Emboldened by the Heartland Institute's capture of the US Trump Government, I suspect that Australia will see a renewed push by one of the compatriots of this American lobby group - the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) - to further wind back federal and state environmental protections.
The IPA already has an uncomfortably close relationship with the Turnbull Government as a number of its members are within its ranks.
This is the current state of play in the United States.
A lawsuit filed in March by the Southern Environmental Law
Center and Environmental Defense Fund has revealed new levels of coordination
between Scott
Pruitt's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the climate
science-denying think tank the
Heartland Institute.
The EPA had
repeatedly failed to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests by the two
groups, which resulted in the lawsuit and subsequent release of the
email communications.
However, both the EPA and
the Heartland Institute have strongly defended their actions revealed by
the newly released emails. EPA spokesperson Lincoln
Ferguson told the Associated Press that communications with the
Heartland Institute helped “to ensure the public is informed” and that this
relationship “… demonstrates the agency’s dedication to advancing
President Trump’s agenda of environmental stewardship and regulatory certainty.”
The current head of the
Heartland Institute is former Congressman Tim Huelskamp who
also was quick to defend the relationship.
“Of course The Heartland
Institute has been working with EPA on policy and personnel
decisions,” Tim Huelskamp said in a statement to AP. “They recognized us
as the pre-eminent organization opposing the radical climate alarmism agenda
and instead promoting sound science and policy.”
In March Huelskamp wrote
a piece in The Hill titled “Scott Pruitt is leading the EPA toward greatness,”
in which he made it quite clear that the reason for this greatness was that
“Trump and Pruitt share an understanding that climate change is not a
significant threat to the prosperity and health of Americans.”
While in Congress,
Huelskamp’s top donor was Koch
Industries, the massive petrochemical empire owned by the conservative
billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David.
However, this latest
revelation is unlikely to derail Pruitt’s career at the EPA. Pruitt is
currently the subject of at least ten investigations. At a scathing hearing in April, he was told by one Congressman that “you
are unfit to hold public office and undeserving of the public trust.”
Still, Pruitt remains
the embattled chief of the nation's top environmental agency under Trump, and,
perhaps not surprisingly, President Donald Trump has
been supportive of Pruitt……
Like his boss, Pruitt is
quick to blame the media for his problems.
“Much of what has been
targeted towards me and my team, has been half-truths, or at best stories that
have been so twisted they do not resemble reality,” Pruitt said in his opening
remarks to Congress during the April hearing. “I'm here and I welcome the
chance to be here to set the record straight in these areas. But let's have no
illusions about what's really going on here.”….
What
the latest EPA emails reveal is the extent which these Koch-funded
climate deniers are now in direct communication with the EPA and
helping influence policy.
One email from John Konkus, EPA’s deputy associate
administrator for public affairs, assures Heartland's then-president Joseph Bast that
“If you send a list, we will make sure an invitation is sent.”
The list refers
to Heartland’s recommendations for economists and scientists that
the EPA would invite to a public hearing on science standards. Under
Trump and Pruitt, climate science deniers are now hand-picking who advises
the EPA on climate change science….
Read the full
blog post here.
BACKGROUND
May 16 - 18, 2010
The Institute of Public
Affairs was a cosponsor (PDF) of the Heartland Institute's Fourth
International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC4). [28]
DeSmogBlog
concluded 19 of the 65 sponsors (including Heartland itself) had
received a total of over $40 million in funding since 1985 from ExxonMobil (who
funded 13 of the organizations), and/or Koch Industries family foundations
(funded 10 organizations) and/or the Scaife family foundations (funded 10
organizations). [29]
October 1, 2010
A group of prominent
Melbourne businessmen founded the IPA in 1943 in the wake of the United
Australia Party-Country Party coalition’s devastating election
loss.
Inaugural chairman G.J.
Coles (founder of the Coles supermarket chain) outlined the IPA’s approach.
He said
it:
… did not wish to be
directly involved in politics, but it wanted to help create a modern political
faith, which would be constructive and progressive and which would receive a
large measure of public support.
Concerned the Labor
Party was leading Australia down a path of central planning and socialism, the
IPA set out to develop and promote an alternative vision. To that end it
published a 70-page pamphlet titled Looking Forward: “a
post-war policy for Australian industry”.
… the finest statement
of basic political and economic problems made in Australia for many years.
Many of the policies
outlined in Looking Forward were incorporated into the platform of the Liberal
Party, founded the following year.
Though the IPA and the
Liberal Party were characterised in their early decades by a mildly Keynesian,
interventionist approach to the economy, since the 1980s both have switched to
a more hardline neoliberal philosophy – embracing free markets, lower taxes and
trickle-down economics.
Shared personnel
David and Rod Kemp, sons
of the IPA’s founder and driving force C.D. “Ref” Kemp, became key figures in
both the IPA and the Liberal Party.
David wrote his honours
thesis on the founding of the IPA, then combined an academic career with stints
advising Malcolm Fraser before entering parliament in 1990. Rod took over and
revitalised the IPA in 1982 before he was elected to the Senate, also in 1990.
Both were ministers in the Howard government.
Former Liberal MP and
leading economic “dry” John
Hyde ran the IPA from 1991 to 1995, before being replaced by Mike Nahan, who is
now treasurer in the Western Australian Liberal government....
When Herald Sun
columnist Andrew Bolt was found to have breached Section
18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in 2011, the IPA was outraged and
immediately launched a campaign to repeal the offending section.
A full-page advertisement was
taken out in The Australian. It included the names of senior Liberals such as
Jamie Briggs, Michaelia Cash, Mathias Cormann, Mitch Fifield, Nick Minchin and
Andrew Robb.
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