My country Nepal is facing disastrous floods due to a glacier lake outburst. It destroyed many settlements taking people, homes, and essential infrastructure with it. You might have seen the tragic videos or images from this horrific disaster. It will take years to rebuild the infrastructure, millions to get the survivors back on their feet, and the forever to heal the wounds the loss of life has caused. Nepal contributes very little to climate change especially compared to big economies, yet we are one of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Not only is it unfair, it is a reality I have a hard time accepting.

The climate crisis isn't just a tragedy, it is an emergency, a crisis that will be at your doorsteps soon; through floods, famine, heatwaves, and environmental collapse.

The scale and urgency of climate change cannot be understated. We should've acted on it long ago but the best time is now. Protest, resist, and revolt! I know the world has a lot on it's plate right now; fascism, genocide, war, xenophobia, oppression, inequality, and climate collapse. But, we must understand the fight against all of these is one fight: the fight against the rich and powerful. The fascists, the oil lobby, the imperial interests, the capitalists, the war criminals, the xenophobes, the oppressors, they're all collected and organized. But do not be fooled, they are not as strong as the collective.

Protest for:
- Immediate measures to reduce fossil fuel dependency
- Replacing processes that cause emissions (primarily mining)
- Mobilization of funds and aid from the biggest emitters to the most vulnerable
(I'll add more if the comments suggest some that I might have left out)

Answers for anyone who might ask the following questions:

Q: My government doesn't prioritize climate change and/or doesn't listen to activists/protestors. What should I do?
A: Replace the government. As a Nepali, I know a thing about bringing down a government, and yes it is hard and has consequences, but it is possible. Organize to save the world!

Q: Most people don't care about climate change. Will climate action be possible when there is so little support for it?
A: It is our job to make people care for it. I have seen how a protest, a movement, a campaign becomes big enough to create change. Tell your friends, your family, your neighbors about the urgency, about the need to protest, to act. Action is the only option.

P.S. After reading this post it feels a little AI-generated (lol) but I assure you no AI has been used in writing this post. Completely written by a human (me). Fuck AI, fuck data centers.

I would say more detail but reddit keeps removing my post, so I will just post the link to this news article.

Hi everyone,

I’m finding that people don’t seem to know the details about how the Kochs attacked climate science and I can’t post this in r/50501 anymore and my post in r/climate change got removed (I didn’t read the description so I think it was the wrong sub, my bad) so I’m posting here so you don’t have to read the 450+ pages - Dark Money is 10 years old but it explains exactly how we ended up here - if anyone has another detailed source that is more recent, please let me know.

I will have to do two more posts but my first post in r/50501 is still there and linked above.

———-

Corporate lobbying [xvi] legal organizations, lobbyists [xviii]

By 1990, enterprising conservative and libertarian activists were wearing a path to Wichita to pitch their proposals to Charles Koch in hopes of his patronage. [178] In 1991, William “Chip” Mellor, III, a former Reagan administration lawyer, proposed an aggressive, right-wing public interest law firm that would litigate against government regulations in favor of “economic liberty”. [178]

Charles Koch said, “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll give you up to $500,000 a year for three years, each year, but you’ll have to come back each year and demonstrate that you’ve met these milestones that you’ve set out to accomplish and I will evaluate it on a yearly basis, and there’s no guarantees.” [178] The legal group, the Institute for Justice, went on to bring numerous successful cases against government regulations, including campaign-finance laws, several of which reached the Supreme Court. [178]

From 1998-2008, Koch Industries spent more than $50 million on lobbying. [1998-2008, 179]

Another member of the Koch network, Richard DeVos ($5.7 billion) [no date, 21], cofounder of Amway, Michigan-based MLM empire, led similar efforts to take political action and change laws after pleading guilty to defrauding the Canadian government (from 1965-1978 [285]) of $22 million in customs duties in 1982. [20]

In 1980, Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel, cofounders of Amway, became the top spenders on behalf of Ronald Reagan’s presidential candidacy. [285] By 1981, Richard DeVos was the finance chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), which Jay Van Andel headed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. [285]

Amway gave $2.5 million to the Republican Party during the 1994 midterm elections, which was the largest known soft money donation from a corporation in the country’s history. [287]

Richard Junior, known as Dick, married the other royal family of Michigan’s Dutch Reformed community, Betsy Prince, whose father, Edgar Prince, founded an auto parts manufacturing company that sold for $1.35 billion in cash in 1996, while her brother, Erik Prince, founded the global security firm Blackwater, which reporter Jeremy Scahill described as “the world’s most powerful mercenary army”. [287] Betsy DeVos eventually became the chairwoman of Michigan’s Republican Party.

