Rolling Stone USA - 04.2020

ROLLING STONE 57

tamping down federal climate action “in the last

five years than I had in the previous 50.”

Myron Ebell

PROFESSIONAL CLIMATE-CHANGE SKEPTIC

Ebell has made a career

out of casting doubt on

climate science (though he

has no scientific training

himself), most notably

through his role at the

Center for Energy and Envi-

ronment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a

libertarian think tank that has taken millions from

the fossil- fuel industry. In 2016, he led Trump’s

transition team at the EPA, helping to put in place

a team to dismantle Obama’s policies, and he has

continued to advocate for harmful rollbacks like

replacing the landmark Clean Power Plan with

weaker regulations.

Robert Murray

FOUNDER OF MURRAY ENERGY

The founder and former

CEO of Murray Energy

saw his coal behemoth —

which, as America’s largest

privately owned coal com-

pany, produced 76 million

tons of coal annually — go

bankrupt in 2019, but Murray’s influence extends

beyond his floundering dirty-energy company.

For years, he pumped money into a diverse port-

folio of conservative groups that continue to push

disinformation about the climate crisis. Murray

also had an oversize influence on Trump’s climate

policy, donating $300,000 to his inaugural

committee before handing the president a literal

wish list of rollback requests, many of which were

dutifully carried out by the administration.

Marco Rubio and Rick Scott

UNITED STATES SENATORS FROM FLORIDA

Florida is one of America’s

most vulnerable states

when it comes to climate

change, but you wouldn’t

know it from how its Repub-

lican senators have punted

on the issue. When he was

governor, Scott even had

the words “climate change”

and “global warming”

removed from official

reports. Though both men

took a small step forward

in 2019 by acknowledging climate change is

real, they both bashed the Green New Deal and

prescribed, as Rubio put it, “adaptive” solutions to

a “manageable” problem. This is to say: solutions

that don’t upset the fossil-fuel industry. Rubio and

Scott both have a 100-percent approval rating

from the Koch-backed climate-denial group

Americans for Prosperity.

David Bernhardt

UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR

Since joining Trump’s

Department of the Interior,

Bernhardt has shown

complete deference to the

wishes of the extractive

industries that he long

served as a fossil-fuel-

industry lobbyist (clients included Halliburton

and the U.S. Oil and Gas Association). In 2018, he

led an effort to strip protections from 9 million

acres of the imperiled sage-grouse habitat,

opening up the land to oil drilling. More recently,

his department has worked to lease portions

of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for,

you guessed it, more drilling — a decision so

destructive that even a number of major banks

have vowed not to fund oil-and-gas operations

there. Executives with the Independent Petroleum

Association of America, one of Bernhardt’s former

clients, were recorded in 2017 bragging of their

“direct access” to Bernhardt and of having “con-

versations with him about issues ranging from

federal land access to endangered species.”

William Happer

SCIENTIST AND CLIMATE DENIER

An 80-year-old professor

emeritus of physics at

Princeton, Happer has

deep ties to the Heartland

Institute, one of the most

influential pushers of

climate denial in the U.S. In

2018, he joined Trump’s National Security Council,

but his plans to discredit the government’s own

climate reports were so extreme the White House

rejected them for fear they might hurt Trump’s

ability to get re-elected. Happer resigned from

the administration in 2019, but the man who once

compared the demonization of CO2 to the “demo-

nization of the poor Jews under Hitler” hasn’t quit

pushing climate denial. He appeared at a Heart-

land Institute forum to counter the U.N.’s climate

conference last December, where he called the

climate movement “a bizarre environmental cult.”

Jim Inhofe

UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM OKLAHOMA

The longtime Republican

senator literally wrote the

book on climate denial

(The Greatest Hoax) and is

best known for presenting

a snowball on the Senate

floor as evidence that

climate change isn’t real. The 2015 stunt is only

the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. Inhofe,

who has introduced bills to gut the EPA (which he

once likened to the Gestapo and, in 2017, claimed

was “brainwashing our kids”) and been a regular

fixture at high-profile climate-denial conferences,

now has a network of disciples carrying out his

agenda. EPA head Andrew Wheeler used to work

in Inhofe’s office, as did the agency’s chief of staff,

Mandy Gunasekara, who encouraged Trump to

leave the Paris Agreement. “It gives me comfort,”

Inhofe told The Washington Post of his former

staffers who are now influencing Trump’s envi-

ronmental policy. What’s fueling Inhofe’s climate

denial? In 2012, he cited the Book of Genesis,

arguing that humans aren’t “able to change what

[God] is doing in the climate.” It could also be that

he’s received more than $2 million in donations

from fossil-fuel interests over the course of his

congressional career, with his biggest donors

being Koch Industries and Murray Energy.

Kelcy Warren

CEO OF ENERGY TRANSFER PARTNERS

Billionaire Texan and

Repub lican mega- donor

Kelcy Warren is the

CEO of Energy Transfer

Partners, the company

behind the controversial

Dakota Access Pipeline,

the Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline (which

extends the DAPL into Texas), and several other

terminals across North America. The DAPL and

the ETCO have sprung several leaks — including

a 4,998- gallon spill in Tennessee in 2017 — while

another pipeline, Rover, spilled 2 million gallons

of drilling fluid into Ohio wetlands, one of several

of that pipeline’s environmental violations. Warren

has pushed to expand despite the leaks — includ-

ing a move to double the capacity of the Dakota

Access — and quipped in 2018 that two activists

who drilled holes in an empty pipeline should be

“removed from the gene pool.”

Daniel Jorjani
SOLICITOR OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT
OF THE INTERIOR
Jorjani first worked for
the DOI during George W.
Bush’s presidency, a tenure
that included a stint coun-
seling for Deputy Secretary
Lynn Scarlett, who in 1997
compared environmen-
talism to Marxism in its restriction of individual
rights. He later went to work for the Charles Koch
Institute and served as a general counsel for the
Koch-funded Freedom Partners, which doled out
millions to conservative politicians and causes, in-
cluding deregulating the fossil-fuel industry. Since
joining Trump’s DOI as solicitor, Jorjani has issued
several controversial legal opinions, including one
allowing mining companies to set up shop near
Minnesota’s Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilder-
ness, which had been protected under the Obama
administration, and another shielding energy
companies whose operations killed protected
birds. “The way Interior has acted under the
Trump administration is the textbook definition
of a political cartel, using state resources to help
special interests,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said.
“It sure looks to me like Mr. Jorjani has been a key
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