This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A right-wing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, the Guardian has learned.

The Washington, DC-based nonprofit Environmental Law Institute (ELI)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation,” according to ELI’s website.

The American Energy Institute, a right-wing, pro-fossil fuel think tank, has been attacking ELI and its climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying ELI was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science.”

ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project is “falsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about questionable climate science,” the report says. In reality, the American Energy Institute claims, the project is a partner to the more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the climate dangers of coal, oil, and gas usage.

In a PowerPoint presentation about the report found on its website, the group says the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) is “wholly aligned with the climate change plaintiffs and helps them corruptly influence judges behind closed doors.”

“Their true purpose is to preview the plaintiffs’ arguments in the climate cases in an ex parte setting,” the presentation says.

“The idea that [the Environmental Law Institute] is corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Both the report and the PowerPoint presentation link the American Energy Institute to CRC Advisors, a public relations firm chaired by right-wing dark money impresario Leo. Given his outsize role in shaping the US judiciary—Leo helped select multiple judicial nominees for former president Donald Trump, including personally lobbying for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment—his firm’s role in opposing climate litigation is notable.

“He was greatly responsible for moving our federal court systems to the right,” said David Armiak, the research director for Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group tracking money in politics, of Leo. CRC Advisors’ work with the American Energy Institute, Armiak said, seemed “to delegitimize a group that’s seeking to inform judges or the judicial system of climate science, something that [Leo] also opposed with some of his other efforts.”

The American Energy Institute report’s document properties show that its author was Maggie Howell, director of branding and design at CRC Advisors. And the PowerPoint’s document properties lists CRC Advisors’s vice president, Kevin Daley, as the author.

Neither CRC Advisors nor Leo responded to requests for comment.

In an email, the institute’s CEO, Jason Isaac, said: “American Energy Institute employed CRC Advisors to edit and promote our groundbreaking report on the corrupt relationship between our federal court system and leftwing dark money groups.”

But Kert Davies, the director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, who shared the report and PowerPoint with the Guardian, said ELI is “far from leftwing.”

The institute’s staff include a wide variety of legal and climate experts. Its board includes executives from Shell Group and BP—oil companies that have been named as defendants in climate litigation—and a partner at a law firm that represents Chevron. Two partners with the firm Baker Botts LLP, which represents Sunoco LP and its subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum Ltd, in a climate lawsuit filed by Honolulu, also sit on ELI’s leadership council, E&E News previously reported.

“ELI’s seminars are giving judges the ABCs of climate change, which is a complicated subject that they ought to know about,” said Davies. “The idea that they’re corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Asked for comment about ELI’s connection to oil companies, the American Energy Institute CEO, Isaac, said that “all of those companies have embraced and/or are pushing political agendas” that are “contrary to the best interest of Americans, American energy producers, and human flourishing,” including environmental, social, and governance investing and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Isaac described oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

“They are the appeasers, the ones feeding the crocodiles,” he said. He did not respond to questions about the extent of the relationship between the American Energy Institute and CRC Advisors.

In a statement, Nick Collins, a spokesperson for ELI, called the American Energy Institute report “full of misinformation and created by an organization whose leadership regularly spreads false claims about climate science,” and described the CJP curriculum as “fact-based and science-first, developed with a robust peer review process that meets the highest scholarly standards.”

The American Energy Institute’s attack on the judicial climate education program comes as the supreme court considers litigation that could put big oil on the hook for billions of dollars.

Honolulu is one of dozens of cities and states to sue oil majors for allegedly hiding the dangers of their products from the public. Hawaii’s supreme court ruled that the suit can go to trial, but the defendants petitioned the US Supreme Court to review that decision, arguing the cases should be thrown out because emissions are a federal issue that cannot be tried in state courts.

This past spring, far-right fossil fuel allies launched an unprecedented campaign pressuring the Supreme Court to side with the defendants and shield fossil fuel companies from the litigation. Several of the groups behind the campaign have ties to Leo.

In June, the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the defendants’ request. Biden officials could respond as soon as this week. “It’s doubtful that AEI’s timing of their report release was a coincidence,” said Davies.

The Supreme Court may soon weigh in on another case, too: In April, 20 Republican state attorneys general filed “friend of the court” briefs asking the court to prevent states from being able to sue oil companies for climate damages. All of the signatories are members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, to which Leo’s Concord Fund is a major contributor.

In the weeks since its publication, the American Energy Institute report attacking ELI has received a surge of interest from right-wing media. Fox News featured the report, as did an array of conservative websites. On Thursday, The Hill published an op-ed by Ted Cruz attacking the ELI project. Other right-wing groups have previously questioned the motives of ELI.

CRC Advisors has counted Chevron, one of the plaintiffs in Honolulu’s lawsuit, as a client. In 2018, the Leo-led PR firm also worked on a campaign aimed at exonerating the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh from accusations of sexual assault.

Davies said it “would not be surprising” if CRC Advisors had a “large role” in the creation or promotion of the report attacking ELI’s judiciary trainings. “They’re known for running campaigns for corporate interests and rightwing interests,” he said.

In addition to his work with the American Energy Institute, Isaac also serves as a fellow at Texas Public Policy Foundation—a think tank backed by oil and gas companies that has recently garnered scrutiny for its role in drafting the ultraconservative policy playbook Project 2025.

A former Republican Texas state representative, Isaac has dedicated much of his career to disputing climate research and promoting misinformation to justify deregulation of the fossil fuel industry. Isaac recently responded to a Twitter post about Climate Week by the EPA, calling the conference on climate change “nothing more than a celebration of people suffering from mental illness, #EcoDysphoria, with those attending insisting the rest of us catch it.”

