• Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
Climate Change Dispatch
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
Climate Change Dispatch
No Result
View All Result

The Hypocritical Billionaires Pushing For Natural Gas Bans

by Robert Bryce
January 26, 2023, 9:49 AM
in News and Opinion
A A
1
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

natural gas flameThe Climate Imperative Foundation is the newest and richest anti-hydrocarbon anti-natural gas group you’ve never heard of.

How rich is Climate Imperative? According to the latest report from Guidestar, the group took in $221 million in its first full year of operation. (Guidestar calls the income “gross receipts.”)

That means that Climate Imperative, which is less than three years old, is already taking in more cash than the Sierra Club, which bills itself as the “nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization.” [emphasis, links added]

According to Guidestar, the Sierra Club collected $180 million in its latest reporting year. Climate Imperative is also taking in more money than the Rocky Mountain Institute which collected about $130 million in its latest reporting year.

I use those groups for comparison because they are pushing anti-gas initiatives across the country. More on them in a moment.

The emergence of the Climate Imperative — which has received virtually no attention from legacy media outlets — is important for several reasons.

First, it shows that the effort to “electrify everything” and ban the use of natural gas in homes and businesses – and that includes gas stoves — is part of a years-long, lavishly funded campaign that is being bankrolled by some of the world’s richest people.

Second, despite numerous claims about how nefarious actors are blocking the much-hyped “energy transition,” the size of Climate Imperative’s budget provides more evidence that the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex has far more money than the pro-hydrocarbon and pro-nuclear groups.

Indeed, the anti-hydrocarbon NGOs (most of which are also stridently anti-nuclear) have loads of money, media backing, and momentum.

As can be seen in the graphic below, the five biggest anti-hydrocarbon NGOs are now collecting about $1.5 billion per year from their donors. (All data is from Guidestar.)

That sum is roughly three times more than the amount being collected by the top five non-profit associations that are either pro-hydrocarbon or pro-nuclear.

Third, banning the direct use of natural gas in homes and businesses may be worse for the climate. You read that right.

Burning gas directly allows consumers to use about 90% of the energy contained in the fuel.

Using gas indirectly — by converting it into electricity and then using that juice to power a heat pump, stove, or water heater — wastes more than half of the energy in the fuel.

That point was made by Glenn Ducat, in his excellent new book, Blue Oasis No More: Why We’re Not Going to “Beat” Global Warming and What We Need To Do About It. Ducat is a Ph.D. nuclear engineer who worked at Argonne National Lab, as well as at two electric utilities.

He explains that:

“Burning natural gas by residential commercial and industrial customers is at least twice as efficient and emits about half as much CO2 as processes that use electricity produced from fossil fuels.

“Converting process-heat applications to electricity before the electricity grid is completely carbon-free will increase CO2 emissions.” (Emphasis in the original.)

I began tracking Climate Imperative in late 2021 when Axios published a story headlined, “Climate movement veterans launch major new foundation.”

Axios reported that the new group has “a planned budget of $180 million annually over five years.” That number caught my attention. Here was a new group with a planned five-year budget of $1 billion, and yet, Axios was the only media outlet to report on it.

On its website, the group makes it clear that the electrify-everything push is a major focus of its work, saying its “imperatives include rapid scaling of renewable energy, widespread electrification of buildings and transportation, stopping the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, reducing pollution from major industrial sources, and economy-wide pathways to reduce emissions from the biggest sources.”

The website lists some of Climate Imperative’s grantees, a group that includes the Building Decarbonization Coalition and the American Lung Association.

Axios went on to note that the San Francisco-based foundation, “began making grants in the spring of 2020.” It also noted that the group is headed by two former Sierra Club officials: Bruce Nilles and Mary Anne Hitt.

Nilles spent more than a decade heading the group’s Beyond Coal campaign. Climate Imperative’s advisory board includes Margo Oge, a former top EPA official, and Bill Ritter, the former governor of Colorado.

Where is Climate Imperative getting its money? The board of directors likely holds the answer. The most recognizable names on the six-person board are Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

The other board members include Anita Bekenstein, Sanjeev Krishnan, Greg Nelson, and George Pavlov. A source with knowledge of the group’s funding told me this week that the majority of the money is coming from Doerr and Jobs.

Forbes magazine estimates that Doerr has a net worth of $12.7 billion. Forbes puts Jobs’ net worth at $17.7 billion. None of the other board members appear on Forbes’ list of America’s richest people.

The effort to demonize gas stoves began in early 2020, at about the same time Climate Imperative was launched. That year, the Sierra Club claimed that gas stoves are “linked to respiratory illnesses, and children who live in homes with gas stoves are 42% more likely to have asthma.”

The source for that claim was a paper by the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Colorado-based non-profit founded by renewable-energy promoter Amory Lovins.

One of the first legacy media outlets to publish an article promoting claims about bad air quality from gas stoves was The Atlantic. In October 2020, it published an article headlined “Kill Your Gas Stove.”

jobs bloomberg doerr bezos

It may be a coincidence, but The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs. It’s also interesting to note that in 2018, The Atlantic published a piece titled “How the Gas Oven Changed Humans’ Relationship With Fire,” and noted that the “ability to turn flames on and off at will was ‘one of the single greatest contributors to human happiness in the kitchen.’”

Since 2020, the Rocky Mountain Institute has continued its anti-gas crusade. Earlier this month, a spate of news stories was published after the group released a paper that claimed 12.7 percent of childhood asthmas are due to gas stoves.

One of the authors of that paper, Talor Gruenwald, works at RMI. Gruenwald is also a research associate at Rewiring America, a San Francisco-based outfit that calls itself the “leading electrification nonprofit, focused on electrifying our homes, businesses, and communities.” (Rewiring American doesn’t publish a Form 990. It is sponsored by Windward Fund, which took in $273 million in 2021.)

