Meet the Shadowy Network Vilifying Climate Protestors
Activists from Last Generation block a road in Berlin. (photo: Stefan Muller)
The Atlas Network is behind the effort to brand climate activists as extremists and pass anti-protest legislation
by Amy Westervelt and Geoff Dembicki/Desmog Blog
Earlier this year, news footage began making the rounds on social media of young activists from the German climate organization Letzte Generation (Last Generation) being assaulted by their fellow citizens as they obstructed streets in an effort to draw attention to the German government’s inaction on climate. A young woman, with her hand glued to a road was ripped off the road by her hair; a young man was run over by a truck driver; a passerby punched the protestors and was cheered on. A few months later, German police raided the homes of Last Generation activists and seized their bank accounts. It all seemed like a gross overreaction to a pretty tame form of protest. Although Last Generation stands out for its willingness to inconvenience everyday people’s lives to draw awareness to the severity of the climate crisis, the tactic of road blockades is not a new one — it was commonly used by suffragettes, civil rights activists, and anti-war activists in the pasts, and has been used by cycling advocates for decades as well. During the same year that Last Generation was blocking roads in Germany, farmers used the exact same tactic, blocking roads with their tractors to protest a renewable energy policy that they don’t feel provides enough incentives for biogas. Not a single farmer was punched in the face or dragged off the road by their hair. What was making everyone so irate about Last Generation?
It makes slightly more sense if we go back in time a couple of years and follow how one right-wing politician has been talking about The Last Generation. Frank Schäffler, of the Free Democratic Party, or FDP, is a member of the German parliament, or Bundestag, and is well known for hard-right positions. He came to some prominence several years ago as the leader of a small but loud contingent of German politicians who did not want Germany to bail out other EU countries like Greece during the 2011 debt crisis. More recently he’s been the primary block to a national green building policy that would shift the country away from gas heating in new buildings, using a lot of the same tactics the fossil fuel industry has used to fight against gas bans in the United States: accusing the government of taking away citizens’ freedom of choice, spreading fear that the bill amounts to a “heating ban,” and general anti-regulatory rhetoric. Schäffler has described himself as a “climate skeptic,” and says things like “Climate protection is only possible with [economic] growth.”
Almost as soon as Last Generation began staging protests, in early 2022, Schläffler began describing them as extremists. When they threw mashed potatoes on a Monet in Potsdam, Schäffler took to Twitter to describe the act as “terrorism.” He made a similar statement just a few weeks later, comparing Last Generation to the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhoff Gang—a leftist group categorized as terrorists by the West German government in the 1970s after they committed multiple kidnappings, bank robberies, bombings, and assassinations, killing more than 30 people. Last Generation, by contrast, are unarmed activists who have committed no acts of violence. Yet Schläffler has continued to call Last Generation terrorists in one way or another; Schläffler also began describing the group as a “criminal organization,” and publicly calling for it to be investigated for organized crime. It’s a lot easier to justify ripping an activist off the road by their hair, or punching them in the face, when a prominent politician is comparing them to violent terrorists, and a major media outlet is repeating that frame, as both conservative publisher Welt and the more mainstream Der Spiegel have done with Schläffler.
Just six months later, in May 2023, German police conducted nationwide raids on Last Generation activists. Police said the raids were the result of an investigation into Last Generation activists for forming “a criminal organization that was fundraising for the purpose of committing further criminal action.” It was almost exactly the response to Last Generation that Schäffler had recommended.
It’s hard to believe that a relatively young politician known primarily for a crusade against Greece that no one really took seriously has had such an outsized role in blocking climate policy and locking up climate activists. And of course, Schäffler is not acting alone. But something important happened between his debt and climate crusades that helps to explain his sudden influence: Schäffler started a think tank — The Prometheus Institute — and he plugged that think tank into a little-known but enormously powerful network called the Atlas Network.
Atlas is a global network of more than 500 member think tanks, advocating for “free market” policies in the majority of democratic countries. Its members are in regular contact with each other, sharing ideas, tips, and strategies. Back in the 1990s, the Atlas Network even bragged about being early adopters of the internet, for the sole purpose of staying regularly connected and sharing ideas. Representatives from member think tanks also meet at events like the annual regional Liberty Forums or the two-day Liberty Forum and Freedom Dinner. Ideas are shared between member think tanks via various publications as well, including the quarterly Freedom’s Champion magazine, a Latin America podcast “Hablemos Libertad,” and various books in both English and Spanish (even a cookbook!).
