Foundation touts fossil fuel beyond Texas

The Texas Public Policy Foundation's bailiwick has long been small government and tax-cutting advocacy in Texas, pushing for cuts to environmental regulations and renewable energy subsidies at the Legislature and in communities across the state.

But over the last year the conservative, Austin-based think tank, backed by a board whose members include fossil fuel executives, has aimed to export its Texas tactics, producing videos, paying for social media advertisements and writing opinion pieces to draw attention to the ways energy, particularly fossil fuels, has improved quality of life in areas as varied as Arizona and Haiti.

Launching an effort called Life:Powered, the nonprofit has hired an Austin coal lobbyist as the initiative’s director, a former Republican state representative from Hays County with ties to the natural gas industry as its senior manager, and a radio show host who promotes fossil fuels as a senior fellow.

A Democratic U.S. senator from New Mexico has described Life:Powered as “deceptively named” and the foundation as “one of a growing number of political-front groups paid for by wealthy and self-interested fossil fuel donors.”

The expansion comes as the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which does not disclose its donors, has stepped up fundraising and elevated its profile nationally.

“We’re trying to raise America’s energy IQ,” Jason Isaac, the former Texas House member from Dripping Springs, told the American-Statesman. “We’re making the connection between prosperity we enjoy here in the United States and access to energy in all forms, all abundant, affordable reliable, all forms and all of the above.”

When his kids ask him about his new job, he says, he tells them, “I’m going to work to end poverty around the world.”

But even as public policy experts work on how to use energy to raise life expectancy and access to fresh water in poorer parts of the world, the Texas Public Policy Foundation campaign raises questions about the ultimate motives of the coal- and oil-backed group.

Two videos from Life:Powered were screened in August at the American Coal Council's Coal Market Strategies conference in New Mexico. The videos aim to educate an "extremely under-informed" public on fossil fuels, said Michael Nasi, the Austin coal lobbyist who directs Life:Powered, according to a report in the trade publication Generations Market Week.

“We have failed as both a coal industry, a power industry and obviously other fossil industries and the nuclear industry because we have failed to get together to message together,” Nasi said at the time.

Sandy Bahr, director of the Arizona state chapter of the Sierra Club, where Life:Powered has criticized the closing of a power plant on a Navajo reservation, scoffed at the effort.

“Did they run out of ways to promote fossil fuels in Texas?” she said.

A fight in Arizona

The fight in Arizona reflects Life:Powered’s approach to influencing opinion. Even as it might not put people on the ground to meet with lawmakers, it produces or distributes material that promotes fossil fuels and demonizes environmentalists as a way to shape policy.

Wading into a fraught battle that has played out for years on the Navajo Nation reservation in the northern part of Arizona over the fate of a coal-fired power plant, the Texas Public Policy Foundation released a highly produced, short video last year promoting the plant’s operations.

“Coal-based energy provides the Navajo Nation with jobs, dignity and hope,” the video says. “Out-of-state billionaires and environmental extremists want to shut it all down.”

Over wind instruments comes the voice of a young girl: “From my window I can see a castle of three chimneys” — the camera focuses on a coal-fired power plant with three tall stacks. The video cuts to a man wearing a hard-hat. “You need to be a warrior with armor to get in the castle,” continues the voice of the girl.

“Papa says it’s the heart of the land. I can hear it beating,” she says.

The video, which was produced by Texas Public Policy Foundation before the launch of Life:Powered but now carries its brand, concludes with text: “Extreme environmentalist politics will eliminate jobs, destroy families, and spike electric bills in the Navajo Nation and across America. The Navajo don’t need to be told what to do. They’ve been protecting the environment for centuries.”

As with many other coal plants hammered by a changing energy market, one revolutionized by an influx of cheap natural gas, the Navajo Generating Station is scheduled to close at the end of this year, after various companies passed on taking it over.

Bankruptcy filings in 2016 by Peabody Energy, which operates the mine whose coal is burned at the plant, showed the company gave a total of $40,000 to the foundation in 2014 and 2015. The connection was previously reported by liberal watchdog groups.

The video, with more than 4,200 views on YouTube, caused a stir. Bahr called it “an attempt to green wash coal and make it seem like it’s this wonderful thing that is providing sustainable opportunities, and that’s just not the case.”

Nicole Horseherder, the executive director of the nonprofit To’ Nizhoni Ani (Navajo for "beautiful water speaks"), which opposed continuing operations of the plant, told the Statesman that “people in Texas need to, one, mind their own business, and if they want to get involved come out and actually take a walk with the people of Black Mesa” — the area that’s home to the coal plant and a coal mine.

“Texas people need to understand, in northern Arizona we’re in the high desert, with less than 8 inches of water a year,” she continued. “The mine has used the groundwater from Black Mesa for 48 years now, with billions of gallons of pristine aquifer water used for mining operations. That’s increased contaminants in the aquifer, and drawn down the aquifer.”

“The pro-coal supporters have made it all about jobs,” she said. “There’s more to it than that. What’s happening on Black Mesa shows that jobs and revenues is not all that it's made out to be. When you lose your own potable water source, that’s life or death right there.”

No climate concerns

The Life:Powered initiative promotes the ways cheaper, reliable energy can help people in parts of the world without access to running water and other basic amenities, an issue that people from across the political spectrum have worked on.

In the videos and other material, there is no mention of the harms associated with a changing climate, which scientists say is largely the fault of fossil fuel emissions.

“We’re trying to focus on the things we know to actually cause harm” — like carbon monoxide, lead, ozone and mercury, said Isaac, who is also president of the Texas Natural Gas Foundation. Last year, the Statesman found the natural gas group collaborated with a state energy office and the University of Texas to write new public school classroom materials about energy resources in ways favorable to the natural gas industry.

