Recently, some have attacked Clinton for taking a tiny percentage of her campaign contributions from supposed “fossil fuel interests.” Here, we show how much of a stretch those claims are:

First there are the direct contributions from people working for fossil fuel companies to Hillary Clinton’s campaign committee. According to the most recent filings, the committee has received $309,107 (as of 3/21/16; source: Center for Responsive Politics) from such donors

These aren’t donations from fossil fuel companies, they are donations from employees of fossil fuel companies. And this total is less than two tenths of one percent (.2%) of the total contributions received by her campaign committee. That sounds more like “contributions from employees scared to tell their bosses they are Democrats” than “SHE IS BOUGHT!” If this counts as “fossil fuel industry” donations to Clinton, why doesn’t the $53,760 Bernie Sanders has raised from fossil fuel employees count as “fossil fuel industry donations” to him? I put both totals in the same category — contributions from Democrats working in an industry whose aims they don’t agree with because they have to pay the bills and support their families.

contributions from fossil fuel interests to Super PACs supporting Hillary Clinton. Greenpeace has found $3,250,000 in donations from large donors connected to the fossil fuel industry to Priorities Action USA, a Super PAC supporting Secretary Clinton’s campaign.

The entirety of this was from two contributors — David Ellis Shaw ($750,000) and Donald Sussman (2.5 million). To call either one of these contributors a “fossil fuel interest” is a huge stretch. David Ellis Shaw founded the hedge fund DE Shaw in 1988, but he stepped down from managing the firm to work full-time in scientific research since 2001. He is supposedly a “fossil fuel interest” because the hedge fund he founded, the one he stopped running 15 years ago, has about 1% of its money invested in a fossil fuel company… that’s very weak. This is what he is currently working on:

But as Shaw's 50th birthday neared in 2001, he began to look for an exit. His company had more than 1,000 employees, and Shaw was no longer engaged in the quantitative problem-solving that fascinated him. His sister was battling breast cancer — she died in 2003 — and Shaw believed he could contribute to medicine, not just financially but intellectually. In his spare time, he had been reading up on the computational puzzles of molecular dynamics and talking with academic friends. -www.nature.com/...

One of the biggest factors limiting the development of molecular dynamics has always been computational power — which is where Shaw comes in. Having stepped back from running his hedge fund around 2001 (see 'From science to finance and back again'), Shaw, who is also an adjunct professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University in New York, returned to his first enthusiasm — the architecture of massively parallel supercomputers. Predicting the motions of large systems of atoms requires finding the best way to communicate particle positions and forces among multiple processors. And on a scorching afternoon in June 2003, Shaw holed himself up at a friend's house and found a way to speed things up. — www.nature.com/...

As for Donald Sussman, he was married to Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree and former director of Common Cause until 2015. I suppose that means she’s terrible, too? For reference:

www.dailykos.com/...

scorecard.lcv.org/...

pingree.house.gov/...

Donald Sussman supposedly a “fossil fuel interest” because his hedge fund has about 1% of its assets in three fossil fuel companies… If you have your savings in a mutual fund, it probably has a higher percentage of fossil fuel stocks in it. If so, congratulations, you are a “fossil fuel interest!” He also co-founded a wind energy company called First Wind… I suppose Hillary Clinton is also “beholden” to “clean energy interests” because he donated a small percentage of her super pac’s funds.

I am very disappointed that Greenpeace has spread these smears. I’ve been giving monthly contributions to them for several years, but I wrote them just now to cancel. I will instead donate money to an environmental organization that does not spread smears, perhaps the WWF, NRDC, or the Rainforest Trust.

Bernie supporters: there are many good reasons to support Senator Sanders. While I support Secretary Clinton, I admire him greatly and could not think of a better Senator from Vermont. I will never use smears of this sort against him. I hope you agree to do the same about Secretary Clinton. She may not be “perfect” on these issues, but she has been consistently good from when she supported ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in her 2000 Senate campaign just a couple years after the Senate unanimously passed a resolution opposing it until today, when she strongly supports Obama’s climate actions and the Paris Climate Accord. If and when she obtains the Democratic nomination, she will be all that stands between us and a Republican President denies the scientific consensus on climate change and would immediately pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. So please push her to be even better on these issues, but stop spreading dishonest attacks that may promote Nader-ism in November. Without Nader-ism in 2000, we would have had President Gore instead of President Bush… imagine how much we could have accomplished on climate change by now.