EPA Administrator: Elections Won’t Change our Power to Regulate, Our Regulations Were Enhanced under Biden

Ian Hanchett 10 Nov 2022 @ Breitbart News

On Thursday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Surveillance,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan stated that he doesn’t think the 2022 midterms will change the fact that the agency has been given power “to pursue the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to protect public health and protect the planet” through regulations and that the agency got a boost in its goals from the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Co-host Tom Keene asked, “How does EPA’s job change with the election, including a big Republican win in your North Carolina? I’m fascinated how the oil and gas industry that has a GOP bent will change and amend coming off this election.”

Regan said, “Well, the president has had a historic two years in passing historic legislation, with the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act, resources coming to EPA to help with and enhance the regulations that we are required to put in place by law. So, I don’t think the elections will change the fact that EPA has legislative authority or authority provided by the legislature or Congress, to pursue the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to protect public health and protect the planet. We’re going to continue to move forward and do our job, but the resources that flow from the Inflation Reduction Act [do] help with that public-private partnership to pursue these reductions. So, we’re not solely reliant on regulations alone.” 

Bill Gates Lobbied Manchin for Inflation Bill That Benefits His Green Investment Fund

Daniel Greenfield August 31, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog  

As reported exclusively by Frontpage Magazine, Americans can expect to see their chances of an IRS audit increase fourfold under the Biden-Manchin ‘Inflation Increase Act’. The massive upsurge in IRS enforcement was justified as a way to pay for the massive spending in the bill. Much of that spending consists of green pork for Democrat donors and special interests.

The media had spent the past month persuading Americans that they will see economic benefits from the green pork, but once the bill was passed through lies and dirty tricks, we know that it offers as much as $350 billion in loans, subsidies and guarantees to green companies.

Overseeing the Department of Energy’s loan program is Jigar Shah: the founder of SunEdison.

SunEdison was one of the biggest of Obama's subsidized green energy bankruptcies, receiving $1.5 billion in government grants and subsidies. While Solyndra's bankruptcy, after receiving a $535 million loan from the Obama administration, is infamous, there were quite a few disasters.

The $350 billion that the ‘Inflation Increase Act’ is playing with will be far worse.

While Americans have little to cheer about a government program handing out money to its allies and donors, not to mention Tesla owners and the Bay Area elite, Bill Gates is happy.

“Everybody wants to be part of this,” Carmichael Roberts, the head of Bill Gates's green energy investment fund, gushed. “The calls that I’m getting now — tremendous, already."

Gates was described as having personally lobbied Senator Manchin and Schumer in "anticipation of a rare moment in which significant federal dollars might be secured for the clean-energy transition." Billions of those dollars, ripped out of the hands of truck drivers, veterans and small businessmen, will have been “secured” for Gates and his ventures.

A wave of middle class IRS tax audits will be unleashed to pay for those “federal dollars”.

“I bet you there’s somewhere between 300 to 1,000 companies that will exist now because of this bill that would not have existed,” Gates’ venture fund boss boasted.

The question is how many of those will the Gates fund be invested in?

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund backed by Bill Gates, announced earlier that it raised over $2 billion to invest in green companies and that it plans to raise that to $15 billion. It currently has a public portfolio of 70 companies, many of which have government connections.

Ventures led a $20 million investment round into Blue Frontier which had obtained the rights to technology developed at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Sustaera, which claims to remove carbon dioxide, received seed R&D funding from the Department of Energy followed by a $10 million round of financing from Ventures. Quidnet describes the DOE as "among the public and private investors in Quidnet Energy’s innovative energy storage system" and Bill Gates led a $10 million round of investment in the company.

As a Bloomberg article described, “This is no hypothetical for Gates. His investments through Breakthrough Energy, the Gates organization that does climate work, has sunk at least tens of millions into green cement startups such as Ecocem, Chement and Brimstone. None have yet reached commercial scale. He saw the bankruptcy filing of a battery startup he backed, Aquion, that might have had a fighting chance if energy-storage tax credits were available.”

Now most Americans will be forced to back these disastrous green startups and lose their shirts.

But when Bill Gates and his allied billionaires speak, politicians obey and Americans suffer.

Ventures is part of the larger Breakthrough Energy group which also includes Breakthrough Energy Action. The action arm spent over $1 million lobbying on green energy last year.

