Government Accountability & Oversight has filed suit against the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) for its failure to release records about — recent headlines affirm — yet another federal government agency failing to engage in its core responsibilities or competencies in favor of politicization.
“Watch the theme of “environmental justice”- it will subsume much policy orientation going forward”
GAO readers may have seen this recent item about the New Green Blob that’s eating the Old Blob, and the bitter power struggles along the way, in keeping with Sayre’s Law (though admittedly the number of dollars being redistributed is so high).
Now we were reminded of another Biden Transition-era email from a self-proclaimed insider telling an incoming climate apparat that this was the plan.
Old Westerns remind us what happens when it comes time to split up the loot
Recent coverage of “environmental justice” money being thrown around (a billion here and a billion there, pretty soon…)
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reminded GAO of some transition-era emails — including from a recent Biden White House promotion (and, speaking of hijacking agendas and authorities) — suggesting that this funding spigot/machine has even displaced the green establishment in terms of priorities. The same way “climate” consumed traditional (and of course any actual) environmentalism because money, the EJ industry is displacing old-line greens.
Mary of course is Democrat Godmother of the Green Bureaucracy Mary Nichols. Keeping with the theme of just how fast things change when there’s this much cash and power at stake, Ms. Nichols is more recently famous for explaining, at the Rockefeller family mansion, natch, that that other Dem luminary Ernest Moniz had “not been well-managed”, having failed to keep current with updates to the liturgy and claiming that natural gas still is acceptable as a “bridge fuel” to the elusive wind- and solar-powered nirvana.
We don’ need no stinking SCOTUS opinions?
The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has announced a Wednesday confirmation hearing for former Obama Environmental Protection Agency climate guru Joe Goffman to be Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation at the EPA. Goffman has served in an acting capacity or otherwise in-waiting since joining the Biden transition team, but this affair had previously succumbed to postponements due to Democratic members failing to show.
Goffman is boasted of in GreenWorld as being the EPA’s “Law Whisperer”, teaching old laws new tricks, as Energy Policy Advocates explained in its amicus brief in State of New York et al. v. (US) EPA. That brief laid out what open records productions show about how progressive state attorneys general offices, led by New York’s, worked with activists to craft a plan to impose the “climate” agenda through the Clean Air Act, somehow. To do so they turned to a network of former EPA employees cum outside activists, having been referred to them following NY OAG’s consultations on the plan with none other than Joe Goffman. Who now awaits confirmation to a position where he gets to decide whether he and his allies pull it off.
No, he hasn’t recused from New York, or related matters. More on that strange state of affairs momentarily. First, consider the further confounding fact that, subsequent to those machinations, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion calling a halt to “law whispering”. In fact, SCOTUS ruled specifically in the context of using the Clean Air Act to impose a climate agenda (indeed, a plan crafted by Mr. Goffman). Which seems relevant, what with more of the same being the very reason for bringing in the Law Whisperer.
Then there is that State of New York case. GAO readers may recall that this is about what the Wall Street Journal editorial page called “Biden’s BackDoor Climate Plan”, of effectively imposing a greenhouse gas rationing scheme through Clean Air Act provisions never enacted for such a task. Anyone who sees the emails and attachments reflecting the progression of discussions — the “pretextual pas de deux” — preceding the January 20, 2021 filing of State of New York et al. will wonder why Mr. Goffman did not recuse from EPA’s deliberations over that now-exposed stab at a sue-and-settle by the party he consulted with, or from deliberations over how to use other provisions of the Clean Air Act to force “climate” rules into place.
The short answer is because he did not disclose his consultation with the AGs (New York’s OAG). Well.
That’s bad. Are things actually worse? After all, in West Virginia v. EPA the Supreme Court called a halt to “law whispering”, or let’s pretend the law really lets us do this thing Congress keeps refusing to authorize us to do. And as this PowerPoint — the latest of several iterations or redacted release from USEPA in FOIA litigation also brought by Energy Policy Advocates — makes quite clear, Mr. Goffman came into the administration raring to go with the whole teach the Clean Air Act new tricks thing, as surely was the point.
