MacEachern: Green energy billionaires doing own “Koch” thing
A day doesn’t go by without our “letters to the editor” file flooding with missives about those wicked, old Koch brothers and their insane conspiracy to lay waste to the earth.
Thanks, Mr. Soros!
But Koch-obsessing is getting a little long in the tooth, isn’t it? Especially now that there is a new conspiracy to monger: The Rise of the Anti-Kochs: Revenge of the Green Billionaires!
The Energy & Environment Legal Legal Institute is a non-profit, free-market-oriented group that does “strategic litigation, policy research, and public education on important energy and environmental issues.” It has produced a report that purports to show proof of conspiratorial collusion between the White House, the Environmental Protection Agency, conservation groups like the Sierra Club and “green-minded” billionaires like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.
The group’s report contends the billionaires are funneling tens of millions of dollars to environmental groups who use the cash to raise armies of lawyers that then conspire with the EPA (with the eager oversight and support of the Obama White House) to crush the coal industry now, and oil down the road. All on behalf of their heavily subsidized green-industry investments.
I’d never heard of the group before, but let’s just get ahead of the crowd anyhow and note that the Soros-funded Center for Media and Democracy has cited evidence that it has “connections with the Koch brothers… and other conservative donors.”
The essence of the report is that the billionaires are rigging the regulatory game, state by state, in order to clear the energy field of cheaper coal on behalf of the taxpayer-subsidized solar- and wind-energy industries in which they’ve invested their billions.
