Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
From Climate Science Watch (March 18, 2010): To the libertarians, the widely-shared scientific assessment that human-caused climate change will likely produce major harmful consequences — and the communication of this evidence to the public by the leading climate scientists — poses a particularly serious threat. An informed public concerned about the likelihood of harmful impacts of unchecked global climatic disruption is more likely to call for significant government action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In order to block proactive government policymaking and keep corporate interests unregulated, libertarian groups have focused a significant part of their efforts on climate change on distorting the science to confuse public opinion, denying the seriousness of the problem, and, most recently, impugning the integrity of the climate science community. The Koch brothers have stepped forward with deep pockets to bankroll such efforts.
Many people have already heard about the libertarian billionaire businessmen brothers Charles and David Koch who have helped to found and/or fund a number of non-profit organizations and think tanks—including the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), the Federalist Society, the Reason Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation—whose aim seems to be the advancement of the Kochs’ agenda “that government taxes and regulations impinge on prosperity.”
What many people may not be aware of is the number of academic centers/institutions that the Kochs are also helping to fund at both public and private colleges and universities—including Florida State University, West Virginia University, Brown University, Troy University, and Utah State University.
I’m going to focus on just one of these Koch-funded academic centers in this post—the Mercatus Center, a conservative think tank located at George Mason University in Virginia—and on Susan B. Dudley, a woman who worked at Mercatus and was then appointed to a regulatory position at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 2007.
THE MERCATUS CENTER
In a 2004 Wall Street Journal article, the Mercatus Center was described as “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of.” Previously known as the Center for the Study of Free Market Processes, the Mercatus Center was founded by Richard Fink—with a grant from Charles Koch. Koch currently serves on the center’s Board of Directors—as does Fink who is also an executive vice president and a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries, Inc.
Jane Mayer wrote the following in Covert Operations, an article that appeared in the New Yorker in 2010: The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.
Public Citizen, a group founded by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, has called the Mercatus Center “a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries and other corporate interests.” Richard Fink claims, however, that the center does not actively promote the Koch company’s private interests. He said that Koch “has other means of fighting its battles” in Washington and that they never had a nonprofit advance their agenda. Some people would disagree.
Thomas McGarity, a University of Texas law professor who specializes in environmental issues, told Mayer that “Koch has been constantly in trouble with the E.P.A., and Mercatus has constantly hammered on the agency.” Another environmental lawyer who spoke to Mayer said that Mercatus was “a means of laundering economic aims.” The lawyer described the strategy: “You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”
Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist, told Mayer that the relationship between George Mason University and Mercatus is an unusual arrangement. “George Mason is a public university, and receives public funds. Virginia is hosting an institution that the Kochs practically control.” Stein claimed that Mercatus was “ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington.”
According to Sourcewatch, Mercatus “has engaged in campaigns involving deregulation, especially environmental deregulation.” It has been reported that fourteen of the twenty-three regulations that George W. Bush put on his hit list were first suggested by academics who worked at the Mercatus Center.
In 2010, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute released a study that named Koch Industries as one of this country’s top ten polluters. That same year, Greenpeace released a report titled Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine. In the report’s executive summary, Greenpeace stated that Koch Industries had “become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition.” (Greenpeace also reported that Koch foundations have contributed more than $48 million in grants to “climate opposition groups” since 1997—and that more than half of that has been donated since 2005.)
MEET SUSAN B. DUDLEY
Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, wrote in 2007 about George W. Bush’s re-nomination of “a veritable rogues’ gallery of anti-environmental figures to key posts in federal agencies.” O’Donnell said that Susan B. Dudley, one of the nominees, was “a true anti-regulatory zealot. As director of regulatory studies at the industry-funded Mercatus Center, Dudley was like a wrecking ball out to smash key safeguards.” He added, “Putting Dudley in this key federal post would be like naming comedian Michael Richards to head the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.”
