How insecure is the coal industry?
Enough that coal lobbyists and coal-friendly lawmakers threatened to pull millions of dollars from the University of Wyoming if they didn’t take down an art installation they deemed offensive — reminding school officials of “the industries that feed them.”
According to emails acquired by the Casper Star Tribune, officials from the University of Wyoming received a barrage of threats over the last year from mining officials, coal companies, and lawmakers furious about an art piece installed on campus last July that drew a loose connection between coal, climate change, and pine beetle infestations.
And the threats worked.
The piece, called “Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around,” featured a spiral of beetle-infested pine logs covered in coal. Artist Chris Drury said the installation was not a political statement. “I’m not trying to shove it down everyone’s throat, but I hope people will have a conversation” about climate change, he said when the sculpture was first installed.
It was meant to stay until at least 2013 — and possibly stay indefinitely and slowly decay over time. But due to strong pressure from the fossil fuel industry, the sculpture didn’t even make it a year.
The initial public reaction from industry was frustrated, but tempered. State mining officials called it “disappointing,” but also said they were “very supportive” of academic freedom.
Privately, however, the fossil fuel industry and sympathetic lawmakers were threatening the school. In one email to major donors and fellow fossil fuel executives, the president of Wyoming’s Petroleum Institute even scoffed that the university would try to “hide behind academic freedom.”
The Star Tribune reported on the email correspondence:
The energy industry pays millions in taxes, royalties and fees, he noted. Left unsaid: Those millions flow through state coffers to the university.
“Don, what kind of crap is this?” Loomis asked.
Bruce Hinchey, president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, fired off an email to oil and gas company officials and major university donors slamming the university for the sculpture.
“The next time the University of Wyoming is asking for donations it might be helpful to remind them of this and other things they have done to the industries that feed them before you donate,” Hinchey wrote. “They always hide behind academic freedom but their policies and actions can change if they so choose.”
Hinchey sent his message to a number of Wyoming oil and gas business, civic leaders and university donors.
Top university officials, including at least one trustee, worked the phones to answer concerns from coal companies, including Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak Energy. Peabody wrote that the sculpture threatened its willingness to donate $2 million.
It wasn’t just coal companies and associations stepping up the pressure. State lawmakers also jumped into the battle, threatening to cut off funding streams and investigate who allowed the sculpture to be installed:
Legislators, primarily from coal-rich Campbell County, wrote university officials. They threatened to restrict the university’s funding, called for a hunt to find out which university officials knew about the sculpture ahead of time and decried the university for not knowing about the piece.
“It never ceases to amaze me how the UW invites folks in that spit in the face of the very system that writes the checks to pay the bills at the university,” wrote Rep. Elaine Harvey, R-Lovell, in an email to Buchanan.
One influential legislator threatened the university’s funding, and later the committee of senators and representatives in charge of budget decisions demanded an accounting of art at the university, both what it was and how it was paid for.
“I am considering introducing legislation to avoid any hypocrisy at UW by insuring that no fossil fuel derived tax dollars find their way into the University of Wyoming funding stream,” Rep. Tom Lubnau, R-Gillette, wrote in an email to university officials.
“We are going to get to the bottom of who knew what and when they knew it,” Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, wrote in an email to UW trustee John Macpherson on July 21, 2011, more than a week after the sculpture hit the news.
The artistic witch hunt served its purpose. School officials caved and pulled the sculpture down prematurely. In public, they said it was due to water damage. But the emails obtained by the Star Tribune show those statements were “not true.”
Immediately after deciding to take it down, one official notified critical lawmakers that the piece as “being demolished.”
The coal was then used for the only way these critics saw fit: it was burned.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Sometimes its surprising how big the dimensions are to the company store that we all live in.
This is scary. Academic freedom is something that people “hide behind”?
Let’s just let the fossil fuel companies shower money on our major universities (with strings attached), and get a Democratic president to criticize his opponent for badmouthing coal.
Oh, I forgot, that has already happened.
Push is coming to shove folks. However a third party would introduce some fresh viewpoints into the debate. Something other than the socially enabled capitalistic viewpoint. Perhaps even the “Tea Party” would return to the original Tea Party rebellion of being against taxation without representation that they have unwittingly abandoned to carry water for the Fossil Barons. After all they too are taxed to support the ecocide of the planet via subsidies to the ecocide fossil barons as much as progressives. And will pay the same costs of trashed commons and greed exploited resources. (Transformed into nothing more than garish bimbo yachts and hidden bank accounts.) The GOP do not fund Abortion. Fine. A precedent. How come we all must support the ecocide of the planet via fossil subsidies, that amount to a lot more $$$, to the detriment of HUMANITY and EARTH’S LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS!
Stop profits from the Pollution of the commons.
“When decent becomes impossible, Revolution becomes inevitable.” MLK
Is that the same Peabody Energy that has seen its stock price plunge 60% from its high point last year? Nothing like a declining demand for your dangerous product to make executives a bit testy.
Maybe they were stressed out over the recent US EIA modelling that shows that even a modestly rising carbon price would push USA coal industry into bankruptcy by 2035. Hard to have a sense of humor when your carbon bubble is popping.
Good thing it is all out in the open, ME
In his autobiography, Teddy Roosevelt quotes an 1886 address by Senator Cushman K Davis:
“Feudalism, with its domains, its untaxed lords, their retainers, its exemptions and privileges, made war upon the aspiring spirit of humanity, and fell with all its grandeurs. Its spirit walks the earth and haunts the institutions of today, in the great corporations,… their cynical contempt for the law,… their sorcery to debase most gifted men to the capacity of splendid slaves, their pollution of the ermine of the judge and the robe of the Senator, their aggregation in one man of wealth so enormous as to make Croesus seem a pauper… If we look into the origin of… the modern corporations… we find that… [they have] grown from an unrestrained freedom of action, aggression, and development, which they commend as the very ideal of political wisdom,… when it often means bind and gag that the strongest may work his will.”
Davis goes on to say:
“The liberty of the individual has been annihilated by the logical process constructed to maintain it. We have come to the political deification of Mammon. Laissez-faire is not utterly blameworthy. It begat modern democracy, and made the modern republic possible… But there it reached its limit of political benefaction… To every assertion that the people in their collective capacity of a government ought to exert their indefeasible right of self-defense, it is said you touch the sacred rights of property.”
These are very old battles, and they will have to be fought forever.
The eloquence is amazing, the truths undeniable and the progress made by humanity since entirely backwards. The klepto-kakistocrats are more dominant than ever, politicians oleaginous mumblers of profane untruths, the MSM an echo-chamber of duplicitous Groupthink, with a range of acceptable opinion from A to A flat minor and the public virtually inaudible as they poke and prod their little screens, or struggle to keep body and soul together. Neo-feudalism has triumphed and the Age of the Lobotomised Amphibian has arrived.
I agree with Merrelyn, the artwork did what it was supposed to: smoke out the coal lobby and their paid servants and make them show their cards. Academic freedom? What about freedom of expression, the 1st amendment? Since when it is it allowed to censor artwork at a public institution?
The Law is for the mighty, alone. The rest must fear and tremble.
Academic freedom, indeed. I seem to recall that the coal industry in West Virginia is offering courses that tout the benefits of coal and coal mining — although I think those are intended for middle and high schools, not colleges.
Better to have a smaller university, or none, than the fake that Wyoming has currently.
If anyone at the U who was involved comes to their senses, they could help by publicly resigning.