On a September 25 episode of the right-wing Wisconsin talk radio program “The Vicki McKenna Show,” Isaac offered a defense of the fossil fuel industry, describing oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

Formerly known as Texas Natural Gas Foundation, the American Energy Institute on its face appears to contribute little more than public relations work in defense of the fossil fuels industry. The group publishes blog posts defending carbon emissions and denouncing the push for climate action. It has also produced a handful of longer reports promoting laws that restrict environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and opposing the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

Among its board members are Steve Milloy, who served on Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, once ran a tobacco industry front group, and is a well-known climate denier. Milloy did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the group’s most recent tax filings, the American Energy Institute, which lists four staffers and a CEO on its website, is not a lavish operation. The group brought in about $312,000 in revenue in 2022 and appears to fund its operations at least partly by selling merchandise—among other products, branded T-shirts, tote bags, and beer koozies emblazoned with the words, “I Embrace The High Carbon Lifestyle.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A right-wing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, the Guardian has learned.

The Washington, DC-based nonprofit Environmental Law Institute (ELI)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation,” according to ELI’s website.

The American Energy Institute, a right-wing, pro-fossil fuel think tank, has been attacking ELI and its climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying ELI was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science.”

ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project is “falsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about questionable climate science,” the report says. In reality, the American Energy Institute claims, the project is a partner to the more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the climate dangers of coal, oil, and gas usage.

In a PowerPoint presentation about the report found on its website, the group says the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) is “wholly aligned with the climate change plaintiffs and helps them corruptly influence judges behind closed doors.”

“Their true purpose is to preview the plaintiffs’ arguments in the climate cases in an ex parte setting,” the presentation says.

“The idea that [the Environmental Law Institute] is corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Both the report and the PowerPoint presentation link the American Energy Institute to CRC Advisors, a public relations firm chaired by right-wing dark money impresario Leo. Given his outsize role in shaping the US judiciary—Leo helped select multiple judicial nominees for former president Donald Trump, including personally lobbying for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment—his firm’s role in opposing climate litigation is notable.

“He was greatly responsible for moving our federal court systems to the right,” said David Armiak, the research director for Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group tracking money in politics, of Leo. CRC Advisors’ work with the American Energy Institute, Armiak said, seemed “to delegitimize a group that’s seeking to inform judges or the judicial system of climate science, something that [Leo] also opposed with some of his other efforts.”

The American Energy Institute report’s document properties show that its author was Maggie Howell, director of branding and design at CRC Advisors. And the PowerPoint’s document properties lists CRC Advisors’s vice president, Kevin Daley, as the author.

Neither CRC Advisors nor Leo responded to requests for comment.

In an email, the institute’s CEO, Jason Isaac, said: “American Energy Institute employed CRC Advisors to edit and promote our groundbreaking report on the corrupt relationship between our federal court system and leftwing dark money groups.”

But Kert Davies, the director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, who shared the report and PowerPoint with the Guardian, said ELI is “far from leftwing.”

The institute’s staff include a wide variety of legal and climate experts. Its board includes executives from Shell Group and BP—oil companies that have been named as defendants in climate litigation—and a partner at a law firm that represents Chevron. Two partners with the firm Baker Botts LLP, which represents Sunoco LP and its subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum Ltd, in a climate lawsuit filed by Honolulu, also sit on ELI’s leadership council, E&E News previously reported.

“ELI’s seminars are giving judges the ABCs of climate change, which is a complicated subject that they ought to know about,” said Davies. “The idea that they’re corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Asked for comment about ELI’s connection to oil companies, the American Energy Institute CEO, Isaac, said that “all of those companies have embraced and/or are pushing political agendas” that are “contrary to the best interest of Americans, American energy producers, and human flourishing,” including environmental, social, and governance investing and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Isaac described oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

“They are the appeasers, the ones feeding the crocodiles,” he said. He did not respond to questions about the extent of the relationship between the American Energy Institute and CRC Advisors.

In a statement, Nick Collins, a spokesperson for ELI, called the American Energy Institute report “full of misinformation and created by an organization whose leadership regularly spreads false claims about climate science,” and described the CJP curriculum as “fact-based and science-first, developed with a robust peer review process that meets the highest scholarly standards.”

The American Energy Institute’s attack on the judicial climate education program comes as the supreme court considers litigation that could put big oil on the hook for billions of dollars.

Honolulu is one of dozens of cities and states to sue oil majors for allegedly hiding the dangers of their products from the public. Hawaii’s supreme court ruled that the suit can go to trial, but the defendants petitioned the US Supreme Court to review that decision, arguing the cases should be thrown out because emissions are a federal issue that cannot be tried in state courts.

This past spring, far-right fossil fuel allies launched an unprecedented campaign pressuring the Supreme Court to side with the defendants and shield fossil fuel companies from the litigation. Several of the groups behind the campaign have ties to Leo.

In June, the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the defendants’ request. Biden officials could respond as soon as this week. “It’s doubtful that AEI’s timing of their report release was a coincidence,” said Davies.

The Supreme Court may soon weigh in on another case, too: In April, 20 Republican state attorneys general filed “friend of the court” briefs asking the court to prevent states from being able to sue oil companies for climate damages. All of the signatories are members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, to which Leo’s Concord Fund is a major contributor.

In the weeks since its publication, the American Energy Institute report attacking ELI has received a surge of interest from right-wing media. Fox News featured the report, as did an array of conservative websites. On Thursday, The Hill published an op-ed by Ted Cruz attacking the ELI project. Other right-wing groups have previously questioned the motives of ELI.

CRC Advisors has counted Chevron, one of the plaintiffs in Honolulu’s lawsuit, as a client. In 2018, the Leo-led PR firm also worked on a campaign aimed at exonerating the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh from accusations of sexual assault.

Davies said it “would not be surprising” if CRC Advisors had a “large role” in the creation or promotion of the report attacking ELI’s judiciary trainings. “They’re known for running campaigns for corporate interests and rightwing interests,” he said.

In addition to his work with the American Energy Institute, Isaac also serves as a fellow at Texas Public Policy Foundation—a think tank backed by oil and gas companies that has recently garnered scrutiny for its role in drafting the ultraconservative policy playbook Project 2025.

A former Republican Texas state representative, Isaac has dedicated much of his career to disputing climate research and promoting misinformation to justify deregulation of the fossil fuel industry. Isaac recently responded to a Twitter post about Climate Week by the EPA, calling the conference on climate change “nothing more than a celebration of people suffering from mental illness, #EcoDysphoria, with those attending insisting the rest of us catch it.”

