Links tagged “funding”

Morano: "They've turned science into lobbying and there's nothing to alarm the American public. In fact, the climate death rate
over 100 years has declined 95 plus percent. In other words, our fossil fuel use has protected us. It's taken an unsafe climate and made it safe and the UN claims we need to make ourselves poorer to make us produce a climate better." 

Reuters: "The license holds metals such as nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum and the funding will cover evaluation and initial drilling. KoBold is a privately-held company whose principal investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate and technology fund backed by Microsoft (MSFT.O) co-founder Bill Gates, Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg, Amazon (AMZN.O) founder Jeff Bezos, and Ray Dalio, founder of the world's largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates."

Buried in the massive proposal—which is already longer than 2,700 pages—is a section titled, "ADVANCED IMPAIRED DRIVING TECHNOLOGY," which mandates new vehicles include "a system that … passively and accurately detect[s] whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a motor vehicle is equal to or greater than the blood alcohol concentration" of .08, in which case the system would "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation." Automobile manufacturers would have a three-year grace period to comply with the regulation. ...

Intoxalock, a company that manufactures vehicle breathalyzers, has also spent heavily on lobbying in the past five years. It has spent more than $900,000 on lobbyists since 2017, according to the Center For Responsive Politics, including $40,000 to Crossroads Strategies in 2021. The firm boasts many employees who have worked in the federal government, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.

None of that work, spanning decades, was due to any financial support from Exxon. When Exxon was a donor to Heartland, from 1998 to 2006, its contributions of about $50,000 never exceeded more than 5 percent of our annual budget. Those donations were also reported by Exxon itself.  In fact, Exxon’s last gift to Heartland was in 2006 – two years before the first of Heartland’s more than a dozen major International Conferences on Climate Change and three years before the publication of the first volume of the Climate Change Reconsidered series. Their gifts ceased precisely because of Heartland’s work debunking the junk climate science that is used to set global policies that restrict human freedom and do economic harm to countries, industries, and individuals.

“A state, in consultation with any metropolitan planning organization designated within the state, shall develop a carbon reduction strategy,” according to the text, which is also in the officially released version of the bill. [Emphasis added] ... 

Requirements include but are not limited to:

• Reducing traffic congestion by disincentivizing single-occupant vehicle trips and facilitating “the use of alternatives” like public transportation, shared or pooled vehicle trips, “pedestrian facilities,” and “bicycle facilities” within the state.
• Facilitating the use of vehicles or modes of travel that result in “lower transportation emissions per person-mile traveled as compared to existing vehicles.”
• Incentivizing the construction of vehicles that emit less carbon.

States, at their “discretion,” would also be required to come up with a way to keep track of total carbon emissions from the production, transport, and use of materials used in the construction of transportation facilities within their states.

The secretary of transportation has the power to reject states’ proposed strategies if the plans do not meet the laid out requirements and are therefore deemed “not green enough.”

Alex Epstein responds: "An unpopular but irrefutable truth: the CO2 emissions of rich countries have been a huge net-benefit to poor countries. Fossil fueled make possible the rich world's incredible productivity and innovation, which have dramatically raised life expectancies everywhere...The rich world should not be giving climate payouts to the poor world. But we sure as hell need to stop encouraging/forcing them not to use fossil fuels. We also need to encourage the replacement of dictatorship with freedom and the rule of law."