The Filthy Dirty World of the Big Green Grift

Two recent reads exemplify the dirty world of the Big Green Grift. One is Doug Sheridan’s take on the Texas Tumble into grid unreliability via corporatism wrought by the Lonestar State’s political establishment. The second is about a group I have written about numerous times over more than a decade. The Washington Free Beacon picks up on what it’s all about these days, which is ugly but misses a key point.

Sheridan’s LinkedIn post is worth reading in its entirety and follows (emphasis added):

It's no secret we're both flummoxed and infuriated by the decline of Texas' power grid over the past decade. So we're diving headfirst into the labyrinthine world of Texas energy politics to uncover how the state became a testing ground for unreliable renewables. We’ll report our findings here, and count on readers to help us get things right.

Our efforts began in the summer. They included everything from decoding the state's unclear lobbying reports to learning how to extract data from strangely huge state databases. None of it was easy.

The good news is we now have a framework for tracking money flows, legislative voting records and bill sponsorships. And that means we can better trace the players, events, and influences that led state politicians to so heavily back renewables.

It wasn’t inevitable Texas would become a global symbol for renewables. The seedlings planted two decades ago by former governors Bush and Perry bore more fruit than either likely imagined. They aimed for 5 GW, and later 10 GW, of renewable capacity (the total now approaches 70 GW). At the time, nat gas prices were at all-time highs. The belief was state support for renewable energy would reduce dependence on nat gas. It would also generate revenue in rural areas with declining agriculture. Well-intentioned central planning, Texas style.

Alas, once the ball got rolling, politicians didn’t stop. They enticed even more wind and solar development. Streamlined permitting, tax breaks, and school district benefits abounded in areas with wind and solar farms. Elected officials crowed about what they were doing for their districts and the state.

What’s not to love? Plenty, it turns out.

Taxpayers and ratepayers have certainly suffered. They've gotten higher electricity costs, more emergency alerts, and damaging power outages. The state’s school districts have even suffered. That's because when taxes are abated for one district, the state makes up the difference from a statewide pool of funds. The abatement decreases the amount available for other districts. Nice, huh?

The bigger story concerning Texas renewables is how few leaders seemingly ever considered the impact of growing renewable capacity on the grid. Texans have received no apologies for policies that now undermine dispatchable gas-fired power on the grid. The same is true for the trend of well-heeled businesses and residents contracting for or even generating their own "behind the meter" power. Average businesses and Texans are poised to shoulder a greater share of grid costs as the trend continues. State politicians seem not to care.

To Sum It Up: Clean energy activists laud the upsides of piling renewables on Texas' once-reliable grid. When examined closely, however, we believe the benefits pale compared to the downsides, which could last for decades. Stay tuned as we investigate these and other points... and share our findings.

What we see here is simply the unholy alliance found in all corporatism. Politicians discover they can get publicity and campaign donations by passing along largely hidden money to climate entrepreneurs who simply want to milk the ratepayers and taxpayers rather than engage in real capitalism. It's dirty and it's everywhere today.

There is another even dirtier side of it, though. That's when foreign nations get involved in promoting the schemes for their own benefit while simultaneously undermining our energy security in the process; a double whammy. Here is just a bit of the Free Beacon story to explain:

A climate nonprofit run by former Chinese Communist Party officials funneled millions of dollars to U.S. universities and left-wing groups to promote replacing fossil fuels with green energy, tax forms reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

The climate nonprofit, formally known as the Energy Foundation but which dubs itself "Energy Foundation China," wired grants to Harvard College, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Maryland to support research and education on building a "clean energy future" and advancing "low carbon cities." The Energy Foundation gave a total of $630,000 to the four universities in 2023. All four of those universities promote far-left climate policies.

The Energy Foundation also funneled another $1.5 million to the following left-wing climate nonprofits: the Rocky Mountain Institute, International Council on Clean Transportation, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, and Natural Resources Defense Council. Those groups all are dedicated to promoting the phase-out of fossil fuels and mass expansion of costly green energy alternatives.

The Chinese-tied organization's involvement in the American climate movement is indicative of how China seeks to influence the United States economy and weaken the billion-dollar fossil fuel sector. China stands to benefit from a global green transition—Chinese businesses dominate solar, wind, and electric vehicle supply chains while America dominates oil and gas production.

The story goes on to detail the nature and extent of Communist China in the Energy Foundation’s program. The CCP’s goals are clear; they want to weaken the U.S. by destroying our fossil fuel industry as the build coal plants at an astounding rate, and they want to sell us their subsidized green rope with which to hang ourselves.

This is all valuable information, but it misses a key element in what’s going on here. That is the involvement of the Energy Foundation chief funder here in the U.S., that being the Sea Change Foundation created by Nathaniel Simons and his wife. I wrote about it here in 2017, noting the following:

Politico is anything but an unbiased observer; hence its hyperbolic headlines and ledes but it does put out a lot of facts and if you’re patient enough to read beyond the 10th paragraph you often find them. A story the other day about the Sea Change Foundation and the possible role of the Russians in funding fractivism is no exception. There is headline suggesting the whole thing is nothing more than an attempt to conjure up a scandal, followed by the facts indicating there is almost certainly is one requiring investigation…

We’ve written about the Sea Change Foundation, the Simons family behind it, their hedge-fund renewables investment and their dark money connections many times (here and here, for example). Nat Simons (who is the Sea Change Foundation) and his father, Jim Simons [since deceased], are total corporatists, rent-seekers who farm the government for subsidies, favors and restrictions on their competitors. Like Tom Steyer, they make a great pretense of being folks who just care about climate-change, while pursuing special advantages for their corporate renewables investments and schemes.

