From Government Accountability & Oversight
FOIA Litigation reveals eye-opening breadth and depth of climate activist involvement with Biden Administration
Coordination extends beyond SEC, to White House, EPA, others
Energy Policy Advocates has obtained 501 pages from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation over records pertaining to the involvement of a “climate” rent-seeker, Persefoni, and its partners Ceres and a consultant called ERM. It is now clear that these parties worked hand-in-glove with the SEC in developing the latter’s “climate risk disclosure” (CRD) proposed rule.
That rule declared an outlying, relatively low cost estimate a fraction of what other parties estimate this will do to the broader economy and its (non-Persefoni) participants, yet lacking citation or methodology to explain from whence it came.
Subsequently, numerous congressional oversight efforts have focused on determining where this enigmatic cost estimate for SEC’s extraordinary and legally adventuresome CRD proposal came from.
For a primer, GAO has covered this troubling public-private partnership, here.
To the list of glaring problems (think: compelled speech, materiality, Major Questions Doctrine), it seems a decent bet to add good old arbitrary and capricious to CRD’s obvious vulnerabilities.
Here are a few exemplars from early in the production, and early in the game, giving a flavor of the canoodling:
As background, emails and other info in the public domain indicate Curtis Ravenel serves both Michael Bloomberg (see, “Mike”) and consultant to the ESG stars and former Bank of England head Mark Carney in lobbying the Biden Administration to adopt their “climate” projects respectively styled TCFD and GFANZ — by regulatory fiat. This portfolio includes, as Treasury Department productions show, lobbying them on their Gmails.
The latter being a practice also used by Bloomberg aide and former SEC Chair Mary Schapiro, who would email, e.g., Janet Yellen Chief of Staff Didem Nisanci’s GMail, then come in to jointly lobby SEC on climate issues (?!)). It’s quite an operation.
Persefoni has since brought on board SEC’s Kristina Wyatt who features in these emails, Emily Pierce and former Commissioner and Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee, whose schedule also obtained by Energy Policy Advocates affirms was the principal driver of this overreach, on the Commission. They all go way back with this rather new yet remarkably influential entity.
One can see why the House Financial Services Committee, House Committee on Oversight & Reform, and Senate Banking Committee Republicans have been pressing SEC on this matter. Hopefully this helps as, yet again, stonewalling agencies have made it necessary for private parties to go to court to get some of the record of how these institutions are being used, with whom.
There is much more there. As SEC stated about this production in a Joint Status Report filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia yesterday:
9,600 pages, most of which are attachments. Yesterday’s production included all “parent” emails and began releasing some of the many pages of attachments, thereto.
Those numbers strongly suggest we’ve cracked the mystery of the missing source behind SEC’s cost estimate for its climate risk disclosure rule. (Readers also will spot Team Persefoni spending quite a bit of time downplaying costs of CRD and, reminiscent of so much in the climate industry, how those costs, why, they’ll just go lower once you coerce a bigger market for us into place.)
There is more coming, and hopefully congressional oversight bodies get further information. For now, anyone with any involvement with this move should read the SEC’s initial production, here.
The vast global post war wealth created by western capitalism has caused such a huge increase in global tax bases in every nation that bureaucrats have increased exponentially and are now seeking absolute power.
The Chinese Communist Party has the authoritarian power to harness that development for its own purposes but the western nations are in a flat spin with no idea how to deal with it.
So many political figures have been captured by the process that voting power for ordinary citizens is disappearing.
the voting power of citizens has been ceded by citizens to political parties long past.
Sounds very much like what elected ministers in the UK now opening talk about and describe as The Blob.
Been going on quite some time = hence the satirical TV series ‘Yes Minister’ – based in the offices of the fictitious but now very real “Department of Administrative Affairs”
It is that, ministers and other politicians get elected on promises they’ve made to voters.
But, when they get into their offices and try to fulfil those promises immense lethargy and foot-dragging becomes apparent in the ‘underlings’ who should actually Do The Work.
These being the permanent staff that comprise The Civil Service within Whitehall/Westminster – and scattered in other offices all around the country.
(Which Does Not Help despite the wonders of email and Zoom)
Some of the affected/frustrated ones have spoken of the UK civil service being now chock full of activists, not least as= Brexit Remoaners and also Climate Activists
So if any individual within that humongous ‘organisation’ doesn’t ‘like’ what they’re being asked to do, they procrastinate, they pass the buck, they go sick, go on leave, they ‘spam’ the email, they blame the postman, they have endless meeting meetings meetings etc etc etc
Before anyone realises, five years has passed by, the elected minister didn’t ‘fulfil the promises’ they made and a whole new lot are voted in.
Deep State?
Simple reason: There Are No ‘Strong Men’ Anymore.
OK, where did they go?
A: They died of starvation.
Crazy as it seems, yes Bojo, despite being 17stone when PM and now = 20+stone – Bojo was starving.
Fat People everywhere are = Starving and a $4 trillion pa healthcare bill says as much
It has gone way further than The Blob. Every quango, school board, education facility, professional organisation, pretty much everything has been taken over by activists of one type or another.
The voter hasn’t got a chance and those of us just trying to make a living are being strangled by red tape and a vast plethora of counterproductive energy sapping regulation.
