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Well, who are these guys at the NRDC? It’s an interesting list.

Natural Resources Defense Council Board of Trustees
Chairman	Frederick A. O. Schwartz, Jr.	Partner, Cravath Swaine & Moore; (a British Law Firm) Former New York City Corporation Counsel (under Mayor Ed Koch)
Executive Director	Frances Beinecke	Co-founder, The New York League of Conservation Voters (with RFK Jr.)
Trustee	Laurance Rockefeller	Private philanthropist; Former Chairman, Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Former chairman, Citizens Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality; Trustee, the Laurance Rockefeller Charitable Trust
Trustee	Thomas A. Troyer	Partner, Caplin & Drysdale; Former Chairman, the Foundation Lawyers’ Group; Former member of the IRS Commissioner’s Advisory Group on Tax-exempt Organizations; (no conflict of interest there?) Board member, the Carnegie Corporation of New York
Pres & Co-founder	John H. Adams	Former Assistant US Attorney (New York)
Vice Chair	Adam Albright	Board member, Redefining Progress; Board Chair, Population Communications International; Program Chair, Conservation International
Vice Chair	Alan Horn	Chairman & Chief Operating Officer, Warner Brothers
Vice Chair	Burks Lapham	Chairman, Concern Inc.; Director, Chesapeake Bay Foundation (a relatively benign group)
Vice Chair	George Woodwell	Founding Director, Woods Hole Research Center; Co-founder, Environmental Defense Fund (they banned DDT, Alar, etc.)
Co-founder & Treas	Richard E. Ayres	Partner, Howrey & Simon; Former Chairman, National Clean Air Coalition
Trustee	Patricia Bauman	Member, Pew Environmental Health Commission; Former Manager, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences; Co-Director, The Bauman Foundation
Trustee	William Richardson	Former US Secretary of Energy; Former US Ambassador to the United Nations; Former US Congressman (D-NM)
Trustee	Michael Finnegan	Managing Partner, J.P Morgan Securities

Is this "Natural Resources" defense, or natural resource SUPPLIERS defense?

Now, let’s look at who gives the NRDC money, shall we?

Top Funders of NRDC
Funder	Total Donated	Comments
		Descriptions in bold are major energy investors
Pew Charitable Trusts	$11,568,000.00	Sunoco money
Blue Moon Fund	$7,818,735.00	This is W. Alton Jones Money (Citgo)
Energy Foundation	$6,965,000.00	Launched by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and The Rockefeller Foundation. The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation joined as a funding partner in 1996, and The McKnight Foundation joined in 1998. In 1999, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation joined to support two programs: the U.S. Clean Energy Program (now the Climate Program) and the China Sustainable Energy Program. In 2002, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation joined to support advanced technology transportation and clean energy for the West.
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation	$5,636,500.00	Bankers Life and Casualty money (investment portfolio unknown)
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency	$4,681,097.00	Your tax dollars at work subsidizing the interests of whom?
Turner Foundation	$3,795,167.00	CNN, and a lot more
Public Welfare Foundation	$3,500,000.00	Too confounded to determine
Joyce Foundation	$3,309,445.00	Timber Wealth
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation	$3,022,340.00	General Motors
Ford Foundation	$2,733,300.00	Ford
Beinecke Foundation	$2,150,000.00	Major player at Yale.
J. M. Kaplan Fund	$2,057,500.00
William Bingham Foundation	$1,995,000.00
Homeland Foundation	$1,733,000.00
San Francisco Foundation	$1,654,739.00
Rockefeller Brothers Fund	$1,377,510.00	Them again
McKnight Foundation	$1,365,500.00
Robert Sterling Clark Foundation	$1,310,000.00
Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation	$1,310,000.00
Bauman Family Foundation	$1,226,000.00
Nathan Cummings Foundation	$1,220,000.00
Educational Foundation of America	$1,210,000.00
Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund	$1,205,000.00
Mertz Gilmore Foundation	$1,201,000.00
Carnegie Corporation of New York	$1,200,000.00
Park Foundation	$1,198,010.00
New York Community Trust	$1,186,821.00
Overbrook Foundation	$1,182,585.00
Surdna Foundation	$1,147,000.00
Bullitt Foundation	$1,122,675.00
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation	$1,075,000.00	Note also the participation with the Energy Foundation

These people are energy investors who use federal money and their own tax-exempt "charitable" donations to fund lawsuits that manipulate access to resources, control processing of energy feedstocks, and set attainment targets in a manner preferential to their own investments. ALL of the resulting capital gains in their trusts are tax-exempt. You may be surprised to find the Hewlett and Packard fortunes listed as energy investors, but they just gave over 130 million to Stanford to research extraction of methane hydrates and are directly tied in with Exxon/Mobil in that effort. Keeping it in the family they've put Lynn Orr, who is married to Susan Packard, in charge of the global energy project. The idea is that they can use the energy revenues and the carbon credits for removing a principal source of atmospheric methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. They need Kyoto or this will be a big loser of an investment. Curiously, if they disturb those nodules foolishly, they may end up releasing a great deal of methane to the surface which would release the gases into the atmosphere. You don’t think that they might need protection from the NRDC in case they screw up, do you?

Did anybody sue the NRDC for the cleanup costs of MTBE?

They can’t be sued. Clinton EO 12986 indemnified them from such lawsuits as members in good standing at the IUCN, the United Nations' equivalent of the EPA.

Using a charitable foundation, to use the law to force people to use your product, to use regulatory power to keep competitors out of the market or force them into selling or go bankrupt, and to protect you from liability for your product in order to reap a guaranteed profit is tax-exempt racketeering, and on a grand scale.