Climate-related philanthropy in America has been hijacked by a radical agenda that will hurt the affordability, reliability, and resilience of the U.S. electric grid.
More proof of that hijacking came last month when mega-billionaire Michael Bloomberg announced that Bloomberg Philanthropies would give $500 million to the Beyond Carbon campaign. [emphasis, links added]
The goal of the effort is to shutter the bulk of our most important power plants — the ones that burn coal and natural gas and are therefore dispatchable and weather-resilient — and, in Bloomberg’s words, replace them with “renewable energy.”
The September 20 announcement quotes Bloomberg as saying the $500 million gift marks a “new chapter in the Beyond Carbon campaign, as we move to finish the job. By working with our partners across the country, we hope to transform the way we power America by moving beyond fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable energy.”
The press release goes on to say the goal is to “shut down every last U.S. coal plant” and “slash gas plant capacity in half, and block all new gas plants.”
A more radical agenda is difficult to conjure.
The coal and gas plants that Bloomberg and his allies in the anti-industry industry want to shutter produced about 40% of all the electricity used in the U.S. last year.
Here are the numbers: In 2022, according to the Statistical Review of World Energy, U.S. electricity generation totaled about 4,550 terawatt-hours (TWh).
About 904 TWh came from coal-fired power plants, and 1,817 TWh was generated by burning natural gas. Thus, the Beyond Carbon campaign aims to eliminate about 1,813 TWh of dispatchable thermal generation from the U.S. electric grid and do so by 2030.
The 1,813 TWh/year of electricity that Bloomberg wants to eliminate equals the combined annual electricity use of nine states: Texas, Florida, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, and Illinois.
The timing of Bloomberg’s announcement could scarcely be more tone-deaf. It comes in the wake of repeated warnings made this year by America’s top regulators, grid operators, and an industry association that our power grid is losing too much dispatchable generation capacity.
It is adding too much capacity dependent on the vagaries and whims of the weather.
Indeed, Bloomberg announced the $500 million donation scarcely a month after the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that bad energy policy was a significant threat to the reliability of the U.S. electric grid. More on that in a moment.
The September 20 announcement brings Bloomberg’s total funding of the Beyond Carbon campaign to $1.05 billion. (In 2011, he gave the Sierra Club $50 million for its Beyond Coal campaign. In 2019, he announced a $500 million pledge to the Beyond Carbon campaign.)
The new $500 million grant shows, yet again, that funding behind the $4.5 billion-per-year anti-industry industry dwarfs the funding for NGOs and associations that promote hydrocarbons and nuclear energy.
Further, it shows that the anti-industry industry is collecting hundreds of millions of dollars per year from some of the world’s wealthiest people to fund climate policies that will impose regressive taxes on the poor and the middle class while weakening our most critical energy network, the electric grid.
The $500 million will, according to the press release, be parceled out to some of the richest climate NGOs in the country, including the League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Earthjustice, all of which have operating budgets of more than $100 million per year.
Other groups who will get cash from Bloomberg include the Hip Hop Caucus, Advanced Energy United, and Coalfield Development, who will all work “to accelerate efforts to end fossil fuels and turbocharge clean energy.”
The press release quoted Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, who said, “We look forward to finishing the fight to shut down fossil fuels and increase U.S. clean energy.”
It also quotes Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, who claimed, “…the tailwinds have never been stronger to realize the climate, health, and economic benefits of clean power.”
The press release does not define “clean energy” or “clean power.” Nor does it mention wind energy or solar energy. Nor is there any mention of the cleanest and safest form of power generation: nuclear energy.
Now, to the warnings about grid reliability. Over the past five months, top regulators and industry officials have repeatedly warned policymakers that the U.S. electric grid is on the verge of a reliability crisis.
The looming crisis is due to the very things that Bloomberg and his well-heeled claqueurs are promoting: premature retirements of our dispatchable thermal power plants fueled by coal and natural gas and massive increases in the deployment of intermittent wind and solar resources.
Read rest at Substack
Like all the wealthy liberals Bloomberg can afford his lavish lifestyle this pompous old Peacock is not about to give up his lifestyle of the Liberal and Spoiled