Today’s Washington Times reports on a scheme outed by Energy Policy Advocates, and first revealed by CLW, by which activist governors bring in privately hired “staff” to, as New Mexico put it, “to implement the Governor’s Executive Order on Climate Change”.
USCA’s Julie Cerqueira is quoted disputing that any such program exists (actually…the UN Foundation’s Cerqueira…it’s USCA that doesn’t exist in any form that allows it to hire anyone; it’s a website, if one with an Executive Director and lots of donor-funded consultants):
“Some states have indicated that capacity constraints are a challenge to meeting their climate goals, and that additional staff capacity is needed,” said Ms. Cerqueira in an email. “That’s what you will see in the released emails. As you see from below, we don’t have a program currently stood up (nor did we previously, despite Horner’s ‘expose’).”
The “expose'” could refer either to CLW’s recent revelation, or Chris Horner’s report for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “Government for Rent“, which detailed the apparent pilot program for this scheme, laid out also by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in “Climate of Unaccountability“. That reportage, too, revealed something less than the truth about the scheme, with Gov. Inslee’s office claiming ignorance about the private funding of his ‘climate’ aide, while numerous emails show them bragging about it. (One of those emails is here, and many more such public records are available for posting in the event this, too, gets disputed.
We don’t know which Ms. Cerqueira refers to since both programs definitely have been “stood up”.
Ms. Cerqueira corresponded with, e.g., Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’s office, “Since we have funding specifically for your state and one other, this will be Phase 1 of the Fellow Program”. (Possibly that other state is the one that New Mexico’s Sandra Ely said was “to implement the Governor’s Executive Order on Climate Change”?)
We don’t know what Gov. Polis’s office said about it, as they don’t want the public to see.
The real question is whether “USCA” told its (UN Foundation’s) donors that there was no program they were funding to place “staff” in governors’ offices to implement the climate agenda.
Or, depending on which version reflects reality, maybe it’s all a big tease and there are no donors who’ve agreed to run money through the UN Foundation to hire non-staff to serve in governors’ offices as “USCA” Fellows.
There certainly were efforts to get donors for this scheme a la Michael Bloomberg’s underwriting of “Special Assistant Attorneys General” for climate prosecutions. Not all of which went over well. More on that in a bit.