Thus far, Cornwall has been able to
masquerade as a legitimate, independent group of pastors and religious leaders opposed to addressing climate change. However, ThinkProgress investigated the group and found deep ties to the oil industry, as well as with longtime right-wing operatives orchestrating the climate science denial machine.
The Cornwall Alliance appears to be a creation of a group called the
James Partnership, a nonprofit run by Chris Rogers and Peter Stein, according to documents filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. Rogers, who heads a media and public relations firm called
CDR Communications,
collaborates with longtime oil front group operative
David Rothbard, the founder and President of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and Jacques Villarreal, a lower level
staffer at CFACT, for his James Partnership group. In the past, Rogers’ firm has
worked for the Bush administration and for the
secretive conservative planning group, the Council for National Policy.
According to public records, the following entities are all registered to the same address, 9302-C Old Keene Mill Road Burke, VA 22015, an office park in suburban Virginia:
In late 2005, evangelical leaders like
Rick Warren joined a drive to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying “millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.” To counter this historic shift in the evangelical community, a group called the “
Interfaith Stewardship Alliance” (ISA) was launched to oppose action on carbon emissions and to deny the existence of climate chance. One of the men guiding this group was Paul Driessen, a
consultant for ExxonMobil, the mining industry, and
for CFACT.
For “stream lining” reasons, ISA
relaunched as the Cornwall Alliance in 2006. With the new name came a redesigned website,
highly produced web videos, and an organized
network of churches to distribute climate change denying propaganda to hundreds of pastors around the country. The branding for the Cornwall Alliance is derived from the “
Cornwall Declaration,” a 1999 document pushing back against the creation-care movement in the evangelical community. The Declaration “stressed a free-market environmental stewardship and emphasized that individuals and private organizations should be trusted to care for their own property without government intervention.” CFACT President Rothbard has been hailed as the “
driving force” behind the Cornwall Declaration public relations effort.
CFACT is a gimmicky right-wing organization that does everything it can to try to discredit the science underpinning climate change. For instance, staffers from the group traveled to the Copenhagen conference on climate change to stage
silly press conferences with Rush Limbaugh’s former producer and
stunts aimed at mocking Greenpeace.
But who is the “driving force” behind CFACT? According to
disclosures, CFACT is funded by at least $542,000 from ExxonMobil,
$60,500 from Chevron, and $1,280,000 from Scaife family foundations, which are rooted in wealth from Gulf Oil and steel interests.
CFACT and the Cornwall Alliance, according to
disclosures filed with the Washington State Secretary of State’s office, share a common fundraising firm, ClearWord Communications Group. ClearWord has helped raise
millions of dollars not only for CFACT and Cornwall, but also for infamous polluter front groups like FreedomWorks, the Institute for Energy Research, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Last year, Cornwall
produced a video with former Sen. George Allen (R-VA) attacking clean energy legislation as part of a campaign by the
ExxonMobil-funded “American Energy Freedom Center.”
In a call to the Cornwall Alliance’s media office Monday afternoon, spokesman Quena Gonzalez said Cornwall has no relationship to CFACT and said CFACT President Rothbard has no official capacity with his group. Gonzalez said that in “several years of working” at Cornwall, he has never heard any questions about working with CFACT, and instructed ThinkProgress to contact Calvin Beisner, the national representative for Cornwall. Incidentally, Beisner is a
board member of CFACT.
Rothbard had a central role in sparking the founding of Cornwall and is currently a partner with Chris Rogers, the man who runs Cornwall and CDR Communications. Nevertheless, under his capacity as CFACT President, Rothbard’s anti-Greenpeace publicity stunts are
reported regularly on the Cornwall blog as breaking news, without any acknowledgement of Rothbard’s relationship with Cornwall.
Gonzalez also said he had never heard of CDR Communications. But according to his own LinkedIn
profile, Gonzalez works for CDR Communications as the “
Director for Religion and the Environment” at the firm. ThinkProgress contacted Chris Rogers on Monday, who contradicted Gonzalez and said his firm CDR Communications provides “support” for Cornwall but did not clarify.
It appears that Cornwall attempts to carefully hide its backers. Not only did Gonzalez refuse to provide much information, but Cornwall’s website is registered with a
special service to hide the identity of the person or group who purchased the domain address.
