Posted on 06/16/2015 4:02:08 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
A collection of investment firms, foundations, universities and other private institutions have pledged $4 billion to invest in new clean energy technology, the White House announced on Monday.
The funding comes in response to an Obama administration call for more private sector research into low-carbon energy technology. The government will also launch a new Department of Energy program to provide technical assistance for investors.
Obama administration officials launched their “Clean Energy Investment Initiative” in February, hoping to secure $2 billion from the private sector to fund new energy research. The White House doubled that goal, receiving major pledges from the University of California system, Goldman Sachs and other investors.
“The response over only a couple of months has exceeded even our ambitious expectations,” Brian Deese, a senior adviser to President Obama, said in a call with reporters on Monday. “And our hope is that by highlighting these commitments … we’ll be able to build on that progress and be able to generate more commitments and more enthusiasm.”
The announcement comes ahead of a White House clean energy summit on Tuesday. Vice President Joe Biden, White House science adviser John Holdren and Deese will speak at the event.
“A growing number of mission-driven investors have committed to investing in clean energy innovation and solutions for our climate change challenges, and they do so in pursuit of both financial returns and mission-aligned impact,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said Monday. “I think this is a tremendously important development.”
DOE’s new program, dubbed the "Clean Energy Impact Investment Center," will provide government information and technical assistance to those investing in new energy technology.
Moniz said investments in low-carbon energy sources will play a key role in U.S. efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of a United Nations climate change deal that will be hashed out in Paris later this year.
“What we are emphasizing very, very strongly on the road to Paris is, in fact, the role of technology innovation, and associated cost reduction, as really key to meeting the global commitments that we need to reduce greenhouse gases,” he said.
Moniz didn’t any specifics Monday about the types of projects the DOE program would support, but he said he expects technology investors to begin coordinating with the department as soon as the effort formally launches.
“I view this, ultimately, as a kind of one-stop-shop, multi-dimensional information resource [for] investors who have obviously expressed their interest and their desire to get into this space,” he said.
“I can’t give you an example yet, but check back in a year and I certainly hope I’ll have a bunch.”
"White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett is quietly working behind the scenes to build a coalition of major U.S. corporations to back President Barack Obama’s goal of hashing out a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions at the upcoming United Nations summit in Paris.
The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained a letter that outlines how, by the end of June, Obama is looking to build a coalition of businesses to show support for UN climate talks. After that, the White House will then try to grow this group of businesses to 250 in the run up to the Paris talks this November.
The way the letter is written, it’s likely being circulated by someone or some group on behalf of the White House. The source could not disclose who was circulating the letter on the White House’s behalf, but did confirm the business they work for was approached to support the Paris climate talks....." - Source: Valerie Jarrett Secretly Lobbying Big Corporations To Support UN Climate Talks
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The announcement comes ahead of a White House clean energy summit on Tuesday. Vice President Joe Biden, White House science adviser John Holdren and Deese will speak at the event.
Obama's Science and Technology adviser, John P. Holdren has been "on the job" since he first joined forces with Paul and Anne Ehrlich 45 years ago. Holdren advocates for the de-development of the United States:
....“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren wrote along with Paul and Anne H. Ehrlich in the “recommendations” concluding their 1973 book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.
“De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation,” Holdren and the Ehrlichs wrote...."
2009: The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development: The Population Bomb Revisited - by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich
"....Some of the lowest birthrates are now found in the rich, fully industrialized nations of Europe and in Japan. That’s fortunate in one respect because it is the high-consuming rich nations that place the greatest pressure on humanity’s staggering life-support systems (Ehrlich and Holdren 1971, Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2005).
The big exception is the United States, which is a center of over-consumption and whose population continues growing because of a relatively high birthrate (average family size about 2.1 children, compared with 1.4 in Italy and Spain and 1.3 in Germany and Japan) and high immigra-tion rate (4 per thousand, with Italy the same, Spain 7, Germany 0, and Japan 0). The nation has recently been in the strange position of debating immigration policy without ever discussing population policy...."
Ehrlich P. and J. Holdren. 1971. Impact of population growth. Science 171: 1212-1217.
Ehrlich P., Ehrlich A., and J. Holdren. 1977. Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment . San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co.
February 19, 2015: GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP NECESSARY & POSSIBLE?
"With the continued buildup of greenhouse gases and the continued apathy of governments towards the lethal results of human population growth, Paul and Anne Ehrlich believe that a potential environmental storm is building up to bring down civilization....
..... Can much of the world population come to understand that humanity’s current dilemmas of environmental destruction, inequities, unemployment, and declining democracy, are not largely an accidental result of cultural evolution, but are rather mostly the consequences of deliberate planning, by those in charge, to increase their own wealth and power? Can they move dramatically to close the gap between the rich and poor that is especially dramatic in developing nations, and growing in many rich ones, especially the United States?....
[SNIP]
.....The MAHB’s [mahb.stanford.edukey] strategy is threefold: foster collaboration between natural scientists and social scientists to better understand the issues; build understanding of what we call ‘foresight intelligence’—the ability of individuals, institutions, governments, and society to act (behave) in ‘future smart’ ways; and engage civil society (individuals and organizations), already concerned about collapse, in ways that ‘strengthen’ the political impact of their endeavors. In short, the MAHB’s main goal could be said to help generate a bottom-up program to produce large numbers of global citizens, who, in turn might be able to divert society from its suicidal course. The odds of success seem small, but what choice does any ethical person have but to try?"
They like to lose their shirts?
ECO WATCH: Pope Francis’s Encyclical Could Have Bigger Impact Than the Paris Climate Talks, Says NASA Scientist
“I’m not a religious person at all,” NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt told USA TODAY, adding that faith-based efforts to shift thinking on climate action are very promising. “The Pope’s encyclical is probably going to have a bigger impact than the Paris negotiations.”