It sets forth several of those old laws the Biden EPA under Mr. Goffman intends to use to impose the climate agenda. Post West Virginia, that would mean, again, congressional intent be damned.
So, will EPW members ask, is it SCOTUS be damned, as well? West Virginia v. EPA seems to have removed the rationale for bringing Mr. Goffman in, to craft “Biden’s BackDoor Climate Plan“. Which is not a bar to his confirmation, but certainly something to press him on and be wary of (now, the failure to recuse seems to be a different kettle of fish). But, has this attorney been chastened by SCOTUS on his signature move, in a historic smackdown? Or has the activist ideologue won out?
As EPA notes in seeking to get this PowerPoint further unredacted — given there is de minimis foreseeable harm to the Agency in releasing what are now mostly if not all pipe dreams, if expensive ones to the taxpayer (and the economy, in the interim) were EPA appointees to keep bad habits alive until struck down again:
[USEPA] withholds, through redactions of 8 pages of a PowerPoint presentation titled “Power Sector Strategy [on] Climate, Public Health [and] Environmental Justice,” setting forth “proposed strategies” to impose that agenda (Defendant’s Statements of Material Undisputed Facts, ECF No. 16-2, ¶¶ 24-32), through “regulating and reducing power sector pollution” (Shoaff Declaration, Exhibit A, p. 20). As the audience, the White House Climate Office, affirms, this is a February 4, 2021, presentation about using the Clean Air Act (slides 6 – 11) and other statutory authorities implemented by the Agency to impose a “climate” agenda, to restrict the use of certain fuels through air emission and solid waste regulatory regimes.
In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, 597 U.S. ___ (2022), decided June 30, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Agency’s attempt to regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs), specifically carbon dioxide (CO2), under the Clean Air Act’s (CAA) Section 111, “to implement the needed shift in generation to cleaner sources” by using the CAA in a way that “would implement a sectorwide shift in electricity production from coal to natural gas and renewables.” Id. This regulation, known as the “Clean Power Plan,” was one of several Agency attempts in recent years to deploy CAA to restrict GHGs, particularly CO2, by those described outcomes, none of which efforts passed judicial muster.[1] As the Court noted, in striking down EPA’s effort to do so through §111, “Prior to the Clean Power Plan, EPA had used Section 111(d) only a handful of times since its enactment in 1970.” Id. (EPA cites and redacts its discussion of using §111(d) to restrict GHGs on slide 8).
As noted by the Court in West Virginia, there “EPA claimed to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute designed as a gap filler. That discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined to enact itself.” Id. The Court again rejected EPA’s claim to possess heretofore unknown authority to impose this agenda in obscure Clean Air Act provisions. Notably, to date, in addition to the redacted material addressing precisely this use of the CAA on slide 8, the other provisions and programs cited in the redacted slides/pages at issue — e.g., effluent Non-attainment provisions (slide 7), air toxics standards (e.g., MATS Rule)(slide 6) Regional Haze (a visibility program[2]) — also have never been discovered to provide EPA the authority to impose this agenda.
Here’s to a meaningful discussion tomorrow over West Virginia and this signature approach of claiming to find elephants in mouse holes, as Justice Scalia first put it, so to conjure an ideological agenda into place regardless of actual congressional grants of authority. Which might reasonably begin with learning why in the world Mr. Goffman never disclosed or recused from these matters in the first place, starting with State of New York.
[1] See, “And this Court doubts that “Congress. . . intended to delegate . . . decision[s] of such economic and political significance,” i.e., how much coal-based generation there should be over the coming decades, to any administrative agency.” West Virginia at 5-6. See West Virginia v. EPA, generally.
