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Buzz - 9-25 - 24 - Bella - DeVaan

Bella DeVaan, Associate Director of the Charity Reform Initiative at Inequality.org, talks about her recent article "Fossil Fuel Philanthropy Exposed: New Report Reveals How Climate Disinformation is Subsidized by American Taxpayers", which tracks some of the donations to Donor-Advised Funds, which give large investors tax breaks, and in return allow them to donate potentially billions to promote climate change disinformation in support of their fossil fuel investments.

Broadcast on:: 25 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

Hi, this is Jan Miyasaki, the host of the Wednesday 8 o'clock buzz. Thank you for tuning into W-O-R-T. If you like what you're hearing, please consider making a donation at w-o-r-t-f-m.org/donate. It's just about 12 minutes after 8 and joining me is Bella Divan, Associate Director of the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of inequality.org. And she is the co-author of a new Institute for Policy Studies report, a fossil field philanthropy how taxpayers subsidize charities, promote climate change, disinformation, and stall urgent action. The report illustrates how wealthy donors take taxpayers subsidize charity deductions and when they pour millions of dollars into charities that actively work to spread disinformation about climate change. The report details for the first time the top charities formed to receive funding for climate disinformation via donor-advised funds and private foundations and illustrates how they've been created to give tax breaks to billionaires while also advancing their personal fossil fuel-dependent interests. So good morning, Bella Divan, thank you for joining me. Hi, Jan. Great to be here with you. Hey, so I'm just going to jump right into this report. And can you, what were you looking at? And it's hard to find out how donor-advised funds are used. So yeah, tell us about how you got this information. Absolutely, well, our organization is really concerned about the, you know, extended influence of wealthy interests in our philanthropic sector and the ways that people can use philanthropy, which is meant to serve our common good to create really anti-democratic policy consequences. And so what we did is we were really worried about ways that the fossil fuel industry and other wealthy interests have, you know, laundered false claims in junk science through different philanthropically funded efforts to slow public action on climate change. So we identified 137 groups that engage in climate disinformation, six of which are pretty much all disinformation focused. And we used a lot of our database information and matching up of different tax code identification numbers to really sort of trace the flow of money, because sometimes that can be really difficult. Charitable intermediaries like private foundations and donor-advised funds have insufficient reporting regulation. So an average citizen can't really figure out how individuals are directly giving to different policy agendas through philanthropy. So we had to come up with a matching system where we were able to trace different tax payer coding information to different charities and that's how we were able to sort of identify the flow of money. But our report can confirm that at least 219 million is traceable to specific climate focus groups. But that number could be in the billions of dollars and it likely is, because over five billion dollars has floated into these 137 groups that work on a lot of different issue areas. So tell us how then it works because these are donors that have built fortunes on fossil field interests. Then they get to donate money, get a tax payer, subsidize deduction to do more work from the other arm, if you will. That's right. You've put it perfectly. Yeah, that's the flow of influence and our team and other experts in this field estimate that up to 74 cents of every dollar that a wealthy donor gives to charity is subsidized by the tax paying public. So somebody's making profit, donating it and not having to pay into our common interest through our tax system, and then gets to engage in political influence that, of course, you know, can be really outsized compared to just a regular vote. So you give us some examples of how this chain of influence works. Absolutely. So here's one example. Some of the top recipients of fossil fuel philanthropy are groups in the Charles Koch and Koch Brothers network, one of which is called the Stamp Together network. It kind of builds itself as a group of social entrepreneurs who are engaged in creating a more favorable regulatory environment for energy, right? And in 2018, so they've received hundreds of millions of dollars for work on their advocacy and philanthropic efforts. Of course, these groups can both spend politically and also use research and media, which can be more readily tax exempted. And in 2018, after the first year of the Trump administration, this network stand together released a report really touting its influence in the Trump administration. So how the EPA Clean Power Plan was getting formally repealed under the Trump administration, how the organization builds itself as essential to the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. And also a lot of the staff that gets funded by these networks helped the administration walk back rules to roll back different, you know, regulatory decisions across the nation. So this is a direct example of how philanthropic money funded a lot of advocacy work that led to real policy change. I'm looking here that the Heritage Foundation, which is the name, anyway, that headlines the project 2025 report received millions of dollars. Yes, Heritage is holding almost 400 million dollars in assets as of the last reported year. They've received tons of money to engage in climate disinformation over the years. And they are the convening