The entirety of the political apparatus could only be viewed from the top, by a handful of people with the authority to see the entire operation. These people were Charles Koch, David Koch, and their top political operative, Richard Fink. Of the three of them, Charles Koch unquestionably had the most authority. It was Charles Koch, then, who had the most influence over how this political machine would react to the surprising momentum behind the Waxman-Markey bill. His reaction might have been unsurprising to anyone who knew him well. Charles Koch had been unyielding in his years-long legal battle against his brother Bill. He had been unyielding in his battles with relatives and shareholders who wanted to take the company public. He had been unyielding in his battle against labor unions. He was unyielding now.
Koch’s political machine was deployed, in 2009, in ways that it had never been deployed before. Millions of new dollars would flow into a new political network at the state level. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of new activists would be brought on board. New attack campaigns were launched. New political candidates were chosen and supported.
In the fight that Charles Koch was about to wage, there would be no compromise. There would be no effort to amend the Waxman-Markey bill or win subsidies through the emission allotments. There would be no effort to suggest an alternative path to lower carbon emissions, such as a carbon tax. There would not even be an acknowledgment that climate change was real.
The central strategy would remain the same as the one conveyed in Koch’s lobbying office earlier in the summer. The primary target of Koch’s campaign would be Republicans who supported the Waxman-Markey bill, and any Republicans who stood against Koch on the issue of climate change.
These Republicans were the primary targets for a reason. Koch’s long-term plan was to reshape the Republican party, and these members would be made an example of. The strategy wasn’t necessarily new, but the means that Koch used to pursue it were unprecedented.
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After the Waxman-Markey bill passed, Phillips and the other members of the Global Warming Committee handed off most of their work to their colleagues in the Senate. Congress was called into recess for the Fourth of July break, and members went back to their districts for the annual tradition of constituent meetings and parades.
During the holiday recess, the Global Warming Committee’s communications director, Jeff Sharp, kept working, monitoring media reports about the Waxman-Markey bill. The Senate would pick up debate of the measure in the fall, and Sharp wanted to stay on top of the story in the meantime. Over the Fourth of July holiday, Sharp started getting some disturbing phone calls and e-mails. There were protests. And the protests were remarkable. Protestors were standing along parade routes, on Independence Day, waving placards and shouting at the members of Congress as they passed by. Sharp couldn’t remember anything like it happening before.
“At each parade, there is a group of four to six people in the parade screaming and yelling: ‘No cap and trade! No cap and tax!’ Like, viscerally angry on that issue. In the parade. This is a parade, right? Most parades, as you go through the parade, at that time, people were not yelling and screaming about an issue, let alone a very specific issue like cap and trade.”
The protestors were also showing up at the congressional members’ town hall meetings, those boring civic obligations that never drew more than a half dozen people or so. The town halls were crowded now with angry constituents who hectored the congressional members with shaking anger in their voices. These protestors didn’t look like typical protestors. They were middle-aged people. Mostly white. Affluent looking. Not the kind of people that most Congress members were accustomed to seeing protest in public.
Sharp received a video from the town hall meeting held by a Delaware Republican named Mike Castle, who’d voted in favor of the Waxman-Markey bill. Protestors lined the back of his town hall. They hooted and bellowed. They repeatedly brought up the cap-and-trade plan.
“On this energy thing,” one protestor said, “CO2 emissions have nothing to do—and the greenhouse effect has nothing to do—with global warming. It’s all a hoax! Personally, for the life of me, I can’t understand how you could have been one of the eight Republican traitors.”
At the word traitors, loud applause broke out. Castle, standing at a podium, dutifully took notes as the protestors made their arguments. After the event, a woman in the crowd pigeonholed Castle and informed him that the Earth was, in fact, cooling. She asked if he knew how much the “cap-and-tax” system was going to harm the poultry industry in Delaware.
Sharp watched these videos over and over. The comments struck him as odd. Cap and trade and global warming had never elicited such visceral anger from the public. People didn’t normally show up at parades and yell about one single issue. And he kept hearing the same phrases, the same talking points, again and again. The protestors talked about “cap and tax” and a “hoax” and an “energy tax.” It was as if the protestors had been coached or handed a script. This wouldn’t have been groundbreaking—Sharp had seen such tactics used up close during his years in the PR and lobbying businesses.
When he saw these protests, Sharp saw a coordinated campaign. “I remember watching that and [thinking]: Something is Astroturf–smelling about that event,” he recalled. “It did not feel organic.”
Sharp kept watching the video of Mike Castle getting berated at the town hall. And he kept thinking about the protestor in back who called climate change “a hoax.”
“I remember watching it, and being like, Where did that guy get that from?”
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I. This statement is provably untrue. NASA data shows that eighteen of the nineteen hottest years on record occurred since 2001.
II. Laurie Sahatjian married and changed her name to Laurie McCausland.
III. A tipping fee is the fee a person must pay to dump garbage at a private garbage dump.
CHAPTER 20
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Hotter
(2009–2010)
If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence.
—Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, 2018.
As hot as it is today, if we keep working this issue, it’s going to get even hotter for Barack Obama and Harry Reid! Because I think the American people are fed up! Don’t you?
—Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, speaking at a rally outside the US Capitol, August 7, 2010
This was unmanageable. Bob Inglis was standing in an auditorium, in front of a very large crowd, trying to make himself heard. He was hosting a town hall event and had a microphone in his hand, but his words were drowned out by heckling and shouting. He seemed dazed, like he couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing.
The first thing that didn’t make sense to Inglis was the sheer size of the crowd. There were roughly five hundred people in the room, maybe more. This was incomprehensible. Bob Inglis had been holding town hall events for years and was lucky to draw fifteen or twenty people to each event. Americans simply didn’t turn out for civic events, even if you provided free food. But one of his meetings that summer drew an estimated seven hundred people. The fire marshals arrived at that one and turned people away.