Actually, an extremely biased read on the subject.
CFACT is part of the Koch brothers donor network. During the 2012 election year they received over 67% ($3,694,219) of their funding from DonorsTrust, the dark money ATM of the conservative right.
In 2016, the Center for Media and Democracy reported that Peabody Energy listed CFACT as a creditor in its bankruptcy filings. At the time, Peabody was the world’s largest private-sector coal company.
CFACT have also received donations from ExxonMobil and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.
Craig Rucker, co-founder of CFACT, attended the private meeting held by Trump’s EPA transition team. As reported by DeSmog, the meeting was a “ Who's Who of Climate Science Deniers."
When news came out in 2016 that ExxonMobil knew about climate change but withheld the information from the public and shareholders, CFACT Advisor Larry Bell sided with ExxonMobil.
CFACT funded the movie “ Climate Hustle” which is narrated by Marc Morano, Director of Communications at CFACT (whose salary exceeds that of CFACT's founding president, and its founding CEO). The movie propagates climate change denial myths. In 2016, Morano also suggested that climate change official figures from the US governmental agencies may have been “adjusted”.
CFACT's top paid employee, Marc Morano, aggregates news on climate change on his website, Climate Depot. Modeled off of the Drudge Report, Climate Depot links to news and blog posts using headlines written by Morano, usually to refute viewpoints held by the majority of climate scientists, or promoting authors who cast doubt on the validity of climate science.
The organization has a history of opposing international climate treaties, most recently by denouncing the 2016 UN Paris Climate Agreement, which CFACT considers “symbolic.”
In January 2014, CFACT released a fundraising letter asking for donations in response to the previous UN global warming conference in Poland. In the letter, they compare climate scientists and environmentalists to the perpetrators of the Holocaust:
“Surely, the political and policy battles we are fighting cannot even begin to compare to the horrors represented by those camps [Auschwitz and Birkenau]. There is simply no parallel. Yet such examples from history are instructive to show just how far otherwise-civilized people can descend when they are gripped by false ideologies and twisted utopian ambitions.”
In 2013, Collegians For A Constructive Tomorrow hosted climate change denier Willie Soon at Wisconsin and Michigan universities. Willie Soon has taken more than $1.2 million from the fossil-fuel industry, including ExxonMobil, the Charles Koch Foundation, the American Petroleum Institute, and coal utility Southern Company. |