“We like to talk about the facts; we know there are criteria pollutants that cause people harm. CO2 isn’t one of those,” Isaac said.

Talking heads in the videos have their own history of downplaying the consequences of carbon emissions. Caleb Rossiter, for example, who appears on a video to discuss how carbon dioxide regulations punish impoverished people in the developing world, is the executive director of the CO2 Coalition, which is funded by the conservative Mercer Family Foundation. In congressional testimony in April, he said carbon dioxide emissions "have had a modest, positive impact on public health" in the U.S. as plant food and because it has "contributed to warming."

"The fracking revolution may have averted many deaths here because it has reduced the price of home heating," he said, referring to a form of natural gas extraction.

In mid-May, Life:Powered communications manager Katie Tahuahua wrote on the initiative's website that “expensive and regressive policies that drive up the cost of energy — and therefore the cost of living — hurt the poorest among us the most.”

But Phil LaRocco, who teaches a course on energy challenges in developing countries at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and reviewed a Life:Powered video on energy poverty and material on the initiative’s website at the Statesman’s request, said the project opts for a misleading “either-or presentation” that suggests “renewables cannot do it because the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow all the time; but of course fossil fuels can always do it because it has done it in the past.”

“In so many ways, that’s pure drivel as a construction,” said LaRocco, who founded a firm that invests in energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and Southeast Asia.

Much of the video he reviewed “is a reasonable presentation of the condition and the essential nature of modern energy to eradicating energy poverty.”

“The balance of the video, however, and other materials on the website do a fair job of conflating eradicating energy poverty with the central station-fossil fuel-energy-by-wires model, and conflating electricity with heat (especially for cooking and boiling water),” he said.

He said that decentralized renewables can reach people at a lower cost per household than extending the grid, and can do it now. Building out an electric grid, on the other hand, takes years, and societies are traditionally reluctant to extend a grid to rural areas. 

“We are already in an energy transition,” he continued, “so why not work with it instead of promoting the expansion of buggy whip manufacturing so you can export buggy whips to less fortunate economies?”

An expanding operation

The expansion beyond Texas’ borders reflects the foundation's growing ambition.

Its revenue in 2017, the latest for which information is available on federal tax filings, was $12.1 million. The previous year, the foundation raised $18.3 million, part of a capital campaign to build its new headquarters downtown.

In 2010, revenue was $4.7 million. Significant contributions come from foundations related to the family behind Koch Industries, which operates oil refineries and other heavy industry in Texas and beyond.

The influx of cash has helped pay for the bigger footprint of Life:Powered, which was previously branded as the Fueling Freedom initiative.

One video opens with this tagline: “Coal. Oil. Natural Gas. Fossil Fuels are essential to modern life.” It then follows a person from her morning alarm, through her ablutions and breakfast and into her SUV, itemizing all the things along the way that were made with the help of fossil fuels.

In April, Nasi, the Life:Powered director, wrote an opinion piece in the Albuquerque Journal critical of a zero-carbon mandate adopted by New Mexico.

“Solar and wind energy consume massive amounts of land, destroy wildlife habitats and are dependent on rare-earth minerals,” he wrote. “Production of these minerals is dominated by the Chinese and produces toxic and radioactive waste, destroying more land in the process.”

Not disclosed in his op-ed: Nasi could make as much as $305,000 this year as a lobbyist for the North American Coal Corp. and the Coal Combustion Products Coalition, among other coal companies and utilities, according to a Statesman review of Texas Ethics Commission lobbying records.

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, struck back with an op-ed of his own, accusing Nasi of running a “disinformation campaign” that amounted to “a cynical attempt to stand in the way of the actions we must take as a state, as a nation, and as a global community to address the scientific reality of climate change.”

With market forces and technological innovation influencing electricity production, Heinrich argued that renewable energy represented the state’s “greatest prospect for economic growth in generations.”

Isaac said Life:Powered aims to work in Minnesota, Michigan, Washington state and Alaska, among others, to push back on initiatives to expand state subsidies for renewable energy or efforts to implement a carbon tax.

In Colorado, the foundation is mobilizing to fight efforts to hand more power to cities and counties to regulate oil and gas extraction.

“They’re taking away people’s private property rights that own mineral rights, denying them the ability to make money off their land,” Isaac said.

Texas Public Policy Foundation spokeswoman Sarah Silberstein said Life:Powered is partnering with affiliates of the State Policy Network, a collection of conservative organizations whose collective mission is to “catalyze thriving, durable freedom movements,” which has pushed for cutting welfare programs and government spending, expanding access to charter schools and loosening industrial regulations. Money for the groups reportedly comes from conservative foundations, corporations and private donors, such as the Kochs.

For now, the campaigns are chiefly through social media, YouTube videos and town halls.

“As Life:Powered grows, we have more capacity to expand beyond just digital and traditional media to raise public awareness of energy and environmental policy,” Tahuahua said. On Wednesday, Life:Powered hosted a meeting in a San Antonio library that was critical of the city’s carbon dioxide reduction plan, and it is hosting a series of educational policy primers in Washington, D.C., for congressional staff.

“There are other groups that just don’t have the sophistication or team or experience that we have in dealing with these policies,” Isaac said. “If we can spread our policies and our research to other states, it’s good for the country.”

EXPERT REPORTINGAsher Price has covered energy and the environment for the American-Statesman since 2006. In numerous stories, he has explored the politics of endangered species protections in Texas and the cozy relationship between top state officials and the oil and gas industry. He’s the co-author of “The Great Texas Wind Rush: How George Bush, Ann Richards, and a Bunch of Tinkerers Helped the Oil and Gas State Win the Race to Wind Power.”

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