DragonI

Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, are best known as the secretive billionaire megadonors who bankrolled and organized President Donald Trump’s campaign, poured at least $10 million into Breitbart News, and showered millions on a network of right-wing websites and think tanks. The family has spent $36.6 million on Republican races and super PACs since 2010.

Tax disclosures typically become public a year after a nonprofit files, so the most recently available documents are from 2015. The Mercers’ contributions are detailed on the foundation’s most recent 990 tax form, which researchers at the nonpartisan Climate Investigations Center obtained and shared with HuffPost. 

The spending is notable not only for the large amounts, but because it seems to mark a shift in the world of climate-denial funding, which was once bolstered mainly by fossil fuel titans like Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil Corp. but has now become too extreme even for some of its original benefactors.

The Mercers have long donated to an array of conservative groups that oppose regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. The foundation also provided nearly $2.3 million to the Donors Trust, a conservative funding group that does not take an official position on climate change but has for years funneled money to denial proponents, earning it the nickname “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.”

But the Mercer Family Foundation appears to have discontinued funding for other climate denial groups. They gave a total of $800,000 in 2013 and 2014 to the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Ron Arnold, the group’s executive vice president, serves as a policy adviser to Heartland, and has been quoted as saying his goal is “to eradicate the environmental movement.”

• Gave $800,000 to the right-wing think tank and major proponent of climate change denialism, up from $100,000 the previous year.

• Gave $200,000 for a second year in a row to a discredited medial research group best known for spreading a hoax petition in 2009 claiming that 30,000 climatologists rejected global warming. 

• Gave $150,000 to CO2 Coalition, an organization born from the ashes of the defunct George C. Marshall Institute, which denied global warming and lobbied against the science behind acid rain and smoking-caused cancer.
• In its first year, the CO2 Coalition raised $404,384, so the donation the Mercers disclosed for last year increased the budget by nearly 40 percent. For Idso’s outfit, which took in just $194,757, according to its most recent filing, the Mercer money would mark a 64 percent budgetary increase.

• Gave $125,000 to an oil-funded think tank run by former Peabody Energy executive Craig Idso

The increased funding is making the Mercers a new target for environmentalists and scientists. 

• On Thursday, more than 200 scientists called on the American Museum of Natural History to drop Rebekah Mercer from its board of directors. The Mercer Family Foundation donated $625,000 to the museum in 2016, bringing the total contributions to nearly $4.1 million since 2012, according to filings.
• In 2016, activists ousted David Koch from the museum’s board after a months-long campaign highlighting the billionaire’s history of funding climate change denial and attacks on scientists.