Climate Money Watchdog founders Dina Rasor and Greg Williams recap our first twenty episodes. We cover such issues as:
See our main web site, our episode listing on Buzzsprout, or wherever you like to get your podcasts for full listing.
Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!
Climate Money Watchdog founders Dina Rasor and Greg Williams recap our first twenty episodes. We cover such issues as:
See our main web site, our episode listing on Buzzsprout, or wherever you like to get your podcasts for full listing.
Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!
Thanks to our listeners for joining us for another episode of climate money watchdog where we study how the federal government spends its money on mitigating climate change and protecting the environment. This is our 21st episode. And we're going to be going back and looking at the 20 episodes that have come before this. And highlighting what we think is most interesting about each of those episodes. These have covered a lot of ground, everywhere from municipal politics, all the way on up to the federal, across lots of different technologies, lots of different approaches to mitigating climate change. And we we think this is going to be an interesting recap.
Dina Rasor:Yes, and I'm Dana razor, and I'm the Executive Director, and Greg is my co founder. And we want reason that we want to start doing it change. We're doing those we're going to talk about the stuff that we learned with no way to do it. And when we started this a year ago, we were learning and then there was no money being spent. And then all the sudden the infrastructure law passed, and then the inflation act Reduction Act passed. And both of those things just suddenly shot money, a lot of money. This is the largest amount of money that has been ever spent on climate change. And so if the money spent wrong or abuse the opponents of climate spending, we use any fraud. Waste is a cudgel to destroy current and future things. So we're going to be looking at money including large spending programs such as the Evie electric vehicle charging, and we have a one podcast on that subject. And Biden's already accepted the Eevee charging plans for all 50 states. And we are concerned that the states that lean against climate spending were put may purloined the climate money into other spending programs like they did with COVID money. Another big area that we looked at, and I'm we have three different to podcasts on this is carbon capture and sequestration CCS. And it's often seen as a bridge technology.
Greg Williams:I think it's worth reminding the audience that we have a whole episode on the example of Solyndra, which was a company that the Obama and the Obama administration guaranteed a loan for them. And they quickly went out of business, which gate really gave a black eye to the government's role in supporting the solar panel industry. And we want to make sure that that kind of thing doesn't happen again, both that the money isn't wasted, and that environmental protection and climate change mitigation doesn't get a bad name, because of one or a few or heaven forbid many programs were that are mismanaged.
Dina Rasor:Yes. And that that podcast was had an old friend of mine named Eric Thorson, and he was the former inspector general the Treasury for 11 years. And so and was actually the one that played Clean up on aisle five, on Solyndra thing that once it happened, his he and his investigators went in to see what went wrong. And interestingly, it was really that there wasn't a lot of fraud. There was just the Department of Energy didn't do their due diligence. And for they put out this tremendously big loan, they pushed it out too fast. And it collapsed. And even though it was a smaller part of all the money that was in that loan program that was done successfully and actually made money for the government, it was used as a cudgel by people who against climate change and waving the bloody flag of Solyndra every time you brought up spending. So yes, so another big area that we have been going is, like I said, was carbon capture and sequestration. And we have three of them on that. What that means is that you are, it's really kind of a complicated situation. So instead of not burning the fuel at all, you burn the fuel, whether it's coal or natural gas, or other things, and you capture the carbon out of the smokestack and unfold Shouldn't weigh hasn't been, it hasn't been that successful. And sometimes it's only about 40% of the carbon. And so you, you capture the carbon, you pressurize it very highly used to have to have a series of pipelines all across country, a big pipeline network, which they're planning to build, which which is talked about in these in these three issues. And you transported by pipelines, which are very popular this day to build right. And then you see, Quester it in caves. caimans, Canyon, cane has underground caverns underground. And it sits there. And they say they're going to try to find a way to use it. But the problem is that when they want to use it, they they so far they've used it, and Greg can go into this more, they use this to extract more oil out of old, old wells, which means there is more oil you pull out, burn, try to capture the carbon, put it into grants. So it's already underground. Can't we just leave it there? Because if you bring it up, and it has really had a high failure rate in the past, and we talk about, we have three podcasts on that, and one of them is a great podcast we did with Dr. Charles Harvey. And Dr. Curt house. And they're one is one is in private industry, the Kurhaus. He's working on batteries. And Dr. Harvey is with MIT. And they started a company run by Dr. Paths about seven years ago, was one of the first startups on carbon capture, because this was the way to go. This is what we're going to have to do as a bridge technology. Because renewables are a way down the line, there's got to be you can't use them all. They can't replace everything. And they so they did their startup company. But they soon found out that the renewables were advancing so quickly that CCS cannot compete on price or technology. And CCS has had an entire history of failure. They keep waiting for that technology, aha, that would make it thing but they years ago, they were the first they were the pioneers going into carbon capture, and they walked away and said, it's just not gonna work. I mean, you can do the technology, but it'll never be able to compete.