On a September 25 episode of the right-wing Wisconsin talk radio program “The Vicki McKenna Show,” Isaac offered a defense of the fossil fuel industry, describing oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

Formerly known as Texas Natural Gas Foundation, the American Energy Institute on its face appears to contribute little more than public relations work in defense of the fossil fuels industry. The group publishes blog posts defending carbon emissions and denouncing the push for climate action. It has also produced a handful of longer reports promoting laws that restrict environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and opposing the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

Among its board members are Steve Milloy, who served on Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, once ran a tobacco industry front group, and is a well-known climate denier. Milloy did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the group’s most recent tax filings, the American Energy Institute, which lists four staffers and a CEO on its website, is not a lavish operation. The group brought in about $312,000 in revenue in 2022 and appears to fund its operations at least partly by selling merchandise—among other products, branded T-shirts, tote bags, and beer koozies emblazoned with the words, “I Embrace The High Carbon Lifestyle.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The seven swing states that will decide the upcoming election have received nearly half of the torrent of clean energy manufacturing dollars unleashed by a landmark 2022 climate bill, a new analysis shows, amid stuttering Democratic efforts to translate new factory jobs into political support.

Since the passage of clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a bill called the “most significant climate law in the history of mankind” by Joe Biden, nearly $150 billion has been announced for a flurry of new American facilities producing electric cars, batteries, and components for renewable energy.

Of this, $63 billion, or nearly half, will flow to just seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that form the battleground fought over by Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for November’s presidential election, bringing more than 50,000 new manufacturing jobs, according to an analysis carried out for the Guardian by Atlas Public Policy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer.”

“The steady drumbeat of announcements over the past two years has been remarkable, and time and time again they are going to swing states,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas.

“The election will decide the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and the election will be decided by the states that have benefitted the most from the manufacturing incentives in the law.”

Two years on, the IRA has delivered “the biggest US economic revolution in generations—and it’s all because America finally, finally decided to do something about climate change,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan business group.

Nearly half a trillion dollars in total public and private investment, when deployment of wind and solar farms is included, has occurred nationally, creating more than 300,000 new jobs. Clean energy now accounts for more than half of total US private investment growth, while jobs in the industry are multiplying at double the rate of the overall American economy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer,” said Gina McCarthy, who was Biden’s top climate advisor when the IRA was passed. “It’s flipped the climate conversation on its head. It’s been a remarkable success.”

Yet despite this green boom being centered upon some of the most politically contested parts of the US, there is little evidence the IRA is set to deliver electorally for Democrats. The swing states remain on a knife-edge between Harris, who cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the bill but barely mentions it while campaigning, and Trump, who has called it a “green scam” and vowed to abolish its spending.

Only four in 10 American voters have even heard anything much about the IRA, polling has shown, with a minority of voters expressing any confidence it will aid the economy, their families, or them personally. “Most people don’t even know about it, so clearly there’s a communication problem, they’ve just not done a good job on that,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in public climate opinion at Yale University.

Leiserowitz said it’s “remarkable” only 49 percent of liberal Democrats, those most concerned about the climate crisis, have heard of the IRA, highlighting the struggles in selling a wonky tome of tax credits amid a fevered news cycle that lurches from one eye-popping crisis to the next.

Criticism has seeped into this vacuum—among major cable news channels in the past two years, half of all mentions of the IRA have been on Fox News, where it has been portrayed as wasteful and likened to far-left totalitarianism.

“Imagine if Trump had passed this,” said Leiserowitz. “He is a salesman, he made damn sure his signature was on those stimulus checks. Republicans are just much better at crowing about their successes than Democrats. There’s been a lack of focused messaging and the media is not inspired to do the job for them.”

Nadine Luci, a 60-year-old resident of Pennsylvania’s Rochester township who usually votes Democrat, worries about pollution and the climate but said she hasn’t “heard much at all” about the “Inflation Act.” In fact, she wasn’t even sure it had passed.

“I thought it was shut down a couple years ago by Republicans,” she said. “But if it goes through I think it would be a positive thing for Pennsylvania.”

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed.”

When told the bill earmarked historic levels of funding for green technology, Luci said it sounded “really good.”

“We all could use it, everybody could use it,” said Luci. “But no, I haven’t heard much.”

Frustratingly for Democrats, this appears to be a trend. Leiserowitz’s polling has found that when voters are actually provided a description of the IRA an overwhelming three-quarters of them support it. “It’s just an enormous wasted opportunity,” he said.

Proclaiming the Inflation Reduction Act has been a challenge from its birth, which required assent from Joe Manchin, the coal baron senator and most conservative Democrat in Congress. It was bestowed a clumsy name that belies what it is—an enormous climate and energy bill with some healthcare add-ons—and has befuddled basic public recognition. “I wish I hadn’t called it that,” Biden lamented last year.

“It has been challenging because it’s technical in nature,” McCarthy said of the bill. “It’s been a little slow to energize people and for it to become a personal thing for people to grab onto. It’s a big bill but I do think we are beginning to see momentum gathering around it.”

The dense, 274-page bill outlines some Manchin-friendly measures controversial with environmental groups—mandated oil and gas drilling leases, dollops of cash for unproven carbon capture projects—but at its core was a shot of adrenaline to the heart of the climate movement and to an economy ravaged by Covid.

Uncapped tax credits for clean energy for the next decade that could top $1 trillion, grants for industrial emissions reduction, rebates for Americans to buy electric cars, incentives for people to get heat pumps or electric stoves at home—the IRA almost has it all in terms of support for clean energy, if not penalties for the fossil fuel pollution causing the climate crisis.

The benefits are set be profound. Goldman Sachs, which has said “so far at least, the reality is living up to or even exceeding expectations,” forecasts $3 trillion in clean energy spending as a result of the bill, with the US treasury coming up with an even more eye-watering figure—$5 trillion—in global economic benefits by 2050 from reduced carbon and air pollution.

