The Rockefellers are using their wealth to disrupt pipeline repairs, making life more difficult for blue-collar workers.
For years now, the descendants of John D. Rockefeller — at least those in control of its philanthropically powerful Rockefeller Family Fund — have waged war on the industry on which their wealth was built.
A fascinating 2018 New York Magazine piece provided a look into this campaign: One zeroed in on the Rockefellers’ efforts to expose ExxonMobil’s ostensible knowledge of and lies about climate change.
Peter Case, a great-great-grandson of the oil tycoon and a vice president on the board of the Rockefeller Family Fund, gave some insight into his clan’s environmental crusade in that article, explaining that “there’s something about the moral imperative of what we’re doing — or trying to ‘undo.’”
“I mean, what would you do?” asked Case.
It’s unclear if Case himself has a full understanding of what it is that he’s doing, because while media attention has been centered on how the Rockefellers’ activism has humbled giants, it’s also worth considering the ways in which their activism affects the little guy.
The Equation Campaign, a project of the Rockefeller Family Fund,
provide[s] funding that supports two missing pieces of the equation in most climate philanthropy and activism to date: (1) supply side strategies to stop or delay new or expanded projects, and to directly target the power of the fossil fuel industry, and (2) racial justice movement strategies that center the expertise and power of the communities impacted first and worst by both the climate crisis and the impacts of oil and gas operations. Our goal is to amplify the voices of people on the frontlines, for whom the expansion of the oil and gas industry is a matter of life and death.
If this second racial-justice piece appears to be shoehorned into the Equation Campaign’s otherwise climate-centric identity, that’s because it is. Its presence, however, does help to explain some of the organization’s more intriguing grantees.
Take the examples of Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light, Unkitawa, and Honor the Earth, three anti-pipeline groups (the latter two of which are Native American) with the primary objective of stopping Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline replacement project.
For more than a half century, Line 3 has carried oil from Edmonton, Alberta, down to Wisconsin. In 2016, the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Enbridge reached a settlement requiring the firm to replace Line 3. Enbridge’s website asserts that “replacing an aging pipeline with new, modern construction is the safest and best option for protecting the environment.” The notoriously stingy Obama-era EPA evidently agreed.
That hasn’t stopped these groups from behaving as though the consequences of its construction for the environment would be catastrophic. Winona LaDuke, founder of Honor the Earth, has complained that “we want the jobs removing the pipeline, not putting it in.” She’s also accused Enbridge of “using Native people as a smoke screen to destroy the environment,” and “work[ing] hard to seed division in our [Native American] communities, in our families, for the past four years.”
Louder than those words are her and her fellow activists’ actions, which have landed them on the front pages of Minnesota’s newspapers as they continue to not merely protest Line 3 but actively harass and intimidate those working on it.
On June 7, a protest involving the Rockefeller-funded groups turned violent when its participants blocked off an access road to a Minnesota construction site, trespassed onto the property, cut electrical wires, slashed tires, destroyed environmental safeguards (so much for the first of the Equation Campaign’s objectives), and even tried to entrap blue-collar workers unfortunate enough to be on shift. Forty-four of them were evacuated, and ten were with the Native American–owned and –operated Gordon Construction (there goes the second objective).
Its owner, Matt Gordon, penned a letter in the incident’s aftermath along with five other Native American contractors, asserting that “protests that disrupt work, damage property and threaten our employees while claiming to be on behalf of our Native people is creating additional tension and consequences within our tribal communities.”
The business owners also lamented the “false narrative that there is no Native American support for this project and the economic impacts and opportunities it brings to our people.”
Not only does the Equation Campaign fund these protest organizations directly, but they also subsidize the cost of their actions through another one of their grantees, the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, a legal group crusading against Line 3.
The group’s website boasts about “supporting and administering a funding pool to subsidize and offset legal costs on a funds-available basis for defense of civil and human rights of persons arrested while exercising their First Amendment rights in opposition to Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline” and misleadingly insists that “peaceful opposition” is being met with violent force. No mention of the events of June 7, however, are to be found.
Hubbard County sheriff Cory Aukes has taken note of the remarkable speed with which those arrested are bailed out of prison, saying, “What is amazing to me, is the process after an arrest is made.”
“Time and time again, a protester makes a phone call and someone shows up with a duffel bag full of cash to bail them out. A bag full of $100 bills; in fact, $52,000 on one occasion,” Aukes told local media.
Intergenerational guilt can be a powerful force. Particularly when you’re blessed with the resources to remedy it in any way you see fit, as the Rockefeller family does. But at what point does it simply become an excuse to try to remake the world to fit your own personal vision — small-scale consequences for the little people be damned?
Is it justice — racial, environmental, or otherwise — when Rockefeller cash funds a riot that leads working-class Native Americans to fear for their lives when they report to their jobs on a project mandated by a Democratic administration’s Environmental Protection Agency? What about when those who instilled that fear in others act with impunity, in the full and comforting knowledge that their legal fees would be covered by those same funds? And is it, ultimately, a positive development for the environment if these groups get their wish and Line 3 is not replaced?