According to Lee Fang of Think Progress, George W. Bush appointed Susan B. Dudley, the director of the Regulatory Studies Program at the Mercatus Center, to head the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)—after the center had attacked the “EPA regulation of tailpipe greenhouse gases by challenging the science of climate change.” (Dudley’s was a recess appointment in 2007.)
O’Donnell said that as head of OIRA Dudley would have one “of the most obscure yet powerful jobs in Washington. The person in this position can, largely without public scrutiny, interfere with actions of agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and become a conduit for industries seeking to avoid federal health, environmental and safety standards.”
The Cost is Too High: How Susan Dudley Threatens Public Protections, a report produced by Public Citizen and OMB Watch in 2006, said that while Dudley worked at Mercatus, she “attacked proposed regulations in formal submissions to government agencies and orchestrated campaigns to derail other safeguards already on the books.” The report also claimed that Dudley displayed “an extreme anti-regulatory ideology” and “questioned the merit of regulation altogether in congressional testimony and regulatory comments, and she has urged weakening, if not eliminating entirely, public safeguards.”
Dudley worked to oppose public health regulations as a “hidden tax” that hinders profits when she was at Mercatus. She opposed all of the following: EPA plans that would have set tougher standards for smog; lower-polluting cars and SUVs—as well as cleaner gasoline; air bags in cars; stronger regulations for arsenic in drinking water; measures that could help curb global warming. (Think Progress)
Dudley has been quoted as stating that the “evidence regarding global warming and human contribution to it is mixed, and…if a slight warming does occur, historical evidence suggests it is likely to be beneficial, occurring at night, in the winter, and at the poles.” In her testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air, Wetlands, Private Property and Nuclear Safety/Committee on Environment and Public on April 24, 1997, Dudley said: “Ozone in the troposphere, like ozone in the stratosphere, has the beneficial effect of screening ultraviolet radiation, which is known to have various health and welfare effects including melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer, cataracts, and crop and fishery damage.”
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a nonprofit consortium of more than seventy universities that offer Ph.D.s in atmospheric and related sciences, doesn’t see it the same way Dudley does. UCAR has said the following about ozone in the troposphere:
Ozone occurs naturally at ground-level in low concentrations. The two major sources of natural ground-level ozone are hydrocarbons, which are released by plants and soil, and small amounts of stratospheric ozone, which occasionally migrate down to the earth’s surface. Neither of these sources contributes enough ozone to be considered a threat to the health of humans or the environment.
But the ozone that is a byproduct of certain human activities does become a problem at ground level and this is what we think of as ‘bad’ ozone. With increasing populations, more automobiles, and more industry, there’s more ozone in the lower atmosphere. Since 1900 the amount of ozone near the earth’s surface has more than doubled. Unlike most other air pollutants, ozone is not directly emitted from any one source. Tropospheric ozone is formed by the interaction of sunlight, particularly ultraviolet light, with hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, which are emitted by automobiles, gasoline vapors, fossil fuel power plants, refineries, and certain other industries.
And this is what UCAR said about the negative impacts of tropospheric ozone:
While stratospheric ozone shields us from ultraviolet radiation, in the troposphere this irritating, reactive molecule damages forests and crops; destroys nylon, rubber, and other materials; and injures or destroys living tissue. It is a particular threat to people who exercise outdoors or who already have respiratory problems.
Ozone affects plants in several ways. High concentrations of ozone cause plants to close their stomata. These are the cells on the underside of the plant that allow carbon dioxide and water to diffuse into the plant tissue. This slows down photosynthesis and plant growth. Ozone may also enter the plants through the stomata and directly damage internal cells.
Rubber, textile dyes, fibers, and certain paints may be weakened or damaged by exposure to ozone. Some elastic materials can become brittle and crack, while paints and fabric dyes may fade more quickly.