Battery factories are sprouting in faded corners of St Louis, Missouri; Weirton, West Virginia; and in rural Georgia. At-risk auto manufacturing plants are being retooled for electric cars across eight states; a former paper mill in Lincoln, Maine, is being reimagined as a massive energy storage facility; solar farms are blanketing parts of Arizona and Texas and Indiana; clean aluminum production is starting in Kentucky and green steel in JD Vance’s Ohio hometown.

Many of the dozens of new projects are in “places where opportunity has left,” as Ali Zaidi, the White House climate adviser, has put it, with a vision of reinvigorated blue-collar towns helping the US close the gap on the clean energy powerhouse of China.

“We are already looking at it as a real pivotal moment,” said Dawn Lippert, chief executive of Elemental Impact, a nonprofit investor in climate tech, who added that “our portfolio companies see extraordinary opportunity in rural areas of the US” because of their manufacturing history.

Politically, Republican rural and exurban areas have received the lion’s share of the spending, a fact that’s causing growing nervousness among some GOP members of Congress over the prospect of Trump reversing new job creation in their districts, even after they voted against it.

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed,” said Keefe. “It’s working-class people in Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina that are going to get hurt because that’s where these these projects are going.”

If it survives intact over the next decade, the IRA could help create 9m new jobs, one analysis shows, while pushing down emissions 40 percent by 2030, putting the US within reach of its target to cut planet-heating polling in half by this point.

Young people, people of color, and suburban women do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls.”

This progress is incremental and often invisible, though, with only a fraction of IRA funding already committed. In the former steel town of Weirton, West Virginia, for instance, many residents said they have not yet seen a resulting surge in the economy.

“We’ve been made a lot of promises here [that] haven’t been met,” said Dave, a retiree of the former Weirton steel mill in an interview at Dee Jay’s barbecue restaurant, adding he is “no fan” of Bidenomics or the Inflation Reduction Act.

Carol Hrabovsky, who owns Irish Pub, one of the only remaining bars on Weirton’s Main Street, said locals are still struggling with a lack of jobs and the high “price of everything.” Once a Democrat and now a Trump supporter, she said the IRA won’t convince her to vote for the Democratic nominee, and she believes most of her neighbors feel the same.

“They shouldn’t have even called it the Inflation Reduction Act,” she said, adding that she is worried about Biden and Harris fostering “communism.”

Other lives are starting to be touched more positively—more than 3 million American families have already used tax credits to upgrade their homes with solar panels, heat pumps, water heaters or insulation, for example. The IRA may in time become a piece of the national furniture despite Republican hostility, much like Obamacare.

But can it help win Harris the election? Climate isn’t ranked as a leading priority by many voters, but Leiserowitz said there are opportunities within three climate-conscious groups that Harris badly needs in November—young people, people of color, and suburban women. They could tip the balance in a close election.

“Those demographics do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls,” he said. “I don’t understand why they aren’t doing this. She has said that Trump thinks climate change is a hoax, which is a step in the right direction, but you need to connect the dots for people.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The seven swing states that will decide the upcoming election have received nearly half of the torrent of clean energy manufacturing dollars unleashed by a landmark 2022 climate bill, a new analysis shows, amid stuttering Democratic efforts to translate new factory jobs into political support.

Since the passage of clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a bill called the “most significant climate law in the history of mankind” by Joe Biden, nearly $150 billion has been announced for a flurry of new American facilities producing electric cars, batteries, and components for renewable energy.

Of this, $63 billion, or nearly half, will flow to just seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that form the battleground fought over by Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for November’s presidential election, bringing more than 50,000 new manufacturing jobs, according to an analysis carried out for the Guardian by Atlas Public Policy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer.”

“The steady drumbeat of announcements over the past two years has been remarkable, and time and time again they are going to swing states,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas.

“The election will decide the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and the election will be decided by the states that have benefitted the most from the manufacturing incentives in the law.”

Two years on, the IRA has delivered “the biggest US economic revolution in generations—and it’s all because America finally, finally decided to do something about climate change,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan business group.

Nearly half a trillion dollars in total public and private investment, when deployment of wind and solar farms is included, has occurred nationally, creating more than 300,000 new jobs. Clean energy now accounts for more than half of total US private investment growth, while jobs in the industry are multiplying at double the rate of the overall American economy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer,” said Gina McCarthy, who was Biden’s top climate advisor when the IRA was passed. “It’s flipped the climate conversation on its head. It’s been a remarkable success.”

Yet despite this green boom being centered upon some of the most politically contested parts of the US, there is little evidence the IRA is set to deliver electorally for Democrats. The swing states remain on a knife-edge between Harris, who cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the bill but barely mentions it while campaigning, and Trump, who has called it a “green scam” and vowed to abolish its spending.

Only four in 10 American voters have even heard anything much about the IRA, polling has shown, with a minority of voters expressing any confidence it will aid the economy, their families, or them personally. “Most people don’t even know about it, so clearly there’s a communication problem, they’ve just not done a good job on that,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in public climate opinion at Yale University.

Leiserowitz said it’s “remarkable” only 49 percent of liberal Democrats, those most concerned about the climate crisis, have heard of the IRA, highlighting the struggles in selling a wonky tome of tax credits amid a fevered news cycle that lurches from one eye-popping crisis to the next.

Criticism has seeped into this vacuum—among major cable news channels in the past two years, half of all mentions of the IRA have been on Fox News, where it has been portrayed as wasteful and likened to far-left totalitarianism.

“Imagine if Trump had passed this,” said Leiserowitz. “He is a salesman, he made damn sure his signature was on those stimulus checks. Republicans are just much better at crowing about their successes than Democrats. There’s been a lack of focused messaging and the media is not inspired to do the job for them.”

Nadine Luci, a 60-year-old resident of Pennsylvania’s Rochester township who usually votes Democrat, worries about pollution and the climate but said she hasn’t “heard much at all” about the “Inflation Act.” In fact, she wasn’t even sure it had passed.

