Another quick and dirty, "raw data" post.  Feel free to ignore - or augment via the comments.

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Apologies in advance for what will likely be a quick and dirty post - more in the "raw data" category than anything else.  What the causal link is - or whether there is one - is not something I address here

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Short answer: the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Lotus Fund.  But what's the Lotus Fund, and who's behind it?

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June 20, 22, 23 updates: Got some answers, but still got questions.

On June 20 I received an email from Michael Shellenberger with a statement (see below) from a Lotus Foundation; it names the benefactor & states that they're proud to fund The Breakthrough Institute. 

But questions remain, since the Lotus Foundation's support for TBI would seem to be a) new, and b) likely not substantial enough to be a major funding source: while I haven't seen their 990 for 2008, their 2005-2007 ones don't show any support of TBI, and the grants they do make are comparatively small - although the  grants cover a wide range, from under 1k up to 100k, most are around 30k. 

The Nathan Cummings Foundation gives larger grants, and their 2007 990 shows a 375k grant to TBI (the 2nd largest they gave, that year); but still it seems like the level of funding from these two foundations would run short, to support an org with a budget of ~700-800k.

But I don't know that it's insufficient, since I don't know TBI's budget - all I have to go on is Shellenberger's characterization of it as "well under a million", which I'm ass-u-me-ing would translate to ~700-800k. But it could also translate to a lot less, if wielded literally.
(6/22 update: I've asked; am waiting to hear back.)


Here's the Lotus Foundation statement:

"Lotus Foundation [not Fund] is a private foundation whose purpose is to promote a more informed and tolerant society by encouraging citizen participation through a balanced and open dialogue. The Foundation is supported by Ms. Rachel Pritzker and members of her family. Grantees include Center for American Progress, Media Matters, and Center for Independent Media. Lotus Foundation has been proud to support the work of Breakthrough Institute in its work analyzing and explaining climate and energy policies and creating a new progressive agenda for the 21st Century."

Thanks to Michael Shellenberger and to the Lotus Foundation for this information.

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Original post:

No hard information here, this is just a (somewhat stonewalled) query in progress.  There's been an unwillingness to provide details that'd allow verification, that strikes me as odd - so I wanted to lay this out for y'all, in the hopes that some future reader might be better equipped to make sense of it.

Environmental movement "bad boys" Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus - authors of The Death of Environmentalism (link and discussion), which argues that environmental organizations are increasingly ineffective and new alliances and approaches are called for - co-founded their think tank The Breakthrough Institute  in 2002 (link).
 
They've been inveighing against the Waxman-Markey climate bill, and more, according to this May 22 Climate Progress post ("In just the last few months, TBI, and its founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have gone on a disinformation rampage with the help of the media..." - which appears to be continuing. )

The May 22 post elicited a comment:

"...wonder who or what finances these two. They certainly are making the rounds ..."

I was curious too; so, I emailed TBI asking who funded them.  Michael Shellenberger responded, saying:

"... We have two funders and 5 staff. RPA [Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors] is our parent non-profit, they do not fund us nor are they any longer connected to Big Oil.
...[The two funders are] Cummings Foundation, from the Sara Lee fortune,... and Lotus Fund. Neither is connected to fossil fuels."

There's plenty of information available online about the Cummings Foundation, but the Lotus Fund was - and remains - a mystery.

The only "Lotus Fund" proper  appears to have been a venture capital fund -

"Lotus Fund is a venture-stage, Global Equity Investment Fund which focuses on investing in and supporting high growth firms within the technology and energy sectors.
Lotus Fund is a long-term, value-added investor. With contacts throughout the world, the fund provides companies with financial resources, and it assists companies in acquiring strategic assets and relationships for the purpose of enabling them to enhance their growth rates and their competitiveness."

But Shellenberger told me this venture capital fund is not TBI's funder.

And there's Lotus the "1-2-3" spreadsheet-maker, whose former CEO, Jim Manzi, has been active in debating climate change policies.
(Manzi advocates government funding for climate technology that "should be related to detecting or ameliorating the effects of global warming, should serve a public rather than a private need, and should provide no obvious potential source of profit to investors if successful.")

But Shellenberger told me that Manzi is not involved with the Lotus Fund that supports TBI.

