During the 2020 Presidential election campaign, I wondered why some very, very rich people were not only supporting Democratic candidate Joe Biden but contributing record amounts of money to his campaign. After all, he was threatening to raise taxes especially on those making over $400000 per year.
Was there more to his appeal than met the eye? Billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates did not become rich by neglecting to get good returns on their investments or their political contributions. You may remember that after his own campaign tanked, Billionaire Michael Bloomburg, the former mayor of New York City, invested millions to help Biden carry the pivotal state of Florida. Was it just hatred of President Trump?
As the old saying goes. “Follow the Money.” Could it be that these very rich Democrats saw an opportunity to profit even more by supporting Progressive causes? After all, if you can substantially increase your assets by gaining access to government stimulus money, why not pay a little more in Federal income taxes?
Michael Schellenberger, a committed environmentalist, described how billionaires have profited from climate change activism in his book, Apocalypse Never. Subtitled, “Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” the book offers a balanced assessment on climate change and how to deal with it. However, he also details how well connected politicians and venture capitalists have profited from government environmental spending.
Schellenberger quotes John Doerr, a venture capitalist, who found an upside in climate change.“Green technology—going green—is bigger than the Internet,” Doerr said. “It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.”
During the administration of President Obama, Shellenberger admits that he was involved in an environmental program that could be regarded as a forerunner of the Green New Deal. But things did not work out as he expected. He writes:
Between 2009 and 2015, the U.S. government spent about $150 billion on our Green New Deal, $90 billion of it in stimulus money.
Stimulus money wasn’t evenly distributed but rather clustered around donors to President Obama and the Democratic Party. At least ten members of Obama’s finance committee and more than twelve of his fundraising bundlers, who raised a minimum of $100,000 for Obamo, benefitted from $16.4 of the $20.5 billion in stimulus loans.
Fisker, which produced some of the world’s first luxury hybrid vehicles, received $529 million in federal loans; Doerr was one of Fisker’s major investors. It eventually went bankrupt, costing taxpayers 132 million. … (217-218)
But the loans were just one program among many others that funneled money to well-connected Obama donors without creating many jobs. The most famous of the green investments was when DOE gave $575 million to a solar company called Solyndra, 35 percent of which was owned by a billionaire donor and fundraising bundler for Obama, George Kaiser.
Nobody wanted to invest in Solyndra because its panels were too expensive, which independently minded DOE staffers pointed out. They were overruled, however, and the loan was approved.
The people who benefitted most from the green stimulus were billionaires, including Musk, Doerr, Kaiser, Khosla, Ted Turner, Pat Stryker, and Paul Tudor Jones. Vinod Khosla led Obama’s “India Policy team” during the 2008 election and was a major financial contributor to Democrats. His companies received more than $399 million.
However, few Democratic Party donors outperformed Doerr when it came to receiving federal stimulus loans. More than half of the companies in his Genentech portfolio… received loans or outright grants from the government. “Considering that the acceptance rate in most of the Department of Energy programs was often 10 percent or less, this is a stunning record,” wrote an investigative reporter. (218)
Shellenberger’s research led him to conclude that nuclear power is the answer not only to creating a cleaner environment but also to providing for the world’s expanding energy needs. But he documents the efforts of pseudo-scientific activists and self- interested politicians like former Governor Jerry Brown of California to shut down nuclear power in California. Brown and his family were heavily invested in fossil fuels like oil and natural gas.
Apocalypse Never does offer solutions to serious environmental problems but it is also a sad story when it details how many have profited by alarming people all over the globe. He cites his own example as typical of many:
I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago. I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate change reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the environment.
Nothing is sadder that the plight of now-famous teenager Greta Thunberg who, like many other children, has been traumatized by climate alarmists. She claims that her childhood was taken from her by these fears, and truly believes that the human race will be extinct in 15 years. Who taught her that?
In Apocalypse Never Michael Shellenberger concludes that there is much more reason for optimism than pessimism.
Conventional air pollution peaked fifty years ago in developed nations and carbon emissions have peaked or will soon peak in most others.
The amount of land we use for meat production is declining. Forests are growing back and wildlife is returning.
There is no reason poor nations can’t develop and adapt to climate change. Deaths from extreme events should keep declining….
None of this means there isn’t work to do. There is plenty. But much if not most of it has to do with accelerating those existing, positive trends, not trying to reverse them in a bid to return to low-energy agrarian societies.
Now the Biden Administration is pushing Green energy programs and subsidies that far exceed those of the Obama administration. Why is the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not concerned about massive solar farms that destroy desert environments, or windmill complexes that kill thousands of birds each year, or the disposal problems related to toxic lithium automobile batteries? The people who use the threat of climate change to make fortunes or gain votes should be ashamed of themselves.
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