Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group
$4,800 from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2014.
Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) is a 501c3 nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC that claims to represent a million people in the interest of reducing government mismanagement and spending. CAGW has a 501c4 affiliate organization, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW), which describes its mission “to advocate the elimination of waste and inefficiency in government through nonpartisan public education programs and lobbying activities.”
The CAGW alluded to “faulty climate science” and “the damage the Paris agreement could do to our nation’s economy,” in a 2017 post on President Donald Trump’s plans to leave the Paris Climate Treaty.
CAGW stated its disapproval of state Attorneys General who initiated investigations into ExxonMobil’s payments to political organizations that dispute the science of climate change, and specifically defended the coal- and oil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) from similar scrutiny by the U.S. Senate.
In a March, 2016 article titled “Pushing Back on the Global Warming Hypothesis,” Elizabeth Wright promoted an effort by Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), a politician with outsized support from the oil industry, to procure emails from scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) whose data appeared to bring an end to a popular (and incorrect) argument used by climate skeptics. Without noting that Rep. Smith’s actions were denounced as a political attack by most of the nation’s top science institutions, Wright cites a supportive letter t0 Rep. Smith’s signed by “300 scientists, engineers, economists,” but did not appear to the credentials of the signatories. Many of the letter’s endorsers have no expertise in climate science, do not conduct research, don’t have Ph.D’s, or are financed by fossil fuel interests. In addition to the letter, Wright quotes Patrick Michaels, a longtime consultant for fossil fuel companies and spokesman for Charles Koch’s Cato Institute.
Wrightdoes not mention the 97% of scientists who agree that climate change is an ongoing, documented and dangerous phenomenon rooted in human activity. Instead, she wields the arguments of industry-funded “skeptics” against the entire scientific foundation of global warming, with emphatic statements like, “In fact it is clear that science is not settled when it comes to global warming.”