Climate

The Heritage Foundation

Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group
$6,130,201 from Koch foundations, 1997-2017.

The Heritage Foundation is a 501c3 nonprofit think tank that is well known in the U.S. policy world. It was founded in 1973 by the late Joseph Coors (the founder of Coors Brewing) and the late Paul Weyrich. Weyrich played a historic role in transforming wealthy people and businesses into major political influencers, famously proclaiming, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

ProPublica reported that Heritage Action, the 501c4 arm of the Heritage Foundation, received $500,000 from the Freedom Partners, a consortium of donors founded by Koch Industries executives, in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. This “outside spending”

In 2010, The Heritage Foundation severely misrepresented the Royal Society’s position on climate change, editing out ten pages of a report to make it appear that the scientific authority was uncertain about the occurrence of global warming. The post’s author is a former associate of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Heritage supports federal approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would greatly increase tar sands imports from Canada and directly benefit Koch Industries and other major oil companies as a result.

The Heritage Foundation has also: misinterpreted the impacts of global warming on the US economy; twisted news reports to justify claims about ‘climate taxes’; issued deceptive economic analyses and presentations; and released allegations about economic ruin and job losses from green stimulus investments by Congress.

Heritage Foundation promoted the discredited “Spanish” study to undermine the clean energy sector, working with the Institute for Energy Research (IER).

Heritage is a member of the State Policy Network.