“I thought it was shut down a couple years ago by Republicans,” she said. “But if it goes through I think it would be a positive thing for Pennsylvania.”

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed.”

When told the bill earmarked historic levels of funding for green technology, Luci said it sounded “really good.”

“We all could use it, everybody could use it,” said Luci. “But no, I haven’t heard much.”

Frustratingly for Democrats, this appears to be a trend. Leiserowitz’s polling has found that when voters are actually provided a description of the IRA an overwhelming three-quarters of them support it. “It’s just an enormous wasted opportunity,” he said.

Proclaiming the Inflation Reduction Act has been a challenge from its birth, which required assent from Joe Manchin, the coal baron senator and most conservative Democrat in Congress. It was bestowed a clumsy name that belies what it is—an enormous climate and energy bill with some healthcare add-ons—and has befuddled basic public recognition. “I wish I hadn’t called it that,” Biden lamented last year.

“It has been challenging because it’s technical in nature,” McCarthy said of the bill. “It’s been a little slow to energize people and for it to become a personal thing for people to grab onto. It’s a big bill but I do think we are beginning to see momentum gathering around it.”

The dense, 274-page bill outlines some Manchin-friendly measures controversial with environmental groups—mandated oil and gas drilling leases, dollops of cash for unproven carbon capture projects—but at its core was a shot of adrenaline to the heart of the climate movement and to an economy ravaged by Covid.

Uncapped tax credits for clean energy for the next decade that could top $1 trillion, grants for industrial emissions reduction, rebates for Americans to buy electric cars, incentives for people to get heat pumps or electric stoves at home—the IRA almost has it all in terms of support for clean energy, if not penalties for the fossil fuel pollution causing the climate crisis.

The benefits are set be profound. Goldman Sachs, which has said “so far at least, the reality is living up to or even exceeding expectations,” forecasts $3 trillion in clean energy spending as a result of the bill, with the US treasury coming up with an even more eye-watering figure—$5 trillion—in global economic benefits by 2050 from reduced carbon and air pollution.

Battery factories are sprouting in faded corners of St Louis, Missouri; Weirton, West Virginia; and in rural Georgia. At-risk auto manufacturing plants are being retooled for electric cars across eight states; a former paper mill in Lincoln, Maine, is being reimagined as a massive energy storage facility; solar farms are blanketing parts of Arizona and Texas and Indiana; clean aluminum production is starting in Kentucky and green steel in JD Vance’s Ohio hometown.

Many of the dozens of new projects are in “places where opportunity has left,” as Ali Zaidi, the White House climate adviser, has put it, with a vision of reinvigorated blue-collar towns helping the US close the gap on the clean energy powerhouse of China.

“We are already looking at it as a real pivotal moment,” said Dawn Lippert, chief executive of Elemental Impact, a nonprofit investor in climate tech, who added that “our portfolio companies see extraordinary opportunity in rural areas of the US” because of their manufacturing history.

Politically, Republican rural and exurban areas have received the lion’s share of the spending, a fact that’s causing growing nervousness among some GOP members of Congress over the prospect of Trump reversing new job creation in their districts, even after they voted against it.

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed,” said Keefe. “It’s working-class people in Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina that are going to get hurt because that’s where these these projects are going.”

If it survives intact over the next decade, the IRA could help create 9m new jobs, one analysis shows, while pushing down emissions 40 percent by 2030, putting the US within reach of its target to cut planet-heating polling in half by this point.

Young people, people of color, and suburban women do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls.”

This progress is incremental and often invisible, though, with only a fraction of IRA funding already committed. In the former steel town of Weirton, West Virginia, for instance, many residents said they have not yet seen a resulting surge in the economy.

“We’ve been made a lot of promises here [that] haven’t been met,” said Dave, a retiree of the former Weirton steel mill in an interview at Dee Jay’s barbecue restaurant, adding he is “no fan” of Bidenomics or the Inflation Reduction Act.

Carol Hrabovsky, who owns Irish Pub, one of the only remaining bars on Weirton’s Main Street, said locals are still struggling with a lack of jobs and the high “price of everything.” Once a Democrat and now a Trump supporter, she said the IRA won’t convince her to vote for the Democratic nominee, and she believes most of her neighbors feel the same.

“They shouldn’t have even called it the Inflation Reduction Act,” she said, adding that she is worried about Biden and Harris fostering “communism.”

Other lives are starting to be touched more positively—more than 3 million American families have already used tax credits to upgrade their homes with solar panels, heat pumps, water heaters or insulation, for example. The IRA may in time become a piece of the national furniture despite Republican hostility, much like Obamacare.

But can it help win Harris the election? Climate isn’t ranked as a leading priority by many voters, but Leiserowitz said there are opportunities within three climate-conscious groups that Harris badly needs in November—young people, people of color, and suburban women. They could tip the balance in a close election.

“Those demographics do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls,” he said. “I don’t understand why they aren’t doing this. She has said that Trump thinks climate change is a hoax, which is a step in the right direction, but you need to connect the dots for people.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fossil fuel companies’ funding of universities’ climate-focused efforts is delaying the green transition, according to the most extensive peer-reviewed study to date of the industry’s influence on academia.

For the study, published in the journal WIREs Climate Change on Thursday, six researchers pored over thousands of academic articles on industries’ funding of research from the past two decades. Just a handful of them focused on oil and gas companies, showing a “worrying lack of attention” to the issue, the analysis says.

But even that small body of research shows a pattern of industry influence: “The academic integrity of higher education is at risk,” they write.

During the past two decades, non-profits, campus organizers and a small group of scholars have sounded the alarm about oil companies’ influence in academia, drawing parallels to tobacco, pharmaceuticals and food producers who have also funded scholarship.

In the new study, researchers found that out of roughly 14,000 peer-reviewed articles about conflicts of interest, bias and research funding across all industries from 2003 to 2023, only seven mentioned fossil fuels. When the authors broadened their search to look at book chapters, they found only seven more.

An influential 2011 MIT report whose authors had ties to the fossil fuel industry “helped to situate natural gas, or fossil gas, as part of the climate solution.”

