By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 15, 2025 ~

The cognizant dissonance of watching scandal-ridden Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth stonewall his way through a Senate confirmation hearing yesterday for the job of Secretary of Defense, as thousands of homes smolder in ruins in the suburbs of Los Angeles from a failure of the U.S. to properly address climate change, has a common thread – dark money from the fossil fuel industry.

The science-fiction like world Americans now wake to each morning, which is set to become ever more surreal in five days, with 34-count convicted felon Donald Trump assuming the Presidency of the United States, is the product of four decades of the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial octopus of front groups.

Two groups funded with fossil fuel money, the Heritage Foundation and American Leadership PAC are separately running ads pushing U.S. Senators to confirm Hegseth. (Watch the ads here and here.)

Greenpeace has called the Heritage Foundation “Koch Industries’ Climate Denial Front Group” and reported previously that public financial disclosures show that the network of charitable foundations linked to Koch and his late brother, David Koch, donated more than $165 million to climate-change-denial groups between 1986 and 2018.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show that American Leadership PAC money has come from a handful of ultra-wealthy donors, including Bill Koch (brother to Charles Koch) and Texas billionaire Timothy Dunn, CEO of CrownQuest Operating, a fossil fuels business headquartered in Midland, Texas.

The desperation of the fossil fuels industry to pack the Trump administration with yes men is likely tied to the fact that two dozen state and local governments are suing oil companies for their decades of covering up fossil fuels’ role in climate change. Big Oil smells the same potential outcome for their coverup as occurred when Big Tobacco’s conspiracies were revealed in federal court in the 90s, costing them billions of dollars.

What help could a compliant Secretary of Defense bring to the aid of the fossil fuel industry? He could quell a wave of protests when discovery in these court cases begin to show the depth of the conspiracy by fossil fuel companies to hide their knowledge of climate change. Yesterday, this exchange occurred between Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, and Hegseth:

Hirono: “In June of 2020, then-President Trump directed former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with. Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?”

Hegseth attempted to dance around answering the question directly, forcing Hirono to repeatedly push for a direct answer. After Hegseth continued to evade answering the question by talking about Secret Service agents being injured by rioters during the protest in downtown D.C., Hirono remarked: “That sounds to me that you will comply with such an order. You will shoot protesters in the leg.” Hegseth did not dispute that assessment by Hirono.

Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island and the Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee that conducted yesterday’s confirmation hearing of Hegseth, stated the following during his opening remarks:

“You have been nominated to be the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary is responsible for leading a department of three and a half million service members and civilians; an annual budget of nearly $900 billion; and hundreds of thousands of aircraft, ships, submarines, combat vehicles, satellites and a nuclear arsenal…Mr. Hegseth, I do not believe that you are qualified to meet the overwhelming demands of this job.”

Hegseth admitted during questioning that the largest number of employees he had supervised in the past amounted to 8 at one nonprofit, 100 at another nonprofit, and approximately 200 in the military.

Reed continued in his opening remarks with this:

“You have championed the pardoning of military members who were turned in by their fellow soldiers and seals [for alleged war crimes]. And let me emphasize that – they weren’t discovered by reporters, they were turned in by fellow soldiers and fellow seals. And also pardoning of military contractors convicted of killing 14 Iraqi citizens without cause. You have also advocated for the restitution of interrogation methods like waterboarding, that have been defined as torture, and you have belittled the advice and counsel of Judge Advocates General while on deployment. In your book, ‘The War on Warriors,’ you write ‘Should we follow the Geneva Convention? If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals to feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?’ ”