When ozone pollution reaches high levels, pollution alerts are issued urging people with respiratory problems to take extra precautions or to remain indoors. Smog can damage respiratory tissues through inhalation. Ozone has been linked to tissue decay, the promotion of scar tissue formation, and cell damage by oxidation. It can impair an athlete’s performance, create more frequent attacks for individuals with asthma, cause eye irritation, chest pain, coughing, nausea, headaches and chest congestion and discomfort. It can worsen heart disease, bronchitis, and emphysema.
Prior to Dudley’s appointment to OIRA, Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, wrote in an email exchange with Media Transparency that “Dudley would be the most anti-regulatory zealot within the Bush Administration, bar none. Her ideology is based upon a core belief that regulations are generally bad and there should be no regulation unless it can be proven to be cost effective and supported from within the market place.”
The Cost is Too High report said that Dudley’s radicalism put her “right at home at Mercatus”—which was “founded by corporate interests and endowed by large corporations, free-market oriented foundations, and leaders from the corporate world” and “has long operated at the intersection of money, power, and influence in order to promote corporate special interests at the expense of the public interest.”
Note: Susan B. Dudley is a Research Professor of Public Policy and Public Administration and is serving as the Director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
EPA Nemesis: Mercatus Center Another Koch Think Tank (Sourcewatch/Center for Media and Democracy)
Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group Mercatus Center (Greenpeace)
From Promoting Acid Rain To Climate Denial: Over 20 Years Of David Koch’s Polluter Front Groups (Think Progress)
The White House’s Agents Of Environmental Corruption (Think Progress)
Koch’s Web of Influence (Center for Public Integrity)
Koch-Powered Tea Party Pushes Climate Denial Bill In New Hampshire (Think Progress)
Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama. (The New Yorker)
The White House’s Agents Of Environmental Corruption (Think Progress)
Does Bush know how to pick ’em or does he know how to pick ’em? (Daily Kos)
The Cost is Too High: How Susan Dudley Threatens Public Protections (Public Citizen & OMB Watch)
Bush Nominates Anti-Regulatory Zealot To Head ‘Super-Powerful’ Public Safety Office (Think Progress)
Stop Susan Dudley: The air you breathe depends on it (Public Citizen)
Dudley Do-Wrong of George Mason University (Media Transparency)
With Senate on break, Bush appoints officials: The three, including a contentious regulatory director, most likely would not have been approved by lawmakers. (Los Angeles Times)
I Am OMB and I Write the Rules (Washington Post)
On First Day Of New Congress, Koch Operatives Met With GOP Chairman Planning To Gut The Clean Air Act (Think Progress)
ALEC Exposed: The Koch Connection (The Nation)
Exclusive: Tea Party Billionaire David Koch Denies Climate Change, Shrugs Off His Carbon Pollution (ThinkProgress)
The Koch Energy and Commerce Committee (Turley Blog)
Koch Industries multibillionaire Koch brothers bankroll attacks on climate change science and policy (Climate Science Watch)
The Most Important Think Tank You’ve Never Heard Of (Richard C. Young)
Rule Breaker: In Washington, Tiny Think Tank Wields Big Stick on Regulation (Mercatus)
Meet Koch Industries (Oil Watchdog)
Mercatus Center—Koch Industries: Still Fueling Climate Denial [REPORT] (PolluterWatch)
Koch Industries: Still Fueling Climate Denial [REPORT] (PolluterWatch)
Koch Industries: Still Fueling Climate Denial 2011 Update (Greenpeace)
Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine (Greenpeace)
The Kochs’ Mercatus Center and Environmental Deregulation (The Green Market)
Does This Matter? Eliminating the EPA? (Watchdog Progressive)
REPORT: Koch Fueling Far Right Academic Centers At Universities Across The Country (ThinkProgress)
FSU Accepts Funds From Charles Koch In Return For Control Over Its Academic Freedom (ThinkProgress)
Billionaire’s role in hiring decisions at Florida State University raises questions (St. Petersburg Times)
VIDEO: Why Oil Billionaire David Koch Is Secretly Funding Astroturf To Repeal CA Clean Energy Law AB 32 (Think Progress)
Wegman scandal rocks cornerstone of climate denial (Think Progress)
Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) – Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group (Greenpeace)
Bush Obstructs EPA, OSHA, CDC Regulations (Mother Jones)
