Heartland is the Tip of the Donors’ Trust Iceberg

Finally some real muckraking! Suzanne Goldenburg at The Guardian investigates funding running through Donors’ Trust to climate denial organizations.

By 2010, the two Donor Trusts between them were channelling just under $30m to a host of conservative organisations opposing climate action or science. That accounted to 46% of all their grants to conservative causes, according to the Greenpeace analysis.

The funding stream far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, the records show. When it came to blocking action on the climate crisis, the obscure charity in the suburbs was outspending the Koch brothers by a factor of six to one.
 

This graphic came with the article. Notice how small the Heartland Institute is in the scheme of things – their funding was a few million per year.

The defeat of Heartland should not be overvalued. Donors’ Trust (and its ilk) is the problem.