We Told You It Was All About the Money, Not the Ideology

The bought and paid for AP surprisingly did a story yesterday confirming everything we’ve been saying for several years; namely, that the entire imaginary climate crisis is not primarily about ideology but. rather, money to be made by grifting. That is to say forget Greta and focus on who is enabling her. The story is a long and ugly one, but here are some key parts:

Executives, officials and major investors in First Solar, the largest domestic maker of solar panels, donated at least $2 million to Democrats in 2020, including $1.5 million to Biden’s successful bid for the White House. After he won, the company spent $2.8 million more lobbying his administration and Congress, records show — an effort that included high-level meetings with top administration officials.

The strategy was a dramatic departure from the Arizona-based company’s posture under then-President Donald Trump, whom corporate officials publicly called out as hostile toward renewable energy. It has also paid massive dividends as First Solar became perhaps the biggest beneficiary of an estimated $1 trillion in environmental spending enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act, a major piece of legislation Biden signed into law in 2022 after it cleared Congress solely with Democratic votes.

Since then, First Solar’s stock price has doubled and its profits have soared thanks to new federal subsidies that could be worth as much as $10 billion over a decade. The success has also delivered a massive windfall to a small group of Democratic donors who invested heavily in the company…

Founded in 1999 by a private equity group that included a Walmart fortune heir, First Solar went public in 2006, the same year former Vice President Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” helped raise consciousness about the threat of climate change. Company officials cultivated a constituency with Democrats during Barack Obama’s administration, which in turn subsidized their industry — and First Solar — through billions of dollars in government-backed loans…

The company will benefit from billions of dollars in lucrative tax credits for domestic clean energy manufacturers — a policy aimed at putting the U.S. on a more competitive footing with green energy giant China. Though intended to reward clean energy businesses, the credits can also be sold on the open market to companies that have little to do with fighting climate change.

Last December, First Solar agreed to sell roughly $650 million of these credits to a tech company — providing a massive influx of cash, courtesy of the U.S. government.

Investors in the company, including a handful of major Democratic donors, have also benefited as First Solar’s share price soars.

Farhad “Fred” Ebrahimi, co-founder of the software company Quark, was added to Forbes billionaires list in 2023 thanks to the skyrocketing value of his roughly 5% stake in First Solar, financial disclosures show. Ebrahimi, along with his wife and family, contributed at least $1 million to Biden’s 2020 election effort, according to campaign finance disclosures.

Lukas T. Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, held a 4.9% interest in the company, according to financial disclosures from 2020. Walton donated $360,000 to Biden’s 2020 campaign, as well as $100,000 to his 2021 inauguration, campaign finance records show…

Democratic megadonor Jim Simons, an enthusiastic backer of the party’s green energy efforts, gave $2.5 million to Schumer’s super PAC, which spends tens of millions of dollars each election season supporting Senate Democrats.

Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund founded by Simons, also started buying First Solar shares. The hedge fund purchased 60,000 shares between July, when Schumer was privately negotiating with Manchin, and September, when Biden held a celebration after signing the bill, financial filings show. The fund eventually increased its position to 1.5 million shares, which it sold in 2023 after the company’s stock price price shot up.

Simons, who died in May, was no ordinary donor. His family contributed $25 million to Democrats in 2022, records show.

Jim Simons was also the father of Nathaniel Simons, about whom we have written numerous times, including this from over eight years ago:

Back in August, 2013, I wrote a post for Energy In Depth “Secret Offshore Financing Behind Natural Gas Opposition,” which built off an article in the Washington Free Beacon about the wealthy Simons family and the way they have used off-shore dark money outfits to funnel money (possibly Russian money) to various fractivist entities, including everyone from the Clean Air Council to EarthJustice to the Sustainable Markets Foundation (a Park-Rockefeller operation). We’ve followed up several times to point the nefarious role of the Energy Foundation in all this, even pointing out a potential Russian money connection. New details have recently come out even more strongly suggesting this.

A December article in the Daily Caller, revisited the subject of a possible Russian money connection to US fractivist groups based on a new report entitled From Russia With Love? by the Environmental Policy Alliance. The story also included this video:

Readers can judge the report for themselves. It focuses on the Sea Change Foundation’s connections to Russian oligarchs and its donations to the Sierra Club, the NRDC and the League of Conservation Voters, with emphasis on the Sierra Club. That the Sierra Club is a money-grubbing outfit is well-documented, of course, and an earlier article in the Washington Times provides the possible motive for the Sea Change Foundation (created and funded by hedge fund billionaire Nathaniel Simons) to be involved in such dark money deals:

In a new report, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute reveals that a number of environmental activists, including billionaires Nathaniel Simons, Roger Sant and Michael Bloomberg, benefit richly from their hefty donations to the Sierra Club.

Mr. Simons, a hedge fund baron worth an estimated $12 billion, has donated more than $14 million to the Sierra Club since 2009. Those contributions have largely been earmarked for campaigns to “educate the public about clean energy.” The donations have likely proven quite worthwhile to Mr. Simons. According to Fortune magazine, at the same time he was underwriting the Sierra Club’s efforts to promote renewables, Mr. Simons was quietly creating a clean-tech venture fund that invests in clean energy.

Simons used the Sea Change Foundation as his vehicle for funding the Sierra Club and he also apparently has the Russian money connections to bring those resources into the equation as well; both he and his connections have a mutual interest in delaying or killing fracking. And, it’s not just the Sierra Club that’s getting the money.

When I wrote that post for Energy In Depth back in 2013, in fact, I included three tables demonstrating how Simons was funneling money to big fractivist groups; directly through the Sea Change Foundation and indirectly through the Energy Foundation, its biggest grantee. Sea Change gave out grants totaling $49,105,535 to 27 organizations in 2013 (most recent year available), including numerous grants summing to $14,366,668 to the Energy Foundation and another $6,000,000 to the Partnership Project (a collaborative of several environmental groups) who, in turn, passed out more money to the same groups. Here’s how it stacked up for 2013:

We see the Sierra Club did get a big piece of change, but so did the NRDC and the League of Conservation Voters and the last two are both essentially Rockefeller family created organizations that continue to be heavily influenced by the family. Interestingly, as my Energy In Depth post noted, the Energy Foundation has also donated to the Rockefeller Family Fund and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, both of whom also support numerous fractivist groups, including many of the same players. It’s a tangled web of interconnected organizations not unlike the Standard Oil empire from which so much of the other fractivist money comes, making it nearly impossible to tell who the original sources are, which is so, so convenient, of course.

Obviously, the use of NGOs by the Simons family to grease the skids for green grifting has only continued and expanded as the AP story shows us. The grifters are paying out millions to Biden and other Democrats and getting back billions in return. This is the real climate story. Why is AP suddenly showing interest in it? Could it be that the AP, like some other media outlets, have gotten the word from deep state and Democrat mega-funders that this is the time to give Joe Biden a shove off the Democrat ticket? We don’t know, but these kinds of stories are never an accident either.

#AP #FirstSolar #Biden #Democrats #Grift #Climate #Simons