WASHINGTON:The Washington Post is helping pull back the curtain on the National Black Chamber of Commerce’s (NBCC) oil industry-funded campaign against environmental safeguards.In a September 28 article, The Post explained that the NBCC is engaged in a “subtle effort to reduce support for [environmental] regulations among blacks, Latinos and even the elderly groups not usually regarded as natural allies for corporations fighting air-pollution laws.
” The Post noted that the NBCC has been heavily funded by Exxon Mobil, and that the list of sponsors for NBCC’s 2015 national conference “included a number of major fossil-fuel interests, including Koch Industries, owned by oil magnates and conservative activists Charles and David Koch,” adding: “Such donations make up as much as 80 percent of the group’s revenue in some years, tax records show, and the NBCC has channeled its money into causes that favor fossil-fuel interests.”
While the Post article focused on NBCC’s work to undermine Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plan to reduce harmful ozone pollution, the NBCC has also produced a discredited study about the EPA’s climate change plan, which establishes the first-ever federal limits on carbon pollution from power plants. NBCC President Harry Alford has used the NBCC study to attack the EPA climate plan in congressional testimony and a series of deceptive op-eds.