[2] “The Regional Haze Rule calls for state and federal agencies to work together to improve visibility in 156 national parks and wilderness areas”. https://www.epa.gov/visibility/regional-haze-program
UPDATE: Here are some relevant filings in Energy Policy Advocates’s effort to get this pre-West Virginia v. EPA roadmap out for the post-West Virginia world to see. Keep in mind the effluent, coal ash, MATS, ozone, and yes even regional haze (visibility) proposals being laid out by the Law Whisperer placed in the Air Office to push climate are to the Climate Office. And no, the Air Office doesn’t administer effluent limitation or RCRA regimes any more than a visibility or the other programs were enacted as programs to force “generation shifting”. These are all “Biden’s Back Door Climate Plans”. Plaintiff’s Amended Statement of Material Facts, Plaintiff’s Opposition to Summary Judgment, Declaration of John Shoaff, EPA’s Vaughn Index.
The Washington Times has a rather substantial exclusive up this morning, “Green groups, government officials meet secretly to plot end of gas stoves and appliances”. The piece keys off of the very real issue of using the state to ban gas stoves, expanding across the country and which recently stumbled onto the national stage with a clumsily half-baked “reveal” in a Bloomberg interview by CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka, Jr.
The agenda is laid out in notes obtained in late 2020 from a two-day, July 2019 meeting hosted by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (“RBF”) at the Rockefeller family mansion at Pocantico, New York, styled “Accelerating State Action on Climate Change.”
The meeting’s attendee list is below. The notetakers were Carla Frisch of the activist group/consultancy which is the public face behind the stove-ban campaign, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), and an official from Tom Steyer’s Energy Foundation, Katie McCormack, who circulated an oftentimes verbatim, typewritten set. These records were obtained by Energy Policy Advocates.
These notes create a “me or your lying eyes?” problem for the hapless cleanup crew tasked with dismissing Trumka’s scandalously candid boast as a “culture war”: conjured by others, and from nothing. Insert “gaslighting” pun here.
For example, these notes confess to the plan, e.g., as summarized by RDF’s Michael Northrup,
** States need a road map for how to get off natural gas (Katie Dykes)
** There’s an opportunity to understand all the rules and incentives that preference gas and unwind them
** Buildings may be the best first target for moving beyond gas
The individual tasked with managing the issue for Team Rockefeller, Commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy & Environmental Protection (DEEP) Dykes, is recorded in the notes as admitting nonetheless that “gas keeps prices down while building more expensive RE” (renewable energy).
Further damning, the “problem” for the nannies, as New Mexico’s Energy Secretary sees it, is the state’s booming oil & gas production.
Readers can judge which time these officials and activists are telling the truth: among themselves and their donors at the Rockefeller mansion as written in their own hand, or in their public denials of the obvious?
One of the more amusing items Ms. Frisch found worthy of documenting was a discussion apparently complaining that “Ernie Moniz saying gas is a bridge fuel…”, about which outrage California regulator Mary Nichols commented, “Moniz has not been well managed.”
Some other color from the meeting fyi:
RBF housed the public employees at Pocantico, flying them there by running the money through the Georgetown Climate Center — a Georgetown Law School vehicle that runs climate campaigns for donors and which, for tax purposes, is simply the 501c3 University.
Host and RBF President Michael Northrop emailed one official that the Rockefellers keep the air conditioning on at a level in which one doesn’t wear short sleeves. There is some irony here given the agenda of making energy less abundant and more expensive.
Emails between RBF and the Center for a New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, run by former Colorado Democratic Governor Bill Ritter and now “new energy economy” advocate, reveals concern that these notes would find their way to someone like Energy Policy Advocates. For example, RBF raised the prospect of mailing the notes instead of email. Ritter cited to an EPA request they had learned about from Sarah Cottrell Propst, Cabinet Secretary of New Mexico’s Energy, Minerals, & Natural Resources Department.