But RMI’s asthma claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps the most definitive analysis of the issue was a 2013 study published in Lancet Respiratory Medicine that studied half a million schoolchildren in 47 countries over a multi-year period.

It relied on questionnaires filled out by the mothers of children. What did it find? “We detected no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.”

Furthermore, just a day or two after the RMI paper came out, the group walked back its claim about asthma, with one RMI official telling the Washington Examiner that the study “does not assume or estimate a causal relationship” between childhood asthma and natural gas stoves.

Where does RMI get the money to push its electrification agenda? Some of it is coming from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.

In 2020, the Bezos Earth Fund gave RMI $10 million, which the group said will be used to “reduce GHG emissions from homes, commercial structures, and other buildings, enabling RMI to increase its current work with a coalition of partners in key states. The project will focus on making all U.S. buildings carbon-free by 2040 by advocating for all-electric new construction…”

Bezos is also a big backer of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the group that shamelessly bragged about its role in the premature closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York.

In 2020, the NRDC issued a press release touting the $100 million grant it got from the Bezos Earth Fund. It said the money “will be used to help NRDC advance climate solutions and legislation at the state level, [and] move the needle on policies and programs focused on reducing oil and gas production…” (Emphasis added.)

Read rest at SubStack

  • Truth
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Gettr
  • Threads
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Mastodon
  • Buffer
  • Telegram
  • Email
  • Copy Link
  • Share Using More Networks…
Share via
  • Facebook
  • Like
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Skype
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky

Join our list

Subscribe to our mailing list and get interesting stuff and updates to your email inbox.

Thank you for subscribing.

Something went wrong.

We respect your privacy and take protecting it seriously

Related Posts

Energy

UK’s Green Agenda Blows Up As Ørsted Kills Massive Offshore Wind Project

May 9, 2025
Electric Vehicles (EVs)

16 States, DC Sue Trump Admin Over EV Charger Funds, Most Have Built None

May 9, 2025
Extreme Weather

NOAA Quietly Kills Its Billion-Dollar Disaster Database And Report After Years Of Criticism

May 9, 2025

Comments 1

  1. Russell Johnson says:
    2 years ago

    Totalitarianism is advancing as we are fed daily doses of climate change propaganda! Globalists are planning genocide by severely limiting all fossil fuels and substituting renewables; all the time knowing CO2 is not the problem. The result will be wrecked economies, starvation and death! The fight against climate change will result in a death march to oblivion for much of humanity.

Stay Connected On Social Media

gab-logo

Donate Today

Beating back the alarmist narrative takes time and money. Please donate today to help!

Recent Posts

  • yorkshire offshore windUK’s Green Agenda Blows Up As Ørsted Kills Massive Offshore Wind Project
    May 9, 2025
    Orsted scrapped the Hornsea 4 offshore wind project, dealing a massive blow to Ed Miliband’s green vision and raising questions about UK net zero targets. […]
  • ev charging station16 States, DC Sue Trump Admin Over EV Charger Funds, Most Have Built None
    May 9, 2025
    17 states sue the Trump administration for access to $5 billion in EV charger funding, despite most failing to build a single charger. […]
  • weather montageNOAA Quietly Kills Its Billion-Dollar Disaster Database And Report After Years Of Criticism
    May 9, 2025
    NOAA has quietly retired its Billion-Dollar Disaster list after years of criticism over transparency, accuracy, and scientific integrity. […]
  • german wind farmHow Wind And Solar Sent Energy Prices Sky-High in ‘Green’ Countries
    May 8, 2025
    Adding more green energy makes power more expensive, not cheaper—due to unreliable output, required fossil fuel backup, and taxpayer subsidies. […]
  • bernie sanders fox newsBernie Sanders Defends Private Jet Use, Says ‘He’s Too Important’ To Fly Coach
    May 8, 2025
    Bernie Sanders and AOC are facing criticism for using private jets while promoting their climate-focused “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. […]
  • blackout stationGreen Energy Suicide: The West Pays The Price For Its Net-Zero Delusions
    May 8, 2025
    Green energy policies clash with reality as Europe and the U.S. face blackouts, soaring costs, and a collapsing power grid. […]
  • wright trump exec orderDOE Scraps $4.5M Website And Logo Project Meant To Showcase Green Agenda
    May 8, 2025
    The DOE canceled a $4.5 million contract the Biden admin awarded for a new agency website and logo that highlighted the green energy transition. […]
  • desantis bill signing‘Dead On Arrival’: DeSantis Signs Law Banning Geoengineering And Weather Modification In Florida
    May 7, 2025
    DeSantis has signed legislation shutting down geoengineering and weather modification projects in Florida amid rising voter concerns. […]
  • columbia protestersNo Worthwhile Research Was Lost In The Columbia Funding Cuts
    May 7, 2025
    Columbia University laid off 180 people after Trump ended grants for leftist equity and global warming research. […]
  • tree ringsHow Activists And Flawed Data Created The Illusion Of A Climate Apocalypse
    May 7, 2025
    Activist-made climate graphic misuses smoothed proxy data to exaggerate modern warming, with IPCC silence fueling ongoing alarmism and misinformation. […]

Get Instant Email Notifications

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email either instantly or daily. Check your Junk folder for any verification emails upon subscribing.

Submit a tip

Please enter your email, so we know you're human.

Books We Like

very convenient warming

exposing great lie

Have a suggestion? Let us know! We swap out books based on your input. We participate in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. See here.

  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us

© Portions copyright Climate Change Dispatch

Share via
  • Threads
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Mastodon
  • Buffer
  • Telegram
  • Email
  • Copy Link
  • Share Using More Networks…
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us

© 2025 Climate Change Dispatch