Fool Me Twice Read online

  “We continue to work with some colleagues inside the (Obama) administration, as well as continuing to push for bold action from the outside,” Becker said at the time, adding that the White House “adopted quite a few of our recommendations or variations of them.”

  Last January, PCAP released an extensive new list of recommendations for the White House in a seventy-five-page paper entitled, “Building the Obama Administration’s Climate Legacy.”6

  Foremost among PCAP’s recommendations is that the Department of Energy (DOE) should join three other Federal agencies—the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Department of Transportation (DOT), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—in funding what is essentially a progressive slush fund called the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. The Partnership blandly proclaims it aims to “help communities nationwide improve access to affordable housing, increase transportation options, and lower transportation costs while protecting the environment.”7

  The Partnership has already granted over $409 million in financing to support what it calls “livability investments” in over two-hundred communities across the country. Additionally, the Partnership’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities oversees two grant programs established by the Livable Communities Act. One grant program makes $2.2 billion available for communities to build and improve affordable housing, strengthen public transportation, promote transit-oriented development, and redevelop brownfield sites. A second grant program provides $500 million to support comprehensive regional planning that recognizes the interconnectedness of transportation, housing, community and economic development, and environmental sustainability.8

  If Obama is reelected, progressive plans backed up by proposed legislation aim for an immediate and massive increase in federal funding for domestic “green” projects. A seminal November 2010 report by the de facto policy nerve center of the Obama White House, the Center for American Progress, titled “Cutting the Cost of Clean Energy 1.0,” recommends a de facto federal “green bank” for the sole purpose of loaning or granting public funds to so-called clean energy companies.9

  The report calls for a new “Energy Independence Trust,” which could “borrow from the federal treasury to provide low-cost financing to private-sector investments in clean energy.” Continues the CAP paper:

  Our proposed Energy Independence Trust would hold sufficient reserves to protect the Treasury from loan losses, and would be able to offer a variety of debt- and equity-based financial instruments, loan guarantees, and tax incentives to draw a wave of private capital into the clean energy sector.

  The policy proposals outlined in this paper represent key elements of a strategy to begin immediately rebuilding the U.S. economy on a foundation of clean and efficient energy.

  The program for rebuilding the U.S. economy using clean energy as an impractical and unworkable “foundation” is telling. Written a full fourteen months before Obama’s most recent State of the Union, the paper proposes exactly what the president called for in his SOTU.

  This should not surprise readers of our previous books in which we showed how proposals by progressive think tanks can incubate for years, even decades, as the policies are recrafted and perfected, with activists waiting for the right opportunity to foster a particular policy, such as health care or immigration reform, on the American public.

  The direct links between the seven authors of CAP’s Energy Trust report and the Obama administration leave little to the imagination about how the progressive think tank’s recommendations become Obama’s policies. One author, senior CAP Fellow Bracken Hendricks, served as a policy advisor to President Clinton’s Global Initiative organization as well as to Obama’s presidential campaign and 2009 White House transition team. Hendricks is also a founder and the first executive director of the Apollo Alliance, which reportedly helped craft key portions of Obama’s 2009 stimulus. Last year, after a slew of negative publicity about the group, Apollo changed its name to the BlueGreen Alliance. Van Jones serves on Apollo’s board. The group is funded by the George Soros–financed radical clearinghouse, the Tides Center. Energy Trust report authors Ken Berlin and Alex Kragie, meanwhile, also served on Obama’s White House transition, after Kragie served as a regional field director on the Obama presidential campaign in 2008.

  All CAP reports must be taken seriously, as they have the strong potential to shape Obama’s presidential agenda. The U.S. House of Representatives has already attempted to translate CAP’s “green bank” program into reality. The American-Made Energy Act of 2011, sponsored by Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR), seeks to establish an Energy Trust Fund for “alternative and renewable energy incentives and projects (e.g., wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal resources, waste to energy, hydropower, nuclear power, coal to liquid technology, compressed natural gas, and liquified natural gas).”10 This legislation comes right out of the CAP playbook, with Obama clearly in support.

  That the CAP saw Obama’s State of the Union as the public launching pad for its own energy agenda was declared by the progressive group itself. Writing on their website, CAP’s vice president for energy policy, Kate Gordon, posted a piece called “Manufacturing America’s Energy Future: Enacting President Obama’s Blueprint Means Sustained Economic Growth.” In the article, Gordon fawned over virtually every aspect of Obama’s speech dealing with clean energy, while proclaiming the president’s plan crucial to a clean energy future.11

