On that trip in September, 2024, she was awarded ALEC's notorious "State Legislator of the Month" award, for her success at keeping it free for Koch Industries to pollute in our state. New Hampshire citizens and businesses are worse off because of Notter's "success".
"The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is an organization designed to link state legislators with corporations and create templates for state legislation. Some corporations ALEC has worked with include ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Peabody Energy, and Reynolds Tobacco."*
"Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line."*
"[A]t least 77 ALEC bills... opposing renewable energy standards, supporting fracking and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, or otherwise undermining environmental laws."*
"ALEC hosts conferences three times a year where they frequently invite prominent climate change skeptics"* (while consistently ignoring mainstream science and do not invite mainstream climate scientists).
"ALEC had received at least $504,700 from Koch Industries between 1995 and 1998, adding up to nearly $1 million from Koch-Controlled Foundations between 1998 and 2012. CMD additionally found that the tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris/Altria gave ALEC $1,426,700 between 1995 and 2010."*
The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling made it possible to hide the sources of vast amounts of money channeled into politics and astroturf activism. "Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, two of the largest supporters of climate science denial, have recently [as of 2013] pulled back from publicly funding countermovement organizations. Coinciding with the decline in traceable funding, the amount of funding given to countermovement organizations through third party pass-through foundations like Donors Trust and Donors Capital, whose funders cannot be traced, has risen dramatically."♠
Charles Koch is a fossil fuel industry billionaire extremist with a free market fundamentalist ideology who spends billions of dollars to manipulate politics, policy, and society in ways that build his wealth at the expense of human health, civilized society, and the natural world. Koch is one of the main reasons climate pollution from fossil fuels is still free in America.
Why is that a problem? The U.S. is now the only developed country in the world where that is still true, and other countries are preparing to charge us their carbon price in trade. We are falling behind, but we must close the growing U.S. carbon price gap for our health and wellbeing, our country's economic success, and to preserve a livable world.
See A Case Study on this site for an example of how ALEC prevents New Hampshire's legislature from acting on our behalf.
See below for where the money to fund ALEC comes from.
"ALEC’s energy policy has been guided by the “principle” that climate change is “inevitable.” It has backed efforts to block carbon emission policies and the transition to renewables." - greenpeace.org/usa/alec-50-years-of-attacking-environmental-protection-and-democracy.
Footnotes
* "American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)" - desmog.com/american-legislative-exchange-council
♠ "Not Just the Koch Brothers: New Drexel Study Reveals Funders Behind the Climate Change Denial Effort" - drexel.edu/news/archive/2013/december/climate-change