The Putin and Buffett war on U.S. pipelines

Billionaires use secretive foundations to finance anti-pipeline protests – and get even richer from the files of Paul Driessen at CFACT.org.

A Paul Driessen Story at CFACT.org (Putin and Buffett

Abundant, reliable, affordable oil and natural gas empower people. They support job creation, mobility, modern agriculture, homes and hospitals, computers and communications, lights and refrigerators, life and study after sundown, indoor plumbing, safe drinking water, less disease and longer lives.

Hydrocarbons make plastics, pharmaceuticals and synthetic clothing. They create fertilizers and pesticides, to improve crop yields, reduce food prices and improve nutrition.

But Sierra Club, 350.org and other radicals want to keep America’s oil and natural gas bounties in the ground. They block leasing, drilling and fracking. They block pipelines that transport oil and gas to refineries, power plants, factories and homes. And the more their “dangerous manmade climate change” mantras fall on deaf ears, the more absurd their anti-energy campaigns are getting.

Hydraulic fracturing and Canadian oil sands development made North American petroleum production soar, created millions of jobs, sent oil, gasoline and natural gas prices plunging, and provided some of the few bright spots in the 2008-14 Obama economy.

New pipelines were approved and constructed, including the Keystone system’s first three phases. They augmented 2.5 million miles of liquid petroleum, gas transmission and gas distribution pipelines that already crisscross the United States.

But when the Keystone XL segment was proposed, intense opposition suddenly materialized. Protesters railed that habitat disturbance, potential leaks, climate change and ending fossil fuel use necessitated “no more pipelines.” Now the Sandpiper Pipeline from North Dakota’s Bakken shale region across Minnesota to Superior, Wisconsin is meeting similar resistance.

As with Keystone, the protesters say they’re just concerned student, hiker and Native American grassroots activists: average citizens who just care about their environment. The facts do not support their claims.

In reality, they are being bankrolled by billionaires, fat-cat foundations and foreign oil interests.

Putin-allied Russian oil billionaires laundered $23 million through the Bermuda-based Wakefield Quin law firm to the Sea Change Foundation and thence to anti-fracking and anti-Keystone groups, the Environmental Policy Alliance found.

Sandpiper opponents are also being funded and coordinated by wealthy financiers and shadowy foundations, researcher Ron Arnold discovered.

It’s true that several small groups are involved in the anti-Sandpiper protests. However, the campaign is coordinated by Honor the Earth, a Native American group that is actually a Tides Foundation “project,” with the Tides Center as its “fiscal sponsor.” They’ve contributed $700,000 and extensive in-kind aid. Out-of-state donors provide 99% of Honor’s funding.

The Indigenous Environmental Network also funds Honor the Earth. Minnesota corporate records show no incorporation entry for the Network, and 95% of its money comes from outside Minnesota. Tides gave IEN $670,000 to oppose pipelines.

Indeed, $25 billion in left-wing foundation investment portfolios support the anti-Sandpiper effort. Vastly more backing makes the $13-billion-per-year U.S. environmentalist movement a power to be reckoned with, Arnold and I document in our book, Cracking Big Green.

These tax-exempt foundations do not simply give money to pressure groups. They serve as puppeteers, telling protesters what campaigns to conduct, what tactics to use. Meanwhile, donors enjoy deductions for “charitable giving” to “education, conservation and other social change” programs.

Tides Foundation combined cash flows exceed $200 million annually, Canadian investigative journalist Cory Morningstar reported (here and here). Like Arnold, she and fellow Canadian sleuth Vivian Krause have delved deeply into troubling arrangements among Big Green, Big Government and Big Finance.

Morningstar calls the San Francisco-based Tides operation “a priceless, magical, money funneling machine of epic proportions.” It enables über-rich donors to distribute funds to specific organizations and campaigns of their choice, without disclosing their identities.

Even more interesting, among Tides’ biggest donors is Obama friend and advisor Warren Buffett. Beginning in 2004, Buffett funneled $30.5 million through his family’s NoVo Foundation to Tides. The cash ultimately went to selected pressure groups that led campaigns against Keystone, Sandpiper and other projects, Morningstar and Arnold found.

By donating the market value of greatly appreciated Berkshire Hathaway shares to NoVo, the Omaha billionaire avoided income taxes on his gains. Even more important, while public, media and political attention was riveted on Keystone, Berkshire Hathaway quietly bought the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad and Union Tank Car manufacturing company – with no notice, dissent or interference, Morningstar observed.

When Keystone XL et al. were blocked, more oil was shipped by rail – much of it via Buffett companies. In fact, oil-by-rail skyrocketed from 9,500 carloads in 2009 to 450,000 carloads in 2014. Mr. Buffett’s “investment” in anti-pipeline activism garnered billions in rail revenues.

The anti-pipeline campaigns blocked thousands of jobs and increased risks of tank car derailments, like the Lac Megantic, Quebec spill that destroyed much of the town and incinerated 47 people.

That may help explain why Mr. Buffett recently criticized President Obama’s veto of Keystone XL legislation. He now says the pipeline would be good for both Canada and the United States, and it is a mistake to jeopardize trade relationships with our northern neighbor.

But the campaigns rage on. Mr. Buffett helped unleash a beast he cannot control. The campaigns are not grassroots, or even Astroturf. Their “green” tint is the color of unfathomable behind-the-scenes wealth.