But even by combing through the small body of existing scholarship, the authors identified hundreds of instances in the US, UK, Canada and Australia where oil and gas interests had poured funding into climate and energy research while sitting on advisory or governing boards, endowing academic posts, sponsoring scholarships, advising curricula or otherwise influencing universities.

“We find that universities are an established yet under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry,” the authors write.

The analysis found that oil companies have long influenced universities to focus on climate efforts that would enshrine a future for fossil fuels, despite experts’ repeated warnings that the world must stop burning coal, oil, and gas to avert the worst climate impacts.

“The science has been telling us that fossil fuel phase-out is the No. 1 thing that we need to focus on, but within our universities, there’s very little research on how to do fossil fuel phase-out,” said Jennie Stephens, a climate justice professor at Maynooth University in Ireland and study co-author. “This provides some explanation for why society has been so ineffective and inadequate in our responses to the climate crisis.”

Fossil fuel companies’ relationships with universities can create the potential for bias in research and real or perceived conflicts of interest, the authors write.

“Our intention is to protect scientific integrity,” said Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami associate professor who studies fossil fuel industry messaging and co-authored the study. “We want to warn scholars and university leaders that they can be pawns in a propaganda scheme.”

BP, for instance, funneled between $2.1 million and $2.6 million to Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative between 2012 and 2017. The initiative produced research on ways to decarbonize the economy. “It’s noteworthy of that the scenarios for decarbonization that the initiative outlined, only one of them didn’t include a serious role to be played by fossil fuels paired with negative emissions technologies,” said Supran.

The study highlights an internal 2017 campaign-strategy memo presented by a public relations firm to BP that proposed targeting Princeton as a “partner” that could help authenticate “BP’s commitment to low carbon” despite its commitment to expanding planet-heating fossil fuel production.

In another example, an influential 2011 study from the MIT Energy Initiative called gas “a bridge to a low carbon future” even though it is a planet-heating fossil fuel. Several of the study’s authors had financial ties to, and funding from, major oil and gas companies.

“The report helped to situate natural gas, or fossil gas, as part of the climate solution,” said Stephens. “And it seemed to reinforce the Obama administration’s all-of-the-above strategy,” she added, referring to the former president’s commitments to supporting both fossil fuels and renewables.

A spokesperson for the MIT Energy Initiative said funders “have no control” over the institute’s reports: “no approval or rejection, no opportunity to accept or reject any findings.” He added that the study in question was “developed and vigorously debated by a multidisciplinary team.”

In an earlier example, the study notes that in 1997, Exxon paid a Harvard Law School professor to write about “why punitive damages awards are inappropriate in today’s civil justice system” as the company was appealing a $5 billion punitive damages award following a major oil tanker spill in Alaska.

Fossil fuel companies had donated at least $700 million to US universities in the decade prior, a 2023 study found.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the US fossil fuel lobby group American Petroleum Institute said: “America’s oil and natural gas industry will continue to work with experts and organizations committed to advancing solutions that tackle climate change, meet growing demand and ensure continued access to affordable, reliable American energy.” The Guardian also contacted BP, Exxon, Princeton, and Harvard ; none were immediately available for comment.

There is some evidence that funding from oil and gas companies is associated with a more positive view of fossil fuels, the study notes. And relationships with polluting energy companies can also affect internal campus decision-making, the authors argue.

Universities that are dependent on fossil fuel funding, for instance, may be less likely to divest their endowments from the sector, said Supran.

Despite the authors’ efforts, the scope of fossil fuel funding on campus remains unclear because the vast majority of university research centers do not disclose their donors publicly. One 2023 report from the nonprofit Data for Progress found that fossil fuel companies donated at least $700 million to 27 US universities over the past decade, but the authors noted this was almost certainly an undercount.

Universities have sometimes pushed back on calls for transparency. Years ago, one of the new study’s co-authors, Emily Eaton, requested that her university in Canada disclose its fossil fuel funders; when it refused to do so, she took it to court, and in 2021 a judge ruled in her favor.

The report comes amid increasing public scrutiny of the oil sector’s relationship with universities, including in an April report from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Efforts to push academic institutions to “dissociate” from fossil fuel companies are also ramping up on campuses across the country.

“This literature review confirms what students in our movement have known for years,” said Jake Lowe, executive director of Campus Climate Network, which is pressuring schools to sever ties with the industry. “Big oil has infiltrated academia in order to gain undue credibility and obstruct climate action.”

To avert these conflicts in the future, Stephens said governments should provide more public funding to universities. “More public funding could help them act in the public good,” she said.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed exactly two years ago, was pitched as a policy that puts the “middle class first.” But the spending bill’s residential tax credits have so far disproportionately benefited wealthy families, new data indicates.

That’s a major challenge for the efforts to decarbonize the US economy in time to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. “If going green is just a niche lifestyle choice for the upper middle class, it won’t move the needle on emissions at a societal level,” said Matt Huber, a geography and environment professor at Syracuse University and the author of the 2022 book Climate Change is Class War.

A Treasury Department report published this month shines a light on the use of two IRA renewable energy tax credits: one that helped Americans boost the energy efficiency of their homes by installing heat pumps, electric water heaters, efficient windows and doors, or other upgrades; and another that helped households install small-scale renewable energy production—most commonly rooftop solar panels.

Households living paycheck to paycheck “do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so.”

In 2023, about 3.4 million households, representing 2.5 percent of all tax filers, took advantage of at least one of these two subsidies, both of which were expansions of pre-existing incentive programs. That represents a 30 percent rise in the use of efficiency and clean energy tax credits over 2021 levels.

Nearly half of those who claimed at least one of these credits last year had incomes lower than $100,000. Yet roughly 75 percent of tax filers had incomes lower than $100,000 in 2023, and a closer look at the use of the credits by households within that bracket shows that wealthier Americans more frequently adopted both tax credits.

Of all filers making less than $100,000, just 0.7 percent claimed the clean energy tax credit, and just 0.9 percent claimed the efficiency incentive. In the over-$100,000 bracket, those percentages rose to 1.6 percent and a stunningly high 4.0 percent.