What’s happened in Germany — public rhetoric vilifying activists, which the media then picks up and amplifies and, ultimately, the criminalization of those activists — is a pattern we’ve seen play out in multiple countries. New research from Drilled and DeSmog reveals that strategy is spreading easily across borders thanks in no small part to the Atlas Network.
The Long Shadow of Thatcherism
To understand the role Atlas Network think tanks are playing today to help frame climate activists as the biggest threat facing society, it helps to understand the network’s history, its long-standing relationship to extractive industry, and its ideological foundation. The Atlas Network describes itself as “a nonprofit that aims to secure the right to economic and personal freedom for all individuals through its global network of think tanks.” But before it was a network it was just one think tank: the Institute of Economic Affairs, or IEA, in the UK, founded by a man named Antony Fisher.
Fisher was born into a wealthy mining family. He went to elite schools — first Eton, then Cambridge — then enlisted in the Royal Air Force during World War II. Legend has it that the experience of watching his brother plummet to his death after his plane was shot down was the impetus for Fisher to fight for a freer and more prosperous world, the idea being that if everyone was better off there would be no need for war. It was a noble idea. In practice, Fisher’s take on freedom was unorthodox, starting with the fact that the primary way he made his own fortune, separate from the family mining money, was by bringing caged chicken farming to the U.K.
Shocked that the British public elected the Labor Party in their first post-war election, Fisher decided he must make sure people voted the right way next time around. He read the Reader’s Digest version of the book Road to Serfdom, by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, which blamed socialism for all of society’s ills, and went to visit Hayek, who was teaching at the time at the London School of Economics. “And Hayek tells him all we need to do is change what the intellectuals think—the teachers, the journalists, these are the people who paved the way for public acceptance of the welfare state, so these are the people we need to target,” says Jeremy Walker, a senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, longtime Atlas Network researcher, and author of the book More Heat Than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy and Economics. Hayek told Fisher to forget about getting into politics and to engage instead in a “war of ideas.”
In 1954, Hayek invited Fisher to join the Mont Pelerin Society, a global group of academics, writers, and thought leaders who met to discuss, debate, and promote neoliberal ideas. The next year, Fisher started the IEA. For the first few years, it didn’t have much success, but then in the early 1960s Fisher landed the think tank’s first big corporate donor: Royal Dutch Shell. Shortly after Shell started to back Fisher, BP came onboard as well, and suddenly the IEA started to have some real impact.
“They would get these professors to write short, digestible articles, often around things like currency conversion or sort of things that were fairly technical to the non-economists,” says Walker. “But then they would have these wealthy donors to the IEA who would buy copies and send them to all the schools and the universities.”
Not disclosing their corporate donors was a key to IEA’s success, too.
“The think tank method allowed corporations to say things that they couldn’t say themselves without appearing to be merely speaking to their own profit motives,” Walker said.
In this way the IEA was able to rapidly spread the sort of free-market ideology that helped elect Margaret Thatcher, and spread her particular form of conservatism.
Meanwhile Fisher took his caged-chicken fortune and used it to start a turtle farming (yes, turtle farming) venture in the Cayman Islands. As the IEA puts it in their history of Fisher, “The turtle farm was poised to be a real winner but the environmentalists persuaded politicians to ban its products.”
Suddenly Fisher had a lot of time on his hands and a lot of people wanted to know how the IEA had managed to push UK politics so far to the right and so quickly. So, he took the show on the road. In 1970, he did a speaking tour in the United States with the Institute for Humane Studies — an organization funded by Charles and David Koch, early on in what would be a decades-long career in massively reshaping American politics for industry’s benefit. In those U.S. talks, Fisher encouraged American businessmen to fight back against the social movements of the 1960s. In 1974, Fisher traveled to Canada, co-founding his first think tank outside of Britain: the Fraser Institute. The same year, the IEA loaned one of its leaders, Nigel Vinson, to rising conservative politician Margaret Thatcher to start a sister think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies in the U.K. Then Fisher was on the road again to Australia, where Rupert Murdoch helped him found the Centre for Independent Studies in 1976. Back in the UK, Fisher co-founded the Adam Smith Institute, another IEA copycat, in 1977. In 1978 he returned to the United States, where he co-founded The Manhattan Institute, and The Pacific Research Institute in 1979, again with help from the Koch Brothers and the extractive industry. By this point, his work with the IEA and the Centre for Policy Studies had succeeded in getting Margaret Thatcher elected. Famed “free market” economist Milton Friedman would later say that “the U-turn in British policy executed by Margaret Thatcher owes more to Fisher than any other individual.”