The DeVos family funded legal challenges to various campaign finance laws for years. In 1997, Betsy DeVos became a founding member of the James Madison Center for Free Speech, a nonprofit organization whose only goal was to end all restrictions on money in politics. [288] Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fundraiser. [288] By designating itself a nonprofit charitable group, the Madison Center enabled the DeVos Family Foundation and other supporters to take tax deductions for subsidizing long-shot lawsuits that might never have been attempted otherwise. [289]

Betsy DeVos wrote, “My family is the largest single contributor of soft money [e.g. for “issue” ads] to the national Republican Party … We do expect some things in return”. [289]

As a Republican running for office in Kentucky in the 1970s, McConnell admitted, “[A] spending edge is the only thing that gives a Republican a chance to compete”. [288] In a Senate debate on proposed campaign finance restrictions, McConnell repeatedly told colleagues, “If we stop this thing, we can control the institution for the next 20 years”. [288]

Politically tinged nonprofit spending [xvi] think tanks, academic programs, front groups [xviii]

Between 1998-2008, Charles Koch’s private fund, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, made more than $48 million in tax-deductible grants, primarily to groups promoting his political views. [179] The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, controlled by Charles and his wife Liz, with two company executives and an accountant, similarly made more than $28 million in tax-deductible grants. [179] David Koch’s fund, the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, made more than $120 million in tax-deductible grants - many to cultural and scientific projects rather than political. [179]

Academic programs - the “intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor” to influence elite opinion with op-ed pieces, lawsuits, and expert think tank studies [235-236]

Charles Koch wanted to focus on “attracting youth” because “this is the only group that is open to a radically different social philosophy” [68] through educational indoctrination, with free-market curricula and even video games promoting his ideology pitched to prospects as young as grade school. [68]

He believed that government interference in the economy was what had caused the last Great Depression. [210] “Bankers, brokers and businessmen” had been falsely blamed. [210] The true culprits to him were Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, whom he regarded as dangerous liberals. [210]

“He advocated funding private institutes within prestigious universities, where influence over hiring decisions and other forms of control could be exerted by donors while hiding the radicalism of their aims. [69] “It would be necessary to use ambiguous and misleading names, obscure the true agenda, and conceal the means of control. This is the method that Charles Koch would soon practice in his charitable giving, and later in his political actions” [69]

“In order to alter the direction of America, they realized they would have to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks”” [71] “Cumulatively, the many-tentacled ideological machine they built came to be known as the Kochtopus”. [71]

By 1981, the Kochs’ donations of $30 million largely funded the Mercatus Center, a think tank located on the George Mason University campus, a public university, advertised as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas - bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems”. [182]

Clayton Coppin, who taught history at George Mason and compiled Charles’s political activities for Bill Koch, characterized the Mercatus Center as “a lobbying group disguised as a disinterested academic program” that enabled Charles to “have a tax deduction for financing a group, which for all practical purposes is a lobbying group for his corporate interest”. [183]

In the same building as the Mercatus Center was another heavily Koch-funded institute, chaired by Charles Koch, the Institute for Humane Studies. [183] Its founder had called taxes “theft”, welfare “immoral”, and opposed court-ordered remedies to racial segregation. [183] The aim of the IHS was to cultivate and subsidize the next generation’s libertarian scholars. [183]

> Charles reportedly demanded better metrics with which to monitor students’ political views. [183] To the dismay of some faculty members, applicants’ essays had to be run through computers in order to count the number of times they mentioned the free-market icons Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. [183] Students were tested at the beginning and the end of each week for ideological improvement. [183] The institute also housed the Charles G. Koch summer internship program, a paid fellowship placing students who shared the Kochs’ views in like-minded nonprofit groups, where they could join the libertarian network. [183]

By 2004, the Wall Street Journal dubbed the Mercatus Center as “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of” and noted that 14 of the 23 regulations that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list” had been suggested by Mercatus scholars. [186]

