In the summer of 2024, the lame-duck Biden administration handed out the four largest grants ever given to private entities, adding up to $14 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The biggest recipient, the Climate United Fund, which hauled in $7 billion, is headed by a Democratic operative. One related grant went to a brand-new, Democratic-run nonprofit group connected to liberal media favorite Stacey Abrams. These groups now control billions in taxpayer dollars, and they claim the EPA no longer controls this money.

Meanwhile, former President Joe Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, landed a spot on the board of an energy company that Granholm had earlier awarded a $600 million grant to.

The lesson of these incidents is not that the Biden administration was uniquely corrupt. All of these shenanigans happened in previous administrations of both parties. The lesson is about the nature of renewable energy and environmental policy.

Because much of green-energy policy is about making unprofitable technologies turn a profit, it necessarily stands at the intersection of the private sector and the government. The key drivers of such policy will not mostly be what is good for the planet but what profits those who are politically connected.

Green, in short, is the color of money.

Green banks

The unprecedented and massive EPA grants in the final months of the Biden administration were an attempt to “Trump-proof” green-energy spending. In short, Democrats were creating a slush fund.

Of course, they didn’t call it a slush fund but a “Green Bank.” The Green Bank was not a new idea in the Biden era. Obama-era Democrats pushed for a Green Bank, and around that time, international institutions set up their own versions.

Congress had already earmarked billions for solar and wind energy and a dizzying array of subsidies for plug-in cars, electric buses, and the like. So why would they need a special Green Bank?

The purpose of the Green Bank was to insulate their green spending from democratic accountability. The greenies didn’t want their money to dry up if voters decided it wasn’t a good use of taxpayer dollars.

“Once established, funded, and furnished with a Board of Directors,” explained one Green Bank called the Coalition for Green Capital, “its investment decisions would be made by experts rather than by elected officials. It would be insulated from politics and would receive no further taxpayer funding after its initial capitalization, instead drawing in private capital to co-invest in its projects.” 

Read those words again: “Its investment decisions would be made by experts rather than by elected officials. It would be insulated from politics.”

That means insiders would control many billions in taxpayer dollars, while the taxpayers, the voters, would have little or no ability to control or audit the spending.

(CGC is run by Reed Hundt, a law school friend of former President Bill Clinton and former Clinton appointee.)

Democrats were explicit about this. In the summer of 2024, they did everything they could to “Trump-proof” their green-energy spending. Politico reported, “Congress commanded that the money go out quickly, setting a strict Sept. 30 deadline that would prevent a future Trump administration from clawing it back.”

Getting the money out of government coffers and into the hands of friendly nonprofit groups was necessary because “if it was a government-run program, they could take the money away if Trump won,” as one EPA Biden appointee put it after the election. “It was an insurance policy against Trump winning.”

“Throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic was how the Biden EPA official famously put it.

Lee Zeldin, President Donald Trump’s EPA administrator, highlighted the “gold bars” video when he announced he would try to claw back the money.

Much of the news media attacked Zeldin’s efforts and defended the massive grants as sacrosanct. What’s notable is how little coverage these initial grants and their politically connected grantees received.

If you search the archives of Politico or, say, the Washington Post, you will not find a single mention of the Climate United Fund until after Zeldin announced his plan to rescind the money.

(The Washington Examiner reported on the grant awards to the Climate United Fund when they were first announced in April 2024.)

One of these climate funds to receive $2 billion was a brand-new nonprofit coalition called “Power Forward Communities.” The leader of this coalition is a Democratic-connected nonprofit group called “Rewiring America.” Free Beacon reporter Thomas Catenacci has reported extensively on the group’s political ties, including a revolving door with former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and Abrams’s seat on the board.

Abrams is not merely a failed Democratic politician who refused to concede her election loss. She is renowned as one of the best recruiters of Democratic voters in the country. So, the Green Bank serves, in part, to subsidize the Democratic Party.

This is why many Republicans oppose all green-energy spending and nearly all new federal spending programs: These programs exist in large part to fund the organs of the Left and to slush money around in Democratic coffers.

The Inflation Reduction Act that funded these Green Banks could largely be understood as the “Elect Democrats in 2028 Act.”

The Revolving Door

The revolving door, whereby politicians, staffers, and appointees get rich by passing between government and the private sector, is not limited to green energy, but it thrives there.

That’s why nobody was surprised when Biden’s energy secretary exited the administration to take a board spot at Edison International, a massive holding company of U.S. utilities.

Granholm, as secretary, awarded a $600 million grant to a consortium including some of the utilities held by Edison.

Green-energy lobbyists are at the heart of the Democratic Party. The Democratic National Committee chairman under Biden was Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist whose clients included the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.

These green-energy businesses getting federal subsidies aren’t tiny environmental nonprofit groups trying to save the world. Typically, they are very large businesses.

Green-energy companies spend as much on lobbying as fossil-fuel companies do, Scientific American found in an Obama-era study. One of Biden’s environmental plans included subsidies for private jets.

And, of course, the Hunter Biden scandals include green-energy lobbying. Biden donor Karen Tramontano, who used Hunter Biden’s name to get a consulting contract with Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, later parlayed that Ukrainian access into a green-energy lobbying gig in Ukraine.

Skepticism warranted

When you recall that one of the longest-running green-energy subsidies, the ethanol mandate, has likely been bad for the planet and that the Biden electric-car-charger initiative failed to install chargers, it’s natural to be cynical about what’s going on in the green-energy push.

TRUMP PROPOSES CRONYISM SLUSH FUND

Then, when you consider that the whole undertaking amounts to funneling billions of dollars into Democratic-connected nonprofit groups while enriching Democratic political operatives, the cynicism seems more than warranted.

The Biden administration was praised as the greenest ever. For Biden’s inner circle, that was certainly true.