Exposing Big Bad Green

Three major stories about the Green movement and its ties to major Left-wing foundations and Left-wing journalists have been in the news.

• MediaTrackers uncovered Gamechanger Salon, a secretive group of over 1,000 Leftwing leaders and activists from organizations like AFL-CIO, Change.org, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, Huffington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ThinkProgress, Media Matters, and such climate-alarm groups as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, US Climate Action Network, shaping news reporting and government policy.
• The U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee revealed a “Billionaires’ Club” of carefully orchestrated and hidden Leftwing support for environmental organizations totaling over $1.3 billion per year that exploits ties with the Environmental Protection Agency and other parts of the Obama Administration to pass policies Congress, the real representatives of the people, won’t adopt.
• Capital Research Center exposed a concerted effort in the mainstream media here and around the world, including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and the BBC as well as leading newspapers and magazines, to exclude the views of “climate-change skeptic” scientists from coverage, thus hiding from the public the real and growing debates over climate change among qualified climate scientists.

Here are more details.

Gamechanger Salon

On July 29, MediaTrackers, thanks to a University of Wisconsin professor’s emails acquired through an open records request, exposed Gamechanger Salon (GS), a secretive group of  “over 1,000 state and national leftwing leaders and activists” that its policy manual describes as coming “from different ‘worlds’ of the movement to share stories, honest reflections, interesting articles, and provocative ideas on how we build a stronger, more coordinated, more game-changing movement for the 21st Century.” GS’s members come from a many of the most powerful Leftwing organizations in America, including AFL-CIO, Change.org, NARAL, Progressive Change Campaign Committee,SEIU, MoveOn.org Political Action, Huffington Post, MSNBC; ThinkProgress, and George Soros’s Media Matters.

Green—especially climate alarmist—groups are prominently represented: 350.org, Alliance for Climate Education, Climate Advocacy, Climate Justice, DeSmogBlog, Environment America, EnvironmentalAction.org, Forecast the Facts, Greenpeace, Greenpeace Global Youth Climate, Sierra Club, Sierra Student Coalition, Solar Mosaic, Story of Stuff, Climate Action Lab, US Climate Action Network, and Wilderness Society.

A GS member, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Fitsnews.com, “The object of this group was to protect Barack Obama at all costs, and push progressive messaging around the country. For your normal person, Gamechanger Salon sounds like some strange, forgettable thing—but these are the biggest movers and shakers in the nation. And the most hard core leftists in the nation.” Another member—a member, mind you—called it “the vast left-wing conspiracy.”

“Billionaires Club” Pulls Green Puppets’ Strings On July 30, the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee’s minority staff released a shocking 92-page report: “The Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA.” As Forbes contributor Chris Pandoni sums it up, the report shows that “What may seem like an organic, disparate movement is actually a well oiled machine that receives its funding from a handful of super rich liberal donors operating behind the anonymity of foundations and charities” and reveals “the cozy relationship many environmental groups have with the executive branch and the revolving door that makes this possible.” Some bottom-line points from Pandoni’s article and the EPW’s press release that introduced the report:

• In 2011, 10 foundations gave over half a billion dollars to Green groups.
• In the same year, member foundations of the Environmental Grantmakers Association (which doesn’t make its membership list public) gave $1.13 billion to Green groups.
• “Former environmentalists working at EPA funnel government money through grants to their former employers and colleagues.”
• “Under President Obama, EPA has given more than $27 million in taxpayer-funded grants to major environmental groups. Notably, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund—two key activists groups with significant ties to senior EPA officials—have collected more than $1 million in funding each.”
• A key tactic of these mega-donors: set up faux-grass roots organizations as boots on the ground for campaigns against, e.g., hydraulic fracturing for gas and oil.

Before you dive into the full EPW report, you can get a sense of just how deep and dark the story is from an article on it by Ron Arnold, a veteran researcher on corruption in the Green movement, in the Washington Examiner.

Mainstream Media Censor Climate Skeptics

On August 5, the Capital Research Center released a new report documenting the fact that, even as observational evidence against CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) mounts to the crushing point, mainstream journalists in both print and broadcast media have betrayed their profession by becoming advocates for global warming alarmism, with many institutions announcing publicly that they will not publish comments by warming skeptics. Again, a few highlights:

• As of March 6, 2014, according to a report released that date by the Media Research Center, it had been over 3-1/2 years since either ABC or CBS had reported the views of a CAGW skeptic scientist, and over 9 months for NBC.
• Last October the Los Angeles Times letters editor decided the newspaper would no longer print letters taking a CAGW skeptic position.
• The science forum of news aggregator website reddit, with over 4 million subscribers (twice as many as the New York Times), has decided not to publish CAGW skeptics’ comments.
• Similar decisions have been made by the Sydney Morning Herald, CNN’s Reliable Sources program, Popular Science, the BBC, and others.

It is good to see that with far less resources, the free-market, pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, pro-progress, pro-science, pro-realism side is getting to the dark underbelly of the beast. Such transparency will aid lawmakers and the public fully access a raft of public policies that are supposed to be good for the environment but, in fact, are good for bad.