https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/10/22/empowerment-alliance-dark-money-natural-gas-industry
[Just a reminder. The 10 year global warming potential (GWP10) of
methane (natural gas) is 130. That is, 130 times more potent than CO2.]
links in online article]
‘The Empowerment Alliance’ and Other New Dark Money Groups Sound a Lot
Like the Natural Gas Industry
By Dana Drugmand • Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Amid the crescendo of calls for climate action and rising rage directed
at the fossil fuel industry, petroleum producers and their allies are
engaging in an aggressive promotional push focused on natural gas. The
same month that the American Petroleum Institute (API) started running
ads emphasizing gas’s role in reducing carbon emissions, a new dark
money group has launched under the patriotic guise of promoting
“America’s energy independence” by promoting, you guessed it, natural gas.
That group, called The Empowerment Alliance (TEA), is a registered
501(c)4 that does not disclose its donors (and is not required to under
law). TEA launched on September 30 with a news release filled with
natural gas industry talking points and attacks on the Green New Deal.
The organization describes natural gas as “essential to our shared
prosperity” in terms of jobs, national security, energy costs, and even
air quality, while the Green New Deal is labeled as “radical and
unachievable” and a “risky tax scheme.”
This anonymously funded organization, from its leaders to its messaging,
is part of a broader chorus of misleading talking points that goes
beyond the “natural gas and oil” industry (as the API ads say) to
conservative media pundits and top strategists and officials within the
Trump administration and the GOP.
Key Players and Plans
The Empowerment Alliance is known to be run by two top figures and
lobbyists for the Republican Party.
James Nathanson, the executive director, is a longtime Republican
operative and apparent dark money extraordinaire. Nathanson’s business
consulting firm in Dayton, Ohio, James S. Nathanson & Associates, has
funded various conservative candidates and Republican Party groups and
SuperPACs. But while these donations are transparent, Nathanson has also
headed a group called Freedom Vote, Inc. — another 501(c)(4) dark money
organization. Freedom Vote (FV) has been accused of failing to report
more than $1.1 million spent on political attack ads during the 2016
U.S. Senate race in Ohio.
Watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
(CREW) filed official complaints against Freedom Vote to the IRS and
Federal Election Commission (FEC), and even filed a lawsuit in June
seeking to compel the FEC to take enforcement action against the
organization. Nathanson was also a central subject to a 2004 complaint
to the FEC for violating campaign finance law in Ohio election campaigns.
Terry Holt, partner at the PR firm HDMK, is TEA’s communications
director and spokesman. He was senior communications strategist for the
George W. Bush presidential campaigns and has worked for former House
Speaker John Boehner. According to his HDMK profile, he has “provided
long-term communications and media strategy for several chief executives
at leading trade associations and corporations.” Notably, HDMK was hired
in 2010 to do communications and PR for the American Coalition for Clean
Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a coal industry lobby group.
HDMK boasts on its website about its work to build localized support for
expanding big energy infrastructure: “To reset the conversation about
the construction of energy infrastructure at the national level, HDMK
built a grassroots coalition of workers, small and medium sized
businesses, civic leaders, unions, and other local supporters. By
activating local supporters and giving them a voice at the national
level, we created favorable news coverage during the heated debate about
the expansion of America’s energy infrastructure.”
The Empowerment Alliance appears poised to undertake this same
industry-funded “grassroots” strategy. Holt told Politico the group
plans to “run ads, engage in grassroots work and reach out to the media
and may set up a lobbying operation down the road.” The group’s
anonymous donors are hoping it will be a “significant factor” in the
2020 election.
The group also revealed that it intends to “mount an aggressive
fundraising campaign in the coming months with plans to announce a
formal leadership structure and new initiatives before the end of the
year.” TEA has started running paid ads on Facebook spending a total of
more than $8,000 so far.
Anonymous Donors?
TEA says it intends to “engage the American people in an open and honest
dialogue” and decries the “billionaire mega donors” and “deep pockets”
supporting policies to curb fossil fuel production. Yet the organization
is notably opaque about its own funding sources and donors. TEA
explicitly states its “policy is to not disclose its donors to the
general public.” It also clarifies that there are no limits on donation
amounts “by an individual, corporation, union, or trade association.” In
other words, unlimited dark money is welcome.
Holt explained to Politico that the group’s donors are kept secret to
protect them from opposition and protesters. And as E&E News reported,
Holt also claimed donors feared safety risks from anti-fossil fuel
activists, or as he called them — “eco-terrorists”: “Because of violence
and trespassing and other criminal behavior, the Empowerment Alliance is
going to protect its donors from that kind of risk,” he said. “We are
offering donors this protection out of the concern that we would have
should they come forward and the scrutiny of some of these eco-terrorists.”
