When asked about coordination that’s taken place behind the scenes between Sec. Haaland and her daughter, agency officials have repeatedly refused to comment.

Recently the federal watchdog group Protect the People’s Trust released open records documents showing the Interior Secretary had alarming connections with organizers of a violent protest in 2021 at the department. The group found that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s own daughter was one of the organizers.
 
On October 14, 2021, a protest at Interior headquarters in D.C. featured rallies of indigenous people opposed to leasing around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Protesters breached the building, handcuffed themselves in place, and staged a sit-in. When security personnel attempted to remove the protesters, things turned violent. Multiple police officers were injured and 55 protesters were arrested.

​A leading group of climate journalists is campaigning in 2023 to weaponize claims of “disinformation” and bar voices supporting oil and natural gas from news stories. Ironically, based on their own standards these reporters are advancing disinformation of their own.
 
The Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), an association of 1,400 reporters that’s funded in large part by billion-dollar, anti-fossil fuel philanthropies, recently kicked off a campaign to promote its “2023 Journalists’ Guide to Energy & Environment.” As an extension of the campaign, SEJ and its leaders are pushing reporters across the country to exclude views that run counter to theirs in climate stories.
 
The following highlights several recent comments by SEJ leadership and its members.

​The White House Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) is working on a scorecard intended to assess federal agencies’ efforts to advance “environmental justice.” The initiative is designed to address the president’s Executive Order Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad which orders agencies to make achieving environmental justice part of their missions. The scorecard is intended to assess how well agency programs and policies address the “disproportionately high and adverse human health, environmental, climate-related, and other cumulative impacts on disadvantaged communities.”
 
As with many things, the notion of environmental justice comes from good intentions. Often low-income communities are indeed located near industrial areas and closer to pollution sources than those who can afford better-situated real estate. Environmental justice originally focused on ensuring disadvantaged communities aren’t unduly impacted and giving them voice in environmental matters. Of course regulation should focus on reducing pollutants to protect the health of nearby residents and previously marginalized people should have a voice in issues impacting their communities. However, the concept has ballooned since the original conception while at the same time become focused on a fairly narrow range of policy prescriptions, including those aimed at eliminating oil and natural gas. 

​Russia’s attempts to influence American politics in recent years is no secret, particularly when it comes to energy production. Which is why you’d expect policymakers to ensure proposed regulations stay clear of any association with the oppressive regime, especially in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
 
However, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) apparently is failing with its proposed climate disclosure rule. The following continues our series reviewing the questionable sources cited within the commission’s rule.
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Our recent analysis conducted in the course of drafting our comment letter shows that significant crossover exists among the organizations funding the seven major climate initiatives cited in the proposed rule. The global network of non-profits that are pushing climate change policies through financial regulation are backed by numerous well-known activist philanthropies and climate groups that have pushed Keep-It-in-the-Ground policies for several years, such as Bloomberg Philanthropies, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), New Venture Fund (NVF), Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

• U.S. flaring intensity is down 46% since 2012
• Russian gas piped into Europe has 41% higher GHG emissions than U.S. LNG, even with the transportation emissions
• Venezuela’s flaring intensity is 18 times higher than ours
• Yet Interior Sec. Haaland couldn’t bring herself to admit that American production is more environmentally friendly.

 
A few years ago, France held up a U.S. LNG import project over alleged concerns about methane emissions, as if the alternative of Russian gas was cleaner. France was trying to make a point about Trump methane rules, despite the fact that every molecule of natural gas at the wellpad controlled by the Obama methane rule was captured by the Trump rule. But of course that was not the narrative in the media. We also now know more about how Russia funds antifracking activism in Europe as a means of crowding out U.S. competition and asserting its energy hegemony over the continent. That decision’s aged particularly poorly since the invasion of Ukraine.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says its proposed disclosure rule is necessary to meet a growing demand by investors for information on publicly traded companies’  climate change risk. Yet only a small fraction of American asset managers are interested in such regulations whereas the majority of the pressure is from Europe. Today, we get granular to further show the weakness of SEC’s case.
 
The following continues our series based on our white paper that provides more detail.
 
SEC justifies the proposed rule as necessary to meet “significant investor demand for information about how climate conditions may impact their investments. That demand has been increasing in recent years.” SEC cites to a well-known letter to investors in 2020 from BlackRock Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink as proof of investor demand. Fink wrote that, “BlackRock announced a number of initiatives to place sustainability at the center of our investment approach,” including exiting investments in coal.

​Absent from SEC’s discussion is any reference to the robust public debate and criticism of BlackRock’s letter and its continued investments in the coal and oil sectors. Mr. Fink’s letter is presented by SEC as though it is widely popular and uncontroversial, and that cannot be further from the truth.