Rick Scott Is Heavily Invested in Fossil Fuel Companies Donating to His Senate Campaign

Oil, gas and coal companies are bankrolling the Florida governor’s campaign to join the U.S. Senate as increasingly intense storms batter his state.


Published on Oct 17, 2018

As yet another destructive hurricane season lays waste to coastal regions in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott is running a U.S. Senate campaign with the help of fossil fuel companies that contribute to climate change, which is leading to stronger and faster-intensifying storms. Meanwhile, he and his wife are personally invested in five of these companies, most of which have major operations in his state.

According to a Sludge analysis of Federal Election Commission data and Scott’s recently released 2017 personal financial disclosure, the wealthy Republican governor and his wife, Ann, own as much as $2.5 million worth of stock in five fossil fuel companies that have contributed to his Senate election bid, including NextEra Energy and Energy Transfer Equity, which have contributed a total of $238,000 towards his campaign.

Overall, Rick and Ann Scott owned between $12.5 million and $29 million worth of stock in fossil fuel companies and investment funds at the end of 2017, earning them as much as $5 million in profits that year. Many of these investments are held in a blind trust owned by the governor, which, along with his wife’s investments, is managed by a close former colleague and business partner. When Scott recently filed his federal disclosure, which required him to list his wife’s assets for the first time, it was clear that her investments mirrored those within his blind trust, causing ethics experts to question whether Scott was really ignorant of which companies he is invested in.

Scott has a poor environmental record in Florida. He has struck regulations and questioned manmade climate change, and his Department of Environmental Protection reportedly prohibited its employees from publicly using the terms “climate change” and “global warming.”

https://readsludge.com/2018/10/17/rick-scott-is-heavily-invested-in-fossil-fuel-companies-donating-to-his-senate-campaign/