Thomas McGarrity, a law professor at the University of Texas who specialized in environmental issues, argued that “Koch has been constantly in trouble with the EPA and Mercatus has constantly hammered on the agency”. [187]

One environmental lawyer who clashed repeatedly with the Mercatus Center dismissed it as a lobbying show dressed up as a nonprofit, calling it “a means of laundering economic aims”. [187] The lawyer explained the strategy: “You take the corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders”. [187]

For example, a top official at the Mercatus Center made a pro-smog argument that “by blocking the sun, smog cut down on cases of skin cancer. She claimed that if pollution were controlled, it would cause up to 11,000 additional cases of skin cancer”. [187] Wendy Gramm, wife of Senator Phil Gramm, head of Mercatus’ Regulatory Studies Program, pushed for the Enron Loophole, exempting the type of energy derivatives from which Enron profited from regulatory oversight. [188] Senator Gramm crafted a deregulatory bill made to order for Enron and Koch, called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. [188] In 2001, Enron collapsed in a heap of bogus financial statements and fraudulent accounting practices. [188] But Wendy Gramm had pocketed up to $1.8 million from Enron the year after arguing for the loophole. [188] It emerged that before going under, Enron had made substantial campaign contributions to Senator Gramm, while its chairman, Kenneth Lay, had given money to the Mercatus Center. [188]

By 2008, George Mason University was both the largest single recipient of Koch funds for higher education and the largest research university in Virginia [189]

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute colluded with top oil executives and conservative think tank officials on a secret plan to spend $2 million to confuse the press and the public about the growing scientific consensus on global warming. [255] The plan called for recruiting skeptical scientists and training them in public relations so that they could act as spokesmen, thereby adding legitimacy and cover to the industry’s agenda. [255]

Kert Davies, the director of research at Greenpeace, the liberal environmental group, spent months trying to trace the funds flowing into a web of nonprofit organizations and talking heads, all denying the reality of global warming as if working from the same script. [251] What he discovered was that from 2005-2008, a single source, the Kochs, poured almost $25 million into dozens of different organizations fighting climate reforms. [251] His research showed that Charles and David had outspent, by a factor of three, what was then the world’s largest public oil company, ExxonMobil [251] In a 2010 report, Greenpeace crowned Koch Industries the “kingpin of climate science denial”. [251]

The first peer-reviewed academic study on climate science denial by Robert Brulle, Drexel professor of sociology and environmental science, discovered that between 2003-2010, more than half a billion ($558 million) dollars had been spent on a massive “campaign to manipulate and mislead the public about the threat posed by climate change”, funded by 140 conservative foundations - in essence, a corporate lobbying campaign disguised as a tax-exempt philanthropic endeavor. [251]

The money went to think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations, other foundations, and academic and legal programs. [251]

However, 3/4 of the funds for this “climate change counter-movement” were untraceable. [252] Brulle said, “Powerful funders are supporting the campaign to deny scientific findings about global warming and raise public doubts about the roots and remedies of this massive global threat. At the very least, American voters deserve to know who is behind these efforts.” [252]

But by the time Obama took office, some had gone even more underground. Rather than funding directly, a growing number of conservative foundations and donors had begun directing their contributions through an organization called DonorsTrust. [253] Founded in 1999 by Whitney Ball, a West Virginia libertarian who had overseen development of the Koch-founded Cato Institute, it made contributions appear to go to a “donor-advised fund” rather than the more controversial groups she would later distribute the funds into. [253] This way, the donors’ names were erased from the money trail - meanwhile, the donors retained the same if not bigger charitable tax deductions. [253]

A similar liberal donor-advised fund, the Tides Foundation, existed, but DonorsTrust as the conservative response soon had 4 times the funds and a far more strategic board. [253] Its directors consisted of the top officials of some of the most important organizations in the conservative movement, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Institute for Justice, the libertarian legal center whose start was funded by Charles Koch. [253]

In 2010, its single largest grant was $7.4 million to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP), chaired by David Koch. [253] This grant was 40% of the AFP’s funding that year, belying the notion that it was a genuine grassroots organization. [253]

Dr. James Baker, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in 2005, “There’s a better scientific consensus on [global warming] than on any issues I know - except maybe Newton’s second law of thermodynamics”. [255]

