Show Notes
Climate change action by politicians is full of contradictions. Tankers of gasoline and jet fuel top up squadrons of private jets and government aircraft that fly the COP26 attendees to Glasgow, Scotland so they can stress the need for renewable energy. An 85-vehicle entourage whisks President Joe Biden from the airport to the conference center in town. Fossil fuels are essential tools of the fools that rule.
The Chinese government didn’t attend. Instead, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, by far, stayed in Beijing in silence. The Russians stayed away, too.
On today’s podcast Peter and Eric summon up Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth” to ask: who are the witches? Who will benefit from the policy ideas discussed at the UN’s climate conference? The biggest winner will be China and they will have a lot of help. As the conferees talk about carbon emission targets and shifting their massive economies to more solar energy, they note that China dominates 80 percent of the world’s market for solar panel production. How did we get there?
A little history helps. In 2009, President Obama launched his stimulus plan that spent tens of billions on green energy projects. Peter Schweizer studied the grants and loan guarantees made by the Department of Energy and found that 80 percent of those funds went to green energy companies that were at least partially owned by people who sat on Barack Obama’s national campaign finance committee. He detailed this research in the book “Throw Them All Out,” published in 2011.
Readers may recall the splashiest example, a company called Solyndra. Eric points out that Solyndra had innovative solar panel technology that was round and therefore better at collecting sunlight. The company received $500 million in loan guarantees. George Kaiser, a huge contributor to Obama’s campaign, owned 35 percent of the company, which went bankrupt and its technology was bought by the Chinese on the cheap. There were others that Peter discovered. Leucadia Energy received $1.6 billion for a project in Indiana, and another $1.6 for a project in Chicago. That company was owned by Ian Cumming, who sat on Obama’s finance committee as well. First Solar Corp., owned by million-dollar Obama contributor Ted Turner got a total of $4.7 billion. Money went to a company called Solar Reserve owned by Michael Forman, who was also on the committee. Another company called Fisker Automotive, which received $52mm company and also went bankrupt, counted among its top investors none other than former vice president Al Gore. That company’s technology too was bought by the Chinese.
At the time, China was selling solar panels for less than it cost to make them. This practice, sometimes called “dumping,” deliberately undercuts foreign competitors and helped the Chinese get where they are now, controlling 80% of the world market for solar panels.
The history is important because this is about money and the connections of the people who get it. So who gained from these efforts by the Chinese to corner the market?
Peter and Eric then look at the 2015 Paris Accords, the international climate change agreement signed by Barack Obama. The negotiations for the deal allowed China to continue to increase its own carbon emissions footprint for another fifteen years, until 2030, while the United States had to cap its own emissions immediately. Who negotiated this?
Working for the Obama administration, John Podesta negotiated the agreement. In his prior job at the Center for American Progress, this group created the framework for what would become the main terms of the Paris Accords. It had been taking money from an entity called the “China-US Exchange Foundation,” which has been identified by congressional and financial investigators as a “united front group,” which means it was a Chinese government influence operation and was found to be linked to Chinese intelligence.
So, the Paris agreement that was negotiated by John Podesta came after he had set up the framework for the agreement while he was taking money from a group directly linked to a Chinese influence operation.
John Podesta’s brother, Tony, is a high-paid lobbyist. He took on a client called the “Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy.” The coalition was fighting efforts in Congress that would prevent Chinese companies from “dumping” solar panels in the US. The group was actually funded by Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar, two Chinese solar panel manufacturers.
All of this has enabled China to become today what Peter calls “the new OPEC.”
The Podestas were not the only ones with conflicts of interest. Former Secretary of State John Kerry is today Biden’s “climate envoy.” Kerry and his wife, Theresa Heinz, have enormous investments in China and in renewable energy manufacturers. Kerry has a stake valued at between $1 million and $5 million in Hillhouse Investment Group which invests in Chinese companies that produce technology for both solar energy and the kinds of surveillance technology that China uses against its own Uighur ethnic minority. It also invests in companies that use slave labor. Kerry was accused in a letter from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) of actively undermining efforts to wean the US off China for reliance on solar energy.
What’s clear from all of this is, as Peter says, that China has been the ultimate puppet master, controlling the events in Glasgow without even going there. Instead, John Kerry was openly critical of Australia for its lax efforts to reduce its carbon footprint. Meanwhile, China increased its own carbon emissions last year by more than Australia’s entire carbon footprint.
The truth is that various enablers in the US do not want to criticize the Chinese for their own reasons. The US will be investing trillions in solar energy technology that is produced mostly in China. Meanwhile the Chinese stance on reducing its own carbon footprint to reduce global warming amounts to telling the rest of the world, as Eric puts it, “You guys go on ahead… We’ll catch up.”
