Although oil and gas producers have been fracturing wells for decades, the completion routine now is the target of uncompromising environmental opposition claiming it threatens underground sources of drinking water. For even longer than producers have been fracing wells, companies have been building and operating pipelines. Yet a pipeline that would cross the US-Canadian border now is the target of equally uncompromising environmental opposition from activists insisting it would threaten drinking water and aggravate global warming.
Activist opposition to oil and gas projects is not new. Lately, however, it has been unusually successful. Activists have created strong, increasingly successful resistance to hydraulic fracturing and stymied the border crossing of the Keystone XL pipeline. They thus have impeded progress toward energy self-sufficiency in North America, a once-hopeless goal now achievable through development of unconventional hydrocarbon resources. By blocking economic work, activists have restrained employment, incomes, and tax revenues, all in service to a utopian vision of life without hydrocarbon energy. Most Americans don't share that vision, especially when they understand the costs. Activism succeeds, nevertheless. How can this be?
The funding network
Money, of course.
A July report by the minority staff of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works describes the network that has developed for channeling large donations from superrich liberals through charitable foundations to activist groups like the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council. The system hides the identities of donors, some of which reside outside the US. And it's big. According to the committee report, the top 10 donors to the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a financial clearinghouse between foundations and activist groups, gave $580 million to environmentalist causes, many of them explicitly opposed to fossil energy, in 2011.
An important message in the report is that the tax benefits available to charitable groups are being contorted and possibly abused to support environmental activism. Charitable groups face legal limits on their political advocacy. The funding network allows them to outsource that work, and sometimes their tax advantages, to front-line pressure groups. A priority goal of this effort is thoroughly political: the forced switching to carbon-free energy as an intolerably costly and scientifically questionable precaution against catastrophic warming. That isn't charity; it's extremism.
Another clear message in the committee report is that much of the activism supported by tax-advantaged giving does not represent the grassroots spontaneity touted in environmentalists' press notices. The report describes how supposedly local opposition to hydraulic fracturing in New York and Colorado arose from funding from nonlocal foundations and activity by representatives of national environmental groups. In another example, a Nebraska group committed to blocking the Keystone XL project and claiming to be Nebraskan in fact receives most of its support from the national funding apparatus. According to the committee report, the group, Bold Nebraska, provides "a cover for wealthy and distant non-Nebraskan interests who seek to advance a political agenda without drawing attention to the fact that they, too, are outsiders with little interest in or connection to the state."
EPA recruits
A third message in the committee report is confirmation of the pattern of intermarriage of environmental groups and their funding sources with the Environmental Protection Agency. The report, for example, cites an e-mail in which a foundation agreed to pay the salary of a Resources for the Future employee for work at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a move approved in EPA communications a way to "stake our claim there." The report further documents the great extent to which EPA has filled its high-ranking positions with recruits from activist groups.
The oil and gas industry needs the support of all communities affected by its work, especially those within earshot of its rigs, trucks, plants, and crews. But it must understand how much of the opposition it encounters that poses as local in fact originates elsewhere, projects hostility not confined to specific jobs, and has enough money for a long, broad fight.