ESG has now hit the banks and building societies of the UK, it’s only a matter of time before ‘climate risk assessment’ rears it’s ugly head in the UK as well. Why does some idiot always have to come along and spoil everything.
The blob now gets ministers fired and it also targets MPs with the wrong views…
It only takes an accusation
I think this is about more than just rampant government bureaucracy. It looks like a consultant-enrichment scheme. Aren’t environmental-impact-type studies performed by for-profit, non-governmental, entities? Looks like classic regulatory capture, but with a twist. The people who profit are the people who do the studies. I’ll be very surprised if there are not Biden family members and friends profiting from this scheme.
It’s also typical Liberal, elitist thinking. They pretend they are smarter than us, and know what is best for us: they aren’t and don’t. All they really want is control, power and profit.
In the U.S. there is currently only one viable solution to this problem. Its name is Trump. He’s an un-present fellow, but he could start us on the path to draining the swamp. It’ll take generations to complete.
Ironically, Carney introduced the first ‘plastic’ bank note in England.
Nasty piece of work.
Is it accurate that certain Post Offices and Bank of England branches will accept paper notes in exchange for plastic?
The BoE doesn’t have any branches!
They’ve been plastic for some years now, so, no.
I have a couple of paper notes that I got stuck with prior to covid.
Truly staggering what the spending of several trillion dollars buys, like support from “main-stream” media. Now it’s obvious that the effect is double, that is, they have managed to inflict trillions of dollars of damage to economies, all for nothing. Nothing? Follow the money. This is the largest scientific scandal of all-time, but the surgical transition of young children is the most disgusting. What a race to the bottom.
STORY TIP story tip
Vice President Kamala Harris mistakenly (?) suggested that one of the goals of investing in clean energy is population reduction.
“When President [Joe] Biden and I took office, we set an ambitious goal … to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050,” Harris told an audience at Coppin State University in Baltimore on Friday.
“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,” she continued.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/reduce-population-kamala-harriss-verbal-slip-sparks-outrage
Freudian slip?
A rare example of honesty
Sometimes the word salad accidentally makes sense. Of course Minitrue says she said or meant to say pollution.
Yeah, of course she did. And I meant to say ‘not’.
Sometimes it pays to have a VP that, if she even went to school, had to ride the little bus :<)
I use a very simple calculation to determine the cost estimate to determine the OVERALL costs needed to replace fossil fueled or thermal sources of electricity with RENEWABLES.
(Current peak/spike demand / lowest observed renewables output = needed future investment)
Using the number for the ERCOT grid and Winter Storm Uri the calculation is: (~70MW / ~2MW (ERCOT’s panned minimum output) = 35). Yup! 35 times the 2021 investment is needed to replace thermal sources with renewables.
Even funnier, renewables can go to ZERO output which still requires electricity to re-start making the low bounds of renewables outputs a negative number. This calculation can be done for any grid.
Regardless, dividing by ZERO or a NEGATIVE numbers shows us renewables are not fit for the prupose.
BTW, I never get a comment from the liberal peanut gallery when I present these simple calculations.
Net Zero by 2050 is not happening
“#NetZero seems nearly impossible. By #2050, demand for some #mineral resources will increase more than 100-fold just to keep up with the supply chains for #electric vehicles.”
A very interesting video, in my opinion! A CaspianReport video. The channel is very insightful of world affairs.
Carbon free graphite, that I want to see.
They already have (or had) carbon-free sugar. Why not carbon-free carbon?
I mean, how? 12 carbon atoms don’t just get up and walk out, leaving the cane sugar completely intact. I’m guessing they were trying to virtue signal a lack of CO2 emissions but what a stupid way to go about it!
Yes, it refers to the energy used in production. That goes back about 14 years and I’m pretty sure they realized how stupid it was and quietly discontinued it.
This is what comes out when 20-something social justice warriors who failed high school chemistry are handed the reins of a marketing department.
“BTW, I never get a comment from the liberal peanut gallery when I present these simple calculations.”
That’s because the liberals don’t know a Kilowatt from a Kumquat.
The National Socialists (Nazis) had a concept of Gleichschaltung, often translated as coordination. Literally it is switching the same way, everything aligned to the same objectives.
The purpose of CRD is clearly not to protect unsuspecting investors against undisclosed risks in the businesses in which they are investing. It is a way to co-opt private wealth and use it to advance the fascist elite’s policy preferences as well as to force private businesses to divert resources away from profitable activity toward propaganda indoctrination.
So much of what the global elites are doing echos 1930s fascism. Is nobody getting nervous?
Yes, very. And have been for a while now, thanks for asking.
Communism and fascism are indistinguishable.
Not quite, but I agree that they are not the polar opposites that they’re portrayed to be. They’re kissing cousins as far away from ordered liberty as it gets.
I would like to see companies openly reporting on the real risks.
“Government policies on climate risk increasing our costs to the point where we will have to close operations in the USA, Canada and Europe, and relocate to countries with sensible policies. This will result in extensive job losses, and the replacement of exports by imports in the affected countries.”
SEC needs to be disbanded and we can start over. There is no room for liars and cheats.
As Thomas Sowell pointed out, Liberals will ask “but what will we replace the SEC with?” As he further pointed out, when a doctor removes a cancerous tumor, nobody asks, “but what will we replace it with?”