Britain Sent Foreign Aid to EDF to Fight Texas Climate Deniers

Whew. There’s quite a story from today’s Guardian involving the British Government, the Environmental Defense Fund, and right-wing Texas elected officials. The year was 2009. Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office gave 13,673 Pounds (about $21,000) to Texas EDF to “influence climate security policy and legislation in Texas.” How did EDF use this money to accomplish that goal? By organizing voters in key Texas districts? No. By arranging the elected officials to meet Texas victims of climate change? Nope. “The money was used to fly two Texan state politicians, including the climate sceptic Republican Troy Fraser, to the UK to receive a briefing with climate scientists and government officials. A Conference was also held in Austin in which a video of Prince Charles personally addressing Texan politicians on the subject of climate change was shown.” The article doesn’t say so, but it’s obvious what the strategy at work here was. Unable to persuade Texas lawmakers of the righteousness of their cause with only local speakers of the Queen’s English to do the work, EDF was at a loss. If only we could impress the importance of global warming on Fraiser and Co. by using people with authoritative British accents to explain it to them. Brilliant! And it would have worked too, except no one could understand what the Prince was actually saying on that video. Of course, when Governor Perry found out about all this, he was rightfully indignant, taking the position that the English had no business interfering with his plan to devolve state government into a a giant polluter oligarchy. That’s what the EPA is for. There was some other stuff too about how Texas has a great (cough) record of clean air accomplishments (cough) and how global warming is really just a vast left-wing conspiracy, yada, yada, yada. But you expect that from the Guv. What’s EDF’s excuse? EDF’s Texas Director Jim Marston explained that “There are people in Texas, including Governor Perry, who are uneducated
[on this subject]. This was the period leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit. We wanted to get it away from the theoretical and move it to a country where the Kyoto [protocol]
had already been ratified. We wanted them to hear it from the best
scientists from the UK, a country that Texans tend to respect.” See, British accents make everything infinitely more respectable. And how grateful was Senator Troy Frasier after his London Homesick Blues junket? Marston says “he came back very enthused. Sadly, his enthusiasm has decreased since,
partly because the issue [of climate change] has become so politicized.”  That, plus the power of an English accent tends to wane when it’s not constantly reinforced. As Texas grassroots environmental activists, should we be more disappointed in the British for being so condescending about our environmental fights when they’re building breeder reactors and stopping wind turbine farms that ruin Donald Trump’s view of the ocean, or EDF for being so wasteful and naive? We report. You decide.