The Fossil-Fuel Industry’s Spending

A legislative rider that was quietly attached to a major defense funding bill earlier this month marked a watershed change in the political fortunes of the coal, oil, and gas industries and their return to power in Washington, D.C. The rider—which turns the Bull Mountains in Montana over to a Koch-connected, Houston-based company to be strip mined for coal—is the fossil-fuel industry’s first major payoff from a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar investment to secure Republican control of Congress and to set the stage for a pro-coal, pro-drilling, and anti-environment agenda in the new year.

For more on this idea, please see:

• The Fossil-Fuel Industry Spent Big to Set the Anti-Environment Agenda of the Next Congress by Claire Moser and Matt Lee-Ashley