Any Price is Right when soothing the guilt of inherited wealth and privilege
With the climate litigation campaign facing a possible reckoning by the United States Supreme Court, last week came the news of New York State’s extraterritorial money grab, a Climate Superfund. This is the Plan C (or is it D?) of the climate-industrial complex to impose more taxes on more little people, again forcibly enlisting energy companies to be the tax collector (while apparently believing they’re just sticking it to political opponents).
This is the latest stab at creating a “sustainable funding stream” to pay for politicians’ desires without directly taking responsibility for the additional taxation.
As the Wall Street Journal editorial board put it about the crumbling Empire State’s latest gambit:
Upgrading New York City’s sewer system to “deal with regularly-occurring large rain events is estimated to cost around $100 billion,” the law notes. But climate change is merely an excuse to get others to pay for upgrading infrastructure that New York politicians have failed to maintain because they divert so much money to welfare payments and fat public-worker pay and benefits.
Given a recent confession that this “Climate Superfund,” too, is the product of the Rockefeller family’s lobbying campaign, it seemed a good time to trundle through the litany of (known) past feats in the oil heirs’ obsession.
By the Spring of 2016, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal were reporting that the Rockefellers were behind a campaign by progressive attorneys general targeting traditional energy companies, particularly ExxonMobil (from which the Rockefeller fortune flowed—and no doubt endless social embarrassment endured at all of the best parties).
According to the Times, the family’s reach extended to the formative 2012 meeting in La Jolla, which famously arrivedon the strategy of seeking “a single sympathetic state attorney general [who] might have substantial success in bringing key internal documents to light”, or that “even grand juries convened by a district attorney could result in significant document discover.”
And recruiting they went. And by late 2015, the daughter of Rockefeller Family Fund head Lee Wasserman excitedly tweeted out congratulations to her father for… the New York Attorney General launching a Martin Act investigation of Exxon.
Revelations ensued, but only thanks to persistent use of public records laws. Then, almost precisely a year ago, GAO and New York attorney Francis Mention pulled the curtain back on the written details of these machinations. Records now reveal that the entire campaign was drawn up by the Rockefeller team and their outside activists and lawyers, all the way down to writing the Martin Act memo and explanation of how—and why—they thought law enforcement should subpoena their White Whale’s records.
And earlier this past year, “the Wall Street Journal Review section featured a long profile reaffirming the obsessive campaign by late-generation Rockefeller family members against ExxonMobil, the company that not only cruelly subjected them and their predecessor generations of Rockefellers to a lifestyle bubble-wrapped in inherited wealth but also led the way in imposing the horrors of affordable automobility and safety from the elements on billions more. As the otherwise supportive piece suggests, the guilt often triggered by such unearned wealth can provide the sort of drive that helps give lives meaning.”
We now know that the memo behind the Vermont and now New York Climate Superfunds was also “drafted at the request of the Rockefeller Family Fund,” further evidence still that a class of wealthy heirs are behind the push to make ordinary citizens pay for the Climate Industry’s expansive wish list of government gimmes.
Nothing like the wealthy and privileged sticking it to everyone else. CLW looks forward to even more revelations to come.