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Charles Koch's Americans for Prosperity endorses Nikki Haley in effort to stop Trump [1]

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Date: 2023-11-28

Dylan Wells and Hannah Knowles at The Washington Post report

Nikki Haley for president on Tuesday, as it looks to stop Donald Trump from being the Republican nominee. The powerful political network led by conservative billionaire Charles Koch endorsedfor president on Tuesday, as it looks to stopfrom being the Republican nominee. Americans for Prosperity Action, the network’s flagship political group, announced the group’s first endorsement of its type in a presidential race. In 2015, the Koch network identified five approved presidential candidates, all of whom fell to Trump. “AFP Action is proud to throw our full support behind Nikki Haley, who offers America the opportunity to turn the page on the current political era, to win the Republican primary and defeat Joe Biden next November,” Emily Seidel, senior adviser of the group, wrote in a memo. “Haley will have the full weight and scope of AFP Action’s unmatched grassroots army and resources to help her earn the support of Americans to become the next President of the United States of America.”

Nikki Haley

In case you don’t remember or never knew, together with his now-deceased brother, David, Charles Koch has a long record of climate lies and paying others to lie, all to feed the greed of Koch Industries—a refining, petrochemical and pipeline company nicknamed by Greenpeace a “kingpin of climate denial”—and the rest of the fossil fuel industry. Besides Americans for Prosperity, he founded and bankrolled the Cato Institute, the libertarian outfit that for years spread lies about climate change. Between 1997 and 2018, Koch Industries spent close to $150 million financing climate denial groups. According to OpenSecrets, Koch Industries spent $11.3 million on lobbying on oil and gas so in 2022.

2020 video released by her advocacy group Stand for America, Haley said that “man-made climate change is real, but liberal ideas would cost trillions and destroy our economy.” At least she didn’t, like her boss at the time, call it a “hoax” invented by the Chinese. And, of course, Haley trashed the Green New Deal, calling its proposals trillions of dollars of waste. She’s had nothing to say about the $7 trillion the oil and gas industry gets in government subsidies worldwide.

As for Haley, who has plenty else in her record that requires keeping her out of the White House, she at least gets credit for publicly acknowledging that climate change is real. But her efforts in office nonetheless amplified the denials. For instance, in 2017, when she was U.N. ambassador, Haley helped Donald Trump engineer the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate. In areleased by her advocacy groupStand for America, Haley said that “man-made climate change is real, but liberal ideas would cost trillions and destroy our economy.” At least she didn’t, like her boss at the time, call it a “hoax” invented by the Chinese. And, of course, Haley trashed the Green New Deal, calling its proposals trillions of dollars of waste. She’s had nothing to say about the $7 trillion the oil and gas industry gets in government subsidies worldwide.

Like other puppets of the industry, she supports the false promise of uneconomic industrial carbon capture and the inadequacy of planting trees to soak up CO 2 . “The private sector produces innovative ideas that actually work, like capturing CO 2 before it goes into our air [and] reforestation — a.k.a. planting more trees and forests to soak up CO 2. ” Planting billions more trees—not to mention curtailing deforestation—is worthwhile. But neither that nor carbon capture alone are enough to deal with our predicament. And what the most avid purveyors of carbon capture want is to be able to keep prodigiously spewing greenhouse gases while saying it’s okay because we’ll just suck it all out.</p>

“A generalized acknowledgment that climate change is real doesn’t really get you out of the F column in terms of a passing grade on climate,” said Brett Hartl, chief political strategist at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.</p>

Koch’s support for Haley is hardly a surprise. If Trump wins the nomination but is splattered in the general election by Biden, the Koch’s energy agenda is undermined. Haley would keep it alive.

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