entity for the Project 2025 policy campaign, which has a whole chapter authored by the top EPA official in the Trump administration and suggests that, you know, putting environmental justice and public engagement functions at the EPA, eliminating certain offices that sort of match up environmental justice to civil rights, but that should all be eliminated, along with, of course, increasing oil and gas production, reforming energy security laws, just a lot of really scary proposals, and that money is flowing through the Heritage Foundation to make it happen. Now putting together the top climate disinformation funders, and then the other piece, the top climate disinformation recipient charities. So let's talk about more about the funders first. Yeah, so what's difficult about studying, and from why we think this report is so important, is it highlights how little we can actually know. When donors use intermediaries like foundations and donor advice funds, they can, you know, cleanse their name off of the chain of title between their gift and the impact and charity, because donor advice funds pool money across all of its account holders, and then disperse it under their own name. So the top donor advice funds involved here are the National Bone Thropic Trust, the Schwab Charitable Fund, and donors trust. Many groups have tens of thousands of users, but probably seldom few of them are the ones directing the grants to climate disinformation, so that's a key piece of this. Then there are foundations led by Harris to the Mellon family fortune, they're called the Skate family, as well as the Searle Freedom Trust, founded by Daniel Searle, and led by someone named Kimberly Dennis, and also the Lindy and Harry Bradley Foundation. Now, you could get a direct, I don't know, chain of influence for millions, but when you look at these numbers, I see why you and the authors of the report believe it is much more, because we're talking about, you know, 250 million here, 200 million there, I mean, it's a lot of money. Right, those are not modest sums at all, and when you look at the top grantees who are making the top grant makers who are giving under their individual names, those grants are in the tens of millions, but when you multiply that impact by 10, under the cloak of a donor advice fund, you know, that is extremely significant, and this money goes a long way in fortifying influence networks, it doesn't cost a ton of money used strategically to make a massive policy influence. Now, who are the top climate disinformation recipient charities, and you mentioned some of those earlier? Yes, so we pay a lot of attention to the Heartland Institute, which is a group that's doing a lot of organizing and sort of think tank production, promoting skepticism around climate change. We also pay attention to the competitive enterprise institute in this report, which builds itself as being really instrumental to blocking different ratifications of international cooperation and pressuring Trump to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. There's the Media Research Center, which proliferates a lot of, you know, mist debunking, quote unquote, about being too alarmist about climate change, and they just publish a lot of denial. The Reason Foundation is a part of the Coke Network. They are focused on producing reports and policy briefs to influence legislation about regulation of, you know, energy production, and then the top recipient is the bipartisan policy center, which is largely funded by donor drive funds, and it was actually founded to be more of a mainstream group than the other more self-identified right-leaning or libertarian group, or free market groups, this group, towards policies that might be their focus on addressing global warming, but are actually kind of toothless and seem to be benefiting major donors more than the, you know, more than the planet. So it's possible then, especially if it is less known, that folks with resources could be engaged in subsidizing these groups and not know it, is that possible, or can people be vigilant, and would it be somewhere be published, or do folks have to be asking? Yeah, you know, that's a good question. It's hard not to feel a little powerless when you understand the ways that certain people are weaponizing the structure of our philanthropic system to advance specific agendas. We think that anybody who's involved in a donor-advised fund should be asking questions of their donor-advised fund sponsor, you know, why are you willing to facilitate grants to groups like this? Could we get more information on our own fund's gifts to this group, because everybody's billed as a collective in order to maintain the status of the donor-advised fund, so that means that then you have a voice in the way that the whole fund right-large is used. And otherwise, you know, our team is just really advocating for more mandated transparency requirements around individual gifts to philanthropy. That would really be the way to learn more. Say more about solutions. Yeah, so a lot of what climate disinformation thrives on is secrecy, and that's because of the lack of regulation that we have. Not enough oversight from watchdog organizations who can't all be, you know, matching up on taxpayer identification numbers like our database can, and also a lot of really intimidating campaigning. So we think that we need to be able to close some loopholes that let intermediaries give money to each other. A lot of the foundations and the individuals we've identified are giving money to donor-advised funds that then gets given out to these climate disinformation groups. We can also require individual account-level disclosure information from donor-advised funds. So like I was just speaking about, instead of just reporting, in aggregate, we need to know which individual accounts are giving where. We also think that 501(c)(4), so the more over, you know, lobbying