Tuesday, March 22, 2016

March Climate Madness: Colleges Turning Up the Heat

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Over 100 million Americans have filled out NCAA college basketball tournament brackets this week -- it's March Madness!

But some colleges are now playing a new game that's associated with a different form of madness. This calls for a new type of brackets.

Above are shown the Koch Brackets, 32 colleges that receive money via Donors Trust, a shadowy conduit for a network of conservative/libertarian financiers that oppose environmental regulations and fund efforts to deny that burning fossil fuels causes global warming.

So, which colleges are helping the Koch fossil fuel barons turn up the heat on the planet? The brackets above show the dollar amounts for the top 12. 

In genuine free-market fashion, the outcome is predetermined by dollar amount, with powerhouse George Mason University ($3.1 million) lapping the field. This is based on Donors Trust’s most recent filing of Form 990 with the Internal Revenue Service, which lists all grants from the year 2014. 

The Northern Virginia school and its Mercatus Center are to libertarian think tanks what Connecticut is to women’s basketball. 

For more information, read Jane Mayer’s book, Dark Money, which traces the lineage of the Koch brothers, Donors Trust, and conservative philanthropy’s quiet entry into big-time academic spending.

Source: Analysis - The Koch Brothers, by Peter Dykstra, Environmental Health News, March 17, 2016

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