By Marie Cusick, State Impact PA, June 26, 2019

A coalition of sixteen environmental groups sent an open letter to Gov. Tom Wolf and legislators Tuesday decrying the transfer of approximately $10 million out of Pennsylvania’s Environmental Stewardship Fund in this year’s state budget.

The fund was established nearly two decades ago to support environmental programs, including flooding and storm water management, Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts, and farmland preservation.

The budget, which is expected to pass this week, shifts the money to general government operating expenses. Joanne Kilgour heads the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club and said the state has been seeing increasing strains on its built and natural environments.

“It’s absolutely the wrong direction to be decreasing, rather than increasing, our contributions to environmental programs through the state budget,” Kilgour said.

The letter goes on to criticize lawmakers for expanding the state’s Rainy Day Fund, noting that Pennsylvania has been seeing more precipitation and flooding — the kinds of issues the Environmental Stewardship Fund was meant to address. They wrote that it delivers “on-the-ground results for communities now, and helps us avoid future costs from water pollution and property damage.”

Wolf’s spokesman J.J. Abbott said the proposed transfers in the budget would not cut previously allocated environmental projects.

“We believe these transfers will not affect or decrease the output from the [Environmental Stewardship Fund],” he wrote in an email.

Abbott added that Wolf’s Restore PA plan — a $4.5 billion infrastructure proposal that is separate from the state budget — would “dwarf” any previous environmental investments in the state. It outlines ways to address flooding, stormwater, new green infrastructure, brownfield clean-up, and the development of clean energy. Those investments would be funded through a severance tax on natural gas production.

As PA Post reported, Restore PA is Wolf’s fifth attempt in office to enact a severance tax, and it looks like lawmakers will not take it up until the fall.

https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2019/06/26/groups-criticize-state-budget-shifting-10-million-from-environmental-fund/

Government was supposed to be of the people, by the people and for the people.

But, lobbying has changed all that.

Lobbying is a good investment. Ugggh!

You vote and I will vote. Let’s all vote!

RE: Clear Energy AllianceBackground
Clear Energy Alliance (CEA) describes itself as “the latest venture of Mark Mathis who has spent most of his career challenging widely accepted ideas that are simply untrue.”

Before starting CEA, Mathis founded another pro-fossil-fuel group called Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE). While heading CARE, Mathis testified before Congress “on the dangers of anti-energy extremist groups.”

CEA primarily produces videos criticizing renewable energy and mainstream science on climate change. According to its website, “Much of what the media and activist groups tell us about energy is misleading or entirely false, which can lead to dangerous and expensive outcomes.”

According to corporate registry records, CEA was filed as a foreign LLC company in November 2017. It was organized in Delaware and operates out of the state of Florida.

CEI primarily produces videos on YouTube and has regularly paid to promote its videos across Facebook.

Pro-Oil Documentaries

Through CEA, Mathis produced two pro-oil documentary films: Fractured, and spOILed, with the latter celebrating “the incredible lifestyle oil has given us.” The description for Fractured contends that “common terms such as ‘fossil fuel,’ ‘alternative energy,’ ‘clean energy,’ ‘mother nature’ and ‘fracking”’ are highly misleading. These incorrect terms deceive the public about the essential nature of oil, gas, coal and nuclear power and cause people to believe in expensive, dangerous illusions.”

In a 2012 interview with The Texas Tribune, Mathis confirmed the film’s funding sources included individuals from the fossil fuel industry:

“I raised money from independent small investors, some of whom have interests in small independent oil and gas companies. These people were willing to put forth money to get this movie made because these are frustrated people. They’re very frustrated. They feel like they are misportrayed,” Mathis said.

The film was represented by the public relations firm D.W. Turner, which also represents BHP Billiton New Mexico Coal, BP America, Chevron and others with energy-industry ties, Farmington Daily Times reported in 2011.

An IndieGogo funding campaign also raised $16,582 USD for the film, with the backers list including small oil companies.

Before producing pro-energy documentaries through CEA, Mathis worked with another group to help produce a pro-intelligent design documentary entitled Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Several prominent scientists criticized Mathis for including them in his film without explaining what Expelled was about (and introducing it under another name). The anti-defamation league also released a statement on the film, alleging it “misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community.”

Stance on Climate Change — March 2018

Mark Mathis compared climate models to fortune tellers in a Clear Energy Alliance video, listing off a range of unrelated computer models (for elections, hurricanes, and stock markets) as evidence that climate change models are unreliable.

Recent Actions of the “Clear Energy Alliance”

May 9, 2019

The Clear Energy Alliance, represented by Mark Mathis, signed on to an open letter organized by the American Energy Alliance designed to fight against an electric vehicle tax credit.

“The American Energy Alliance has organized a coalition to proclaim in one unified voice that there should be no expansion of the misguided electric vehicle tax credit,” Thomas Pyle wrote in a statement, quoted at The Daily Caller. “There is no question that the electric vehicle tax credit distorts the auto market to no gain.”

According to Pyle and others who signed the letter, electric vehicle tax credits “overwhelmingly benefit the rich.” DeSmog’s Koch vs. Clean project has systematically debunked this, among other well-rehearsed talking points and misinformation put forward by industry about electric vehicles.

The letter cites research by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), a group that has received over $600,000 from ExxonMobil and millions from “dark money” groups DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund.

May 2, 2019

CEA posted a video narrated by Marc Morano titled “Bad Data.” The animated video featured images of dogs urinating on carpets as an analogy for what Morano perceives as scientific malfeasance. Citing the opinions of other climate science deniers as proof of “dodgy distortions” in climate studies, Morano claimed that the scientific consensus on climate change is founded upon flawed studies:

“Remember when kids used to tell their teachers, ‘the dog ate my homework.’ Well, now we’ve got some climate change scientists who might as well be saying the same thing about the raw data backing up their research. A lot of the data is incomplete, inconsistent and just flat out wrong,” Morano said.

“It’s no laughing matter because this research is being used as justification for spending trillions of dollars on policies that probably won’t do anything more than bankrupt the world.”

March 31, 2019

Dallas News commented on a video that Clear Energy Alliance and Mark Mathis had released in June 2018 entitled “Solar Value Eclipse” that portrayed renewable energy sources as “a privileged part-timer who arrives late, does work others could easily do, and then leaves while everyone else is working full tilt.” The video also references a report by the industry-funded Institute for Energy Research.

The article notes that CEA has it “backwards” when it assumes that, without traditional power plants and with a switch to renewables, there will be no one to provide energy during peak demand.

“The fact that renewable generators only produce power during part of the day does impose a cost, but not on consumers; these costs fall on renewable generators themselves. For power companies that produce during peak periods, this lapse in production on the part of renewable generators represents a profit opportunity. Indeed, despite a rapid growth in renewable generation in Texas, electricity prices have fallen further than those in any other state and reliability remains high.” [37]

February 19, 2019

According to Facebook’s archive of political advertising, Clear Energy Alliance launched a series of ads criticizing aspects of the Green New Deal that would push for measures to combat climate change.

“Even attempting to implement the Green New Deal would be incredibly disruptive and unimaginably expensive—not to mention impossible,” some of the ads read.

One ad links to a CEA video that portrays fossil fuels as being “under attack.” In the video, Mark Mathis claims that, like fossil fuels, “Capitalism, industrialization, national sovereignty, and even freedom of speech are all under attack.”

For more misleading activities, see the following:

https://www.desmogblog.com/clear-energy-alliance