Monday, March 23, 2015

Activist green cash has patiently co-opted conservatives in Florida and around the country-Bryan Pick, American Spectator

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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."

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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)

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"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.”"...


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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. 

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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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