From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Michael Chamberlain

We warned you: this gas didn’t smell right from the beginning.

The Greendoggle has made the big time! Not every shady government giveaway to special interests gets its own Wall Street Journal editorial.

But how often does the new EPA administrator announce that his staff has discovered that $20 billion that had been appropriated for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF or “Greendoggle”) had been “parked” in a bank by the Biden EPA until it could be ladled out as grants to climate industry cronies? That’s what Administrator Lee Zeldin announced back in February, referencing a Biden appointee who was infamously caught on tape explaining that the agency was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” – trying to get the unspent money out of the reach of the Trump administration. Zeldin’s “clawing back” that money, and the lawsuit by “public-private investment fund” Climate United to get the $7 billion it was awarded, has got the media paying attention. Finally.

Administrator Zeldin’s announcement that EPA is taking back the $2 billion awarded to an organization tied to prominent political figures marks another auspicious turn in the GGRF saga, which Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has followed and warned about since the beginning. Passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (Mr. Orwell, please call your office …), the GGRF was a massive spending program that would provide funds to environmentalist groups to finance green technology projects. The sheer amount of money Congress shoveled at the EPA was unprecedented. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with commensurate oversight resources – Mr. Zeldin says this was by design. The result was the Greendoggle, an environmentalist slush fund administered by insiders for insiders.

According to emails PPT obtained via FOIA request, the EPA invited a group of green activist organizations and thinktanks to a highly irregular November 2022 meeting to “provide early feedback on the RFI and ask clarifying questions.” And, as PPT foresaw, several groups with ties to EPA officials are on the invitation list. EPA’s “revolving door” with radical environmental groups spun fast in the Biden years.

PPT dug in and researched the green banks, finding multiple insider connections to the Biden administration. “With $27 billion dollars sloshing around, the American public should be on high alert for waste, fraud and abuse,” we warned in October 2023.

The next month, when the “short list” of coalitions vying to become GGRF distributors was announced, the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Nick Pope, whose reporting on the GGRF since early on has been essential in exposing the Greendoggle, revealed it featured “several organizations with considerable connections to the Biden administration, as well as the Democratic Party and its allies.” To put it mildly.

As the Greendoggle came together, the legacy media remained incurious, but for anyone paying attention, it smelled bad. There seemed to be no accountability, and given the Biden EPA’s ethical track record, that was concerning, to say the least.

One of the eight entities eventually chosen was the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), a green bank whose mission is to “accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology throughout the US while maintaining a targeted focus on underserved markets.” CGC board member David Hayes left the organization for nearly two years to join the Biden White House Climate Policy Office as a special assistant to the president. He then went back to the CGC board. As PPT put it in a complaint it filed in June 2024 with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the EPA’s inspector general (and which the Zeldin EPA cited in its legal defense of the clawback), while at the White House Hayes “presumably worked at the highest level on the very GGRF program from which CGC sought funding upon his return. This timing is suspect considering CGC itself publicly announced his return to its board as part of its effort to obtain GGRF funding.” Not very subtle, but it worked. CGC got a $5 billion windfall out of the Greendoggle.

It just so happened that, while Mr. Hayes was in the administration, so was another CGC veteran, Jahi Wise. Like Hayes, Wise was a special climate assistant to the president, until he joined the EPA in December 2022 as … founding director of GGRF. Subtlety doesn’t seem to be among the skill sets CGC looks for in its people. Wise at least didn’t return to CGC after that. He joined a George Soros foundation.

The GGRF should become a metaphor for congressional shortsightedness, bureaucratic arrogance and the venality of special interests at the government trough. The “green” industry is an industry like any other, green special interests are special interests and the color of a taxpayer dollar doesn’t change because it’s being wasted in a nominally noble cause.

The Greendoggle stank, gas and all.

Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader Pierre Poilievre gained the support of one of Canada’s largest trade unions to become the nation’s next Prime Minister in what is an unprecedented show of favor to the conservatives.

An open letter statement published March 24 by the Arnie Stadnick, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers’ vice president, stated that it is in its “interest” to announce its “endorsement for Pierre Poilievre and all the conservative candidates across Canada in this federal election.”

“Pierre gets it. He knows and understands that the surest and most sustainable route to providing a cleaner environment is through technology, not dismantling our energy sectors, raising taxes, importing energy from other nations, and shipping Canadian jobs abroad,” Stadnick wrote.

The Boilermakers, who represent about 12,000 skilled trades workers in many industries such as shipbuilding, manufacturing, and energy, said it supports Poilievre’s “Boots not Suits” policy that looks to expand training for tradespeople in the nation and increase grants.

“This plan is designed to strengthen the workforce and reduce reliance on foreign labour, adding 350,000 Canadian workers to job sites over five years,” the Boilermakers’ union noted.

“We believe that Pierre Poilievre is the man best equipped to support all of us in the work that we do.”

The Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada also endorsed the Conservative leader with a statement last week, saying it “strongly supports the election of Pierre Poilievre as the next Prime Minister of Canada.”

Canada will hold its next federal election on April 28 after Prime Minister Mark Carney, who took over from Justin Trudeau a few weeks ago, triggered it a week ago.

Poilievre has blasted Carney as an “establishment” Liberal politician who was “installed” by “Justin Trudeau’s insiders.”

Carney thus far appears to not have gained the favor of Canada’s trade workers, as could be seen from a recent incident involving a Canadian construction worker. A video of this worker went viral online after the worker “vowed” not to “shake the hand” of Carney at a recent press conference in Alberta.