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.