I'll preface this by saying that, being Brazilian, I do understand your anger at my government's gross encouragement of ecocide and indigenous genocide. It is the same anger I and millions of other Brazilians feel every day, as much about what's being done with the rainforest as about what's being done with our lives: Bolsonaro has deregulated masses of agrotoxins and pesticides, effectively legalized a 7-day work-week, passed a pension reform that generally ensures we'll work until we die, presides over a massive police brutality spike in Rio de Janeiro and other cities, and is trying to close or privatize the public universities where millions of poor people study for free. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief on the web, Brazilians aren't benefitting from the Amazon being stripped off the earth (EDIT: and a recent nationwide poll shows that 96% are against deforesting and in favour of stronger regulation, and 89% want Congress to work towards zero deforesting). The only ones who benefit are the big landowners and land-grabbers who use the cleared ground for cattle ranching and soy plantations. These people have close to zero oversight on their earnings, holdings, and crimes. Brazil has never had a land reform; an almost colonial regime still holds in the countryside, and new forms of colonialism cast a shadow over our cities and politics.

From 2003 to 2016, the country was governed by the centre-left Workers' Party - which, while disappointingly uncommitted to indigenous and rural causes, did see a reduction of deforestation rates from 28 000 km² a year in 2004 to 4 500 km² a year in 2012. It was removed in a soft coup, supported by the US and met with silence by the EU. The coup government, supported by the aforementioned landowners, ramped deforestation rates up to the 7 000 km² a year ballpark - as well as making life worse for everyone, leaving office with less than 5% approval. In last year's election, Lula, who was President from 2003 to 2010, was set to win a landslide over Bolsonaro - until an anti-corruption operation called Car Wash, recently proven to be politically motivated, arrested him on dubious charges and did its best to isolate him from the electoral field. Once again, there are hints of US involvement, starting with the training of the judge responsible and coming to a foreign-funded fake news machine. Bolsonaro might apparently preside over a near 100% increase in deforestation rates, but his approval rates have quickly decayed. It is becoming increasingly obvious to the general population that he is leading us into one of the darkest periods of our history. It might be literally so, as smoke from the recent fires has even darkened São Paulo's afternoon skies.

This is all to say that the proposed solutions of assassinating Bolsonaro, as a conspiracy theorist tried to do on the campaign trail, or going to war against Brazil, as advocated by Foreign Policy, will only bring more strife into an already suffering country, and do nothing to halt the demise of the Amazon. But there are forms of international action that can.

1) Sanction Brazilian beef, soy, and all activities of big landowners. Pressure for immediate land reform, as laid down in the 1988 Constitution.

2) Launch an international investigation and take to task those who have aided and abetted in the 2016 coup and in Lula's political prison. That would likely include several current and former American government officials and judges, as well as oil executives and bankers.

3) Show solidarity with Brazilian activists. Protest at embassies and foreign branches of BNDES. Take down your own fascist government. Though there tends to be an international media blackout on Brazilian news that aren't related to the Amazon, we do see and listen to what is happening worldwide. Occupy a Brazilian embassy with a thousand people and we will take a million to the streets again. Topple one of the many fascists of today and we will be sure to adopt your tactics.

And most of the people there were Covid-19 anti-vaxxers, 5G conspiracists and climate deniers. I came with a small group of climate activists trying to get some climate-related motions pasted, mostly about emissions targets, tracking emissions and declaring a climate emergency.

I couldn't help myself from speaking up against their anti-science non-sense and had to leave before I was torn apart by an angry mob. Despite my best efforts not to insult anyone I apparently come off as extremely condescending according to one person who yelled at me.

If this is indicative of annual general meetings in your local council then I think we are going to need to get a lot more active people in the space. We need to get organised enough to drown out their nonsense.

This is an opinion piece I stumbled upon recently and felt the need to shout about it from the rooftops. I don't claim to know how feasible something like this would be but raising what is essentially a reverse Tea Party that is forwarded by progressives and activists seems really interesting and an additional legal way for the average US citizen to have a larger voice.

If progressives hope to have any shot at influencing today’s Democratic Party and kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party did a decade and a half ago to take power.<

Would it be feasible to organize groups that could support people into the position proposed by the article?

It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees that then go on to hold elected office, and who help draft a party’s platform. <

They’re also generally the first people who elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say. <

I'm tired of seeing my country attempting to stop any and all conservation and environmentalism, I think this is another course of action that needs to be taken in addition to everything we're already doing