How the Rockefeller Fund Killed Keystone

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

President Obama’s recent decision to deny a permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline was widely hailed on the environmental left. Particularly exuberant was the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), which declared on its website that the decision came “against great political odds and the deep-pocketed backing of the oil industry.” The specter of oil industry money and its nefarious influence on politics was a familiar environmental talking point. What the fund did not acknowledge was that its own deep-pocketed backing for environmental groups had a far more decisive impact on Obama’s decision to cancel the pipeline project.

Earlier this month the Canadian news channel Sun News uncovered a PowerPoint presentation by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund that lays bare its strategy of funding a host of environmental groups to thwart the Keystone XL pipeline as well as other development projects that the fund considered a “globally significant threat.” According to investigative reporter Lachlan Markay, the 2008 presentation “describes the allocation of $7 million to environmental non-profits for tactics that include the use of the legislative and legal systems to delay or derail energy production in the United States and Canada, and to ‘raise the costs’ of energy in both nations.” The Daily Caller reports that the 2008 strategy session also featured presentations from Rockefeller Brothers Fund program officer Michael Northrop as well as the representatives of several environmental groups, among them Corporate Ethics International, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Pembina Institute, a Canadian activist group. Together, these groups would emerge at the forefront of an alarmist scare-campaign that ultimately led to Keystone’s cancellation.