“The Department of Energy is being weaponized to reward the political supporters of the administration,” Peter Schweizer concludes on the most recent episode of The Drill Down.
With the government poised at the brink of a shutdown last week, the Department of Energy (DoE) last week doled out another batch of “green energy” spending on projects in eleven states. This is a portion of a $2.3 billion program the Biden administration created to advance its clean-energy drive, according to the Wall Street Journal.
But as listeners of The Drill Down podcast know, the cash from DoE’s spending on green energy comes pre-stained with the greasy fingerprints of John Podesta, the current White House “czar” for such things and a longtime inhabitant of the Washington swamp.
John Podesta, senior advisor to the president for clean energy innovation, right, and Jennifer Granholm, US secretary of energy, during the EEI 2023 event in Austin, Texas, US, on Monday, June 12, 2023.(Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In 2022, Podesta was put in charge of nearly $370 billion in clean energy “investments” by the Biden White House, making him the real decision-maker for handing out funds to make clean energy cost-effective and incentivize Americans to accept higher costs for their gasoline in the process. Meanwhile, Podesta’s personal net worth has skyrocketed during his time in Washington to about $28.4 million, according to his financial disclosures.
Was Podesta picked for the spot because of his expertise in the energy field? Not exactly. He served as chief of staff during Bill Clinton’s administration, then later founded a left-leaning think tank in Washington called the Center for American Progress (CAP).
In 2009, on behalf of the new Obama administration, Podesta and CAP senior fellows held talks with China in Beijing on issues including climate change, according to Peter Schweizer’s book, Red Handed. Podesta himself has said Chinese companies will be the big players of America becoming green.
Podesta also began making lots of money from investments and corporate board memberships. During the Obama years, Podesta was an outside consultant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This meant he did not have to divest from stock holdings. In 2011, he “joined the board of three related energy companies,” Joule Unlimited, Joule Global Holdings, and Stichting Joule Global Foundation. Joule focused on solar energy and one investor for Joule, Hans-Jorg Wyss, consulted with Podesta, not for his energy expertise but for his public policy experience.
As the Government Accountability Institute reported in 2016, the Wyss Charitable Foundation gave “between $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation,” and “Podesta was paid $87,000 by the Wyss Foundation in 2013.” Podesta failed to disclose his membership on the board of Joule Stichting in his federal financial disclosure forms when he did join the Obama administration in 2013 as a senior advisor.
This is the guy making decisions for the Biden administration on where to spend its mountain of taxpayer money on green energy.
Schweizer notes that Democrats in Congress are constantly telling Americans to “trust the experts,” on complicated issues like green-energy investment and technology, much of which is now made in China.
“In this weird way, China wins both ways,” Schweizer says. “They get to keep building their fossil fuel plants, and their coal-fired power plants, whatever they want. And at the same time, they’re developing the technology that they’re selling to us, whether it’s wind turbines, EV batteries for electric cars – they are the big winners here.”
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