This dynamic, said Huber, was predictable. Tax credit programs can be difficult to navigate, especially for families who can’t afford to hire tax accountants, he said.

Further, though tax credits can make upgrades more affordable, they may not bring them into reach for Americans with lower incomes, especially because the programs come with spending caps for each household. “Most working-class Americans, living paycheck to paycheck, do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so,” he said.

The tax incentives also favor those with higher tax burdens. If an upgrade is eligible for up to $2,000 in credits, for instance, filers must owe that amount or more in taxes to receive the full incentive amount.

This marked a substantial change from earlier proposals, which would have made the incentives available even for those with no tax burden. Lew Daly, a senior fellow with the climate justice group Just Solutions, said this was “a tragic political error” that should be changed by Congress.

“Without refundability, most of our country’s millions of moderate- and low-income homeowners are intentionally being excluded from the clean energy transition and its benefits in their everyday life, even as we are giving a massive fortune of tax dollars to big corporations and affluent households through the energy credits program as codified,” he said.

Instead of creating individual incentives, “why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free.”

The two credits also require Americans to pay the up-front cost of home upgrades and wait until tax season to recoup costs—an option some households cannot afford.

It’s a major problem for lower-income Americans who are grappling with rising utility bills and a “threadbare social safety net,” said Daly. “The exclusionary design of the energy credits program is just piling on to create a future of worsening inequity.”

Despite these issues, when compared with similar tax incentives that pre-dated the IRA, the distribution of these credits has been more even, said James Sallee, energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley. One study showed 60 percent of benefits went to the top 20 percent of households from 2006 to 2020.

“But, the benefits are still regressive,” Sallee said. “In every income category, the more money you make, the more money on average people are claiming per tax return.”

The IRA does include provisions aimed at promoting equal distribution. The renewable energy tax credit, for instance, can be used to enroll in community solar—a helpful arrangement for renters and apartment dwellers who tend to have lower incomes than house-owners.

The bill also includes point-of-sale rebates for efficient appliances and upgrades, though their rollout has been slow because they are being distributed locally. Only two states have yet to offer rebates, though others could launch their programs within months.

Other changes could help change the distribution of tax credits, said Sallee. One of them: placing income caps on eligibility.

But ultimately, said Huber, to create green benefits that are easier for all Americans to access, they should be universal rather than means-tested.

“Instead of putting out incentives for individual households, why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free,” he asked. “That might sound outlandish, but if we see solving climate change [as] critical to the public good, there’s no reason why decarbonization shouldn’t be seen as a core public service like healthcare or education.”

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.

A total of 123 elected federal representatives—100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators—deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members.

“It’s definitely concerning,” said Kat So, campaign manager for energy and environment campaigns at the Center for American Progress, which wrote the report.

The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming, or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial.

It also highlights examples of denial from representatives. “Of course the climate is changing,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2018. “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”

Just because politicians “say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Other instances are more recent. “We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period,” Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, referencing long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”

Climate-denying lawmakers have received a combined $52 million in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.

The research shows that the American public, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, is represented disproportionately by climate deniers. Although 23 percent of the entire US Congress is composed of those who dismiss the climate crisis, polls show the proportion of Americans who share this view is significantly smaller, by as much as half.

Even as a quarter of US lawmakers deny the climate crisis, the American public has been moving significantly in the other direction. Fewer than one in five people in the US reject the findings of climate science, according to various studies, with long-running polling by Yale University showing that those they class as “dismissive” stand at just 11 percent.

While this slice of the American public opinion has remained largely unchanged in recent years, a much larger, growing cohort is worried about the climate crisis following a string of record hot years and a parade of wildfires, storms and other climate-fueled events. More than half of Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, the Yale surveys find.

“The amount of people at each end of the spectrum—alarmed and dismissive—were essentially tied back in 2013 but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive, so there’s been a fundamental shift in how people see climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in climate public opinion at Yale.

Though the portion of lawmakers who deny the climate crisis is stunning, it has been steadily declining in recent years. Just five years ago, 150 lawmakers denied the crisis. But many elected officials who don’t deny the crisis still use anti-climate rhetoric and work to thwart greenhouse gas curbing policies.

“There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

The Florida representative Mario Diaz-Balart, for instance, previously used the language of climate denial, but more recently described climate change as being “more of a religion”—a different form of “climate obstruction,” the report says. He has also continued to oppose climate aid.

“There are lots of harmful ways to talk about climate and act on it,” said So. “Just because they accept the scientific findings or say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “unsurprising” that the report found old-school climate denial is on the decline.

“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s so much more apparent that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening constantly,” she said. “Nobody can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”

She noted, however, that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have long used a variety of messaging to rebuff concerns about the climate. She said she was unsure those other forms of rhetoric were any less harmful.

“As far back as the 1990s, they were saying renewable energy isn’t reliable enough, or they were saying that wind power…kills whales,” she said. “Is it really so different from climate denial if you don’t deny the science but you deny the possibility of solutions?”

Among ordinary people, Leiserowitz said the views of the relatively small group of people who deny that temperatures are warming, or tie climate science to conspiracy theories involving Al Gore or the United Nations, are often exaggerated both politically and throughout US society.

“This small minority of Americans are really vocal, they are more likely to vote and clearly they are more than adequately represented in the halls of Congress,” he said. “They are punching above their weight and having an undue influence on the public square, to the extent that most people don’t want to talk about climate change because they think half of the country doesn’t believe in it. There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

Political polarization and the prevalence of “safe” congressional seats, which encourage candidates to hew to more extreme views in order to secure key party primary contests, have helped entrench this imbalance, Leiserowitz said, along with a flood of donations from the fossil fuel industry.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Companies have spent decades obstructing efforts to take on the plastics crisis and may have breached a host of US laws, a new report argues.

The research from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) details the widespread burdens that plastic pollution places on US cities and states and argues that plastic producers may be breaking public nuisance, product-liability, and consumer-protection laws.