The clandestine Buffett-Berkshire-NoVo-Putin-Tides-activist-railroad arrangement reflects “a devious strategy on the part of both benefactor and recipient,” Morningstar concludes. “At minimum, it demonstrates an almost criminal conflict of interest.” Legislative investigations are needed, especially since the Justice Department is hardly likely to look into what its key allies are doing.

Meanwhile, pro-Sandpiper students from the Collegians For A Constructive Tomorrow presented these inconvenient financial truths to pipeline protesters at a recent University of Minnesota rally. “Buffet’s Puppets,” the CFACT students called the protesters.

How did the Buffett-Tides-Putin allies react, when they learned they are being used by billionaires? They dug in their ideological heels and shouted insults.

One red-faced protester walked away. Others intensified their chants or shouted racially tinged epithets at the multi-ethnic CFACT students. None wanted to discuss funding issues, America’s need for oil and jobs, or how best to transport fuels safely.

This is what passes for “environmental studies,” “robust debate,” “higher education” and compassion for blue-collar families on campuses and picket lines today. No wonder “environmentalism” and “liberalism” have become such pathetic political philosophies.

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Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: To save the world from the save-the-earth money machine ~ both books available on Amazon.com

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Hidden threats to America's energy boom

From A.F. (Tony) Branco at The American Energy Alliance

In December, the Obama administration released revised Draft Guidance to examine the impacts of climate change under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA requires that federal agencies look at the environmental impact of their major actions.

The administration’s new greenhouse gas guidance would make an already costly and time-consuming process even more onerous without providing any new and actionable information.

This administration’s proposal is the latest move by the administration to make it more difficult to spend federal dollars on any infrastructure projects—including the expenditure of funds for permitting of projects—and the guidance is designed to make it more difficult to produce natural gas, oil, and coal in the United States – if those activities lead to an increase in carbon dioxide.

For example, this guidance would make it more difficult to produce, use, and export natural gas. America is the number one natural gas producer in the world, with production surging 55 percent since September 2005.

We have so much natural gas that we can now export a lot of it to our allies and still keep prices affordable here at home.

A study commissioned by the U.S. Energy Department found that the U.S. can expect “to gain net economic benefits from allowing LNG exports” and that “scenarios with unlimited exports always had higher net economic benefits than corresponding cases with limited exports.”

Our ability to realize these economic benefits depends on securing timely approval of new LNG projects. Yet this new guidance adds more red tape to an already burdensome process. As the Center for Liquefied Natural Gas notes in public comments, the draft guidance would “undermine regulatory certainty by adding significant costs and delays to LNG export projects while potentially leaving the process vulnerable to unnecessary litigation.”

It is conceivable (and not clear from the guidance) that a project could be held up because opponents of all hydrocarbon use would argue that a project requiring a permit insufficiently assessed the impact of the project on global carbon dioxide emissions from direct and indirect sources.

An export facility, it could be alleged, not only produces carbon dioxide or allows carbon dioxide-producing natural gas to flow through it, but also then may allow economic expansion because it provides affordable energy to enable a steel mill to operate, which might produce more steel; but also, more carbon dioxide.

The list of “what ifs” becomes infinite in the hands of creative and clever lawyers, whose intent it is to slow construction of facilities that might expand the use of hydrocarbons in the U.S. or the world.

The Institute for Energy Research has exposed the numerous flaws with the administration’s draft guidance. In March, IER called for the guidance to be withdrawn, noting it “is internally inconsistent, fails to require information about climate change itself, is inconsistent with NEPA, is inconsistent with current NEPA regulations, is inconsistent with case law, and uses the arbitrary and capricious social cost of carbon.”

For example, the draft guidance requires that if cost and benefits of a proposed actions are calculated, then the social cost of carbon (SCC) should be used to “monetize” the climate change impacts. As we have explained a number of times, the social cost of carbon is wholly arbitrary.

As MIT economist Robert Pindyck wrote in a peer-reviewed publication, the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) used to estimate the SCC . . .  have crucial flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis: certain inputs (e.g. the discount rate) are arbitrary, but have huge effects on the SCC estimates the models produce; the models’ descriptions of the impact of climate change are completely ad hoc, with no theoretical or empirical foundation; and the models can tell us nothing about the most important driver of the SCC, the possibility of a catastrophic climate outcome.

IAM-based analyses of climate policy create a perception of knowledge and precision, but that perception is illusory and misleading. [emphasis added]

Pindyck continued: When it comes to the damage function, however, we know almost nothing, so developers of IAMs [Integrated Assessment Models] can do little more than make up functional forms and corresponding parameter values. And that is pretty much what they have done.

A tool that is “close to useless” for policy analysis should not be required to be used by this guidance. This is especially true for something that is basically “made up.” But the administration wants to use the social cost of carbon because it give the illusion of large costs.

The social cost of carbon provides the illusion of large impacts from greenhouse gas emissions that have no discernable impact on the actual climate.

As the House Natural Resources Committee explains, many federal agencies believe carbon dioxide emissions from their activities “will have small, if any, potential climate change effects.” Yet the administration now wants agencies to consider climate change effects for nearly everything they do.

The Natural Resources Committee held a hearing this week on the draft guidance. We hope Congress uses every tool at its disposal to shine a light on this power grab so Americans can continue to enjoy the benefits of domestic energy production without further interference from federal bureaucrats.

• Editorial cartoonist
• Net Right Daily
• Legal Insurrection
• Liberty Alliance
• ConservativeDailyNews.com

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