Another, possibly more thoughtful correspondent suggested that “Snail mail is probably subject to open records too, no?” Yes.
The indispensable transparency-in-government group Energy Policy Advocates has provided GAO a review of record productions from FOIA litigation with the Securities & Exchange Commission, including specifically from calendars of Chairman Gary Gensler and then-Commissioner Allison Herren Lee.
Between the near-obsession with advancing the “ESG” and “Climate Risk Disclosure” agenda which these reveal, and emerging information about an apparent revolving door example that’s ostentatious even by Washington standards, GAO feels bold to say that an inquiry into the Securities & Exchange Commission’s seemingly disproportionate focus on CRD and ESG, and its execution of this agenda, is warranted.
Factors includes:
Regarding the latter, raising possible conflicts and undue influence issues re the climate risk disclosure rule, “Kristina Wyatt left the SEC [in February 2022] to join Persefoni, a climate management and accounting platform, as its deputy general counsel and senior vice president for global regulatory climate disclosure. Wyatt was serving as senior counsel for climate and ESG to the director of the Division of Corporation Finance at the SEC — she is steeped in the processes and decision-making that has underpinned this proposed ruling.”
The CRD rule public comment docket shows that Persefoni, a little-known but well-funded startup, held a disproportionate number of meetings with SEC staff compared to other advocates. It seems most likely that Persefoni was pushing its methodology for claiming the climate rule’s cost, given that the SEC has been unable to provide any methodology or citation for its lowballed cost of compliance estimate for CRD, and the only figure that comes close to the SEC’s comes from a survey jointly commissioned by Ceres, ERM and Persefoni.
The sheer volume of senior staff time dedicated to this issue, including canoodling with activists, is troubling. That this is all in pursuit of a political agenda item demanded by investors, yes — ideologically activist investors, including obvious rent-seekers — is another story entirely.
Each of these AHL items is distinct, btw
Energy Policy Advocates’ FOIA litigation with SEC continues on several fronts — one matter has revealed a four-alarm fire at the Biden White House when SEC passed along a FOIA request for correspondence between the two, “Importance: High”, to which the White House replied, “Has this production been flagged for OMB, CEQ and the WH Military Office?”. Expect more calendars, other documents and, ultimately, removal of certain redactions in coming weeks and months. GAO will stay on top of these important developments and this critical issue.
Readers may recall the recent revelation courtesy of the indispensable Energy Policy Advocates showing the Securities and Exchange Commission staff coordinating with the White House on the SEC’s monumental (and potentially monumentally disastrous) “climate risk disclosure” rule advanced at the request of and following a massive campaign financed by a “green” investor.
Now come a few more calendar entries that show the SEC staff-White House staff coordination came after principal-to-principal meetings between Chairman Gary Gensler and the White House Climate Office.
Over to you, oversight.
Like FERC, another ‘independent agency’ in fact taking White House direction
This is what a “Whole of government approach” to imposing an ideological agenda looks like
For those who haven’t followed the Institute for Energy Research’s revelations about the ‘independent commission’ Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), you should. See e.g., “Richard Glick’s White House Chats,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2022; Daniel Moore, “Threat of Summer Blackouts Looms Over FERC Chair’s Renomination,” Bloomberg.com, July 12, 2022; Catherine Morehouse, “GOP Probes FERC Chair Glick meetings with White House,” Politico, June 29, 2022 (IER’s website with the transparency campaigns records is here).
Courtesy of Energy Policy Advocates (EPA), we now see there is something of a pattern underway, and FERC Chair Glick’s White House Climate Office chats on that Commission weighing in and doing its part on the “whole of government approach” to ‘climate’ weren’t unique: documents just released in an Energy Policy Advocates v SEC FOIA case shows that SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s team also coordinated with the White House on their mammoth overreach, the highly controversial (and concerning) “climate risk disclosure” rule.