Greg Williams:So one of the things that really struck me about that episode is that I've been wondering why there isn't somebody jumping up and down and saying the emperor has no clothes. You know, we see the CCS projects, trying and failing over and over again. And it makes me wonder, why is there still so much widespread and and well funded support for, for these projects. And Dr. Harvey, Dr. House, made it very clear, the oil industry uses carbon dioxide to extract more oil. And they have been capturing and and sequestering carbon dioxide for for many years for half a century in some cases. But they do it for a very different reason they do it because it's a more economical way to get oil out of the ground. And so what happens with a lot of these carbon capture and sequestration projects, is they simply get a big fat, you know, multi hundreds of millions of dollars subsidy for doing what they've been doing for the last 50 years to extract oil, you know, instead of just pumping the co2 back into the ground and using that to force more oil to the surface. They they do that exactly the same way they've been doing all along. They make a show of capturing some of it again, at the at the top of the smokestack when the oil is burned. But then they take that carbon dioxide and pump it into the ground and force more oil out. And so once you understand that this is fundamentally an oil extraction subsidy program rather than a climate change mitigation program. You understand why it keeps getting funded because it's very successful as a subsidy program. And the fact that it's not so successful at reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is is sort of immaterial.
Dina Rasor:And we do when we will, I'll talk about later but we do have, you know, an episode on the past failures. Then it's what's what's amazing about it is that it is that It almost more than half of the tech, the technology, the research money for technology is going to go to carbon capture more than renewables more than renewables, which is astounding to me. Because if you can make renewables work, you don't have to do this whole Kabuki dance of pulling it out, you know, building pipelines building it everywhere, they say they're going to sell it for other things than oil capture, oil extraction. And it has it's dominated and then in the end, the Biden administration is just like me, you know, and Secretary of Energy and is just are just raw writing this and they're just putting out the money, oh, the carbon capture. So you know, we are sort of sitting there going, talking to people to say, this isn't going to work. And so they talk about, you know, renewable energy and markets and they make clear down to the micro grids for small company, I was more small towns, just this little town and Lexington, Oregon that just recently bought a huge battery, and used wind and solar to run their town from the electricity and sell the excess to power companies. So besides Dr. House, and Dr. Harvey, we have podcasts with Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford, very impressive guy who studied 145 countries and their power needs, and believes that all of these countries, including the US can transform only to renewable energy doesn't need carbon capture, or nuclear. And the large investment the world would have to put in there worldwide, could be paid off in six years because the renewables make money and make energy so cheap. So we'll be watchdogging CCS because it failed in the past. We have a podcast outlining that with Bob Bauman of all the failures, and he's my former investigative partner. And during the Obama administration, they put out a lot of money 1.1 billion for tests things and they failed. And they were supposed to build a lovin of these plants, they built one, only one actually opened and it's already closed, because it's just this not economically viable. So we're also looking at grassroots efforts. Mike Eisen, filled it from the San Juan Alliance in Farmington, New Mexico, really impressive group impressive guy. They had a coal plant that was supposed to be retired, and this area has had this coal plant. And he actually sent extracting coal to nearby in this big power grid, just polluting the hell out of the place for years. And so they're going to close it in comes a hedge fund, and says, Oh, we can save this planet, it doesn't have to close because we're going to put carbon capture on it. And we're going to reap the carbon credits. And you know, we will be able to sell it and you know, this and that it'll work and everything else. Well, this is just ridiculous. Because, you know, it's the dog chasing tail again, you're, you could reach, you could change to something else, this thing is going to shut down. It's already ancient and polluting, and it does my new carbon capture on those coal plants. It does not remove the dangerous pollution that gives people asthma, and other terrible lung diseases and all kinds of problems. benzene, you know, I could go through coal ash, I've stood on a call lash mountain, and I'm telling you, it's toxic. So anyway, they they worked against this hedge fund and said, This is ridiculous. We have to close it, the hedge fund finally realized that they couldn't get anybody to invest in it. So they thought they'd get government money coming in the federal government money that's coming in, but then they just gave up and left. So the this little group along with Indian tribes, they're really work to get it shut down. And one of the things that one of the things we want to do is look at groups like this and help publicize their efforts, help them investigate. So if you know some group like that, let us know. We're going to keep working with the with the San Juan Alliance, we're spending the money, money that we want to work with whistleblowers and sources.
