The Biden administration has spent tens of billions of dollars on green energy and yet last year the U.S. and the world used record amounts of fossil fuels.
That would seem to be prima facie evidence that this “great transition” to renewable energy has so far been an expensive policy belly flop.
The evidence is everywhere. Americans aren’t buying EVs anymore than they were before Biden was elected. The car companies even with record federal subsidies are losing billions of dollars making EVs that people don’t want. Wind and solar still account for less than 15% of American energy, and across the country hundreds of communities are saying “not in my backyard” to ugly and spacious solar and wind farms. And of course gas prices at the pump and electric bills are 30% to 50% higher, even though we were promised that the green revolution would save us money.
A case in point is the scandalous mismanagement of how these green energy programs are being implemented. Consider the $7.5 billion federal program stuck inside the Biden 2021 Infrastructure bill — a law that Biden touts as one of his great achievements. That bill promised half a million EV charging stations installed all over the country.
Instead, there have been a grand total of… drum roll please…”seven or eight installed.” To be fair, that was through last month. They might be up to nine now.
When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was confronted recently on CBS’s “Face the Nation” about what happened with all the money, he hemmed and hawed and replied: “In order to do a charger, it’s more than just plunking a small device into the ground, there’s utility work, and this is also, really, a new category of federal investment.”
Uh huh! Sure. Installing an electric charger for a Tesla in your garage is very complicated business. It’s like trying to Build the Taj Mahal (which may not have cost $7.5 billion).
Here’s another mystery. Why can’t Pete give us an exact count on the progress when the number is small enough to use his fingers? What is for sure is that at this pace they may get 500 built by 2030 — not the 500,000 promised.
Thank God our celebrated transportation secretary renowned for riding his bike to his office in Washington wasn’t in charge of the Normandy landing.
Then there is the question of where the $7.5 billion of taxpayer money has actually gone. At their current rate of production the final program’s price tag could inflate to more than $1 trillion.
If Trump were president, he’d have long ago summoned Mayor Pete to the Oval Office and greet him with those two words that made him famous: “YOU’RE FIRED.”
Instead many Democrats are quietly talking about throwing Joe Biden off the ticket and one of the front runners to take his place is none other than the highly accomplished Pete Buttigieg.
But there are some serious lessons to be learned from this monumental screw-up.
First, though Biden loves to chat up how much money the government is “investing” — where are the signs that any of these trillions of dollars of borrowed money have improved our lives. This EV charger scandal is just another reminder that the government generally doesn’t “invest” tax dollars — it mostly wastes them.
Second, competence matters. At the Committee to Unleash Prosperity we released a study finding that more than 90% of the Biden top economic and finance team has NO experience running a business. We have an energy secretary who knows nothing about energy and a transportation secretary who knows nothing about transportation. They are either lawyers, academics, politicians or government employees.
They are not bad people. They just don’t know how to run anything — and it shows.
Finally, why do we need the government to build EV charging stations? One hundred years ago the government didn’t build gas stations. They just magically sprouted up all over the roads that crisscross America because entrepreneurs responded to the demand. So two or three brothers would scrap together some cash, buy a small plot of land on I-66, build a service station with four to eight hoses connected to a tank, put up a tall sign posting the gas price and drivers would pull in and fill er up.
All of this “infrastructure” without a single penny or instruction manual from Washington.
Can you imagine if Biden had been president in the 1920s and proclaimed that the government will build 500,000 gas stations? They still wouldn’t be built and we’d all be waiting in long gas lines.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
People in states that have signed on to the EPA/ State Climate Action Plan program can no longer say, “it’s only happening in California” because California is the United Nations blueprint for the entire United States.
On September 20, 2023, the Biden administration met at the Sustainable Development Summit in New York with the goal of recommitting to the [United Nations] 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals—SDGs. A White House fact sheet stated, “The United States is committed to the full implementation of 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, at home and abroad. At their core, the SDGs seek to:
Expand economic opportunity – This means public-private partnerships, which is crony capitalism. In this scheme there are winners and losers, where profits are privatized, and losses are socialized on the backs of middle-class Americans.
Advance social justice – This means placating and advancing people based on their skin color. At its core it is discriminatory.
Promote good governance – This skirts our elected form of government and injects unelected special interest initiatives into our lives, where no one gets to vote.
Ensure no one is left behind – This means catering to protected classes and minorities in order to create “capacity building” for initiatives and redistributive wealth schemes. Under Diversity and Inclusion (DEI), these classes are awarded “equity” and “inclusion” based on their skin color.
