By Thomas Neuburger
A brief note to tell you what you already knew and what no one else will say when the lights are on — if climate's your issue, Biden's your enemy too, and he's not a soft one.
From climate expert Brad Johnson's new Substack site, Hill Heat:
BANKRUPT POLITICS FTW: Green New Deal progressive Saule Omarova’s nomination to be Comptroller of the Currency (and thereby be one of the top banking regulators) has been tanked by a group of upper-crust corporatist Democratic senators on the Banking Committee—Mark Warner (Va.), Jon Tester (Mont.), and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.)—with the support of fracker John Hickenlooper (Colo.) and Mark Kelly (Ariz.).
The big banks hated Omarova’s nomination, because she has expressed the need to actually regulate them. Even worse, she wants government officials to be in charge of any future bailouts, instead of BlackRock or Blackstone. The banks butter up the members of the Banking Committee. Republicans were happy to beat the stuffing out of “Comrade Omarova” for growing up in Soviet Kazakhstan and wanting to crimp the business of big banks, but the Democrats needed a different public excuse to go after Biden’s nominee. It turns out it was her concern for climate that helped get Democrats to dessert her.
The “gotcha” moment came from an interview in February, in which she said of fossil-fuel companies:
As it turns out, if “we” includes the U.S. Senate, then the answer is “no.”
Unsurprisingly, Republicans hammered her on this quote; fossil-friendly Democrats like Tester joined in. Omarova repeatedly apologized, but the damage was done.
Earlier in the same newsletter, Johnson noted:
The Biden White House has brought on carbon capture and sequestration expert Sally Benson, of the oil-and-gas-industry-funded Stanford Energy program, to be “deputy director for energy and chief strategist for the energy transition” for the newly created Energy Division of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Benson helped Stanford get $20 million each from ExxonMobil and Shell (but only $12.5 from Total) in recent years with turkeys like this:
“Stanford innovators value the support and expertise of companies like ExxonMobil and Bank of America as we all try to help create this next era in energy.”
And then there's this recent affront...
...from the candidate who told you pretty words to get elected, like these from his fantasized "Plan for Climate Change" (emphasis added):
On day one, Biden will use the full authority of the executive branch to make progress and significantly reduce emissions. Biden recognizes we must go further, faster and more aggressively than ever before, by ... banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters [and] modifying royalties to account for climate costs...
As we've said many times, Biden is as destructive to the climate as Trump was. But as the Dem-friendly alternative, he gets a pass in what passes for the mainstream media.
Batten down, folks.
(To read all of my work, visit God's Spies at Substack.com. More information here and here.)