Mercers Cut Trackable Donations To Climate Deniers, But Boost Donors Trust Giving To $8 Million
For years, the Mercer Family Foundation has bankrolled efforts to question climate science with millions of dollars in donations to groups such as the Heartland Institute, CO2 Coalition and Cato Institute. Now the organization appears to be backing off — at least publicly, according to tax records.
The Mercer Family Foundation's most recent public tax records from 2018, which were first obtained by CNBC, don't include any donations to those groups, unlike previous years. What's more, the foundation donated $250,000 to Berkeley Earth, which has done research that clearly shows humans are driving climate change. That's a significant shift from 2017, when the foundation contributed more than $4 million to groups that question mainstream climate science. Now, on paper at least, that support appears to have dropped to about $300,000.
But there could be more to the story. Last year, the Mercer Family Foundation — which is backed by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his family — donated $8 million to Donors Trust, a Koch-linked group that allows donors to anonymously fund conservative groups, the returns show. That was a sharp increase from the $500,000 the Mercers donated in 2017 and more than the $2.5 million they donated in 2016, tax records show.
"Donors Trust was built for exactly this purpose, to be able to hide the trail of breadcrumbs between donors and recipients of those grants," said Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center. "It's been called the 'dark money ATM' for a reason, it functions as an anonymizing body for these wealthy donors to hide their trail."
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