The Biden administration hired people from California and put them into positions in all federal agencies relating to climate change in order to fulfill his Green New Deal plan. Therefore, the plan mirrors what California has done at the national level.
The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program are through cooperative grants, (Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, CPRG) which have “take it or leave it” terms and conditions. These agreements bind states and local jurisdictions into creating GHG inventories to reduce GHG emissions, which eventually wind their way into administrative law, constraining property and individual rights. These grants force United Nations style Sustainable Communities Strategies (SCS) that addresses the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which the Biden administration has committed to.
The EPA pitches climate action plans as voluntary. This is not true. Once a state agrees to take grant money, they sign on to mandatory elements in the grant terms and conditions contract — They are now in the United Nations/California club.
The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program is between the federal EPA, a “Partner” and unelected state agencies, boards, bodies, or commissions. Therefore, the entire process is being implemented without the consent of citizens and oversight of state legislatures – no one gets to vote. In essence, most states, including so-called conservative states, are selling out for bribes, aka grant money.
According to the EPA, states submitted Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAPs) under President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program was hurried into place because there was concern that there could be a Republican change in the November 2024 election, which could jeopardize the program; hence, the name “priority” climate action plan in the first phase of the plan.
In 2023, under the first phase of the $5 billion program, the EPA made a total of $250 million in grants available to states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, 80 MSAs, four territories, and over 200 Tribes and Tribal consortia to develop ambitious climate action plans that address greenhouse gas emissions. 45 states are now covered by a climate action plan. 5 states: Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, South Dakota and Wyoming decided not to participate.
The program is a two-phase federal grant program that allows the state to develop and implement ongoing community-driven projects that reduce ambient air pollution.
Phase I provided $250 million for noncompetitive planning grants, of which states were eligible for $3 million each to support the development of a climate action plan.
Phase II includes $4.6 billion in competitive implementation grants to execute the projects identified in the climate action plan.
The deadlines for submission of PCAPs are:
Priority Climate Action Plan – Creates an inventory of the state’s primary GHG generators. Due March 1, 2024 (states and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and due April 1, 2024 (tribes, tribal consortia, and territories)
Comprehensive Climate Action Plan – A plan to cut that pollution statewide. Due two years after planning grant award, or approximately mid-2025 (states and MSAs) and due at the close of the grant period (tribes, tribal consortia, and territories)
The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program seeks to create arbitrary greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions in order to install unconstitutional hidden fees and taxes on hard working Americans. This is accomplished by doing a greenhouse gas inventory for carbon (CO2) and methane.
Once inventories for GHGs have been established, reduction goals can be set by States and local jurisdictions. Taxes and fees follow: GHG pricing mechanisms like cap and trade programs for energy producers; congestion pricing and vehicle mileage taxes for cars and trucks; mandatory retrofitting of commercial and existing residential homes to “green” building standards; zero emission vehicle requirements; increased gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil prices. For example, categories for emission controls include:
Transportation
Electricity Generation
Industry
Agriculture
Commercial and Residential Buildings
Waste and Materials Management
Wastewater
Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry
The EPA provided states with an outline template to follow in the development of their PCAPs called the, Priority Climate Action Plan Guidance: An Outline for States and MSAs. Therefore, the State PCAPs are very similar in their presentation. For example, PCAP lists required elements:
GHG Emissions Inventory,
Priority Measures and Reduction Estimates,
Benefits Analysis,
Low-Income and Disadvantaged Communities (LIDAC) Benefits Analysis,
Review of Authority to Implement,
Intersection with Other Funding Availability, and
Coordination and Engagement.
State legislatures did not pass PCAPs. It all happened through interagency coordination: EPA and state agencies, which are under the control of Governors.
Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University for the Arizona Governor’s Office of Resiliency were the lead players in The Clean Arizona Plan: Priority Climate Action Plan State of Arizona. They coordinated the obligatory public outreach required by EPA grants, which included feedback from numerous special interest stakeholders who directly benefit from environmental initiatives, while hard working residents are relegated to answering simple questions on outcome-based online surveys — All of this is at the detriment to Arizona’s residents.
People need to contact their state’s Governor and condemn them for signing on and creating commissions and task forces while utilizing faux stakeholder consensus to justify existing PCAPs and Comprehensive Climate Action Plans already in the works. They need to notify their state legislatures that this is happening and ask them if they know about this EPA program.