Greg Williams:So I think something that's worth pointing out about the San Juan Alliance, is that that's an example A victory through local persistence and local self taught expertise. This is not a group of people who have a lot of money or a lot of academic credentials. It's a bunch of people who care about their community have lived there for many, many years. Understand the local zoning and and other laws. And by sheer organizing and and determination managed to stop this, this very ill considered project and another podcast episode where we, where we talk about that kind of grassroots effort and grassroots triumphing over much better funded organizations is one where we speak with somebody from Marin County energy, about Community Choice aggregation, and how they overcame a very well funded local utility company, namely PGD, and succeeded in getting residents access to renewable power at a time when VGA was was saying that that was not economically feasible.
Dina Rasor:That's right. And one of the things they just got me about the Farmington, New Mexico, the things that were things I learned from talking to Mike eyes and felt is that it started as I think, as an industry term, but now, environmental, so picked it up, they call the areas where they've had pollution going on for years and years, you know, poor, with poor people living there who can't really complain because of the jobs and they just live in the pollution. They call them the industries call them sacrifice Jones zones, Oh, these are sacrifice zones, they're heavily polluted. They don't have people in it, that it can protect themselves. And so now, the second one Alliance wants to take this can Valley that's been just creamed by, you know, they dug up coal, they burned coal, a lot of other things, and oil, and so heavily polluted. Now they want to get federal money to clean up the pollution, and also get money to transfer to clean energy, such as solar, because they have a huge electric grid already there to take out the power that was done for the coal plant, and they can, solar is very good in that part of the country. And then they could change it to solar and still have the infrastructure to do it. And they're one of the things Biden really made big in his employment money. He said, we're going to, we're going to Cabot trickle down to environmental justice, and emphasize people that need to find more jobs, and transfer them to learning about giving them money to cook to transfer to clean energy. And that always, that always sounds great. But somehow, on things in the past, I've seen money suck at the top be sucked out at the top, and not get down to the people that actually made it. So we're going to be looking at money designated NGOs, communities and see how difficult it is to get. And if there's any bad actors, like what's happened, what's happened to COVID money, which $42 billion COVID, money stolen, okay, so this, this happens, and it happens when you have to move quickly, like we do. But these we want to try to make sure that these communities who have been overlooked so long, actually get the money and we'll be working with will be working with the San Juan Alliance on their stuff. But I'd also say any small organization or group activists want to come and come and do a podcast with us or call us and ask for help because we've done a lot of investigations that is what we will do. So
Greg Williams:so another context in which community action is it's been an interesting part of these these episodes is we had an interview with with Brittany Trang as a recent graduate student who discovered a much more effective much less costly means of breaking down so called Forever chemicals in the classes of pee fast and P FOSS. And the reason that that's important to local communities is just about anywhere there's there's an airport or someplace where firefighting foam has been used extensively. And, you know, we have a great example just down the river here and in Newburgh, New York and in Princeton, Massachusetts, where my sister lives there. These huge contaminations with with firefighting foam and pee fast and until recently that the best you could do with this stuff is try to collect it and bury it or somehow contain it. And the exciting thing about Brittany trains work is she's figured out and began a whole field of study around how you can take different kinds of very dangerous, very persistent chemicals. And without a lot of energy without a lot of money. You can not contain them, but literally break them down and turn them into cam chemicals that are that are essentially not harmful ones that exist in, in the environment already and don't pose any concerns for human or, or other life. And so having scientists like that on the on the podcast is always interested in is always interesting in terms of just improving our understanding of how these environmental issues work.
