Dark and Dirty Money

PRESENTED BY RICHARD SCARRY

DC folks: Tonight at 6:30 pm, Train Lovers for Harris-Walz and the Green New Deal Network are co-hosting a happy hour and fundraiser at Metrobar, the fun bar-in-a-subway-car. There will be some fun surprise guests and many excellent people.

The “grassroots” opposition to solar power in Ohio is being secretly orchestrated by husband-and-wife fracking executives Tom Rastin and Karen Buchwald Wright, hardcore Trumpers who run Ariel Corporation, a fracking-services company. Attacks on a proposed 120-megawatt solar farm in central Ohio have been organized by Knox Smart Development, run by Jared Yost. In a non-coincidence, Yost formerly worked for Ariel Corporation; after repeated denials he was forced to admit his campaign is financed by Rastin. Rastin and Wright are behind similar campaigns in Michigan and are major contributors to the Koch-backed State Policy Network.

In fact, secretly fossil-fueled opposition to renewable projects is running rampant, a recent investigation by the Energy and Policy Institute has revealed. The EPI report exposes the dirty money flowing to anti-renewable activists across the nation through the Koch network and other fossil-fuel front groups.

Turning off the dirty-money spigot destroying our politics is essential to surviving our future.

This afternoon, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) are re-introducing the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act, which would charge the biggest fossil-fuel companies a total of $1 trillion over 10 years to prepare for and respond to climate disasters caused by them.

The Exxon-sponsored Hurricane Francine slammed into Louisiana yesterday, flooding New Orleans with a month’s worth of rain in a few hours. Hundreds of thousands of households lost power in the driving winds and rain. Francine’s rapid intensification to a Category 2 hurricane came thanks to the superheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico, warmed by hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution dumped into the atmosphere.

The Bridge Fire is exploding near Los Angeles, destroying dozens of homes.

The Vietnam death toll from Typhoon Yagi has risen to 199.

Severe flooding in northeastern Nigeria has killed at least 30 people and affected more than one million others.

DRIVING THE NEWS: The fossil-backed GOP is doing all it can to stall the electric-vehicle revolution, but the industry is moving forward thanks to the Biden administration’s investments.

The House of Representatives, under the shambolic direction of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation), is voting on H.R. 7980 today, to kill the clean vehicle credit for electric cars with battery materials from China.

Meanwhile, Stellantis is investing over $400 million in new EV plants in Michigan, and the U.S. Postal Service is starting to deploy tens of thousands of new electric delivery trucks.

At 10 am, the Senate Energy committee reviews the Department of Energy’s role in advanced computing research, which is rooted in nuclear-weapons modeling, but now also includes climate modeling, quantum computing, AI, and self-driving initiatives. Office of Critical and Emerging Technologies Director Helena Fu and Oak Ridge technologist Shaun Gleason will testify from the Department of Energy, joined by Divyansh Kaushik from the center-right Silicon-Valley-backed lobbying group American Policy Ventures, an offshoot of the center-right Silicon-Valley-backed lobbying group Humanity Forward.

At 3 pm, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and World Resources Institute host a Congressional briefing exploring the policy landscape of carbon dioxide removal at 385 Russell and online.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: Senate Energy and Natural Resources
  The Department of Energy’s Role in Advanced Computing Research

Climate Action Today:

• 3 PM: Environmental and Energy Study Institute
  World Resources Institute
  Exploring the Policy Landscape of Carbon Dioxide Removal

• 6:30 PM: Train Lovers for Harris-Walz
  Green New Deal Network
  Happy Hour and Fundraiser

Our final word comes from Patrick Gathara, who reviews the Harris-Trump debate:

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.