Koch Industries and Lobbying in Washington (Desmogblog)
Koch and George Mason University (Desmogblog)
Still Hiring Tree Haters (Tom Paine)
Another big time fox nominated to be gatekeeper to the henhouse (Watching the Watchers)
Charles Koch’s Assault on Academic Freedom (Mother Jones)
In Washington, Tiny Think Tank Wields Big Stick on Regulation: With White House Ex-Staffers, Mercatus Helps Zap Codes It Says Restrict Business (Wall Street Journal)
Statutory Interpretation in the Era of OIRA (Georgetown University law Center)
Testimony of Susan E. Dudley
Before the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Wetlands, Private Property and Nuclear Safety
Committee on Environment and Public Works
April 24, 1997
Bron: “In my opinion the sun is what causes climate change to any great extent. We may contribute a little bit to warming or cooling but I think the Polar Bears are safe for a few billion years. But then the Woolly Mammoths weren’t and neither were the Giant Sloths or Saber-tooth Cats. Extinction is part of life on earth. Get used to it, we aren’t going to last as a species either unless we figure out space travel in a few billion years.”
—
That statement is breathtaking in it’s optimism and lack of scholarship. The mega-fauna of New Zealand and Madagascar including the Giant Sloth and Moa were hunted to extinction, the sun didn’t kill them, hunters did and did so in a very short period of time.
The Mammoths of Europe and the America’s demise is more problematic but an apt illustration to refute your approach to the issue (do nothing). The warming climate (prior to a re-cooling) did pressure the large animals but hunting practices were probably the death knell. In Europe hunting was less sophisticated than than the America’s but wasteful. Fire was used to drive animals over cliffs, often entire herds. The fossil record has turned up several sites of hundreds of animals killed this way.
In the Americas Paleoamericans, newly landed with more sophisticated technology (Clovis points and detachable points), ended up with as much as 30%-40% of their diet being protein. Climate warming was a problem but a burgeoning population of skilled hunters finished the job. Large populations of animals up against a sophisticated enemy lose, think buffalo here, or Tuna.
To say that Polar Bears or any large animal on earth is safe for a few billion years is an exaggeration that borders on madness. At the rate large animals in the sea are being fished, herds are being encroached and habitat is being destroyed the world over a century is more reasonable. Your great, great, great, great grand children are going to be eating Soylent Yellow, blue and Green.
As for getting off this rock- ain’t gonna’ happen or not in any way that allows the Earth to be disposable. Not unless faster-than-light speed travel happens. Even at light speed there’s nowhere to go close enough that looks good for colonizing. The fact that people can even think it’s OK, in the short term, to damage this perfect environment- perfect for life as we know and live it- and bet on some magic technology in the future is just nuts. We can’t do anything about what nature and the universe throws our way, no use even worrying about that; it’s always been a crap shoot. Not playing our own cards conservatively though is foolhardy.
Bron, they have to go back thousands of years to see if what is happening is cyclical weather or climate change unprecedented in the history of the planet.
“In the last 50 years atmospheric CO2 concentration has been increasing at a rate much faster than any rates observed in the geological record of the past several thousand years. Global annual-mean surface temperatures are rising at a rapid rate to values higher than at any time in the last 400 (and probably in the last 1000) years.”
I wonder why they only go back several thousand years? Maybe if they go back farther it wont substantiate their conclusion?
From the above document, the money quote:
Official position of the American Meteorological Society. This document is in effect until February 1012, at which time it will be revisited and either modified or left unchanged as an official finding of the Society.
The AMS is the official professional scientific membership organization of meterologists.
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.html
Bron,
I didn’t suggest that. Is Susan B. Dudley a climate scientist? Are Charles and David Koch climate scientists?
Elaine,
please stop bringing facts into this discussion!! Thank you for your link to the US study that debunked the climategate nonsense.
