Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

The George W. Bush years, meanwhile, proved a bonanza for the fossil fuel industry, which had thrown its weight behind his election. The coal industry in particular had played a major role in delivering West Virginia’s five electoral votes to Bush in 2000, sealing a victory that would have gone to Al Gore had he carried the formerly Democratic state instead. “State political veterans and top White House staffers concur that it was basically a coal-fired victory,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. The industry was lavishly rewarded. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of the oil-field equipment and services company Halliburton, personally took charge of energy policy. Bush had vowed during the campaign to act on climate change by limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but once in office Cheney countermanded him. In what Cheney’s biographer Barton Gellman describes as a “case study in managing an errant boss,” Cheney shifted the administration’s position to arguing that the science on global warming was “inconclusive,” requiring “more scientific inquiry.”