And the IRS Search for Charities brings up a throng of Lotus-named variants that are 501(c)(3) nonprofits, although none stands out as the obvious candidate Shellenberger was referring to;  and when I sent him the list and asked if TBI's Lotus Fund was among them, he said he had no idea.

You might ask - why the "20 Questions" approach?  Why didn't I just ask Shellenberger outright, which Lotus Fund was funding The Breakthrough Institute?

And I'd agree, that's a much better approach; actually, it's what I did.  But Shellenberger wouldn't say.   It wasn't for lack of time, either - we had a lengthy email exchange, in which he raised a couple of objections to providing this information, which I countered, to no avail.

He ended up saying -
"It's a private family of environmentalists that likes their privacy..." and
"I've been happy to tell others, including reporters, who the funder is, but I'm not about to go telling some random blogger..." 

When in response I pointed out that journalism is a discipline of verification and asked which reporters he'd told, he stopped responding; and he didn't respond when I re-posed the question several days later.

I also tried asking The Breakthrough Institute's parent nonprofit, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers.
 (R.P.A.  features TBI as one of its Special Projects; Shellenberger explains, "[We] pay a small overhead fee to Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, which is a nonprofit that ably houses our work, since we are too small ("budget of well under $1 million") for it to be worth it to be our own nonprofit")

My first email to  RPA asked a general question about the sources and amounts of funding for TBI; then, in response to their "generally we don't disclose that kind of information" reply and query as to why I was asking, I explained why, then reworded my request:

"I have been told that TBI is funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and by the Lotus Fund, with the implication that there are no other funders;  I'd like to know if this information is correct, and if so, which Lotus Fund is the supporter."

No response yet, as of two days later.

I'll update this post when and if I find out more.

Edited.  (I keep flipflopping, on whether they should be online...now they're mostly off again, but I've put a new&improved rewrite of the first one up at Daily Kos.)

So far I've been looking into two tunes from the climate inactivism wurlitzer at the New York Times*, with a quick* glance at a few more.

• (My discoveries reported here, behind)  A contrarian-friendly purported "finding" (baseless, as it turned out) that New York Times columnist John Tierney blogged about, two days before Heartland's "ain't no global warming" conference in NYC last year.
  
• The profile of contrarian Freeman Dyson - written by Nicholas Dawidoff, edited by Alex Starr - in the New York Times Magazine last month;
• A look at the background of NYT journalist William J. Broad;
• In a ThingsBreak comment, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Fred Hiatt (lifted almost entirely from his WSJ bio);
  
• And I took a very cursory look into the background of Marc Morano, profiled by Leslie Kaufman in the Times earlier this month.  Didn't find much though.
  

Yes, I've found the oil industry ties you'd expect; and yes, I've found the PR industry ties you'd expect.  But I've also found ties between these ostensibly independent cases, and I've found - much to my surprise - spookworld, but that may be a distraction from the most important story.  Stay tuned.

Greetings, reader of TPMCafe.

I've been investigating some tunes played by(on?)  the "climate inactivism" wurlitzer, and have found some unexpected connections (along with the expected ones...).  I intend to document what I've found - and ask for help in finding out more - and do some wild speculation - here.

Why here?  Because right now, TPMCafe looks to be the best of the sites available.

The overlapping constraints (for "where's the right site") can't all be met, anywhere I know of; e.g. "it wants readership", "it wants participation", "it wants to be in the company of others doing investigative journalism, not just opining and/or pointing elsewhere", "it wants to be in a community that _values_ original journalism more than opining & pointing elsewhere", "it doesn't want to be on a primarily-political site"; "it wants to be in a format I can accrete onto, without confusing the poor reader and/or driving him/her up the wall", etc.   Some of these constraints I found out by trying elsewhere - I dd a Daily Kos diary on this investigation that flopped, I have a Wordpress blog (that's theoretically a group blog) whose structure isn't scalable and will get overrun if I keep shoveling bits of this story into it; my comments on other blogs (namely Joe Romm's Climate Progress) get held for moderation, perhaps through eternity..and my home blog is locally-focused, while this is not is largely not a local story.  And TPMCafe has already attracted such luminaries as Mrs. Panstreppon, and while I ain't no luminary, I'd be honored to contribute alongside her.

My bio is inside, in the "extended" section, if it's called that where you're reading.  (apologies, I'm still learning how to drive this thing)

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