Elaine:
no more than you are suggesting all climate scientists who believe in climate change due to non-anthropogenic causes are puppets of the Koch brothers.
That would be “Koch” as in Charles and David “Koch” and Koch Industries.
Are you suggesting that climate scientists who believe in climate change are all either socialists, communists, or puppets of George Soros?
what is the agenda of wealthy socialists and communists?
Elaine:
would that be the Kochtopuss, Koch Monster or the Monster Koch?
Or Sorospuss, Soros Monster, Son of Soros, Hydrasoros, Sorosclops.
Kochtopuss vs Sorosclops
Sorospuss vs Monster Koch
Koch Monster vs Hydrasoros
Bron,
I guess Galileo and Copernicus had an agenda too! That’s the way it is with enlightened people. They like to spread their knowledge around.
Bron,
A simple yes or no answer would have been sufficient.
I guess scientists do have an agenda–an agenda to try to provide people with the best science, research, and knowledge available. What is the agenda of the Kochs and Exxon and the other people and organizations who are funding the climate denial machine?
Elaine:
do you deny that communist dupes and wealthy socialists are funding a “climate scare machine”?
Come on, each side has an agenda. I have seen enough to know that there is evidence of warming but what causes the warming is debatable. Personally I think the warming is caused by the sun going into some sort of solar cycle.
Bron,
Do you deny that the Kochs and Exxon and other wealthy individuals and corporations are funding a “climate denial machine?”
Climate Change Denial Machine
Elaine:
you can read the emails yourself. the emails show, I have read some of them, a definite attempt to look at things in a certain way.
Climate change is pushed by politics and money, on both sides, so why should we believe the Daily Kos or for that matter George Mason University?
In my opinion the sun is what causes climate change to any great extent. We may contribute a little bit to warming or cooling but I think the Polar Bears are safe for a few billion years. But then the Woolly Mammoths werent and neither were the Giant Sloths or Saber-tooth Cats. Extinction is part of life on earth. Get used to it, we arent going to last as a species either unless we figure out space travel in a few billion years.
Man cannot control everything on earth nor should he try. Control what you can efficaciously and leave the rest alone. How do you know you wont cause bigger problems by trying to limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
George Mason: Climate Denial U.?
Daily Kos
April 16, 2010
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/04/16/858016/-George-Mason:-Climate-Denial-U
Excerpt:
Northern Virginians have lots of reasons to take pride in George Mason University, as a rapidly growing academic community, named the #1 national university to watch in the 2009 rankings of US News & World Report, with Nobel Prize winning faculty, and an occasionally great basketball team.
Unfortunately, GMU is also known as a magnet for right wing money which takes millions in corporate cash to run a network of centers to gin up and legitimate the latest ultraconservative talking points.
Now let me be clear: I strongly favor an academic environment that is open to debate and opinions from all across the political spectrum. But there is a difference between principled, reason-based academic stands and corporate-funded attempts to skew debate and provide a fig leaf to cover naked profit-based self-interest. And this brings me to the unfortunate role that my local university is playing in the political war over climate change.
A lot of NOVA residents may not realize that GMU gives funding, support
and – most importantly – academic legitimacy to some of the best known and most persistent deniers of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change – notably Patrick Michaels and S. Fred Singer. In doing so, GMU perpetuates the myth that there is widespread academic disagreement about the facts and causes of climate change when in fact there is not.
Notable among the funders to GMU are the notorious Koch brothers, about which Greenpeace recently released a damning report, “Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine.” Koch, the second-largest privately-held company in the US, supports its interests in the oil industry by funding dozens of think-tanks, websites, and PACs to create an echo-chamber that endlessly repeats the latest bogus climate denial claims to convince the media, politicians, and citizens that climate change is just a hoax concocted by corrupt scientists, enviros and the nefarious Al Gore.