It comes as cities such as Baltimore have begun to file claims against plastic manufacturers, but the authors write that existing cases “are likely only the beginning, as more states and municipalities grapple with the challenges of accumulating plastic waste and microplastics contamination.”

Taxpayers foot the bill to clean plastic pollution from streets and waterways, and research shows people could ingest the equivalent of one credit card’s worth of plastic per week.

“We’re in the midst of a population-scale human experiment on the impacts of multigenerational toxic exposures,” said Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL and a report co-author. “Plastics are at the epicenter of that.”

“We’re in the midst of a population-scale human experiment on the impacts of multigenerational toxic exposures. Plastics are at the epicenter of that.”

Drawing on newly revealed internal documents and previous investigations, the authors write that producers knew of these risks and produced and marketed plastics anyway.

Petrochemical producers such as ExxonMobil Chemical and Shell Polymers, and disposable plastic goods producers like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Unilever, should be held responsible, they say.

Global plastics production exploded shortly after the Second World War, when “an industry that had been producing plastics primarily for military purposes needed new markets,” said Muffett.

From 1950 to 2000, global plastic production soared from 2 million tons to 234 million tons annually. And over the next 20 years, production more than doubled to 460 million tons in 2019, the authors write, citing data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). But plastics producers knew in the 1950s that their products don’t break down and in 1969, documents show, industry interests discussed plastics accumulating in the environment but kept marketing them.

As the public grew concerned about plastic pollution, the industry responded with “sophisticated marketing campaigns” to shift blame from producers to consumers—for instance, by popularizing the term litterbug.

In the 1980s, the industry “misled the public” by lobbying states to adopt a plastic-packaging numbering system that resembled the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol and therefore appeared to indicate recyclability. (The Federal Trade Commission is currently re-evaluating the use of the symbols.)

Around that same time, some municipalities began attempting to curb plastic pollution.

Coordinated pushback

In 1989, Massachusetts considered banning all single-use packaging. The ballot initiative, proposed by the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, “had teeth to ensure compliance” including potential fines, jail time, and the possibility of civil-enforcement actions.

The ban was set to appear on the 1990 ballot, but the industry devised a “highly coordinated and sophisticated campaign” to kill it, the authors write based on internal documents.

“Despite being local in its scope, the Massachusetts ban represented a serious threat to plastics producers and a host of other industry interests,” the report says.

From 1950 to 2000, global plastic production soared from 2 million tons to 234 million tons annually. And over the next 20 years, production more than doubled to 460 million tons in 2019, the authors write.

Tobacco lawyers, whose industry had come under fire for littered plastic cigarette butts, lobbied the Massachusetts attorney general to shut down the measure. And, consumer goods producers like Procter & Gamble, petrochemical trade groups like the Chemical Manufacturers Association (which later became the American Chemistry Council), and tobacco lobby group the Tobacco Institute, created a task force to direct opposition.

The Council for Solid Waste Solutions (CSWS), an industry group funded by major petrochemical producers such as Exxon, Dow, DuPont, and Chevron, hired consultants to develop a plan for opposing legislative bans.

CSWS also facilitated the creation of a “front group”, which purported to represent local business interests. And it lobbied state lawmakers to water down the measure, promoting recycling instead of packaging bans.

Another strategy: pitting environmentalists and organized labor against one another. CSWS recruited members of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO to oppose the measure at hearings. Soon after, the labor organization passed a resolution opposing the ban. (The Tobacco Institute took credit for the success of the “labor resolution process,” writing in a document: “Labor and consumer groups are natural allies to environmental organizations; however, efforts are underway to diffuse such alliances on this issue.”)

CSWS also sued to invalidate the measure on a technicality, arguing that because the petition’s signatures and text did not appear on the same page, the signatories may not have reviewed the proposal. This was ultimately successful on appeal; within months, the ballot initiative was dead.

The industry also successfully fended off a similar ballot initiative in Oregon, the report says. And politicians in Oregon, California, and Wisconsin introduced a bill drafted by the right wing think tank American Legislative Exchange Council promoting recycling over packaging bans.

Plastic interests appear to be using similar tactics today. Using Facebook’s advertising database, the researchers found that the petrochemical trade group the American Chemistry Council had run $10m worth of seemingly local ads in US states in recent years encouraging people to contact local officials to oppose anti-plastic measures and support for so-called advanced recycling, which breaks plastic polymers down but is energy-intensive and creates pollution.

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, part of the American Chemistry Council, called the research a “misdirected distraction” from the resources the industry is putting into preventing pollution and said it ignored “the environmental benefits of plastics,” citing a McKinsey study that environmentalists have contested.

Legal theories

The effects of this deception and plastic pollution are widespread, the report argues. Plastic has clogged sewer grates, leading to increased flooding, while also forcing municipalities to invest in expensive skimmers to remove materials from waterways. It has also exposed populations to microplastics, which studies show are pervasive and which researchers believe to be harmful.

The report outlines different legal theories that could help governments pursue accountability for these harms. Nuisance could account for the harms themselves, product liability could put companies on the hook for damage caused by poor design, and consumer-protection law could be used to combat deceitful marketing practices.

Existing lawsuits have made use of these theories. Baltimore sued six plastic companies this month and filed a similar suit against cigarette manufacturers for littered plastic cigarette filters. New York in 2023 also filed a case against PepsiCo. But the damages are more widespread than these suits indicate, the authors say.

Other attempts at accountability are underway. In California, a two-year-old investigation by the attorney general, Rob Bonta, into the plastics industry and its communication about recycling could potentially result in a case against oil interests.

A February report from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) found that companies knew for decades that plastic recycling is not feasible, but promoted it anyway. Both reports add to a “growing body of evidence” showing the plastics crisis was “created and perpetuated by a decades-long campaign of deception,” said Alyssa Johl, CCI vice president.

Brian Frosh, former attorney general for Maryland, who reviewed both reports, said if currently an attorney general, he would be actively pursuing legal action.

“This is a crisis that’s been imposed on the public and one that needs redress,” he said.