Dina Rasor:Yeah, I mean, she, she was a very interesting interview, she's a graduate student, she's now turned to journalism. She got her PhD, but she, her professor said, you know, there's a simple method that nobody pays attention to, because I don't think it'll work. But I want to try it. And she's like, it won't work. And so he said, but let's try it. And it worked. And boy, I tell you got the attention of everybody because this, this chemical is called Forever chemicals because they can't extract it out of the water and soil. And now if they can break it down, it'd be an payfast is very dangerous. And it's all over the place. And I hate to tell you that they used to put it in everything, you know, your Teflon frying pan, your cook your food and soft one time, they said they put it on dental floss, so that it would make the last slide easier because it's kind of a Teflon kind of quality. And I thought, oh my gosh, it's one of those things that you know, like, bestest, they have I mean, they put it in everything. And then they found out this is not good. So it, this was a I love doing interviews like that she's not somebody that's, you know, well known. She's not in the usual circles. And but on the other hand, she made a she and her professor made a breakthrough that could really do that. And we will be looking at pollution as well as climate because what we call Earth overreach. And Earth overreach is finding out how much is can the earth regenerate what we take out and pulling
Greg Williams:every year. So an episode. Yeah, an episode that spoke pretty directly to that was the one in which we interviewed Jeff Creek of the Carbon Cycle Institute. And he wasn't describing so much any particular high tech method of removing pollution so much as re envisioning farming with, with a focus on on the carbon cycle, and increasing the amount of carbon that's retained in the soil. And that is drawn out of the atmosphere by whatever it is that you're growing. And so it doesn't require any particularly new technology or techniques. The techniques that he was describing are ones that have been in use for hundreds of years. But if you if you change your focus from thinking exclusively about how many dollars of revenue can we generate through what we're what we're growing to how can we maximize the the carbon that's retained in the soil, you can profoundly change the equation of commercial farming, you're, you're no longer using petrochemicals to create fertilizers and pump them into the ground and and then pull all that carbon out in the in the form of produce so that nothing is left in the soil, you can do this all in a very closed loop. Way, where if you just keep producing food, keeping in mind that the carbon cycle, you can significantly increase the amount that's retained in the soil. And I think he said that something on the order of a third of the carbon that is now in the atmosphere that we don't want to be in the atmosphere is now missing from the soil through the through the process of industrial farming. And so in a while there isn't a particularly fast way to do it. We can't you know, snap our fingers and install, you know, some multibillion dollar carbon capture facilities to do this but over time, if we move that carbon back from the atmosphere into the soil, doing nothing other than changing the way we Think about farming, we will have solved about a third of the the atmospheric carbon problem.
