The Biden-Harris Administration has been slammed for giving $41 billion to fund nonprofits that ‘spread radical, left-leaning ideology’ to eliminate fossil fuels.
A new report blasted the White House for subsidizing a shift to green energy tech ‘which relies upon supply chains dominated by the Chinese Communist Party,’ although financial analysts who cover the US energy sector dispute those claims.
The Delaware Valley Citizens Council for Clean Air received funding to phase out fracking and ‘make biking, walking, transit, and electric vehicles the primary’ sources of transportation — a plan that stresses the need for green energy.
Another $10 million grant was given to West Harlem Environmental Action, Incorporated (WE ACT), which called for the halt on new natural gas operations to continue ‘fighting false solution infrastructure.’
‘Simply put, the EPA is awarding taxpayer dollars to special interest groups committed to a radical energy agenda to “educate” others,’ House Republicans said.
The Biden-Harris Administration has been slammed for giving $41 billion to fund nonprofits that ‘spread radical, left-leaning ideology’ to eliminate fossil fuels
While the US currently produces one third of its solar panels domestically, it faces fierce competition from China — which produces roughly 98 percent of the world’s solar wafers, lowering prices of the tech globally.
Today under Biden, the US imposes a 39 percent tariff on all such solar components imported from China.
But the US energy sector nevertheless does import solar cells, wafers and polysilicon from the Asian nation, totaling a record $12 billion in 2023 from China and its major export hubs in Malaysia, Vietnan, Thailand and Cambodia, according to Reuters.
Republicans overseeing the House Energy and Commerce Committee, however, zeroed-in on what they called a lack of oversight within the EPA to ensure that $41.5 billion in nonprofit grants funded by Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were properly used.
In a public statement, Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said, ‘It couldn’t be more clear: The Biden-Harris administration rewards its environmental special interests at the expense of the American people.’
‘Equally as alarming,’ Representative Rodgers noted in the joint-statement, ‘is how these policies benefit the Chinese Communist Party — the world’s worst polluter.’
Approximately $2.8 billion managed by the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR) was one specific spending concern in the report.
While the US currently produces one third of its solar panels domestically, it faces fierce competition from China – which produces 98 percent of the world’s solar wafers, according to Reuters. Today, the US imposes a 39 percent tariff on solar components imported from China
The $41.5 billion in EPA grants marks a dramatic increase to the environmental watchdog’s ability to deputize nonprofits in its mission.
Another was $50 million given to the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) that focuses on the ‘social, racial, economic and environmental justice issues of climate change,’ according to its website.
CJA’s work under the EPA grant system would include MEER, a project to reduce climate change with land-based mirrors to reflect light directly back into space, and Rust Belt Harvest, ‘harvests and distributes surplus urban fruit and vegetables in Buffalo, NY.’
‘The influx of new funding and explosion of new programming discussed above will tax the EPA’s oversight and financial awards monitoring capabilities,’ the committee’s report argued.
But while lawmakers worried the EPA might be ‘using taxpayer dollars to promote the Biden-Harris radical energy agenda,’ their report was scant on details for oversight.
‘The EPA must meticulously track use of funding not only by selectees but also partner organizations and subrecipients to minimize the potential for abuse of these grants,’ the 38-page report stated.
IRA spending on these nonprofit groups, the report said, ‘will not only have consequences for American national security but drive affordable and reliable sources of energy — including oil, gas, and coal — out of existence.’
And yet, as of August 2024, a total of $89 billion from the IRA — more than twice the $41 billion proposed for EPA grants to ‘progressive’ nonprofits — has already been spent on US manufacturing investment, according to MIT and the Rhodium Group.
Alongside the EPA grants, over $200 billion has been earmarked for investment in domestic US green tech factories and manufacturing — nearly 500 percent more than the money dedicated to these nonprofits — as part of the Biden’s 2022 IRA.
One brand new $1.9 billion electric vehicle battery plant, announced for Marshall County, Mississippi this past January, was praised as ‘truly life changing to constituents’ by Republican state senator Neil Whaley.
Mississippi’s Republican Governor Tate Reeves also hailed the project, CNBC reported, noting it was the second-largest capital investment in the state’s history.
Funding for domestic manufacturing in rural communities across the US as exploded to levels that are ‘unprecedented in recent history’ the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Rhodium found, ‘in large part due to new clean energy manufacturing facilities’
Some rank-and-file conservative voters appear to have critiqued the new report, blasting the House energy committee for being Republicans in Name Only (RINOs), pledging too little, too late to change the spending priorities of Biden’s IRA (above)
All told, the remaining $111 billion or more of the IRA’s planned $200 billion in domestic ‘green’ manufacturing investment is expected to yield 195,000 jobs, plus ‘economic multiplier effects’ for local businesses based on how those newly employed rural workers spend their pay.
‘The amount of new manufacturing activity that we’re seeing right now is unprecedented in recent history,’ said MIT affiliate Trevor Houser.
Houser noted that this domestic production boom ‘is in large part due to new clean energy manufacturing facilities,’ a claim supported by MIT’s research this year.
Houser, an economist, noted that some IRA efforts to boost US manufacturing might withstand any efforts to cut planned future IRA spending, whether it promotes ‘radical’ nonprofits or businesses.
Above: Current President Joe Biden walks past solar panels while touring the Plymouth Area Renewable Energy Initiative in Plymouth, New Hampshire in 2020 while a candidate for office
‘The more mature technologies, so like wind and solar generation, electric vehicles, those have achieved escape velocity,’ Houser said.
‘They will continue to grow no matter what,’ he told CNBC. ‘It’s a question of speed.’
‘There is a certain luxury enjoyed by politicians who can be rhetorically against something while still quietly welcoming any dollars and jobs that it brings to their constituents,’ energy and commodity sector analyst Jeffrey Davies noted.
Davies, now the founder of what he describes as a data-driven energy new publication EnerWrap, wrote in a co-reported Bloomberg piece that these competing pressures may come to a head in a new Republican-controlled political climate in Washington DC.
‘Looking ahead to November, if Republicans are empowered to a point where they actually could vote those dollars away,’ Davies and his co-authors noted, ‘it would present a much thornier dilemma — and a moment of truth.’
Nevertheless, the $41.5 billion in EPA grants does mark a dramatic increase to the environmental watchdog’s ability to deputize nonprofits in its mission.