The firm which saw the most Action lobbying cash was KDCR Partners which that year had hired Patrick Hayes. Hayes was Senator Joe Manchin's outgoing chief of staff and his former legislative director. Bill Gates' Action lists Hayes as one of its lobbyists.

Forget Silicon Valley. Where else can you invest a few hundred thousand in lobbying cash and come away with a few hundred billion in subsidies while the middle class pays for it?

The board members and investors of Breakthrough Energy Ventures include Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Virgin's Richard Branson, Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskowitz, Walmart heir Ben Walton, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, along with Chinese Communist tycoon Jack Ma of Alibaba and Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

One of the things that many of the investors and board members have in common is that they, hopefully with the exception of the Chinese Communist billionaire, Branson, and the Saudi prince, are Democrat donors. Moskowitz has spent tens of millions on Democrats in presidential elections, Reid Hoffman has been spending $100 million, Bloomberg spent $100 million in an effort to help Biden win three states, while the Gates Foundation poured $70 million into the dark money machine of the Democrats alongside Moskowitz and George Soros.

The formal lobbying of Breakthrough Energy Action may just be a way of conveying the will of its megadonor bosses whose wallets are capable of making and breaking the Democrats.

It’s no secret that Bill Gates played a key role in getting the ‘Inflation Increase Act’ passed.

Bloomberg, the eponymous publication owned by his fellow Breakthrough Energy board member, credited Gates with lobbying Manchin and pressuring Schumer to cut a deal.

The Microsoft founder was described as having “tapped into a relationship with Manchin that he’d cultivated for at least three years”.

“My dialogue with Joe has been going on for quite a while,” the billionaire, whose marriage allegedly broke up over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, bragged. “Almost everyone on the energy committee came over and spent a few hours with me over dinner.”

What followed was a story in which one of the richest men in the world convinced elected officials to ignore their constituencies and spend a fortune on green pork. The ‘Inflation Increase Act’ proved once again that in Washington D.C., voters don’t matter, only power brokers do.

Given a choice between obeying his voters or Bill Gates, Senator Manchin picked him.

“You know, people say Joe likes coal or something like that,” Gates said. “That’s really not fair. Joe wanted a climate bill.”

Or at least Bill Gates did. And so he got one.

“I will say that it's one of the happier moments of my climate work,” Bill Gates said of the passage of the 'Inflation Increase Act'.

Happiness for Bill Gates and his allies means misery, poverty and IRS audits for the country.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.   Thank you for reading.

A History Lesson Ahead of Biden’s Green New Tax

“The thing I’m proudest of that we were able to get done in the first term was the Recovery Act. It had $90 billion in clean-energy programs.” -Vice President Joe Biden, May 9, 2013. 

August 13th, 2022

By Larry Behrens @ CFACT  115 Comments 

The start of a new week brought a renewed sense of momentum for President Joe Biden’s administration and his allies in Congress. At long last, the months-long gridlock, caused by their own party, finally broke and another gusher of tax dollars appears ready to flood our country. Economic realities and those pesky inflation reports be damned.

Proponents have dubbed the bill the “Inflation Reduction Act” because they know it sounds better than the truth: “Biden’s Green New Tax.” History will be the judge about the wisdom of pouring trillions of dollars on an economy struggling with excessive spending. No matter how you slice it, with $369 billion dollars devoted to climate and energy programs, it’s clear there’s a lot on the line for the American taxpayer. If we want to know how the Biden Administration will dole out our dollars, we need look no further than the last time Biden got billions to go green.

As part of the so-called “Recovery Act” passed during the first term of President Obama, there was $90 billion set aside for the very same climate and energy reasoning. President Obama turned to his trusty Vice President to help administer those funds. The results were disastrous.

First, the well-known failure of Solyndra was pinned on Obama, but it was Biden who led the charge in losing $535 million in the fiasco.  Solyndra became the poster child of green failure, but it was far from alone.

Then there was $20.5 billion in federal loans distributed from that 2009 stimulus. One examination found that a whopping 80 percent of that money when to “10 members of former President Barack Obama’s finance committee, and more than 12 of his bundlers.”

Note: This number is shockingly close to the current $20 billion Joe Biden wants to send to “green banks” so it can, once again, be distributed to people and organizations that may have ties to supporting Biden’s campaigns.

