BY LARRY BEHRENS:
As a candidate, Joe Biden was the recipient of an unprecedented donation effort from Big Green. As president, he is now making sure his supporters are getting a solid return on their investment.
In the 2020 election cycle, then-candidate Biden raked in tens of millions of dollars from environmental community[1].
Climate Leaders for Biden? $17 million.
Clean Energy for Biden? $3.2 million.
A Super Pac run by the League of Conservation Voters? $47 million spent on Biden.
However, the most interesting group of donors was a coalition of executives from the largest renewable companies in the country. They refused to disclose how much they raised for Biden, only saying their efforts “were unlike any other for their industry.”
I’m old enough to remember a time when if unnamed executive from an industry not cheered on by the mainstream media brought forth an undisclosed amount of money for a candidate, it would be received with cries of undue industry influence. Especially if that candidate proposed an historic spending bill that benefitted those same donors less than a year after the election. For those paying attention, that’s exactly what Joe Biden has done.
On his first day in office, President Biden cancelled the Keystone pipeline, putting 11,000 hard-working Americans out of a job and telegraphing his hostile intentions against domestic energy sources. Next, he put a moratorium on oil and natural gas production on public lands, an act recently deemed illegal by a federal judge. In his first six months in office, Joe Biden did all he could to put America’s energy workers at a huge disadvantage and now he’s going to do all he can to make sure his “Big Green” donors can cash in.
The $3.5 trillion infrastructure plan debated in Congress this week is nothing more than the worst aspects of the Green New Deal re-packaged to make it easier to swallow for the public. According to a memo circulated to Democrat Senators, the infrastructure bill will include massive tax breaks for solar, wind and electric vehicles. Supporters of the bill would have you believe the bill would “ensure the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes,” unless of course those individuals are in the solar or wind business. If you’re among the big donors to the Biden Campaign, your products will be marketed with huge tax breaks while your competition is being crippled with illegal mandates.
Make no mistake, when it comes to Biden’s Infrastructure bill, “Big Green” will get their cut, just like the last time Biden was in office.
Exactly 12 years ago, then-Vice President Biden was working out a deal to secure a $535 million loan to the little-known solar company called Solyndra. Biden’s promises in 2009 sound very familiar to anyone paying attention in 2021: green jobs just over the horizon that will transform our economy. We all know what happened, Solyndra never produced those green jobs, but the taxpayers lost millions.
Now, President Biden and his congressional allies want us to buy into his infrastructure plan that is a massive gift to his green donors. While Americans are paying too much for gas and struggling to work through a pandemic, Joe Biden wants to make sure his donors get their cut.
Biden and his Big Green donors were wrong before, and they’re wrong now.
This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy