Members took over $4 Million from Big Oil to push planetary heating
CAP’s Kristen Bartoloni in a Wonk Room cross-post.
The team’s name is sadly appropriate, as their agenda will accelerate the greenhouse pollution that is dangerously heating up our planet. Texas Republican Bill Flores, who received over $200,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, explained that their “all of the above” approach means expanding oil and gas drilling:
We desperately need the stability that comes from pursuing an all-of-the-above energy plan, which includes unlocking access and tapping into the vast amounts of taxpayer-owned energy resources both on our public lands and off our coasts.
It’s no surprise that HEAT will be focused on the oil industry wishlist. A Think Progress analysis of campaign contributions revealed that members of HEAT received a whopping $4 million from the oil and gas industry over the course of their careers:
| HEAT: OVER $4 MILLION FROM BIG OIL | |
|---|---|
| Member | Oil & Gas Industry Contributions Through Career |
| Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) | $142,350 |
| Peter Roskam (R-IL) | $153,265 |
| Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) | $170,143 |
| Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) | $343,045 |
| Mike Conaway (R-TX) | $678,818 |
| Steve Scalise (R-LA) | $139,135 |
| Greg Walden (R-OR) | $182,500 |
| Rick Berg (R-ND) | $114,311 |
| Jeff Denham (R-CA) | $24,400 |
| Cory Gardner (R-CO) | $171,324 |
| Doc Hastings (R-WA) | $161,804 |
| Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) | $26,600 |
| Lynn Jenkins (R-KS) | $119,600 |
| Devin Nunes (R-CA) | $138,000 |
| Alan Nunnelee (R-MS) | $55,050 |
| Pete Olson (R-TX) | $246,750 |
| Ben Quayle (R-AZ) | $42,200 |
| Martha Roby (R-AL) | $14,500 |
| Phil Roe (R-TN) | $23,700 |
| Steve Womack (R-AR) | $15,719 |
| Jeff Duncan (R-SC) | $15,000 |
| Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) | $30,000 |
| Bill Flores (R-TX) | $212,528 |
| Virginia Foxx (R-NC) | $58,450 |
| John Shimkus (R-IL) | $275,761 |
| Fred Upton (R-MI) | $262,850 |
| Bill Johnson (R-OH) | $5,250 |
| Mike Pompeo (R-KS) | $250,156 |
| TOTAL | $4,073,209 |
“HEAT must stand for Help Exxon Avoid Taxes,” Center for American Progress Action Fund Senior Fellow Daniel Weiss says. Every member except for Capito, who did not cast a vote, voted to continue Big Oil’s $40 billion in subsidies earlier this year.
– Kristen Bartoloni, Researcher for the ThinkProgress.
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I’m speechless. How is this possible?
Our system is such that 4 million dollars can buy all that influence, I guess.
This is trivial for the oil corporations. Consider ExxonMobil, for example, which makes profits of thirty or forty billion dollars per year.
Question- is this all the money these guys are getting? Are they being given assurances of secure positions in conservative think tanks after they retire, for example, like Newt Gingrich got?
Conservative foundations like the Scaife and Bradley foundations, and the Koch foundations have various tricks to funnel money to those that do what they want. These tricks can include revenues from ghost written books, speaking fees at conferences, salaries from think tanks, and so on. Newt Gingrich, for example, simultaneously got positions at the Hoover Institute and the American Enterprise Institute after his fall from power:
From Sourcewatch:
Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose you or I were sitting on profits of thirty or more billion dollars per year. Suppose we had “friends” in Congress who we want to legally transfer money to in return for very little work.
How would we accomplish this legal transfer of money?
Cushy positions in think tanks, speaking fees, patronage of propaganda and lobbying businesses, assistance with ghost writing books and then buying up thousands of copies of those books to make the books appear to be best sellers, might be some of the ways we would choose to transfer money to our “friends”.
Or, maybe keep it simple and just stuff a bunch of overseas numbered bank accounts, and give Congresspersons the numbers, knowing that the money must be spent carefully or kept for children and grandchildren to use long after the transfer of funds was accomplished.
Mike, I suspect that if this weren’t possible, we wouldn’t be in the trouble we’re in right now.
OT
The WMO says the current European drought could persist for a few more weeks.
http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/news/index_en.html
Could we be heading for massive crop failures?
Here are the main climatological numbers for Belgium during the 2011 spring heatwave:
Total Rain
Month Norm (1833-1978)
Feb 44 52,9
Mar 22,4 53,6
Apr 25,8 53,1
Avg.Temp
Month Norm (1833-1980)
Feb 5,5 3,5
Mar 7,7 5,5
Apr 14,1 9 (yes that’s a full 5ºC above average!)
If I have to choose between these radicals’ remaining “relatively” hidden, and their being out in the open on an unpopular subsidy stance, I suppose I’d take the open option. I’m guessing that most of the radicals on that list have relatively seats. On the subsidy thing, it would not surprise me at all if crude prices are manipulated down enough/violently enough at the right time to give greater voice to the claim that subsidies are essential to smooth the effect on producers of erratic price swings. Breaking addictions can be hell.
“relatively safe seats” that is.
Leyland – the paltry scale of the official cost of buying politicains strongly supports your view. What is $4 million between the likes of Google, Turner, Soros, Gates, etc – not even petty cash.
There have to be other inducements that these alternative buyers are not in a position to match.
Obama has a raft of sundry intelligence agencies able to locate and supply details of those illegal inducements, but he chooses not to release that critically important evidence of the corruption perverting the US legislative branch of government.
The obvious explanations are that either he is himself corrupted to the extent of not wishing to rock the boat – despite both the existential stakes and his oath of office,
or that he has foreign policy priorities that demand continued total obstruction of any significant climate action, including the trashing of the US voluntary ‘pledge’ of ~3.67% off 1990 by 2020.
Following the well-documented sabotage of the senate bill by Obama and his senior staff, if the EPA carbon regulations are now deployed, they will apparently achieve around 0% off 1990 by 2020. As a brush-off to China, that’s really pretty neat.
Regards,
Lewis
HEAT! What if they get what they wish for? Will they take the heat for it? :)
HEAT was also the title of the first book by Guardian reporter George Monbiot. I am not sure we want to feel all that heat on Earth.
The heat is on and we are well on the way to being toasted.
They have so swallowed their own propaganda they have forgotten the point of the exercise. It seemed that the original political and economic task in the 80s and 90s was to emphasize doubt and delay action on CO2. But they have become so inured of their own propaganda they believe AGW is a fraud so they cant taunt everyone with a name like HEAT. Next team we get a clear break on the UAH record of 98/2010 or a break of the 2007 arctic minimum they will not have the luke warmist position to fall back on.
They have made themselves complete hostages to the data.
So 4 million buys 40 billion, now that is one cheap deal, these guys can’t even do corruption competently.
dolormin #10, they are, I believe, hostages to no-one. No matter how grave the weather calamities, no matter how dire the climate destabilisation, all that the Forces of Darkness need do is say that it is all ‘natural variability’ and they will prevail. The Dunning-Krugerites are not dumb for nothing. Their stupidity is notably plastic, and when their though controllers say a 45 degree day in London occurred in 1234 or 3000 BCE (just after the Ark passed over the site of Buckingham Palace), who are they to disbelieve? Every weather disaster is soon forgotten, as willful amnesia is a strong adjunct to denialist evasion. By the time the disasters are literally killing the denialists, just about the only thing that will ever make them wake up (the deaths of Bangladeshis, Bolivians or Tuvaluans are, naturally, of no consequence whatsoever)it will be way, way, too late.
Having arrogant acronyms like HEAT is nothing new for the Right. In Australia, when the Howard Government was actively pursuing political advantage by demonising refugees arriving in boats, the said craft were given the snide title ‘Suspected Illegal Entry Vehicles’ ie SIEV(e)s, which were notoriously leaky (particularly after ‘refugee disruption’ efforts by the regime). The poor blighters on board were labeled Suspected Unlawful Non-Citizens, or SUNCs, sunk in their sieves! Very witty and pathologically contemptuous. I also recall the FBI calling the gangs of heavies that they employed to terrorise Indian reservations during their war with Leonard Peltier’s American Indian Movement in the 1970s, the ‘Guardians of the Oglala Nation’ or GOONs- a fit, if insulting, epithet.