Koch and other right-wing donors give their money to support a web of GMU-affiliated organizations with names like the Mercatus Center, Institute for Humane Studies, and the Science and Environmental Policy Project. Through these centers, GMU and their donors support such climate denial luminaries as Professor Patrick Michaels.
Art Pope’s millions fund climate change denial
Grist
Sue Sturgis
10/26/2010
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-10-26-a-pope-of-climate-denial
Excerpt:
There’s broad agreement among scientists nowadays that global warming is real and caused in large part by human activities like burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests.
For example, a survey [PDF] by university researchers published last year in Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, found that 90 percent of earth scientists agree that mean global temperatures have generally risen since the 1800s, and 82 percent think human activity contributes significantly. As respondents’ level of specialization in climate science increased, so did their confidence in human-caused global warming, with climatologists who actively work on climate change agreeing most strongly. That broad agreement is why prestigious scientific organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society, and the National Academy of Sciences all refer to a climate science “consensus.”
But earlier this month, Rasmussen Reports released a poll that asked likely U.S. voters their thoughts on various energy issues including global warming. While the majority of voters — 59 percent — think climate change is a serious issue, the number has dropped since last year. At the same time, the survey found that only 39 percent of voters think human activity is the main contributor to the earth’s warming.
So why all the confusion among the public? A big reason is a long-lived and generously funded public relations campaign by corporations, business leaders, and others — many with a financial interest in fossil-fuel industries — to make it seem like there’s less of a consensus about human-caused climate change than there really is.
Two key players in this well-funded campaign have been David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers behind Koch Industries, a Kansas-based oil conglomerate and the second-largest privately held company in the United States. The Kochs have landed in the public spotlight lately thanks to a New Yorker profile that detailed their efforts to sow doubt about global warming as well as reports by The New York Times and Think Progress about the brothers’ efforts to coordinate conservative political initiatives, including an assault on what they call “climate change alarmism.”
But the Kochs aren’t the only ones attacking prevailing climate science. An investigation by Facing South finds that they have a valuable ally in North Carolina: the lesser-known but influential conservative benefactor Art Pope.
Pope has close ties to the Kochs as one of four national directors of the Koch-founded political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity; he is also the second-largest institutional funder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
In addition, Pope is a director and board chair of a family foundation that has steered millions to conservative thinks tanks both in North Carolina and nationwide, which have worked closely with the Koch network to manufacture doubt about global warming.
In North Carolina, the climate skeptics that benefit from Pope’s fortune haven’t gained much traction in the state legislature. But that could change if Pope’s strategy pays off this election year: He has begun funneling money to ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits that use it to run attack ads, and among the targeted politicians are two long-time legislative leaders who’ve played a key role in addressing climate change in the state.
Keeping up with the Kochs
For over a decade, the Koch brothers have spent a considerable chunk of their $21.5 billion fortunes financing doubt about climate science.
A report released earlier this year by Greenpeace documented how the Kochs have contributed more than $48.5 million from 1997 to 2008 toward funding what the environmental group refers to as the “climate denial machine” — a network of several dozen think tanks dedicated to sowing doubt about global warming. The Kochs’ money has flowed largely through the brothers’ charitable family foundations: the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the David H. Koch Foundation, and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation.
Facing South’s analysis of tax return data finds that Art Pope’s family foundation has also made very generous contributions to this same network of climate denial groups over that same period — more than $24.1 million in all.
The generosity of the Pope Foundation is especially remarkable when you consider that his fortune is presumably nowhere near as large as the Kochs’. While the Koch brothers landed in fifth place on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans released last month, Pope — who made his millions after inheriting his father’s discount retail chain — did not make the list at all.
The largest chunk of money that Pope contributed to the climate denial network went to the John Locke Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit think tank based in Raleigh, N.C. that was created in 1990 to promote the idea of limited government. Not only does Pope provide 80 percent of the organization’s funding — a striking $16.9 million from 1997 to 2008 alone — he also sits on its board of directors, which gives him considerable power in managing the organization’s operations and policies.