  Other legislation circulating in hopes of attracting support during a second Obama term calls for every sort of green scheme funding. A sampling includes sections of the Make It in America Act of 2011, to be discussed at length elsewhere in this book, as representing the mainstay of Obama’s second-term economic policies. The Act calls for the manufacture of “renewable energy systems” costing billions spent on “clean technology.” It authorizes federal funds to states for “green technologies that are 100% manufactured in the United States from articles, materials, or supplies that are 100% grown, produced, or manufactured in the United States.”12 Then there is the Solar Energy Regulatory Relief Act of 2011 (SERRA), introduced December 14, 2011, by Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-CA). SERRA calls for a federally funded program to provide competitive grants or challenge grants, or both, to local governments that have adopted or offer a commitment to adopt solar-friendly communities.13

  SHUTTING UP TALK RADIO

  Underlying Obama’s environmental agenda is the highly questionable theory of global warming, which took a serious hit from the release in November 2009 of thousands of e-mails and other documents from the UK’s University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The e-mail bombshell revealed a conspiracy to suppress massive amounts of research that refuted, or at least disputed, the basic science underlying global warming theory. Some climate researchers had failed to share their contrary data with fellow scientists. Some conspired to falsify data crucial to the global warming consensus of international bodies, while others sought to keep researchers with dissenting views from publishing in leading scientific journals.14

  Apparently, those helping to craft Obama’s policies are so concerned the public might also question global warming theory that they want to silence the theory’s critics in the public media. Case in point is the earlier referenced 2011 Presidential Climate Action Project report, which outrageously recommends that Obama reinstate the anti–free speech Fairness Doctrine in order to shut up some of global warming theory’s most effective challengers. In one of its first recommendations, the PCAP report states:

  National discourse today is tainted—and in some cases poisoned—by unbalanced ideological use of the public airwaves … To improve and better inform public discourse, it is time for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine.

  The Fairness Doctrine—rescinded under President Reagan between 1985 and 1987—was a legacy of the Telecommunications Act of 1934, which had also created the Federal Communications Commission. In an age before
broadcast television, not to mention cable TV, satellite radio, the Internet, and the explosion of twenty-first-century media services, the doctrine required that holders of the relatively few radio broadcast licenses treat “controversial issues of public importance” in a “balanced” manner, giving equal time to both sides. Thus, no single station could, upon threat of losing its license, advocate principally for one point of view. Critics had long attacked the doctrine as an infringement on First Amendment rights, but with the explosion of new and diverse media sources in the mid-1980s, it was widely acknowledged to be obsolete.

  But President Obama’s advisory commission, it seems, cannot stomach the public raising questions about the “science” underlying global warming theory and the entire green agenda. Never mind the stunning revelation that much of the so-called settled science is, in fact, questionable, and that certain politically motivated scientists conspired, with evident success, to suppress that knowledge. For PCAP, the public, along with dissenting scientists, simply have no right to air such questions—not even Climate Research Unit director Prof. Philip Jones, who publicly conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now—implying that global warming, if it is in fact occurring, may not be man-made at all. Jones said, for example, that for the fifteen years preceding 2009 there had been no “statistically significant” warming, although he qualified this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.15

  Perhaps we should all just ignore the avalanche of news stories suggesting global warning “catastrophes” were really anything but. Central to the theory espoused by the global warming alarmists led by former senator Al Gore is that the oceans are rising due to the melting of ice caps and that soon the seas will be flooding thousands of miles of coastal lands around the globe. If CPAC has its way, we should never know about an April 2009 study that observed that ice is actually expanding in much of Antarctica.16 The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicated there was no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica (although experts stated they were concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast). Antarctica contains 90 percent of the earth’s ice and 80 percent of its fresh water.

  Nor should we be permitted to know of scientific papers that found sea levels worldwide weren’t rising. In one paper presented at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change (2009), Nils-Axel Morner, former emeritus head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at the prestigious Stockholm University in Sweden, revealed that observational records from South Asia and the Pacific—including the Maldives, Bangladesh, India, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu—show the sea level not to be rising at all. Morner concluded there is no “alarming sea level rise” across the globe. His paper says a United Nations report warning of coastal cities being deluged by rising waters from melting polar ice caps “is utterly wrong.” Profs. Manfred Wenzel and Jens Schröte, writing in the Journal of Geophysical Research, came to similar conclusions.17

  The PCAP is not alone in calling for the silencing of global warming theory’s critics. In a remarkable display of paranoia, just prior to his appointment as President Obama’s so-called Regulatory Czar in 2009, Cass Sunstein wrote a lengthy academic paper suggesting the government should “infiltrate” social network websites, chat rooms and message boards. Such “cognitive infiltration,” Sunstein argued, should be used to enforce a U.S. government ban on “conspiracy theorizing.”18 Sunstein’s official title—perhaps invented by a latter-day Orwell or Kafka—is Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Among the beliefs Sunstein classified in his paper as a “conspiracy theory” is advocacy that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.

  AUTHOR OF “STIMULUS” TIED TO COMPANIES FUNDED BY BILL

  Easily overlooked in the morass of Obama’s second-term drive for a radical increase in federal spending on “clean energy” is not simply the utter incompetence of some of the major recipients of “green stimulus” funds but also the rank corruption intrinsic to those hand-outs, as Washington cronyism is routinely ignored by the mainstream news media.

