What We Can Learn from Dr. Evil’s Attack on Obama’s Carbon Rules - by David Roberts

I wrote yesterday about PR maestro Richard Berman, aka Dr. Evil, the Mozart of shilling for malign corporations.  The post discussed his strategies at a fairly abstract level.

Let’s take it down a notch and look at a specific issue: EPA power-plant rules for carbon emissions.  What I think this will help demonstrate is that, while Berman is an important cog, he is only a cog; part of a machine built for exercising power on behalf of concentrated wealth.  Within the machine, the boundaries between analysis and advocacy, academics and lobbyists, persuasion and money are blurred to the point of vanishing.
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As you know, dirty-energy industry groups and conservatives (insofar as there’s any meaningful distinction) are attacking EPA’s carbon rules with every weapon they can conjure. One of the leading groups involved is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is fairly notorious by now.  Another is the lesser known State Policy Network (SPN), a network of right-wing think tanks at the state level.  Both the groups are “Koch-funded,” in the current argot, though there are, of course, many other corporate funders as well.

In 2015 so far, the SPN has helped push seven studies on the impact of the EPA carbon rule, studies done by the Beacon Hill Institute (BHI), a right-wing think tank housed in Suffolk University in Boston.  The BHI’s executive director, a professor at the university named David Tuerck, used to defend tobacco companies back in the ’70s and ’80s and is now a frequent speaker at the Heartland Institute, the denialist think tank famous for comparing those who acknowledge climate change to the Unabomber.

BHI and its subsidiaries have issued one national report and one each for six states:  Iowa, Louisiana, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.  According to spokespeople, reports are soon to come for Alaska, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.

The reports are entirely typical of corporate-funded studies of clean-air regulations:  they exaggerate the costs of compliance, exaggerate the costs of clean energy, disregard benefits, and assume that all cost-containment measures will fail.  BHI’s previous reports on the costs of state renewable energy mandates have been repeatedly debunked; the new studies are more of the same.

Here’s a funny story about BHI.  A while back, it was looking for funding for studies that would similarly exaggerate the costs of the northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. It approached the right-wing Searle Freedom Trust foundation, saying — before having done the research! — that “success will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity that will pare back or repeal RGGI.”

Suffolk University found out about this and shut it down, as The Guardian reported:
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You kind of have to wonder why Suffolk allows BHI to remain at the university.  Aren’t they embarrassed?

Anyway, BHI did not have any trouble getting funding for its work attacking Obama’s Clean Power Plan.  It found a willing funder in a benign-sounding nonprofit called the Employment Policies Institute.

That name ring a bell?  It should:  it’s one of Berman’s front groups, a way for corporations to funnel money into his PR firm without any fingerprints.  Now he’s helping them funnel money into studies explicitly shaped to produce particular policy outcomes.

Read more at What We Can Learn from Dr. Evil’s Attack on Obama’s Carbon Rules