Also, people need to remind elected officials of their constitutional oaths to protect individual property rights, as evidenced in a Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone” season one episode: Patriarch John Dutton is confronted by a group of Communist Chinese tourists who are trespassing on his land. He demands that they leave and when he explains that he owns the land, one trespasser states, “It is wrong for one man to own all this.” Dutton responds, “This is America, we don’t share land here!”
People in states that have signed on to the EPA/State Climate Action Plan program can no longer say, “it’s only happening in California” because California is the United Nations blueprint for the entire United States.
Dan Titus is affiliated with the American Coalition for Sustainable Communities (ACSC). Their mission is sustaining representative government; not governance, by collectivist-oriented unelected agencies and commissions.
In a recent opinion piece, Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) Superintendent Scott Menzel highlights what he considers a long list of accomplishments. According to Superintendent Menzel, the “2023-2024 school year has been marked by significant progress and achievements as we continue to implement initiatives aligned with our Strategic Plan to improve academic achievement and outcomes and prepare students for real-world opportunities in an ever-evolving landscape.”
Let’s delve into the statistics.
Nearly 1,800 seniors graduated from SUSD on May 23rd. During the May 14th Governing Board meeting, 11 seniors were recognized for their academic excellence. In his column, Dr. Menzel highlighted that 51 graduates had received math and science diplomas. While these acknowledged students have rightfully earned praise for their hard work and accomplishments, including receiving various scholarships, what about the remaining 1,800 graduates? How have they fared after receiving a purportedly “world-class, future-focused” education from SUSD?
According to the Arizona Department of Education’s comprehensive school report card system, the overall performance isn’t encouraging. In 2023, when these graduating seniors were juniors, their proficiency levels were assessed, yielding the following results:
Only 63% demonstrated proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA), leaving 37% (or 666) lacking proficiency.
Math proficiency was even lower at 55%, indicating that 45% (or 810) were not proficient.
Science proficiency was the lowest, with a mere 25% demonstrating proficiency, leaving 75% (or 1,350) lacking in this area.
On average, only 48% (or 858 students) of the 1,800 graduates were proficient across all three academic subjects.
Given these outcomes, it seems apt to reconsider the SUSD slogan “Because kids,” as it appears the district may not adequately prioritize the needs of all students. Perhaps it should be restated as “Because some kids.” A school district’s quality should be judged by how well it supports its lowest-performing students.
Yet, despite this concerning academic record, three outgoing members of the current governing board decided, without public input or feedback from district stakeholders, to extend Superintendent Menzel’s contract by two years and grant him a 4% raise.
Dr. Menzel’s emphasis on using class time for destructive “Social Emotional Learning,” “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion,” and gender identity at the expense of teaching academics appears to be falling short for SUSD students, parents, and taxpayers. It’s perhaps unsurprising that parents are increasingly withdrawing their children from SUSD, and staff turnover, including principals, is at an all-time high.
If you share my frustration with the Governing Board’s apparent rubber-stamping of Dr. Menzel’s failing agenda and believe our children deserve better, I urge you to vote for change this November.
Mike Bengert is a husband, father, grandfather, and Scottsdale resident advocating for quality education in SUSD for over 30 years.
UNRWA, the “United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East,” as the name implies, provides humanitarian aid exclusively to Palestinian victims of war. Like all UN agencies, it is purportedly politically neutral and concerned with mitigating conflict, not participating in it. Unfortunately, UNRWA is neither.
UNRWA has a long history of antisemitism in support of the Islamist cause. For example, UNRWA uses books in their schools containing blatantly antisemitic passages. The donor nations that support UNRWA have objected but UNRWA’s promises to remove the offending passages somehow never happen.
A greater concern is that UNRWA allows terrorists to hide their rocket launchers and other weapons in UNRWA facilities, including schools. UNRWA’s staff has failed to call out the practice and in fact, have joined it.
We also know, due to diligent research by UN Watch, that some of the 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza pitched in to help with the horrific massacre of Israelis last October 7. These self-described committed humanitarians voluntarily committed rape, torture, and murder on defenseless victims. Other UNRWA members praised their colleagues for the good work.
Now it has come out that senior officials have stolen food and supplies intended for Gazans. One whistleblower working at a shelter tells of agreeing with co-workers to get out the truth about the corrupt administration even though they knew they would be subject to reprisals.
He told how “displaced people in the external shelter do not get their right to food and non-food aid, but rather it is distributed at night and sold in front of our eyes and everyone who speaks is transferred….” Another told of how “district officials rummaged through the aid cartons and stole the items and their brothers sold them.”
