.
3/15/15, "Enviro Money Coopting Conservatives, A real and present danger not just in Florida" Bryan Pick, American Spectator
"Progressives have for years been laying the groundwork to co-opt
conservatives on energy policy, paying existing right-of-center groups
to help them communicate with the rest, creating new organizations and
heading them with a conservative or two for appearances, and ultimately
using the jargon of markets and freedom in the service of cronyism.
A
jarring example of this is well underway in Florida, where
environmentalist foundations have secured the support of some
right-of-center groups for a ballot initiative promoting solar power.
The
concept isn’t one you’d expect to naturally come from free-market
types: rather than opening up the field to all competitors, the ballot
initiative just carves out part of a captive market for solar
electricity.
You might not expect anyone from an explicitly
anti-cronyism movement like the Tea Party to demand that the state’s
constitution “encourage and promote” a specific, heavily subsidized
product, but the “Green Tea Coalition” makes enough soothing references
to “freedom” and “energy choice” that sympathetic reporters nod along.
The “Tea Party” faces of the coalition say they oppose all energy
subsidies, but they may never get around to answering how that
translates into narrow support for one technology that requires
dizzyingly higher subsidies per unit of energy (solar receives 27% of
total electrical production subsidies to produce 0.5% of total
electricity, according to brand-new numbers from the U.S. Energy Information Administration). Still, we can make some educated guesses.
When
a piece of legislation seems tailored to benefit a particular small
interest group, it isn’t an accident. Following the money, when
possible, will lead back to them. So they try to cover their tracks, but
sometimes you can pick up the trail.
Start with the “Tea” face of
the Coalition, Conservatives for Energy Freedom. That group’s Florida
Director is also chair of the group that collects signatures for the
initiative, Floridians for Solar Choice (FSC). FSC’s treasurer and registered agent, George Cavros, is an attorney at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), which also provides nearly all of FSC’s funding. So some conservatives are skeptical when SACE calls FSC a “grassroots citizens’ effort.”
And
when some of those conservatives start wondering whose cash could have
motivated SACE to take on this project, their top suspect is billionaire
Tom Steyer. Steyer has a financial stake in solar power, and his money
has flowed into organizations that have been preparing the political
battlefield for these kinds of initiatives for years. Campaign
donations, think tanks, foundation-funded advocacy—Steyer has found a
way to spend tens of millions of dollars on each of them in the last six
years.
Indeed, Steyer’s TomKat Charitable Trust had already funneled more than $3 million to the Energy Foundation between 2009 and 2013, and the Energy Foundation in turn has passed through $2.6 million in grants to SACE. So it’s cold comfort when SACE tells reporters that it hasn’t accepted money directly
from Steyer’s groups, and the lack of transparency in how money passes
through layers of foundations means we only have their word that his
fingerprints aren’t on it.
How about the other members of the
“solar choice” coalition? The Sierra Club acknowledges that it has
accepted donations directly from the TomKat Charitable Trust. The Green
Tea Coalition also touts that they have the support of the Christian
Coalition, which is reprising its role from the net neutrality fight as a
sock puppet for strange bedfellow with progressive activists, and it turns out the Christian Coalition has also been accepting a series of grants from the Energy Foundation, totaling more than $1 million, since 2012. Judging by their Form 990 returns, that is a huge fraction of their revenue.
Putting
a small number of conservative faces on heavily subsidized “green
energy” is not isolated to Florida. The Energy Foundation also provides
grants to the Wind Coalition and the Alliance for Solar Choice. The
former’s executive director was on the Advance Staff for the campaign of
George W. Bush, and the latter helped pay for TUSK in Arizona, a group
chaired by former Republican Congressman Barry Goldwater Jr. With
national-level money flowing to more regional and state groups, it’s a
tactic we should expect to see elsewhere.
These dots don’t all
connect neatly, but together they raise questions about the reliance of these superficially conservative groups on progressive donors who just
might not have conservatives’ best interests at heart. And it’s a story
worth tracking moving forward."
