groups, this is part of the fossil fuel disinformation playbook,” mentioned David Michaels, an epidemiologist on the George Washington School of Public Health who has studied company affect campaigns. “The role of these so called policy organizations is not to provide useful information to the public, but to promote the interests of their sponsors, which are often antithetical to public health.”

Robert Henneke, the inspiration’s govt director, disputed the assertion that it was a entrance for fossil gasoline pursuits. “That characterization is inaccurate,” he mentioned. He additionally mentioned that a lot of the insurance policies the inspiration promotes don’t have anything to do with vitality.

A Local Group Goes National

James Leininger, who earned a fortune promoting medical beds, based Texas Public Policy Foundation in 1989 to advertise constitution faculties. As it developed, the group embraced different causes together with prison justice, immigration, border safety, taxes, and vitality.

Mr. Leininger bankrolled Rick Perry’s profitable gubernatorial marketing campaign in 2000, and Mr. Perry reciprocated by donating the proceeds of his 2010 e-book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington,” to the group. Other rich conservative donors started writing checks, together with Tim Dunn, an oilman who’s the vice chairman of the board.

In 2015, the group moved right into a $20 million six-story headquarters in downtown Austin, the place the Texas Capitol is seen from the headquarter’s “Governor Rick Perry Liberty Balcony.”

When President Donald J. Trump tapped Mr. Perry in 2017 to function vitality secretary, the group adopted him to Washington, opening an workplace there and inserting a number of senior officers contained in the administration.

Mr. Trump nominated Kathleen Hartnett White, a fellow on the basis, to guide the Council on Environmental Quality. Ms. White, who had as soon as described believing in international warming as “a kind of paganism,” stumbled at a affirmation listening to, and the White House withdrew her nomination.

Susan Combs, one other fellow on the group, grew to become performing assistant secretary of fish, wildlife and parks on the Department of the Interior. Brooke Rollins, chief govt of the inspiration, went to work on the White House.

Bernard McNamee, a onetime coverage adviser to Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, joined the Department of Energy below Mr. Perry, then left for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, solely to return to the Trump administration after just a few months. Mr. McNamee is now a lawyer who advises fossil gasoline firms.

Douglas W. Domenech, who ran the inspiration’s efforts to dam the Obama administration from regulating emissions from energy vegetation, grew to become assistant secretary on the inside division. He was later discovered to have violated federal ethics rules by assembly with basis officers, creating the looks that he was engaged on behalf of a former employer.

As the group’s profile grew, donations ballooned from $4.7 million in 2010 to $25.6 million in 2021, the latest yr for which information can be found. That allowed the group to increase its mandate far past the Lone Star state.

The basis mentioned a lot of its funding comes from people. Because it’s a nonprofit, the Texas Public Policy Foundation is just not required to reveal its donors. But publicly obtainable tax filings present that the group has acquired cash from fossil gasoline firms together with the coal large Peabody Energy, Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

The basis has additionally acquired at the least $4 million from conservative donors together with Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, in response to public filings. Koch Industries owns oil refineries, petrochemical vegetation and hundreds of miles of oil and gasoline pipelines, and the brothers have an extended historical past of funding efforts to block climate action. Many of the inspiration’s executives and board members have labored for the oil and gasoline trade, together with Mike Nasi, a high lawyer for coal firms who’s a senior adviser to its Life:Powered venture.

The vitality insurance policies supported by the Texas Public Policy Foundation largely line up with these of the fossil gasoline trade. And in at the least one occasion, its work instantly affected a donor, Peabody Energy.

For greater than 4 many years, the Navajo Generating Station close to Page, Ariz., burned coal from a close-by Peabody mine, releasing mercury, arsenic, sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides from its smokestacks, together with carbon dioxide, whereas draining the underground water provide.

The speedy enlargement of low-cost, pure gasoline beginning round 2007, mixed with new emissions guidelines in the course of the Obama administration made the Navajo Generating Station too costly to function, and by 2017 it was slated for closure.

To attempt to appeal to new consumers for each the plant and the mine in 2018, the Texas Public Policy Foundation produced a video that portrayed the coal plant as not solely a significant employer for the Navajo nation but in addition part of its tradition. The video featured a Navajo woman talking over Native American flute music.

“Papa says it’s the heart of the land,” she mentioned as a picture of the plant’s three smokestacks fill the display screen. “Sometimes I think I can hear it beating.”

The effort wasn’t sufficient; the Navajo Generating Station closed in 2019. Peabody Energy didn’t return a request for remark.

Last yr, the inspiration set its sights on the combat in New England over the Vineyard Wind venture, which can encompass 84 generators positioned 14 miles off the coast.

Attorneys for the group filed a lawsuit in federal court docket on behalf of fishing firms, working freed from cost, and the inspiration produced a cinematic YouTube video to advertise the case. The video assaults wind vitality, exhibiting footage of rusted, stalled generators and means that tax subsidies for wind generators profit “foreign governments.”

Meghan Lapp of Seafreeze Shoreside, a seafood wholesaler and one of many plaintiffs, mentioned she hadn’t been conscious of the inspiration’s intensive work to dispute local weather science however was prepared to look previous it.

“The fishing industry needed somebody to represent them,” she mentioned. “When you’re at the point where you’re facing complete annihilation, you look for people who can help.”

Taking on New Fights

Since President Biden got here to workplace pledging to make local weather motion a high precedence, the group has solely elevated its efforts to fight what it sees because the overblown response to international warming — disputing broadly accepted models that venture an uptick in temperatures, questioning the viability of wind and photo voltaic vitality and dismissing the 2015 Paris local weather settlement as a political stunt that may “will push more people into poverty.”

When a storm led to blackouts throughout Texas in February 2021, the inspiration blamed the blackouts on frozen wind generators, regardless that utility officers mentioned the primary cause was the state’s natural gas providers. The message was echoed by Republican politicians throughout the nation and commentators together with Tucker Carlson.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation continues to marketing campaign towards wind energy even supposing Texas now generates almost a third of its vitality from wind energy.

It can also be serving to form the regulation. When a Texas oil govt complained that he couldn’t get a financial institution mortgage to increase drilling operations, Mr. Isaac, a former state lawmaker who beforehand co-founded a nonprofit that promotes pure gasoline, drafted a invoice directing the state to cease doing enterprise with banks and firms that had been divesting from the fossil gasoline trade. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed the regulation final yr.

With encouragement from Mr. Isaac and a network of Republican state treasurers, 4 different states — West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma — have handed related legal guidelines. That has led some states to stop doing business with main monetary establishments together with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and BlackRock.

Meanwhile, the inspiration is suing the Environmental Protection Agency, difficult its designation of greenhouse gases as a hazard to human well being and welfare, and this summer time lodged its objection to a proposal on the Securities and Exchange Commission that will require public firms to reveal the monetary dangers they face from local weather change.

As Republicans take management of the House of Representatives in January, the Texas group is poised to regain affect in Washington.

“It gives us a leg up,” Mr. Isaac mentioned. “We’ve been educating staff on the Hill on our research, our positions and our messaging. We’re going to have more of an impact in Washington not only over the next two years, but over the next six years. It’s great.”