AstroTurf: Tides Foundation funds ‘grassroots’ protests against Canadian oil sands

Posted By Kathy Shaidle On October 16, 2010 @ 10:00 am

AstroTurf® has a petrochemical backing. But in the world of political “astroturfing,” manufactured outrage against Big Oil gets its backing from mega-foundations.

Today, Canada’s Financial Post revealed that protests against domestic oil production are being funded by progressive American “charities”:
Like most protests, the one against oil tankers has all the look and feel of a Canadian grassroots movement. The campaign against Alberta’s oil sands also seems to rise out of the people, but the interesting thing is that there are very few roots under that grass. Money comes in from a small core of U.S. charitable groups.

One of those groups — the U.S. Tides Foundation of California (Tides U.S.) and its Canadian counterpart have paid millions to at least 36 campaign organizations.

All the money, at least US$6-million, comes from a single, foreign charity. The Tides U.S. campaign against Alberta oil is a campaign against one of Canada’s most important industries. It’s fair for Canadians to inquire about who’s funding this campaign and why.

The trouble is, nobody knows.

As we’ve been saying for some time now, the Tides Foundation certainly seems to have some warped priorities:

Many of the grants for the “Tar Sands Campaign” are far larger than grants for other important causes. For example, a rape intervention project in Sub-Saharan Africa got US$9,000 and a project to support people with HIV in Indonesia got US$9,998.

In comparison, Greenpeace got US$186,000 and the World Wildlife Fund got US$160,000 to campaign against Alberta oil.

Researcher Vivian Krause of Fair-Questions.com investigated the Tides Foundation for the Financial Post and reports:

A large part of Tides’ funding comes from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. These are The Big Five. They give away about US$1.2-billion every year.

If these foundations decide to undermine a foreign industry, they probably can.

These Big Five have poured at least US$190-million into Canada’s environmental movement over the last decade, but their American logos are nowhere to be seen. Instead, we see a pageant of Canadian icons: dogwood, herds of caribou, wild salmon, First Nations and loons. U.S. tax returns show that the David Suzuki Foundation has been paid at least US$10-million from American foundations. This hasn’t exactly been out in the open.

David Suzuki isn’t a household name in the United States, but he’s a national icon north of the 49th Parallel, having been voted the 5th “Greatest Canadian” a few years back. The smug, self-styled environmentalist has been a fixture on CBC “nature” shows for decades, and his preaching against “global warming” has become increasingly shrill.

He’s also a misanthropic hypocrite, calling on others to “shrink their carbon footprint” while fathering numerous children, owning a number of homes and engaging in other activities that will surprise no one with the slightest familiarity with the way professional enviro-scolds operate:

But while he railed at others, Suzuki himself was racking up emissions. The Western Standard observed that for the majority of the hour-and-a-half speech, his diesel bus was left idling in downtown Calgary. After the talk, Suzuki and his small entourage rushed into the large bus without taking questions, before driving three blocks to the hotel where they were staying.

These are the types of people who want to shut down Alberta’s oil sands, which — as Ezra Levant documents in the new book, Ethical Oil — offers oil that comes from a stable, friendly Western democracy, not from terror-sponsoring, misogynist Muslim nations.

The funny part is that authors and activists like Levant are constantly (and falsely) being accused of taking money from “Big Oil.” Turns out that, as we’ve suspected all along, their foes are the ones getting millions to undermine an essential industry — in a foreign country, no less.



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