Dina Rasor:And ironically, what he's that this area is not getting very much funding. He's not here he's, he's he's going to look into grants and stuff. But the amount of money that's appropriated for this is minuscule. Compared to other misguided programs, you know, programs like like carbon capture that just, you know, it's just, it's a dog chasing its tail. And I'm we're looking for I'm looking to try to do a future podcast because the he has farmers out there in Marion County, close to where I live, and they do experimental farms. And plan to, I want to plan to to visit those farms and talk to the farmer and see how they do actually do it, and then move out for future podcast, we can talk about this and get more on out because we think this is something that's underrepresented, run, underfunded, underrepresented, represented. And also, but also could make a huge difference that people are overlooking. We also have a two episodes on something that I've worked on for years. And that is, there is a, there's two different laws, one is called the qui tam False Claims Act law. And and then the other is this SEC whistleblower program. And I've worked on qui tam laws quick and cases for years. And that's where you if you have knowledge, and it doesn't matter if you're an employee is you have to have original knowledge. But if you have knowledge that something is going wrong, there, then you can file a lawsuit on behalf of the federal government. And with you know, with obviously, these qui tam lawyers, and if the government decides not to do the case, you can take it to the courts yourself, although that's hard to do, it is not impossible. But what happens no matter what happens, and usually the company settle, you get up to 25% of the money that goes back to the federal government. And so that, that woke up a lot of lawyers, when we passed, we had it read read written in 1986. Because people are started thinking, hey, whistleblowers can help me make money instead of lose money. So we have one with Josh, attorney, Josh, Josh, for us. And he talked about the qui tam False Claims Act. And it's quite a, it's quite deep and quite detailed in how he thinks it could fit into climate. And then we had, you know, Poppy, Poppy Alexander of Constantine cannon, on new ideas on how to use SEC whistleblower proud program, it's really kind of really interesting. And she said, instead of going after the issue, that they're wasting money in fraud and waste, it's hard to do. They all signed contracts, and they have contract clauses. Let's say. You, you know, if you take this contract, you have all kinds of environmental laws you're supposed to pass to,
Greg Williams:excuse me. environmental laws with which they are promised to comply. And so a big part of that are the the fraud. A big part of the way they're framing the fraud is by saying that the company is engaging this in this business, you know, let's say it's making widgets, but they they're claiming that they will do so in compliance with a series of environmental laws. And so if they don't comply, or if they comply to a lesser degree, then they're promising that fraud has a value that can be you know, the entire value of the contract. And so you can sue them for having defrauded the government of that value.
Dina Rasor:And then the SEC the yet and then the SEC can go ahead and cancel and cancel the cancel the contract completely. Not only just cancel the contract and get the money back, can I get the money back but to cancel the contract completely. So this is a way that because a lot if you're going to have a polluting oriented company doing stuff, they're going to try to skirt around these environmental laws. And a lot of times it's hard to prove that they're doing but it's if you can prove that they aren't following these environmental laws. It has the same effect of proving that they're doing fraud.
Greg Williams:I think that the even more interesting aspect of the SEC involvement that the CII introduced us to was the idea that if you are promising through your proxy statement, your your annual report, as a publicly traded company that you are engaging in so called ESG practices in environmental, social and governance issues, you are in a threat, in effect, promising your share your shareholders that you're doing these things. And if you don't, in fact, live up to those promises, you are defrauding all of the shareholders. And an important function of the Securities and Exchange Commission is to make sure that publicly traded stocks are publicly traded lawfully and without fraud. And so they've figured out that you can go after a company for the entire change in market capitalization. So if a company increases its its overall value by billions of dollars, in part by defrauding its shareholders, by not actually fulfilling the ESG promises they make, once again, the SEC can go after them for that. And if you bring this to the attention of the SEC, the SEC, he chooses not to follow up on it, you as a private citizen can potentially go after them for those huge amounts of money.
Dina Rasor:Yeah, and then it's sort of like, you know, the classic thing is saying, how did they catch el Cal Al Capone, tax fraud, something that was completely a side bar that he did, because they could never prove that he hired hits or anything, but sometimes you have to just go and get them on a technicality. And I was really excited because I think this could be an area and we have these two really bright lawyers in. And it's the both episodes are really interesting. They're I mean, I'm amazed on how, how good they are.
