When it comes to anti-science, those who advocate against the science behind climate change are near the top with those who like spouting nonsense about the biology of women. They have a new weapon, however, when it comes to financing the cause of anti-climate science, and that is the anonymous donor groups known as Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Donors Trust and its affiliate, Donors Capital Fund, are run with the intention of keeping their donors anonymous, allowing people to fund right-wing organizations without their names being tied to them. According to Mother Jones, these organizations include The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the NRA’s Freedom Action Foundation, and even Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. They also help funnel money towards the Heartland Institute, one of the foremost organizations against climate change.

While donors can request to be publicly identified, few actually do so, for reasons ranging from wanting to stay out of the spotlight to wanting to avoid having their voicemails, emails and mailboxes fill up with requests from other charities and non-profits looking for money. Some don’t want to be associated with controversial organizations like the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Mother Jones reports that Whitney Ball, CEO of Donors Trust, says that the organization exists as it does so that wealthy conservatives will know that their money is going towards furthering the conservative movement without their having to deal with the growing stigma against conservatism. Exxon-Mobil and the Koch brothers, for instance, had to deal with a growing public backlash against their funding of anti-climate science. Donations directly attributable to them have gone down, while anonymous donations for the same cause have gone up.





The anti-climate science propaganda being funded by these groups has a new target: state and local governments. Leading the charge here is the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which is heavily funded by Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. Its goal is, according to its website, to drive “a conversation about transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility at the grassroots level and putting a human face on public policy.” They attempt to address the falling standards of journalism and report on happenings in state and local governments in a supposedly non-biased way.

The Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, however, has found that journalists working for news organizations that are associated with the Franklin Center tend to be highly ideological, rather than being balanced and disinterested. This is apparently true of many “independent” and not-for-profit news organizations that are funded or backed by ideological “parent” organizations on both sides of the spectrum.

The Franklin Center’s media organizations, often with the word “watchdog” in their names, have led various efforts to accomplish anything from banning the term “sea level rise” in North Carolina to disputing the link between climate change and increasing extreme weather. They also, according to The Raw Story, have worked to stop expansion of wind farms and solar arrays.

More than $300 million has gone from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund into right-wing think tanks for the purpose of fighting climate science. In the past, the right has tended to seize on the fact that science admits there’s a lot it doesn’t know about climate change, however, good science always allows for the fact that it doesn’t know everything, leaving room for new studies and evidence that may challenge current theories and hypotheses. The right wants absolutes, and when it doesn’t get them, equates scientific uncertainty with falsehood.

Regardless of the argument (and many now acknowledge climate change but argue that it’s too expensive to deal with, or that voluntary measures, rather than government-set standards, will solve it), the whole point of anti-climate science is to forever delay all action towards cleaning up the atmosphere.

When economic power such as this remains secret, whatever the reasons, it’s hard to have an open and honest dialogue about an issue. Any issue.

Rika Christensen is an experienced writer and loves debating politics. Engage with her and see more of her work by following her on Facebook and Twitter.