Many others have reported extensive profiteering by UNRWA staff, supported by a compliant administration that refuses to call out the thieves and punishes those who report it. Local Gazans are fed up.
UNRWA officials of course deny the charges, lumping them with ongoing criticism they are subjected to from right-wing crazies. Any other agency with the track record of UNRWA would be designated an enemy pro-terrorist organization.
It might not surprise those familiar with the Obama-Biden history to know that the U.S. continues to be a faithful funder of UNRWA, contributing around $400 million last year. Admittedly, this amount wouldn’t cover the annual overpayment in food stamps, but it’s still boneheaded to—again—support an organization that is our deadly enemy.
The outrages of UNRWA present an opportunity to seriously re-examine our relationship with the U.N. School children are taught that the United Nations was formed by the victorious allies at the end of World War II to assure the end of such destructive wars. It was a time of great hope and idealism.
Unfortunately, looking back after nearly 80 years and $1 trillion, the dreams have died. The U.N. is widely regarded, even by many senior officials, as a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy dedicated mostly to its own perpetuation.
It had nothing to do with the great international relations success of our time, the ending of the Cold War. On the contrary, the Soviet Union ignored every U.N. entreaty but had to finally stand down when its socialist economy could no longer protect itself from America’s military might.
The U.N. has grown from 51 original member nations to 192 today. Unfortunately, most of these are small satellite states who supported first Communist dictatorships and now Islamist autocracies. Meanwhile, Russia and China, two of the most aggressive threats to world peace, are permanent members of the Security Council. They veto attempts to counter their atrocities, like Russia’s unwarranted attacks on several former satellites and the Chinese genocide of the Uyghurs.
Meanwhile, the U.N. continues to disappoint when it counts. During the COVID pandemic, the U.N.’s World Health Organization, rather than providing the medical leadership needed, collapsed into politicization, lying to help the Chinese Communists cover up the origins of the virus. Several voting members of the U.N. Human Rights Council still practice slavery.
The world is not a better nor safer place because of the U.N. It resists meaningful reforms. We should just leave.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
Nobody likes a bully, and yet some people relish playing such a role. Here in Arizona, perhaps no person has taken on that persona quite like Kris Mayes. When she began her political career with the Arizona Corporation Commission, Mayes quickly gained a reputation for bullying other people around, but since becoming Arizona’s Attorney General (AG) in January 2023, she has taken it to a whole other level.
Within months of occupying the AG office, Mayes began using her post to target and investigate the very people and entities she is constitutionally obligated to defend. First in her crosshairs was the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR), a state agency she is legally obligated to represent and provide legal advice to. But because she wants to score political points with her radical environmental allies, she decided to threaten legal action against ADWR unless they provide her with documentation showing that the agency is in compliance with its water management responsibilities.
Mayes then turned around a few weeks later and went after the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program at the Department of Education. In a public tirade, she falsely claimed that the budget agreement that protected universal school choice would bankrupt the state, despite the expenditure data showing that the ESA program actually saves the state money. When that didn’t stop the Republican budget bill from being signed by Governor Hobbs, Mayes doubled down on her ESA assault by threatening legal action against her own client, the Arizona Department of Education, over the program.
And now that she has had more time to get comfortable in office, Mayes is discovering new and creative ways to abuse her power, including collusion and the usage of dirty tactics to target political opponents…
Progressive educators have dressed up nonacademic social training in different outfits for decades. Still, the goal remains: to use public education to dictate the next generation’s norms and behaviors. This may seem innocent enough, but it’s not.
Early 20th-century education reformers like Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and John Dewey, the father of American progressive education, set out to refashion public education to diminish individuality and family influence in children. They aimed to replace these influences with a collectivist mindset prepared for the workforce. By doing so, they could capture the minds and hearts of children in the classroom and substitute “the state for the home and faith.”
Their socialist behaviorist model was effectively the first version of what we now know as social-emotional learning (SEL), which was most recently repackaged as the Whole Child educational framework.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the 1960s, Dr. James Comer of the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center set out to prove the effectiveness of behavior versus academic focus for student success. He tested his theory in 650 low-income schools, admitting thirty years later that it was a failure. Still, his method served as the foundation for today’s SEL in schools.
In the 1980s, Psychology Professor Roger Weissberg aimed to help students “develop positive self-concepts” and hone skills in “self-monitoring” and “values such as personal responsibility and respect for self and others.” These seem like loaded phrases subject to interpretation, but his approach was acceptable enough to keep the behaviorist model train running on its tracks.
