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The Transparency Foundation has long warned about the misleading and unsubstantiated claims made by backers of the California Green New Deal. As our research has shown, the California Green New Deal not only imposes substantial cost burden on state residents, but rarely produces any net benefit to the environment.
Now we are learning that the failures of the California Green New Deal extend beyond just bad public policy – but now extends into outright fraud.
Joe Sanberg, described as a key player in California politics and a major Gavin Newsom donor, now faces 40 years in prison after admitting that his carbon credit platform had defrauded investors.1
Aspiration Partners Inc – started by other big players in the California Green New Deal movement – was set up to sell “carbon credits” to industries, with Aspiration promising to pay third parties to plant trees in Africa that would offset their emissions.
Once a star of the now-fading “environmental, social, and governance (ESG)” movement, Aspiration was found to have concocted fake customers to boost its valuation.
This indeed raises questions about whether the broader world of “carbon credits” amounts to little more than one big company paying another money in exchange for fantasy indulgences, based more on marketing than any real-world impact.
California’s failed Green New Deal policy is rooted in a fundamentally false narrative of an existential “climate crisis” caused by CO2 and human economic activity.2
The Aspiration story directly echoes another dubious “greenwashing” venture that we identified in April 20233 when we examined the ludicrously transparent definitional games and wordsmithing behind the green bond industry, and questioned the bona fides of a sister industry that verifies carbon offset standards.
A month later, the CEO of the carbon consultancy in our example, Verra, apparently the world’s then leading such consultancy, resigned amidst claims that the forest carbon offsets it approved and “certified” were by largely worthless and comprised “phantom credits” without genuine carbon reductions.4
Whether it is the fomenting of CCAs (“Community Choice Aggregators”), whose hidden purpose is to artificially boost demand for renewable energy, thereby increasing the subsidy for what is terribly inefficient and costly power,5 or the subsidy-driven despoiling of vast tracts of fragile or otherwise arable land for solar farms,6 green energy is increasingly revealed as a mechanism to blatantly transfer wealth from American taxpayers to leftist causes—and leftist politicians’ pocketbooks.
Citizens in CA, NH, MD, NY and other states that foolishly shuttered reliable fossils and nuclear plants, and squandered taxpayer wealth on “renewable”—but fundamentally unreliable—wind and solar farms are now re-earning the harsh physical realities of providing reliable and cheap energy, as utility bills.
And that isn’t the worst of it, as renewables are now wrecking what once was the world’s best-functioning and most reliable power system, all in pursuit of a mandated Green New Deal that has never been voter approved.
We would do well to remember a simple truth. Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved powered flight in 1904 on their own nickel, with no government subsidy; nor did Thomas Edison, when he built the world’s first electric power system in New York City several decades earlier. An investment that can only succeed with public subsidy is no investment whatsoever.
3 https://thetransparencyfoundation.org/news/why-green-bonds-might-not-be-so-green-after-all
4 https://thetransparencyfoundation.org/news/not-so-green-green-bonds-we-told-you-so
5 https://thetransparencyfoundation.org/news/what-is-a-cca-and-why-you-should-be-worried
6 https://thetransparencyfoundation.org/news/will-solar-farms-cause-another-dust-bowl
Al Medioli is a Senior Fellow with the Transparency Foundation.
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