In 1979, Fisher had the idea of connecting all of these IEA clone organizations he’d started into a network so that they could more easily work with each other and cross-pollinate ideas. He asked Hayek for introductions to his “friends in Houston” — oil executives — for funding. The Atlas Network, which launched in 1981, initially only included the first dozen or so think tanks Fisher had helped to found himself, but quickly expanded to include hundreds of like-minded member organizations, including all of the Koch-affiliated think tanks in the United States (the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council — some of the most influential forces shaping U.S. conservative politics — are all members).
With access to powerful people came funding from powerful sources. A review of Atlas’s publicly available financials, data from the Conservative Transparency database, and 990 tax forms filed by various foundations reveals that Atlas has received millions of dollars in funding from a number of Koch-funded foundations, the ExxonMobil Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which has a long history of funding climate denial, since its founding. As with the Fraser Institute in Canada, the various Koch-backed think tanks in the United States, and the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia, many of the individual member think tanks that form the Atlas Network are separately funded by foundations affiliated with extractive industries — and, in some cases, supported by donations directly from industry — as well.
At first, Atlas included only the initial dozen or so think tanks Fisher had helped to found himself, but it quickly expanded to include hundreds of like-minded member organizations, including all of the Koch-affiliated think tanks (the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council are all members). Fisher focused in the early years of the Atlas Network on expanding internationally, particularly in Latin America where oil executives around the world were very concerned about leftist movements. One of the first investments Atlas made was in Venezuela, where it funded the launch of the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information (CEDICE) in 1984. Decades later, CEDICE was instrumental in ousting Hugo Chavez. Similarly, Atlas set up shop in Brazil in the 1980s, working with various agribusiness groups to push back against the environmental regulations and Indigenous rights proposals being proposed by the Workers Party. Atlas helped to spur the “Free Brazil” movement that ultimately propelled Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. More recently, at the Atlas Network’s annual regional event, Liberty Forum Latin America, agribusiness influencers and think tank heads spoke about finding a path back to power and stopping the current president, Luiz “Lula” Da Silva, from what they described as a “land invasion”: his campaign promise to protect Indigenous land rights from agribusiness and to transfer private farmland to worker ownership.
In a 1982 memo, Fisher also outlined plans for think tanks in Argentina, India, South Africa, and Sri Lanka, noting in each place a local businessman or politician that wanted to start an institute. He went on to co-found all of them, and all are still operating today.
Alejandro Chafuen, an Argentinean-American businessman who took over the Atlas Network presidency in 1991 and remained in charge until 2018, once described the Atlas Network’s audience in one word: elites.
“To answer the question ‘Who is the real customer of a think tank?’” he said, ”I will refer to the often ignored passage of Ludwig Von Mises, in his book Bureaucracy. In it he describes a type of person – elite – who I believe is not only the real customer of Atlas and many think tanks, but also our ideal customer, who benefits us and is served by us.”
Activists as Terrorists
From Fisher in the 1970s to Frank Schäffler in 2022, Atlas Network executives and member think tanks have always painted environmentalists and the regulations they seek to place on polluting industries as a cancerous growth on society. According to Chafuen’s online biography of the Atlas Network, The Pacific Research Institute was started in California in 1979 specifically to focus on environmental issues. “Fisher and Jim North were ready to launch a research center that would have an important focus on environmental topics,” he writes. “They recruited David Theroux who had an outstanding career developing academic programs in the early years of Cato.” Chafuen goes on to describe the dinner parties that Fisher and early PRI staff would have with Fisher’s neighbor and friend, famed “free market” economist, Milton Friedman.