Email and scheduling traffic are unambiguous on this score. A few samples:
And, as the SEC’s production cover letter shows, SEC also is withholding 170 pages of EOP correspondence as “deliberative” (or, in the alternative, b6, “personnel file-type” information. Mmm, yes.).
“Independent agency” apparently means different things to different people. But the position the SEC have staked out is that the White House had a formal role in the SEC’s development of its CRD rule. Wut.
Also, GAO understands that the SEC’s lawyers have stated in meet-and-confers and even in status reports filed with the court that their delay in processing Energy Policy Advocates’ FOIAs was because they had to consult with the White House on what they should release or withhold.
So, last week EPA filed yet another suit for SEC’s correspondence consulting with the White House on the FOIAs. Clearly another one to watch.
Government transparency group Energy Policy Advocates (EPA) filed suit on Thursday against the Biden White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy’s refusal to produce correspondence pertaining to one of an increasing number of initiatives to combat opposition to the administration’s political agenda as “disinformation.”
Specifically, EPA argued:
“The request sought certain described correspondence of two named officials, Eric Lander and Jane Lubchenco, over an eight-week period of time, on any email account used at any time for work-related correspondence, that was sent to one or more of six or five named outside parties, respectively. This request pertained to an OSTP “event on countering climate change denial and delay” in which the Office brought in political activists to discuss, e.g., social science which might explain political opposition to their demands. See, e.g., Maxine Joselow, “White House schedules first event on countering climate change denial and delay,” Washington Post, February 24, 2022. …
The requested records will inform the public of high-profile ethics revelations at OSTP and media coverage thereof, and also the genesis of a tendentious event and campaign out of OSTP. The described meeting seeking to counter political opposition, one of many Biden administration initiatives seeking to do so by styling opposition as “disinformation” (“deliberate disinformation campaigns that are as insidious as they are invidious”, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/02/25/readout-of-white-house-climate-science-roundtable-on-countering-delayism-and-communicating-the-urgency-of-climate-action/), was the subject of substantial national and international media coverage.
The public deserves to know, without further delay, the genesis of the aforementioned tendentious effort.”
EPA’s complaint also noted that the group sought the described emails with outside activists on any email account, citing:
“in this request that one of the two officials, Ms. Lubchenco, had been shown during a prior stint as a political appointee in a different agency during a previous administration to have continued to use her previous employer’s “.edu” email account for official federal work-related correspondence, and also detailed Defendant’s own history, during that same administration, of employees having been found to engage in the practice of using non-official email accounts for work-related correspondence.”
More documents for the shocked-but-not-surprised department have come to us courtesy of government-transparency group Energy Policy Advocates (EPA), obtained in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation with the Biden Administration Treasury Department.
These records were produced because they include certain phrases relating to the “climate” agenda (and/or pressure groups that love it), such as “ESG”, “climate risk”, “climate-related financial disclosures”, “exposure to climate related risks”, and “social cost of carbon”.
EPA-obtained docs previously showed that the Biden Treasury Department’s talking point to support higher tax rates — “race to the bottom” — was rolled out in coordination with a Washington Post writer. (Recently unredacted emails also show that Treasury overwithholds to keep embarrassing but plainly and purely factual information about such machinations from the public; but they’re clinging like grim death to the ‘RTTB’ redactions on just this one.)
Now take a gander at what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin and her team found to be appropriate briefing materials for a July hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government:
It is unclear whether the “20210622 Senate FSGG Polling Doc” was provided to the Administration by the Committee, or obtained by the Administration for the hearing (either way: on whose dime?). Regardless, the polling information is withheld in full as “deliberative process materials” (🙄). That’s a shame because the contents must be fascinating.
Having taken their eyes off the ball, the administration’s polling numbers on handling the economy make even more sense after reading this. That they are seemingly monomaniacally focused on the spin over the substance — i.e., polling — and this is the result only makes one truly wonder about the competence of those at the federal till(er).
