The Cash Cow
CRC has made two good articles available recently (these are Adobe .pdf linked documents) that dispell the myth that large corporations are conservative monoliths supporting anti-environment causes.
The first is Funding Liberalism with Blue-Chip Profits; Fortune 100 Foundations Back Leftists Causes. The other is called The Price of Doing Business: Environmentalist Groups Toe Funders’ Lines. Both have page after page of data on the amounts that organizations like Earth Justice, Nature Conservancyਊnd Sierra Club are getting from big business and billion dollar charitable trusts.
Does this somehow make them beholden to these financial interests and their agendas in return? I’ll let you read these and judge for yourself.
Also today, Bruce Benson pens this OpinionJournal article: How Earthjustice and other green groups abuse the legal system for their own “non-profit.”
Most federal environmental statutes allow citizens to sue individuals or companies for violating the laws. Indeed, from 1993 to 2002, more than 75% of all environmental federal court decisions started as citizen suits, reports James May. Writing the Widener Law Review, he concludes that citizen suits are “the engine that propels the field of environmental law.”
But most of these suits are brought by environmental organizations, not individuals, and most of the filings don’t end in a court decision; they end in settlements. From 1995-2002, there were 4,438 notices of intent to sue under four environmental statutes--6.6 times more than actual federal court decisions in citizen suits. Presumably most of the others were settled.
Why the settlements?
My research indicates a clear and compelling reason: settlements bring in money environmental groups can use to pursue other goals.
Read the whole thing.
One thing is certain: Between lawsuits and huge infusions of cash from corporate trusts, “non-profit environmentalism” is certainly big business.
[Don’s other habitat is The Evangelical Ecologist Blog]
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