March 29, 2024

Revealed: How environmentalists were allowed to draft Obama’s White House energy policy

Revealed: How environmentalists were allowed to draft Obama's White House energy policy

President Barack Obama’s aggressive and controversial Climate Action Plan grew out of a draft proposal from one of America’s richest environmental activist groups, it emerged Monday.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which spent $41 million of its $210 million nest egg last year pushing for changes in energy policy, circulated a 110-page document in 2012 that outlined what would become the president’s latest salvo in the global-warming wars.

Now that the Obama administration has adopted the green-group’s plan, the NRDC’s insider status is widely seen as an in-your-face response to oil, gas and coal companies that had a seat at the table 13 years ago when then-Vice President Dick Cheney convened meetings in secret to chart future energy policy.

While the Bush administration focused on extracting as much energy out of the ground as legally possible, the current White House’s policy is to erect roadblocks in the path of ‘big coal’ while rewarding alternative energy speculators with loan guarantees and other sources of public funds.

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Celeb-fueled access and activism: The NRDC gets its street cred from the Hollywood glitterati who host its fundraisers and record its robocalls

Celeb-fueled access and activism: The NRDC gets its street cred from the Hollywood glitterati who host its fundraisers and record its robocalls

 

Apocalypse: Climate change activists, led by the NRDC and billionaire Tom Steyer -- who co-funded the 'Risky Business' report and its fearsome predictions -- have their fingers on the pulse of the Obama White House
Apocalypse: Climate change activists, led by the NRDC and billionaire Tom Steyer — who co-funded the ‘Risky Business’ report and its fearsome predictions — have their fingers on the pulse of the Obama White House

 

The NRDC’s proposal departed from the green movement’s previous one-size-fits-all approaches, allowing states to determine how to meet stringent carbon-emission targets while drawing them all toward the central goal of squeezing coal-generated electricity to the margins of the U.S. national power picture.

As with the Obamacare law, however, state-based solutions could result in a patchwork quilt of crisscrossing rules that aggravate tensions between businesses and the White House, while opening up the floodgates for a wealth of legal avenues by lawsuit-waving opponents.

Environmental Protection Agency regulators were among a narrow group of stakeholders who got private briefings on the proposal beginning in 2012, and based their eventual written rules on what they heard.

‘Once enacted,’ The New York Times reported on Monday, the new EPA regime ‘could do far more than just shut down coal plants; it could spur a transformation of the nation’s electricity sector.’

Such a wholesale shift is high on the list of NRDC’s priorities, and its three activists who wrote the proposal – and frequently advocate for green policies with government agencies – had all the resources they wanted to pull it off, according to an NRDC insider.

‘This was the most talked-about thing going on inside the organization,’ the veteran D.C. activist told MailOnline. ‘Nothing else we were doing – not pollution control or ESA [Endangered Species Act] work or marine protected areas – nothing had as much juice behind it.’

‘Of course, fundraising was always a trump card, but other than that, the carbon policy team got everything it wanted and pretty much had a blank check.’

The statistical analysis alone coast ‘a few hundred thousand dollars,’ NRDC lawyer David Doniger told the Times.

Doniger wrote the document along with fellow lawyer David Hawkins and Daniel Lashof, an activist described by the Times as a ‘climate scientist.’

Lashof holds a Harvard bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics, and a Berkeley Ph.D. from an ‘Energy and Resources’ program that describes its goal not in research terms but as a policy outcome: ‘a sus­tain­able envi­ron­ment and a just society.’

Outsize influence: NRDC president Frances Beineke (2nd L) draws big names to fundraising events, including HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington (L) and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt (2nd R)
Outsize influence: NRDC president Frances Beineke (2nd L) draws big names to fundraising events, including HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington (L) and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt (2nd R)

 

Not dying off: An American climate scientist was recently forced into retirement after being accused of falsifying data to show polar bears were drowning because polar ice caps had melted
Not dying off: An American climate scientist was recently forced into retirement after being accused of falsifying data to show polar bears were drowning because polar ice caps had melted

 

Endangered species: Coal production in the U.S. is under fire as the White House -- with help from the NRDC -- seeks to muscle it out of America's energy picture
Endangered species: Coal production in the U.S. is under fire as the White House — with help from the NRDC — seeks to muscle it out of America’s energy picture

 

Before co-authoring what became the Obama White House’s latest climate rules, he helped draft the U.S. Senate’s failed ‘cap and trade’ carbon emissions bill.

Lashof recently left the NRDC to take the reins at NextGen Climate America, a think-tank sidecar on NextGen Climate Action, a wealthy super PAC bankrolled by liberal climate activist billionaire Tom Steyer.

Steyer plans to put $100 million in play this year electing politicians who embrace his PAC’s desire to ‘avert climate disaster.’

Doniger told MailOnline on Monday that the NRDC was ‘unsolicited by EPA or others in the Administration,’  and that his group ‘briefed EPA and others around that time, at our initiative.’

He also emphasized that ‘no funder came to us to do this work.’

Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group, which delivered a report to the president in May 2001, was a body solely comprised of government officials. But it held about 40 meetings with energy-policy stakeholders – mostly those on the business side.

Green groups were given a chance to preset their case, but only after the task force’s initial report was already drafted.

David Doniger from the Natural Resources Defense Counsil
David Doniger from the Natural Resources Defense Counsil

 

Thomas
Thomas “Tom” Steyer, founder of Farallon Capital Management LLC, speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview in Pescadero, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2013. Keystone XL will be a “major driver” of oil sands expansion that significantly raises the risks of climate change, said Steyer, a former hedge fund manager who has spent some of his fortune fighting the pipeline. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

President Obama told the League of Conservation Voters that Republican global warming deniers pretended they can't read in order to curry political favor on their right wing
President Obama told the League of Conservation Voters that Republican global warming deniers pretended they can’t read in order to curry political favor on their right wing

 

 

 

The NRDC insider added that it was common in the organization to talk about how the environmental movement needed to ‘compete with the big polluters like the BPs and Halliburtons who directed the Bush-Cheney energy policy in secret.’

‘Did we want to turn the tables? Hell yes.’

Theories about global warming have taken a serious hit in recent weeks with the revelation that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s official graph of historical surface temperatures records has been quietly altered for years.

Many of the world’s most oft-cited climate measurements, records indicate, have been gradually replaced in at least three countries with hypothetical numbers derived from computer models.

The result, naysayers contend, has been a faulty reading of a climate trend that has been cooling, not warming, the earth since the 1930s – despite a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide emissions since 1996.

Additionally, U.S. policy won’t impact the frenzied pace of coal-fired power plant construction in China and other Asian nations.

Obama last jabbed at global warming skeptics during a speech at the University of California Irvine, saying their arguments are similar to believing the moon is made of cheese.

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