Tonight, FIU is hosting a climate change workshop and including, as a matter of some controversy, a climate change denier from the Heartland Institute.
“Climate Change in the Americas” is the theme of the 35th edition of the annual Journalists & Editors Workshop on Latin America and the Caribbean to be held on March 27-28, 2018, at Florida International University’s Miami Beach Urban Studios.
As always: follow the money.
The Trump election in 2016 is traceable to the influence of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer's Cambridge Analytica: the data mining and exploitation firm that took tens of millions of Facebook data users to create a psyops campaign that turned just enough voters to propel Trump to the White House. (Whether or not Mercer's CA collaborated with Moscow Center is among key questions being explored by Special Investigator Robert Mueller and his staff.)
Among Mercer's eccentricities is a fierce determination to avoid the science of climate change and global warming. Mercer is key funder of the Heartland Institute, giving at least $800,000 in 2016. The Union of Concerned Scientists website underscores the role of other major donors like the Kochs: "Heartland () once marked Earth Day by mailing out 100,000 free copies of a book claiming that “climate science has been corrupted” [40] – despite acknowledging that “…all major scientific organizations of the world have taken the official position that humankind is causing global warming.” Heartland received more than $675,000 from ExxonMobil from 1997-2006 [41]. Heartland also raked in millions from the Koch-funded organization Donors Trust through 2011."
In The New Yorker, "Robert Mercer: The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency", Jane Mayer writes:
By 2011, the Mercers had joined forces with Charles and David Koch, who own Koch Industries, and who have run a powerful political machine for decades. The Mercers attended the Kochs’ semiannual seminars, which provide a structure for right-wing millionaires looking for effective ways to channel their cash. The Mercers admired the savviness of the Kochs’ plan, which called for attendees to pool their contributions in a fund run by Koch operatives. The fund would strategically deploy the money in races across the country, although, at the time, the Kochs’ chief aim was to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. The Kochs will not reveal the identities of their donors, or the size of contributions, but the Mercers reportedly began giving at least a million dollars a year to the Kochs’ fund. Eventually, they contributed more than twenty-five million.
By way of an update, Buzzfeed reports:
Of the $19 million total the Mercers gave to 44 nonprofits in 2016, about 23% went to groups working at least partly on climate misinformation. (The foundation also gave $625,000 to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Rebekah Mercer is a board member.) This means the same year the powerful conservative donors were spending more than $20 million on the Trump campaign and other Republican candidates, they were also supporting organizations seeding doubt about mainstream climate science.
Trump has repeatedly questioned whether man-made climate change is real. This skepticism is shared by many of his top cabinet members, including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry. The administration has threatened to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, excised climate information on government websites, and rolled back the Clean Power Plan and other Obama-era regulations aimed at curbing emissions.
This rapid deregulatory effort was cheered at the Heartland Institute’s climate denial conference last spring, which was attended by Robert and Rebekah Mercer. It was also the theme of the group’s first-ever “America First Energy Conference” in Houston months later. Both meetings drew Trump officials, another sign of their growing relevance and reach.
“They are responsible for Trump’s denial and they take credit for it,” Davies said. “They are very proud he’s saying what they are saying.”
Between 2008 and 2016, the Mercer Family Foundation gave nearly $6 million to Heartland. Its annual funding ranged from $100,000 in 2015 to $1 million in 2008, with $800,000 in 2016. Heartland declined to comment on its donors.
Tonight's FIU workshop is aimed to journalists and editors from Latin and South America, regions where local economies dependent on small scale agriculture are already being hit hard by global warming. Climate change induced migration is impacting the United States' southern border today, even if that disclosure hasn't made the Fox News crawl.
Perhaps, tonight, audience members of the FIU workshop will let their hosts know what they think about having a climate change denier in the midst of a municipality that has already invested $500 million in street and sewer and pump upgrades just to ward off the latest high tides. More to come.
Here’s How Much Money The Mercer Family Donated To Climate Misinformation Groups In 2016
The Mercer family, among President Trump’s most powerful donors, in 2016 gave nearly $4 million to groups that challenge the scientific consensus on man-made climate change, tax filings reveal.
Posted on January 25, 2018, at 6:14 p.m.
Zahra Hirji BuzzFeed News Reporter
The Mercer family, the secretive GOP megadonors with ties to the alt-right, in 2016 funded several groups that deny climate change is a problem, tax filings obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal.
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