groups should be having to disclose the names of their bigger donors who give over $10,000, and that dot sponsors should also disclose the names of people who are giving 10,000 or more to each dot account. So those are some individual transparency ideas that would at least help us get names out there. And then the public, you know, equipped with this information can decide, is this really how we want our system to work? Is this really the kind of philanthropy that we think should exempt somebody from having to pay taxes, you know, to create our common benefit? Now, we've been talking about donor-advised funds. That is the largest percentage that you've identified as contributing to climate disinformation and can you say, talk about private foundations because I want to link those two together? Absolutely. Thank you. That's a great question. Yes, so donor-advised funds are responsible for 16% of all contributions to these climate disinformation groups over the last three years. It's worth noting that the number one source, which is especially hard to trace, is just individual and corporate donations because those don't have any similar disclosure rules. And then private foundations are responsible for 9% of these gifts. Can I mention some of the names of the biggest foundations that are giving, you know, giving their pieces of their endowment every year out to climate disinformation? And the law states that foundations have to give 5% of the value of their assets away every single year. And so the top foundation giving to disinformation contributed 36 million over the last three years. And that is about 16% of what they've given in total. So it's clear that disinformation is a pretty prominent focus. And this is called the Network of Scafed Foundations and their descendants of an heir to the melon oil and banking fortune. So it's safe to say that a lot of the money that has been generated and given away is connected to the proliferation of oil wealth in America. And there's also the sterile freedom trust, which gives a lot of money 37% of its total disbursements to the tune of $29 million over the last three years to different really intense legislative advocacy groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the aforementioned Heartland Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the money behind this group stems from pharmaceutical fortune. So it's Daniel Searle, produced ambient and drabamine. The person who leads this group is also on the board of the most right-wing donor advised fund called Donors Trust, which funnels a lot of money into these causes. So here you can see a direct linkage in terms of actual personnel between the strategy of the foundation and the donor advised fund. I'm speaking with Bella Devon, Associate Director of Charity, the Charity Reform Initiative Institute for Policy Studies. I would direct people to this report at the Institute for Policy website because you really have to look at this and think about it and kind of take time to process it because it's a lot of--you detail this whole chain of influence, I think, is what you call it. So one of the reforms to disallow private foundations from using grants to donor advised funds to meet their payout requirements, correct? Yes, that's right. And the Donors Trust, donor advised fund sponsor, I was just mentioning, received $116 million, which is well over a third of its incoming contributions from private foundations. So foundations are giving to this fund to then enact the agenda they don't want their name attached to. So when we talk about climate disinformation and when we're talking about how these--their organizations that made their fortunes on fossil fuel and then have this other channel that they can take to make donations to get tax breaks to fund the survival of their corporations, when we talk about climate disinformation, what are we talking about because it really illustrates then really how this whole chain of influence works? Yeah, that's a great question. So to ask climate disinformation is attempting to sever the clear link that science has established between the idea that burning fossil fuels and living energy intensive lives creates really destructive consequences for our environment and warms our climate. It's about creating skepticism around the fact of climate change at all and then turning that skepticism into policy in action or action that reduces regulations around producing oil or solid hydrogen action that regulates industries. So it's about turning those ideas into action or very troublingly in action that will continue the warming of our climate. The report, again, you can read at the Institute for Policy Studies website. They found at least 219 million dollars went to organizations that promote climate disinformation. But when you look at all of the data, it is believed by the authors that this could be much, much more, right? Absolutely. Yeah. We just don't know enough information, not enough to be legally mandated to be reported for us to get the true number, but it's certainly in the billions and billions of dollars. And so they also offer policy solutions to increase transparency. And I think that's also really important to look at the reform proposals, again, disallowing private foundations from using grants, to donor advised funds to meet their payout requirements, to identify grantees by identification number, should be knowing more about who the names of the individuals are, and for those who contribute more than $10,000 and more. So the whole report is really just so much by value IPC. It has got a lot of research information. It's easy to understand stuff that can get really needs to be unpacked. So thank you so much, I'm Bella Divan. I'm from the Institute for Policy Studies Charity Reform Initiative. It was great to talk with you this morning. Thank you so much for having us, Jen. Really appreciate your time. Have a good day.