Oil and gas industry veteran David Blackmon (who was involved in
creating petroleum advocacy groups Energy In Depth and the American
Natural Gas Alliance) praised TEA for “filling a void” left by the
industry itself, but questioned why the industry wasn’t promoting and
advocating for itself.
“However, it remains a wonder why the companies whose bottom lines
depend on increasing the use of natural gas in this economy aren’t
mounting a well-funded national effort of their own,” said Blackmon.
Blackmon noted TEA’s lack of transparency invites skepticism and
negative perceptions: “But the desire to hold its list of contributors
confidential also opens TEA up to being labeled a ‘dark money’ operation
in media reports, with all the attendant negative news coverage and
public perceptions that inevitably come along with that designation.”
Gaslighting and the Green New Deal
One of the primary objectives of the Empowerment Alliance is attacking
the comprehensive climate policy framework known as the Green New Deal.
TEA seems to be pushing natural gas as some kind of Green New Deal
alternative, its answer to energy security, economic growth, and climate
change concerns.
This narrative contradicts the scientific reality of the climate crisis
— which the United Nations says requires “rapid, far-reaching and
unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
As Bill McKibben recently wrote in the New Yorker, “Many of [the gas
defenders] will say that, thanks to natural gas, our ‘emissions’ have
declined. But that will be the most literal gaslighting imaginable, a
lie of real gravity.”
The fracking boom has led to an explosion in natural gas production over
the past decade, contributing to the decline of coal power — as well as
a decline in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions — as gas power plants have
popped up. While burning natural gas releases fewer pollutants than
burning coal, natural gas is comprised almost entirely of the potent
greenhouse gas methane, and leaks in gas systems and industry venting
and flaring are common. After accounting for these leaks, researchers at
Cornell University have warned that fracked gas may be even worse for
the climate than coal.
In contrast to TEA and industry messaging, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions
actually rose last year by 3.4 percent, which included a nearly 2
percent increase in power-sector emissions. According to a 2019 report
spearheaded by Oil Change International, continued oil and gas
exploitation from new reserves could result in new carbon pollution
equivalent to building nearly 1,000 coal-fired power plants.
Echoes of Industry
Nevertheless, conservative media and officials and associates of the
Trump administration repeat these kinds of myths early and often. While
some right-wing attacks on serious climate plans are clearly hyperbolic,
like the false claim that Green New Deal proponents want to ban
hamburgers or air travel, others are more cautiously veiled in concerns
around economic impacts.
For example, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management,
William Perry Pendley, recently told a room full of environmental
journalists that resource extraction is deeply tied to the region’s
economy and jobs, calling it a “life or death issue” for communities.
While oil and gas does have a heavy economic presence in the region,
that framing downplays the ways fracking has also devastated local
communities with documented negative health and safety impacts.
And Dina Gilio-Whitaker, an Indigenous studies scholar and member of the
Colville Confederated Tribes, countered Pendley, pointing to the massive
social impact of “man camps” in booming oil and gas fields, which have
led to the exploitation and abuse of women.
Pendley also said that a “keep it in the ground” policy for fossil fuels
would be “absolutely insane.” But that is in fact a prescription from
scientists and experts analyzing the impact of fossil fuel exploitation
on the carbon budget, with the goal of avoiding catastrophic climate
disruption.
Speaking at the same conference, former Trump Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) official and founder of the pro-Trump 501(c)(4) Energy 45
Fund, Mandy Gunasekara also defended oil and gas, echoing the industry
message about natural gas reducing emissions. Gunasekara, who was the
aide that handed a snowball to Sen. James Inhofe during his infamous
climate science denial speech on the Senate floor, claimed that climate
proposals like the Green New Deal or carbon pricing are “premised on
making energy more expensive.” This prompted fellow panelist Heather
McTeer Toney of Moms Clean Air Force (and a regional EPA administrator
under Obama) to push back.
“That is not true,” Toney said. “It’s information like that that gets
put into the sphere of voters all over this country, and they believe
rhetoric.” She explained that higher energy costs are the result of
energy companies passing along their costs to consumers. “It’s that
little piece you leave out about what’s really going on and does not
connect all the dots,” Toney said.
The key, she added, is figuring out a way to not pass these costs on to
ratepayers, “so that people are not paying for it and our children are
not paying for it, and we stop lying to the American public.”
Like TEA, Gunasekara’s Energy 45 group does not disclose its donors, but
the talking points coming from these dark money groups sound like a
perfect echo of the oil and gas industry itself.
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