=====================
Georgia-based tea party leader and founder of Conservatives For Energy
Freedom said she'd be happy to take Tom Steyer's money:
3/10/15, "Conservative groups battle over solar in Florida," Huffington Post, Kate Sheppard
""If Tom Steyer or
anyone else wants to donate to help us open the market for solar and
push for free-market energy choice in Florida, I would be very happy to
accept their money," said Dooley." (near end of article)
=========================
"Tea Party Leader" says ballot measure would be "free market:"
1/27/15, "Floridians for Solar Choice Ballot Effort Launched by Tea Partiers, Conservative, & Liberals," Cynthia Shahan, planetsave.com
"“A free market that includes all energy sources is the best way to
power Florida,” said Debbie Dooley, Tea Party Leader and Founder of
Conservatives for Energy Freedom. “This ballot measure is an opportunity
for Floridians to make their voices heard. We need to stop the
unelected bureaucrats and government-created monopolies that threaten
our ability to choose how we power our homes and businesses.”"...
========================
Comment: National Tea Party groups were co-opted and sold out by their second day on the job in 2009. If you need money, green activist billionaires are around every corner. The "Green Tea Coalition" founder freely admits she'd take Steyer's money. The key word in the story is "tea." Without that word, the lady wouldn't be in the news. The ATM for the CO2 scare industry was embedded in the US Executive branch in 1990 (see below) before most people had ever heard of climate scientists.
--------------------------------
Added: Global CO2 scare cash machine was legally embedded in the US Executive branch in 1990:
11/16/1990, U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990
3/6/15, "Causes and consequences of the climate science boom," William Butos and Thomas McQuade
"1. The Government’s Role in Climate Science Funding...[is] embedded
in scores of agencies and programs scattered throughout the Executive
Branch of the US government. While such agency activities related to
climate science have received funding for many years as components of
their mission statements, the pursuit of an integrated national agenda
to study climate change and implement policy initiatives took a critical
step with passage of the Global Change Research Act of 1990.
This Act
established institutional structures operating out of the White House to
develop and oversee the implementation of a National Global Change
Research Plan and created the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP)
to coordinate the climate change research activities of Executive
Departments and agencies.[33] As
of 2014, the coordination of climate change-related activities resides
largely in the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy,
which houses several separate offices, including the offices of
Environment and Energy, Polar Sciences, Ocean Sciences, Clean Energy and
Materials R&D, Climate Adaptation and Ecosystems, National Climate
Assessment, and others. The Office of the President also maintains the
National Science and Technology Council, which oversees the Committee on
Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability and its Subcommittee
on Climate Change Research. The Subcommittee is charged with the
responsibility of planning and coordinating with the interagency USGCRP.
Also, the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy is housed within
the President’s Domestic Policy Council. While Congress authorizes
Executive branch budgets, the priorities these departments and agencies
follow are set by the White House. As expressed in various agency and
Executive Branch strategic plans, these efforts have been recently
organized around four components comprising (1) climate change research
and education, (2) emissions reduction through “clean” energy
technologies and investments, (3) adaptation to climate change, and (4)
international climate change leadership.[36]....By any of
these measures, the scale of climate science R&D has increased
substantially since 2001. Perhaps, though, the largest funding increases
have occurred in developing new technologies and tax subsidies. As can
be seen from Table 1, federal dollars to develop and implement “clean
energy technologies” have increased from $1.7 billion in 2001 to $5.8
billion in 2013, while energy tax subsidies have increased from zero in
2001 and 2002 to $13 billion in 2013, with the largest increases
happening since 2010. The impact on scientific research of government
funding is not just a matter of the amounts but also of the
concentration of research monies that arises from the focus a single
source can bring to bear on particular kinds of scientific research.
Government is that single source and has Big Player effects because it
has access to a deep pool of taxpayer (and, indeed, borrowed and
created) funds combined with regulatory and enforcement powers which
necessarily place it on a different footing from other players and
institutions. Notwithstanding the interplay of rival interests within
the government and the separation of powers among the different
branches, there is an important sense in which government’s inherent
need to act produces a particular set of decisions that fall within a
relatively narrow corridor of ends to which it can concentrate
substantial resources.
2. By any standards,
what we have documented here is a massive funding drive, highlighting
the patterns of climate science R&D as funded and directed only by
the Executive Branch and the various agencies that fall within its
purview.[40]
To put its magnitude into some context, the $9.3 billion funding
requested for climate science R&D in 2013 is about one-third of the
total amount appropriated for all 27 National Institutes of Health in
the same year,[41]
yet it is more than enough to sustain a science boom. Its directional
characteristic, concentrated as it has been on R&D premised on the
controversial issue of the actual sensitivity of climate to human-caused
emissions, has gone hand in hand with the IPCC’s expressions of
increasing confidence in the AGW hypothesis and increasingly shrill
claims of impending disaster.
