Obstructing Action: Foundation Funding and U.S. Climate Change Counter-movement Organizations

This paper updates the analysis of funding of the Climate Change Countermovement from 2003 – 2010 to 2003 – 2018, doubling the time period of the previous analysis. Funding for the organizations in the CCCM has continually increased at a rate of 3.4% throughout the time period. The source of the vast majority (74%) of this funding cannot be identied. Where funding can be identied, it is dominated by contributions from a few large conservative philanthropies.


Background
In a 2016 congressional hearing on the climate crisis, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) held up a book entitled "Why Scientists Disagree About Climate Change," and asked: "Who funded this phony climate science denial textbook that the Heartland Institute published and mailed to thousands of schoolteachers around the country? ... We know it costs a lot of money to print [but] we don't know who paid for it!" (SDC, 2019). The publisher of the "textbook" was the Heartland Institute, a central organization in the Climate Change Counter-Movement (CCCM), a complex network of organizations that functions to obstruct climate action (Brulle, 2020). Senator Whitehouse's question points to the extensive network of anonymous funders that supports the CCCM. This anonymous funding allows unaccountable, unknown entities to promote climate misinformation and obstruct climate action. A number of analyses have shown that one major factor driving the misunderstanding of climate science and an overall lack of legislative action on the issue is a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public's understanding of climate change (NRC, 2011, p. 35).
In order for these ongoing efforts to continue, it is imperative that CCCM organizations mobilize su cient nancial resources (Jenkins, 1983). Thus an examination of the funding sources of the CCCM can provide a deeper understanding of the institutional dimensions of this effort. The effort to understand the nancial support of the CCCM has been the topic of scholarly concern (Brulle, 2014;Farrell, 2015Farrell, , 2016Farrell, , 2019. The most extensive such analysis was that of Brulle (2014). In his analysis, he found that over the time period 2003 to 2010, the majority of identi able CCCM funding came from a number of conservative philanthropies and, increasingly, through Donors Trust, a donor-directed philanthropy designed to preserve funders' anonymity. In this research, we revisit and update Brulle's initial analysis.
We double the time-span of the prior study, analyzing data from 2003 to 2018, and add in an analysis of the amount of unidenti able funds supporting the CCCM.

Methods
This research was conducted using two distinct procedures. First, we compiled a list of organizations identi ed as belonging to the CCCM. A preliminary list of 508 potential CCCM organizations was supports work directly related to climate change. We cannot ascertain that any particular grant supports activities directly related to climate change unless speci cally stated on the grant records, but the majority of such records include no meaningful information about the purpose of the grant. We therefore report total grants and contributions on the understanding that they show only broad nancial support for CCCM organizations, some of which goes towards climate-related endeavors. We use "(total) contributions" to refer to all contributions received by CCCM organizations as reported by the IRS and "(foundation) grants" to refer to the donations captured in our dataset.

Findings
The CCCM grew steadily between 2003 and 2018 in terms of both total contributions and foundation grants at an annual rate of 3.4% in 2020 dollars. Figure  Alongside the rise in donations through DAFs, 74% of all contributions to CCCM organizations over the sample period come from completely unidenti ed sources. Figure Three shows a sociogram of the top 1% of grant makers and recipients in the network by total grants given/received, where each line represents all grants between two actors over the sample period, with contribution totals less than $5,000 removed for clarity. Unidenti ed contributions are represented by a single node to demonstrate their prevalence, although they come from many anonymous donors. Individual organizations received between 25% and 100% of their contributions from unidenti ed sources, with no strong (p < 0.05) correlations with organizational assets, revenues, or the nature of their engagement on climate change.
These results con rm and extend the initial analysis in Brulle (2014). Our analysis shows that the size and composition of the CCCM has remained remarkably consistent over the time period of analysis. It also lends support to the nding that funding strategies differ between progressive and conservative philanthropists. The analysis shows a striking stability in funding patterns over the sixteen year time period. The funding strategy of the conservative movement was laid out in the so-called "Fat Memo" (Miller 2005), which informed the giving practices of the Olin Foundation, the rst major conservative philanthropy. This strategy has informed subsequent conservative giving strategies. The objective of these funding efforts is to focus on the development and promulgation of a clear conservative viewpoint.
To realize that effort, conservative philanthropies have funded a range of organizations that can act to realize that goal on a long-term basis. This strategy focused on the creation and maintenance of conservative think tanks, development of public intellectuals ("thought leaders"), and promulgation of a consistent ideological message. Additionally, conservative foundations focus on building institutional capacity in organizations with strong communications capabilities (Covington, 1997;Bartley, 2010).
This consistent and long-term funding strategy has enabled the development of a cohesive institutional network of conservative organizations that work collectively to promulgate a consistent message. This strategy stands in marked contrast to the funding strategy of progressive foundations, which focus on individual research projects and short-term efforts. As a consequence, the progressive activist organizations and think tanks form a very loose and disconnected network (Bartley, 2010, p. 792). This differs signi cantly from the very tight network of organizations and think tanks that comprise the conservative movement. The analysis con rms the long term stable funding that maintains the CCCM. This analysis still leaves Senator Whitehouse's question unanswered. The source of over three-quarters of the funding of the CCCM cannot be identi ed. While some of this funding could come from small donations, the existing IRS disclosure rules do not enable any further investigation in this area. Further research is needed to develop new means to extend our understanding of the unidenti ed funders that created and maintain the CCCM.