Even though climate change is considered a secular topic, according to the Associated Press, Pope Francis’s message will focus on the moral imperative to fight global warming, since the poor are the most affected by it. And the Pope’s message is meant for a global audience, not just Catholics. “This encyclical is aimed at everyone: Let us pray that everyone can receive its message and grow in responsibility toward the common home that God has given us,” the Pontiff said Sunday in before a crowd of thousands in St. Peter’s Square.
Jeff Kiehl with the National Center for Atmospheric Research told USA TODAY that the Pope’s reach could be huge. “The encyclical is going to go out to over 1 billion Catholics—that’s a way of getting a message across to a segment of society that the scientific community could never do,” he said. “I mean it’s just unbelievable.”...................
Valerie Jarrett says, "Jump!"
They ask, "How much?"
I'm sure there are some "Green Energy" taxpayer subsidized billionaires on the list.
"The federal government spent more than $4.28 billion in stimulus money on green upgrades to public buildings — but today, it has no idea if those huge expenditures actually made the facilities any more energy efficient.
“I don’t have the data to say that,” says Nick Goco, the General Services Administration’s deputy assistant inspector general for real-property audit. “To date, the system being used to evaluate the Recovery Act projects has not been fully populated with the data needed to evaluate the project. . . . We don’t know,” he says.
The GSA Office of Inspector General examined 45 full or partial upgrades to government buildings, funded by $2.47 billion in stimulus funds. Though each location was supposed to track data on energy-efficiency yields, many relied on “incomplete, outdated, and unverified data,” the inspector general’s report says.
Though the Energy Policy Act requires federal buildings to track consumption of energy by the hour, some of the buildings receiving stimulus funds had their meters disconnected for two months or longer.
“I’m not surprised,” says Daniel Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research. “There’s little accountability. Whether it’s Solyndra or a myriad of other companies that have gone bad, the federal government just doubles down when they get it stupid the first time. Businesses do energy conservation all the time, and they tend to do it fairly well, because it’s their money. With the government’s money, at the end of the day, they don’t care.”
Goco says the inspector general will conduct another audit determining whether stimulus-funded green buildings are actually saving energy as promised.
But earlier reports call the effectiveness of the stimulus-funded green upgrades into question.
For example, in 2013, the inspector general’s office highlighted the waste of stimulus money at the Public Building Service’s regional offices in D.C. The agency spent $110,887 in stimulus money to pay a contractor for a roofing upgrade that was nixed before construction ever began.
The Public Building Service’s D.C. office also spent $877,152 on a remodel to create an open workspace, which it claimed would help move the office toward a “zero environmental footprint.” The agency said the upgrades would pay for themselves in 45 years. But the inspector general’s office said cost savings wouldn’t kick in for 4,617 years, noting the main purpose of the project appeared to be improving the regional commissioner’s office. Altogether, “these renovations were not a cost-effective use of Recovery Act funds,” the report concluded.
In another instance, the federal government spent $133 million in stimulus cash to install a “vegetative façade” at the Edith Green/Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in Portland, a project that was supposed to provide greener insulation. But as Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn noted in 2009, it cost roughly the same to install a similar façade at a much larger federal building in San Francisco, which raised questions about cost overruns in Portland.
“We do know one thing: It lined the pockets of a lot of Democrats,” says Peter Morici, a professor of business at the University of Maryland. “I don’t think you’ll find many people who voted for Romney on those projects. . . . I think [the buildings] are probably greener, but they’re probably not as green as they’re supposed to be. A lot of this technology doesn’t work out as planned.”
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for National Review as a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the Franklin Center. She is also a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
Without addressing the merits, or demerits, of green energy, why are universities making ‘investments’ in anything? Seems to me it they’ve got that much extra money they should lower tuition or modernize the library or some buildings.
If it were me writing the check for tuition and learned some of it was being used for ‘green investments’ that Valerie Jarrett is championing, I’d be mighty...upset.
I’d guess these “investments” are guaranteed by the government. Warren Buffett says he’d never invest in wind farms in a free market. But with government subsidies and tax credits they’ve made him a ton of money ($400 million in I think) just to build them and it doesn’t matter that they don’t make any money. There was never any risk - just a government guarantee that if he build them he’d make money.
"Green" is how taxpayer money gets funneled to universities, which in turn generate studies that promote green alarmism, which generates more money which is funneled to universities, that in turn generate....
And the economy/middle class is squeezed by higher taxes, regulations and lawsuit abuse.
bttt
Harvard is sitting on something like $30 billion in investments. The Texas university system has so much gold that Texas is going to build a storage facility for it. It’s amazing the colleges are being starved for funds, just ask a Democrat.
I should have known.
What a racket they’ve built up for themselves. The elites really do see us as little more than cows to be milked.
One of the “green energy” shifts I have witnessed is Universities changing their fuel source from coal to torrefied wood pellets. These are different than wood pellets you can buy in bags to burn in your home pellet stove. They are more like charcoal. They are shipped bulk in hopper rail cars like coal. They will not absorb moisture like traditional wood pellets. They also burn hotter and result in higher BTUs.
Therefore, steam generating industrial boilers can switch to this fuel source without spending a lot to modify their boiler. We are currently selling these to a University in NC. There are two companies that are building these plants on the east coast with the intention of shipping their product by boat to Europe. Several European countries have mandated that X amount of their energy source needs to come from a renewable source. The torrefied wood pellet meets this mandate as a substitute for coal burning plants with minimal costs. Now, they just need to ramp up production to bring down the cost/ton of pellets.
The same old pigs lining up at the same old troughs.
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