Greg Williams:So in another area of public engagement, we had a great interview with Eliot Negan, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and he was sharing with us is the research that he's done over many years about the Koch brothers, and other supportive Alec, and how Alec produces so called template legislation, which they then use to get different state and municipal governments to to pass business friendly laws that may be very lenient, and may be very deceptive in terms of how they deal with environmental protection and and climate change. And while I understood that, that was an effective way to funnel money in the direction of business friendly legislation, I had no idea. I think there were two things that were a revelation to me. One is just how thinly staffed state legislators are I mean, Dina and I both have a lot of experience dealing with federal legislators. And we've always known that senators have much bigger staffs than then representatives. But you get down to the state level, and they may have no staff, you know, no legislative assistants, and in those cases, when, when an organization like Alec shows up, and they have expert witnesses, they have pre written legislation, they have marketing materials, it's just very easy to go ahead and go that route. It's a way to, to relatively easily show your effectiveness at a legislator without having to put anywhere near the effort into it that that you would otherwise have two
Dina Rasor:Yeah, and, and Alec is, it's called the American Legislative Exchange Council. It's actually a nonprofit organization being gets tax deduction, and they just blatantly push legislation which is not really allowed. And I've always wondered how they could go years and years without the IRS investigating them, because I've run a non some nonprofits and so it's Greg and you just can't get away with that kind of stuff. So then also, Greg, didn't they you also talked about the Koch brothers money and influence. When you when you're doing Elliott, Meghan, guess
Greg Williams:how they made their money in the oil extraction business? And how over the years that they've found a wide variety of ways of funding that model into political influence, culminating in Alec, but certainly with many other methods as well and I encourage anyone who's interested in learning more about that either go to two negatives material on the Union of Concerned Scientists website or go to our website, listen to that, that apps that episode and follow some of the links in the in the introduction that we have.
Dina Rasor:I missed that episode because I was on my COVID holiday. Greg did a good job of holding down the fort. And one of our first interviews was with Bill McKibben, and is really one of the mainstream guys. He's been working on this for 2530 years. And I can't imagine, I mean, I worked on the Pentagon too. And so I know how you feel like Sisyphus in Iraq, but he, there's nothing he doesn't know. And he started this new group called third act for older people like me to work on climate. And so climate wise money watchdog is my third act, there's no doubt about that. And so he has set it up so that people that know how to or people that have been through the 60s and 70s, know how to organize and do all those kinds of things, to try to change, make change. These are the people that passed, you know, the original Earth Day, legislations and things like that, and, and the EPA, which by the way, Richard Nixon started, a lot of people don't know that. So, but he, he really is able to boil it down after all the years and cut through all the crap. And he recently wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine, which I would recommend you take a look at. But the title alone stopped me in my tracks. And I actually wrote him and said, you should make a bumper sticker out of this title. Because one of the things that's frustrated me over the years is that and I've seen not just environment but environment too. They want to write policy papers. And it's great to have a policy paper, nobody reads it. And in this day and age, the other side has learned to talk in jargon, and bumper sticker, but they spoke Bush sticker speak. And so we have to simplify what the situation is. And the title of this, of this magazine was article was called The Earth is on fire, stop burning things. And that just squares it up, you know, in other words, you're trying to do CCS, where you're burning things, you know. And so anything that requires us to burn, even if we carbon capture, capture the carbon out of it, which we can't completely is contributing to this, and the only thing that's going to work is to stop burning things. And that basically means, you know, natural gas, oil, coal, there's no such thing as clean coal. And that's the stall PR and get past the PR that they can somehow keep burning oil or fossil fuels and stop this and and protect the environment, which they can't. And so whenever you sit there and hear about all the new things that are going on, remember Bill McKibben McKinnon's thing, the Earth is on fire stop burning things. In fact, I really am going to ask him if I can make a bumper sticker about that.
Greg Williams:So I hear again, this probably another good opportunity to mention Jen attenti and marine clean energy and the whole topic of Community Choice aggregators. Which use you've studied for
Dina Rasor:years. Yeah, I studied it years ago. And it's the same kind of things going on in four or five other states. They call it separately, but California passed the law that you are developing what they call Community Choice aggregators. Not a good title. But it's to locally developed public entities that can buy clean energy and send it to the existing power grid. In each community and cough in the in the CCA is run by local officials from each county board. So MCE doesn't call themselves marine clean energy anymore because they were so successful. They went from marine county to and now they substitute into Berkeley also rido a whole bunch of counties so we know where I live, and that they're actually my energy provider. And it has an interesting history because as soon as California passed this law, Pacific Gas and Electric the power the power company who makes power and also owns the grid has been had been trying to try to kill it right off the bat. They've been around since 1905. They don't used to be a competition. And so they backed up a California proposition to basically put in poison pill to kill the the effectiveness of these aggravators. And they put in $14 million. This was seven or eight years ago, that was a quite a bit. And they the aggregators could organizations are public, and they could not protect themselves from this, this political, this political proposition. But
Greg Williams:it's probably important to emphasize that we're not talking about publicly traded companies, we're talking about organizations that are governed by boards that are comprised entirely of elected officials. So they are quasi government organizations that are prohibited from lobbying the way a private company can. Yeah.