The recent Politico story tends to confirm this with a Sierra Club quote about how they somehow know it’s not Russian money they’re getting but, rather, money from a private U.S. donor:

“We have confirmed that the origin of these funds is a private U.S. donor who cares about climate change and has invested in the work the Sierra Club does to tackle the climate crisis and advance the clean energy economy — not from Russia,” she said.

Just exactly how they know where Bermudian company Klein, Ltd. (the suspected conduit for Russian money) got the money it gave to the Sea Change Foundation that it, in turn, gave to the Sierra Club is never explained. Assuming it’s true, though, reveals exactly why the entire arrangement is simply wrong. Nobody, not Russians or U.S. donors, should be able to use a foreign entity to hide who they are when they get tax-exemption courtesy of U.S. taxpayers.

If this U.S. donor wanted to donate money to the Sea Change Foundation for supposedly charitable purposes, they should donate directly and not be able to pass the money through a foreign outfit that is not required to disclose its major donors to the IRS, which would be the case if the money went directly to the Sea Change Foundation. That the money was routed so circuitously doesn’t pass the smell test for legitimacy. It’s a tacit admission that something must be hidden; that there’s corporatism and corruption behind the curtain, not so much in the way of cares about climate change…

[T]he Energy Foundation is essentially an appendage of the Sea Change Foundation having received 45% of the latter’s “charitable” contributions during their latest fiscal year filing for the year ended July 31, 2016…

There’s also the fact the Sea Change Foundation is a private foundation, meaning it is legally not permitted to do any direct or grassroots lobbying. Earmarking donations for “opposition to fracking” would, therefore, be an admission the organization was almost certainly involved in trying to influence legislation, which is why the Sea Change Foundation, of course, lists the purpose of every single contribution it makes as “Mitigate Climate Change.”

It would be hard to develop a more meaningless description, which, obviously, is the intention. But, what exactly do the NRDC and Sierra Club, two recipients of Sea Change Foundation largesse, do to mitigate climate change? How is that they lower temperatures or help people to adapt? That’s what mitigate means, after all, doesn’t it?

They do precisely nothing, of course, other than oppose such things as fracking, which has done more to reduce carbon emissions than any single other measure taken by anyone. “Mitigate climate change,” is pure obfuscation; language to obscure the political activity and corporatism of the Simons family (and perhaps some Russians as well).

That political activity takes the form of very direct advocacy in the case of the NRDC and Sierra Club and more indirect activity in the case of the Energy Foundation, for example…

The Energy Foundation also funds Vote Solar, an overtly political group, the Clean Air Task Force, which is nothing but a propaganda machine and the Earth Island Institute, which serves to funnel money down to wholly radical fractivist groups such as Energy Justice Summer. Then, there are the standard fractivist outlets such as EarthJustice, Earthworks, Environment America and the Sustainable Markets Foundation, which got $925,000 to fund Fractivist Rasputin Jay Halfon and lend support to the extremist Beyond Extreme Energy.

This is how it all works as the Simons family, heavily invested in corrupt corporate solar tricks, throws money at one tax-exempt private foundation, which is no more than them and them alone, to give to another foundation that gives it to another, that gives to still another and so on. It is rampant abuse of the tax-exemption system for what are crony corporatist purposes. It continues and gets worse by the day because the IRS keeps letting them get away with it.

What starts out as “mitigate climate change” ends up funding fractivist disruptions of meetings, unruly fractivist protests and fractivist politics everywhere the eye can see. It’s all kill the competition and line the pockets of those hoping to swell and then catch a wave of government favors and subsidies for their own protected politically correct investments; all well hidden and disguised as noble environmental purposes.

This is the sort of thing that has been destroying America. It is deep-seated corruption at the hands of a plutocracy that manipulates and exploits everyone using tax-exemption as the grease to make the contraption work for them.

Yes, the Energy Foundation is one of the dirtiest outfits around and it is, for all intents and purposes, a tool of a corporatist solar promoter by the name of Nat Simons who seems to always end up on the wrong side of situations where both Russia and China are attempting to destroy our energy security.

And, little has changed since 2017 when I wrote the above. Nat Simons and wife used their private foundation to give the Energy Foundation 250 grants totaling over $171 million between 2009 and 2017, and here is an excerpt from the Sea Change Foundation 990 return for 2022 (latest available):

That’s $19.5 million to the Energy Foundation (over one-third of its contributions) and $1.3 million to Vote Solar. No politics? Yeah, right…

What a filthy dirty business green energy is!

#EnergyFoundation #SeaChangeFoundation #Texas #DougSheridan #Corporatism #DirtyBusiness #NatSimoms #China