3. The recent pattern of federal climate science funding, moving toward
emphasis on the development of technologies and their subsidization
through the tax system, suggests that climate change funding has become
more tightly connected to agencies like the Department of Energy, NASA,
the Department of Commerce (NOAA), EPA, and cross-cutting projects and
programs involving multiple agencies under integrating and coordinating
agencies, like the USGCRP, lodged within the Executive branch. The
allocations of budgets within these agencies are more directly
determined and implemented by Administration priorities and policies. We
note that the traditional role of NSF in supporting basic science based
on a system of merit awards provided (despite some clear imperfections)
certain advantages with regard to generating impartial science. In
contrast, even a casual perusal of current agency documents, such as The
National Science and Technology Council’s The National Global Change Research Plan 2012-2021, shows that those driving this movement make no pretense as to their premises and starting points.[39]
4. To be sure, the very opaqueness of these allocations and their
actual use only provides for “ball park” estimates. However, we believe
that the results presented in Table 3 come closer to a useful accounting
than what previously has been provided. We have combined data from
Leggett et al. (2013) and the AAAS Reports for Fiscal Years 2012 and
2013 (the only years for which the AAAS provides detailed budgetary data
for climate science R&D and climate-related funding). This
constrains Table 3 to including data only from 2010 through 2013. We
have adjusted budgetary data and categorized it in light of discussion
points 1-5 above. Note that the estimated aggregate expenditures for
climate science and climate-related funding (excluding tax subsidies)
from 2010-2013 in Table 3 are about twice that of the Leggett findings.
5.5 Funds administered by the Treasury Department in Table 2 are
credit lines and loans channeled through the World Bank earmarked for
international organizations to finance clean technologies and
sustainable practices; consequently such funds would also more
accurately be considered as climate-related sustainability and
adaptation....
8. This summary and the detail in Table 1, however, do not capture the
full scale of federal funding for climate science R&D. Two
complications must be considered to capture a more accurate estimate.
First, the entries in the first row of Table 1 for climate science only
refer to monies administered by the Executive branch via the office of
the USGCRP and does not include all climate-related R&D in the
federal budget. For example, the entry in Table 1 for the USGCRP in 2011
is just under $2.5 billion; yet the actual budget expenditures for
climate science-related R&D as calculated by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) total about $16.1
billion.[38]
In addition, since USGCRP funding is comprised of monies contributed
from the authorized budgets of the 13 participating departments and
agencies, a more accurate estimate of climate-related R&D requires
deducting USGCRP funding from the aggregated budgets of those 13, most
of which are included in Table 2.
9. Leggett et al. (2013) of the Congressional Research Service provides
a recent account of climate change funding based on data provided by
the White House Office of Management and Budget (see Table 1, below).
Total expenditures for federal funded climate change programs from
2001-2013 were $110.9 billion in current dollars and $120.2 billion in
2012 dollars. “Total budgetary impact” includes various tax provisions
and subsidies related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (which are
treated as “tax expenditures”) and shows total climate change
expenditures from 2001-2013 to be $145.3 billion in current dollars and
$155.4 billion in 2012 dollars.[37]
10. The USGCRP operates as a confederacy of the research components of
thirteen participating government agencies, each of which independently
designates funds in accordance with the objectives of the USGCRP; these
monies comprise the program budget of the USGCRP to fund agency
cross-cutting climate science R&D.[34]
The departments and agencies whose activities comprise the bulk of such
funding include independent agencies such as the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, Environmental
Protection Agency, US Agency for International Development, the
quasi-official Smithsonian Institute, and Executive Departments that
include Agriculture, Commerce (National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology), Energy,
Interior (the US Geological Survey and conservation initiatives),
State, and Treasury.[35]
11. The past 15 years have seen a sustained program of funding, largely from government or quasi-government entities.[31]
The funding efforts are spread across a bewildering array of sources
and buried in a labyrinth of programs, agency initiatives, interagency
activities, and Presidential Offices, but what they seem to have in
common is an adherence to the assumption that human activity is
primarily responsible for the warming observed in the latter part of the
20th century. Funding appears to be driving the science
rather than the other way around. And the extent of this funding appears
not to have been heretofore fully documented.[32]"...
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