Dina Rasor:So the environment, there are a bunch of environmental groups cobbled together $100,000. And they beat them. It's what I call a very Erin Brockovich type victory because she took on PG and n one, two. And so PG and E is it drives them nuts, but they're forced to uneasy to take the aggregators, to customers, let them use their power grid lines. And the there's the CCA is when they're in a community, they tend to be you know, 100 100% clean energy, and you know, it easy to make. So when I get my bill, it's a very interesting library bill, I get charged by MCE on the power that I use, which is all completely renewable. And but I also get a bill from PG and E, which PJ news store has put it all in one on how much it costs to have the power go through the lines. And they have now made it where they can compete with pg&e on price or beat them. So it Beijing is not happy about it. But they can't do anything about it in that there's a bunch of them popping up in California and other parts of the country. So that's very interesting. I think another great local, what you can do locally, to then and small, not having a big huge power company, which you cannot, which by the way is private, and you cannot it's very hard to fight. So the other thing I wanted to bring up is that, you know, we've been, we've been dumping on CCS pretty hard, because we we just don't we just don't see the case for it. But if there's people who don't agree with our podcasts on CCA s or any other issue, we'd be happy to do cockpit podcast with them. Because we're not scared of you know, somebody wants to debate us. It says right now we were we've just been investigating and looking at what is there and what what is and what we see that has worked and what we have done some investigation, see that things that have failed. I quite frankly, don't see how you could ever get the permits to build the pipelines that you need to do to do CCS. That's another area that we've been looking at. And we had, we want to also try to get state and local groups, efforts, through groups to help us do podcasts on their efforts. And if there's any sources and when it come to us and remain anonymous, Greg and I have a lot of experience working with local groups that groups any and welcome anybody contact us. We also have worked years with anonymous sources and protected them with and kept them anonymous. And I've never had anyone caught fired. And I've been doing it for 42 years. dating myself, but we know how to protect people. When you want to contact us we have ways you can contact us safely. And so the money is going out the door. The money is going out the door. There's a lot of money being spent, it's being spent very quickly. And quite frankly, we haven't seen any organization that's dedicated just to watch the money and boy tell you, you have this much money and you have this much people it isn't all a bunch of, you know, pure in the faith environmental startups that are doing it with this kind of money. You're Going to start getting in a lot of influence. And that's already happened. Big, big fossil fuel has already gotten in there that are going to be getting carbon credits. And they're going to be doing CCS development. And so we want to watch the please if you know sort of see something, take something, they say the money is going out the door. And we know how to do investigations on that. And we know how to publicize them. So that's kind of we've been talking about every single podcast we've done. But the ones that just absolutely stood out to us that we thought was the most interesting. So take a look at any of these that you're interested in. And if you disagree with us, come on, if you have something new Come on, if you want to talk about doing something anonymously, fine. If you think you have a qui tam case or SEC case, fine. We've looked at that and we know how to get you over protected to attorneys that we know. We don't We only refer people to attorneys we know are going to do a good job.
Greg Williams:So this probably a good time to to remind our listeners that we are a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization and we do not take any kind of sponsorships or corporate contributions. We depend entirely on contributions from individuals. And when we encourage you to contact us, if you go to our website at climate money watchdog.org You will find email addresses and other ways to communicate with us on a completely secure and encrypted basis. So that you don't need to reveal your identity to us. So again, we encourage you to visit us at climate money watchdog.org And thanks again for being our listeners and we hope to see you at our next episode.