Two years before Joe Biden called his work on the recovery funds the “proudest” part of his first term as vice president, the Government Accountability Office raised concerns about how those funds we handled. The federal loan program “lacked appropriate tools for assessing progress,” showed favoritism to some applicants and found “reporting and quality issues” when it came to figuring out just how many “green” jobs were created. Keep in mind, this was Joe Biden’s “proudest” accomplishment.

Fast forward to 2022 and President Biden is again proud to have four times more money than he had in 2009.  Included in his Green New Tax is the extension of a massive giveaway to those who buy electric vehicles. Studies have shown that those looking to buy an EV make at least $150,000 in annual income, but apparently Joe Biden feels they need a tax break.

Past tends to be prologue for a reason. What we are witnessing with Biden’s Green New Tax is a repeat of 2009. A bill packed with billions of pork that will mostly benefit the rich and those who support President Biden’s failed energy agenda. Joe Biden may be proud of what he did in 2009, but history shows us his pride comes with a huge tag.

Larry Behrens is the Communications Director for Power The Future, a non-profit that advocates for America’s energy workers. You can find him on Twitter @larrybehrens or you can email him: larry@powerthefuture.com

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

We May Have Dodged A Bullet In The Misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act"

August 09, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

On Sunday (August 7) the Senate passed the 700+ page bill with the Orwellian name of the “Inflation Reduction Act.” The bill has essentially nothing to do with supposedly reducing inflation, and is really just a conventional tax-and-spend extravaganza, with hundreds of billions of dollars of completely counterproductive taxing on the one hand, and even larger amounts of equally counterproductive and wasteful spending on the other hand. The bill is still not final, since it differs substantially from a version previously passed by the House. So it may be a while before there is an enacted statute. But now that the main hurdle of Senate passage has been cleared, there probably will be a statute within days, in all likelihood identical to what the Senate has passed.

This is one of the very worst bills ever to clear a house of Congress, although to be fair the (equally misnamed) Build Back Better bill passed by the House toward the end of last year was much larger and would have been even worse. But from information coming to me, it appears that the very most destructive provision of the proposed bill got scrapped at the last minute, just prior to Senate passage. That was a provision that would have attempted to substantially undo the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in West Virginia v. EPA. Although the bill is not final, and I cannot find definitive information at the time of this writing, it appears likely that we have dodged a huge bullet, at least for the moment.

Some background: the West Virginia v. EPA case concerned a challenge by many (red) states to an attempt by the EPA to transform the electricity generation sector of the economy, and impose hundreds of billions of dollars of costs on the American public, on the basis of the thinnest of statutory pretexts. The particular statutory pretext on which EPA relied was found in Section 111 of the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court held that that provision was insufficiently clear and specific, under the Court’s Major Questions Doctrine, to support the economic transformation that EPA was attempting to accomplish:

In arguing that Section 111(d) empowers it to substantially restructure the American energy market, EPA “claim[ed] to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power” representing a “transformative expansion in [its] regulatory authority.” . . . It located that newfound power in the vague language of an “ancillary provision[]” of the Act, . . . one that was designed to function as a gap filler and had rarely been used in the preceding decades. And the Agency’s discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously and repeatedly declined to enact itself. . . . Given these circumstances, there is every reason to “hesitate before concluding that Congress” meant to confer on EPA the authority it claims under Section 111(d).

Thus the effect of West Virginia v. EPA was to stymie the Administrative State, at least for the moment, in its efforts to transform the economy without clear Congressional authority. But the Supreme Court left open the possibility that Congress could enact a new statute granting to EPA the authority that it had just been found to lack. It was obvious that a top priority of the Democrats was going to be to try to get something into the reconciliation bill that could be used to argue that EPA had been unleashed.

Now, this was never going to be an easy task. Under the Senate’s arcane rules, to avoid the possibility of a filibuster and a requirement for 60 votes to proceed, the proposed bill had to meet the tests for “reconciliation.” That meant that the bill could only include provisions for taxing and spending. An official with the title of Senate Parliamentarian would have the ability to make the call if something was non-germane, and therefore made the bill subject to the super-majority to pass. Everyone on the Republican side fully expected the Democrats to try to slip something into the bill that could be argued to effectively reverse West Virginia v. EPA. As drafts of the bill exceeding 700 pages circulated over the last week, think tank scholars and Republican staffers scoured them repeatedly to try to find the inevitable provision that would try to accomplish the task. On Friday, Marlo Lewis at the Competitive Enterprise Institute blog reported:

This Wednesday on Fox Business with Larry Kudlow and later on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) warned that buried in the 725-page Schumer-Manchin bill are provisions designed to “overturn” the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.

