Fool Me Twice (5 page)

Obama's State of the Union speech also came just after the colossal failure of the scandalous $535 million loan guarantee to the Solyndra solar company. “Some technologies don't pan out; some companies fail,” Obama allowed. Still, he pledged, “I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy.” Obama made clear that his future plans will even further increase the use of public money to finance so-called clean energy. “It was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock—reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.”

What follows are Obama's specific second-term plans for billions more in federal funding to “green” companies, including a “green stimulus.”

An organization that calls itself the Presidential Climate Action Project, or PCAP, has been working with the Obama administration since day one to help craft and implement White House environmental policy. Following Obama's victory in 2008, PCAP began working with John Podesta, co-chair of Obama's transition team, to help the incoming president formulate an initial one-hundred-day environmental agenda. Podesta, of course, is president and CEO of the highly influential progressive think tank Center for American Progress. In a November 2009 interview with Aaron Klein, PCAP's executive director, William S. Becker, boasted how his group's specific climate recommendations received a “very positive reception from the moment we delivered (the one-hundred-day proposal) last November to John Podesta.”
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“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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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).”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.