By the 1990s, National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) president Marc Tucker helped pass the Goals 2000 Educate America Act during the Clinton administration, echoing Thorndike’s goals to advance a socialist workforce development mindset in K-12 education. This was followed by the controversial Outcomes Based Education (OBE) model, which debuted when my kids were school age.
Thankfully, parental backlash in the 1990s squashed OBE, yet it morphed and reappeared through CASEL, the Collaborative to Advance Social and Emotional Learning. CASEL took time to stake its claim by hosting conferences and sponsoring research, presumably to build a support base. CASEL’s champion, Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford Graduate School of Education, was a known progressive who advocated for educational equity. The push for so-called equity, versus the much-respected American concept of equal opportunity, hit schools long before COVID.
CASEL’s goals for students include providing “the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.” This sounds innocuous until you realize their specific definitions for each element may be a far cry from what you might think.
For example, CASEL definitively overplays the role of schools in a child’s life when it asserts that “schools have an important role to play in raising healthy children by fostering not only their cognitive development but also their social and emotional development.” (Emphasis is mine.) This is a tremendous assumption of power over your children in the classroom and is tantamount to brainwashing, not promoting basic good behavior.
CASEL defends its emphasis on social and emotional learning via research that leaves something to be desired. First, there are no recent U.S.-based studies; instead, they cite a 2006 study that asked a national sample of 148,189 sixth through twelfth-grade students if they thought they had social competencies such as empathy, decision-making, and conflict-resolution skills. The results? Only 29% indicated that their school provided a caring, encouraging environment. And how accurate are the results when parents were not consulted on the answers, given the relative immaturity of kids to answer these questions competently?
The latest version of SEL, dubbed Whole Child, stems from The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It includes expansive elements in its list of critical areas for schools to deliver to students: mental health, cognitive development, social-emotional development, identity development, academic development, and physical health. This resembles a giant leap toward Thorndike and Dewey’s early progressive education agenda.
According to research from the Massachusetts-based think tank Pioneer, Thorndike equated “learning with training” and believed in learning by conditioning. Like Pavlov’s dogs, children could be conditioned to exhibit the desired behaviors by a system of positive or negative consequences linked to actions. John Dewey, the dean of American progressive education, was equally enthusiastic about manipulating the psychological aspects of learning to manipulate the child.
Remember, Dewey favored the “educational potential of social behaviorism used in totalitarian societies” since those societies “required a collective and cooperative mentality.”
Pioneer’s conclusion? “Carried to its logical conclusion, SEL can replace parental influence with the ultimate nanny state.” Progressives have dressed up the nonacademic paradigm of social-emotional style learning in different outfits for decades. They have planned to substitute “the state for the home and faith” and replace individual liberty with a collectivist mindset readied for the “workforce.”
Social Emotional Learning, in its “transformative” form, promotes “justice-oriented civic engagement” to make your kids into activists or “social justice warriors.” Black Lives Matter has often invited schools over the last few years to engage in that process.
A hallmark of SEL’s manipulative approach is the use of student surveys. The surveys are sent to kids’ email inboxes, often asking questions of students that require parental consent according to federal law. SEL puts teachers in a mindset to pry into the lives of students and families. Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said social and emotional learning programs shift “the role of teachers from educators to therapists.”
SEL is also big business. According to Education Week, nationwide sales of social and emotional learning materials shot up 45% in a year and a half to $765 million in 2021. Soon after, Attorney General Merrick Garland asked the FBI to investigate parents protesting social and emotional learning issues at SB meetings. It just so happens that Garland’s son-in-law co-founded Panorama Education, a company raking in millions selling social and emotional learning materials to school districts.
Don’t be fooled by social-emotional learning as your child’s education framework. It is not founded on academics and pushes your kids toward an activist mindset that may not align with your family’s values. The Scottsdale Unified School District’s governing board recently approved a new social-emotional learning curriculum called Second Step. For help discovering SEL’s impact on your kids at school, contact education@azwomenofaction.com for information and steps you can take.
Tamra Farah has a twenty-year career in public policy and politics. Her role as director and senior advisor at Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and Arizona Women of Action and her expertise in PR and communications demonstrate her ability to create engagement and transformation in her efforts. Tamra has appeared on Fox News, America’s Voice, Newsmax, and Victory Channel and quoted in major publications like The New York Times and Washington Post.