  For starters there’s BrightSource Energy, a solar energy company attempting to build the world’s largest solar power plant amid concerns such a venture might be too risky an investment for the federal government. So BrightSource received a $1.37 billion federal loan guarantee, the largest the Department of Energy has ever given for a solar power project.19 The loan guarantee is for the construction of a gigantic California desert solar plant known as the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, featuring mirrors that reflect sunlight towards a massive central tower that is thereby heated to produce steam, spinning turbines that, in turn, produce electricity.20

  BrightSource projects it will produce enough power to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of Californians. During a national address last October, Obama mentioned the possible benefits of BrightSource Energy’s “revolutionary new type of solar power plant.” But some, including advocates for green power, have questioned whether the massive solar plant will actually work. The Bay Citizen quoted Michael Boyd, president of the nonprofit Californians for Renewable Energy, as saying there is “no evidence” BrightSource’s project will succeed. Boyd also complained that most of the equipment used at the plant would be manufactured in China and Germany. “Stimulus money isn’t going to jobs here in the U.S. It’s going to jobs overseas,” he said. Boyd’s group in 2010 reportedly filed an administrative complaint seeking to block the U.S. loan guarantee, worrying that the solar project “could have the unintended consequences of killing innovation if these projects fail.” But in a recent briefing, BrightSource CEO John Woolard exuded confidence his plant would significantly lower energy costs.21

  Besides the question of risk, a giant elephant in the room has received nearly zero media attention. BrightSource’s chairman at the time of the federal loan guarantee was John Bryson, who stepped down from the energy company before being sworn in on October 21, 2011, as the thirty-seventh secretary of the Department of Commerce.22 In other words, the former employer of Obama’s commerce secretary received the Energy Department’s $1.4 billion loan guarantee. Of note is that Bryson also cofounded the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental activist group belonging to the controversial Apollo Alliance, which helped draft the “green” portions of Obama’s 2009 stimulus, the very legislation that underwrote BrightSource’s loan.

  Bryson is not the exception. His inside deal should have been one of the biggest scandals of the Obama administration. Instead it is exclusive to this book, as the “watchdog” (actually lapdog) news media remain mysteriously uninterested in probing corruption within the monstrous expansion of government under Obama.

  Here’s another Obama crony we found playing a key role in developing the energy provisions of the stimulus bill while occupying the boards of several companies recently receiving Federal funds, including hundreds of millions in “stimulus” money. T. J. Glauthier served on Obama’s 2008 White House Transition Team. He is widely credited with helping to craft the energy provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, aka the “stimulus.” In addition to serving on the boards of multiple major energy companies, Glauthier previously held two presidential appointments during the Clinton administration. He was the Energy Department’s deputy secretary and chief operating officer, its second-highest-ranking official. Earlier, he served in the White House for five years as the associate director for Natural Resources, Energy and Science in the Office of Management and Budget. Glauthier is tied to several energy companies that benefited from the “stimulus” bill he helped to write.23

  One such company investigated by these authors is GridPoint Inc, where Glauthier was appointed to the board in March 2008.24 GridPoint provides utilities software solutions for electrical grid management and electric power demand and supply balancing. The “stimulus” provides a whopping $4.5 billion for so-called smart grid projects, and GridPoint got paid from sc
ores of smart grid deals funded by the “stimulus.” The company partnered with the Electric Transportation Engineering Corporation (eTec), Nissan, the Idaho National Laboratory, and others in a project to deploy electric vehicles (EVs) and their charging infrastructure in five states.25 The Energy Department had awarded eTec almost $100 million in “stimulus” funds to support the project. GridPoint’s role in the eTec project was to supply smart charging and data logging capability to utilities located in strategic markets of eTec’s program in Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington.

  GridPoint also benefited from “stimulus” funds when it recently provided home energy management, load management, and electric vehicle management software solutions for a KCP&L’s Green Impact Zone SmartGrid Demonstration in Kansas City, Mo.26

  Additionally, GridPoint helped the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, or SMUD, to manage power from its customers’ rooftop solar panels.27 SMUD had won $127.5 million in “stimulus” funds from the Department of Energy to carry out the project, which also includes deploying 600,000 smart meters in its service territory. Again, in early 2009, the Energy Department awarded Argonne National Laboratory nearly $2.7 million in “stimulus” funding for three solar energy–related research projects. Argonne reportedly shared another $5 million in “stimulus” funding for projects with GridPoint and other companies and the University of Illinois Sustainable Technology Center.28

  Besides benefiting from “stimulus” grants, GridPoint, in 2010, won a separate $28 million contract with the U.S. Postal Service to install energy management systems in selected post office locations across the U.S.29 At the same time, Gridpoint’s founder, Peter L. Corsell, contributed the $50,000 maximum donation allowable to Obama’s inauguration.30