Renewable Energy Agency Props Up Alarmist Panel Supporting Demands for Renewable Energy Agencies…
President Eisenhower presciently warned of a “scientific-technological elite” as a threat alongside the “military-industrial complex”: “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” In practice, government funding has underwritten something of a war on intellectual curiosity, if that curiosity threatens that federal funding.
This brings us to the vast and largely taxpayer-funded Climate Industrial Complex. That blob recently lashed out at the prospect of a “red team” review of climate projections, independent of federal government outfits. Those outfits both ritually prophesy, and existentially depend upon public acceptance of, looming catastrophic man-made global warming
Now we know that the proposed review, in the form of a Presidential Committee on Climate Security, is on hold at least until after the 2020 elections.
This is disappointing given the myriad reasons to demand such a review — beginning with each and every Obama regulatory overreach that depends on the regulatory Leviathan’s self-serving doomsday reports, and every Climate Kidz lawsuit seeking to disband with our separation of powers once and for all.
Now we learn of another reason, found in of all places the growing fad of “Green Banks”. These are not much more than slush funds to politically allocate billions of dollars propping up ‘investors’, who in turn are propping up the climate industry and its calls for more — you guessed it — Green Banks.
Green Banks happen to be the subject of ongoing investigative research project of Government Accountability & Oversight. GAO has studied public filings, emails and other public records to examine the leading “Green Bank”, one that public records also show is the model for a group of off-books staff being provided to activist governors by ‘progressive’ foundations with the goal of affording each willing governor his own Obama-style “green jobs” fund to distribute.
GAO plans to publish the first chapter in this story soon. Some background first.
Independent review of these climate proclamations was so terrifying because it would finally offer the long-eschewed adversarial process, involving actual subject matter experts not dependent on climate alarm for their prosperity or prestige. It would confront whether the federal climate blob is being straight with the public. That is, whether these outfits are, as they seem, merely enabling the climate industry of which they are part, with “official reports” declaring calamity unless we adopt a political agenda.
Consider the Fourth National Climate Assessment released in November 2018. This ritual shriek of terror was co-authored by government researchers, whose programs stay funded by grace of climate alarmism, and activists such as Union of Concerned Scientists’ Brenda Ekwurzel.
Yes, that UCS, which, public records reveal happens to be the driving force behind state attorneys general investigations of parties who have stood in the way of the “climate” agenda.
In other words, these “official reports” represent precisely what the term “industry science” connotes, with the industry being the climate industry, which we know is at minimum “over $1 a billion a year” industry. Meanwhile, politicians aspire to each having their own $1 billion “Green Bank.” Green Banks depend upon alarmist prognostication.
And now one of these Green Banks has taken a stake in producing more doomsday reports, by financing a panel that President Trump disbanded.
The Washington Examiner reported in an April item, “Born-again climate commission disbanded by Trump calls for new agency”. The article noted (emphases added):
A federal climate change advisory commission that President Trump disbanded early in his tenure has reconstituted itself to call Thursday for the creation of a climate agency outside of Washington to help states make scientifically-based decisions about global warming….
The advisory committee, comprising dozens of scientists, had reconvened with the help of the New York state government’s renewable energy agency — called the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Columbia University, and professional scientific organizations.
The report released Thursday is meant to provide the scientific foundation for states’ efforts in dealing with “the new normal” — which includes the effects of climate change on daily life, Richard Moss, the advisory committee’s team leader…
Translated, Trump axed an activist federal panel that had for years produced grist for the climate industry to push policies and litigation, but also supporting politicians distributing bags of money in a way reminiscent of President Obama’s “Green Jobs” schemes propping up renewables companies. “New York state government’s renewable energy agency” — NYSERDA, which depends upon climate alarm to skim hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers and ratepayers to be directed to political uses — reconstituted the panel, as the Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate Assessment.
Indeed, all of the parties reconvening this process have a stake in ensuring further alarm: Columbia University has numerous schools and dedicated centers feeding at the climate industry trough, from the home of climate activists led for years by James “Coal Cars = Auschwitz Cars” Hansen — to, naturally, its law school; the science professions have grown fat and increasingly dependent upon federal funding (there is a reason the American Association for the Advancement of Science chose Washington, DC for its headquarters).
As you might expect, GAO has found that NYSERDA is rife with apparent conflicts of interest. Add to those glaring conflicts its financing of an “independent” committee to advocate for more of what NYSERDA does. Which is funnel tax- and rate-payer dollars into green boondoggle after green boondoggle.