Cruz did not name the provision or provisions he was referring to. But Lewis went through the then-current 725-page version of the bill, and found this provision in Section 60105(g) at page 666:

(g) OTHER ACTIVITIES.—In addition to amounts otherwise available, there is appropriated to the Adminis- trator of the Environmental Protection Agency for fiscal year 2022, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, $45,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2031, to carry out, with respect to greenhouse gases, sections 111, 115, 165, 177, 202, 211, 213, and 231 of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7411, 7415, 7475, 7507, 7521, 7545, 7547, and 7571).

Note that one of the sections listed is 42 U.S.C. 7411, which is also what goes by the name of Section 111 of the Clean Air Act — the very section that the Supreme Court had just ruled did not give the EPA the authority to transform the electricity sector of the economy with respect to greenhouse gases. Lewis points out that this section the IRA bill appeared to be clearly intended to give the EPA something to cite to claim new authority to regulate “greenhouse gases” like CO2 under the Clean Air Act:

And then there was Section 60107 of the draft bill. Lewis:

Section 60107 of Schumer-Manchin also provides $18 million “to ensure that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from domestic electricity generation and use are achieved through use of the authorities of this Act, including through the establishment of requirements under this Act,” based on the $1 million monitoring program. So, if Schumer-Manchin passes, Congress will have amended the Clean Air Act to create an electric-sector greenhouse gas reduction program, with an $18 million fund to “ensure” reductions are “achieved,” including by “the establishment of requirements.”

Thus, in the guise of seemingly modest appropriations of $45 million in one case and $18 million in the other (rounding errors in a bill containing over $500 billion in appropriations), Congress could perhaps be argued to have given EPA authority that did not previously exist to regulate “greenhouse gases” in the electricity-generating sector of the economy.

And then, after a flurry of last-minute changes over the weekend, the Senate passed a somewhat revised version of the IRA bill on Sunday. But, were Sections 60105(g) and 60107 still in the version that actually passed? I have sources that are telling me that those sections were deleted at the last minute, at the behest of the Senate Parliamentarian. As of this writing, I have not been able to find a definitive text of the bill as passed, and thus I have not been able to confirm the deletions. I suppose we will know the definitive answer shortly.

Even if Sections 60105(g) and 60107 had made it into the final statute, it is probably unlikely that the six justices of the Supreme Court majority in West Virginia would have been impressed. Lewis concurs in that assessment:

Creating a Low Electricity Emissions Program through a reconciliation bill, without benefit of a hearing, would not cut any ice with the six justices comprising the majority in West Virginia. It would in no way contradict their judgment that CAA Section 111 does not authorize the EPA to compel states or utilities to reallocate production and market share from coal to gas generation and from fossil generation to renewables.

But the prospect of ultimate defeat in the Supreme Court would have been unlikely to deter the zealots at the EPA, who would be only too happy to wreak havoc with the electricity sector, and triple everyone’s cost of electricity, for three or five years before the next case could reach the high court. With any luck, we will now be spared that prospect.

Meanwhile, the rest of the IRA bill is a disaster in every way, although perhaps not as big a disaster is it could have been. The amount of money allocated by the Federal Government in the bill for renewable energy has been reported in the range of $370 billion, a truly astounding amount. It is subsidies, grants, handouts, and tax benefits of every sort for wind and solar power in particular. Basically, we are now going to follow the completely failed strategy of Germany, that has brought the Germans wind and solar generators covering the landscape, triple our electricity costs, but yet no ability to get rid of fossil fuel backup because that is still absolutely essential.

UPDATE, August 11: It looks like my sources had it right about the removal from the Senate bill of the provisions seeming to grant new regulatory authority to EPA to regulate “greenhouse gases.” From an unsigned editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Enter [Shelley Moore Capito, the other Senator from West Virginia], who offered an amendment on the Senate floor to strip the bill’s sweeping grant of regulatory authority from the bill. . . . She then challenged compliance with budget reconciliation rules, which prohibit measures whose budgetary effects are “merely incidental” to the policy impact. The Senate parliamentarian agreed and struck the provisions from the bill.