Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) may oversee up to $4.6 billion in federal funding to implement emissions reduction plans.
The billions cover the second of two phases required by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) Program. That phase concerns implementation grants for greenhouse gas emissions reduction policies, programs, and projects. The preceding phase covers planning grants for the development of regional climate plans.
For phase one, the EPA gave Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) a $1 million CPRG Program grant to serve as the lead planning organization for the Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler metropolitan statistical area. This grant requires MAG to develop a priority climate action plan due next March, comprehensive climate action plan due in 2025, and a status report due in 2027 after the four-year grant period expires.
MAG accepted the $1 million during a meeting on Wednesday, amending their 2024-2025 Biennial Planning Work Program and Budget to do so.
The priority climate action plan is a prerequisite for the $4.6 billion implementation grant. As part of this plan, MAG must issue a benefits analysis for how their plan produces the most significant benefits to low-income and disadvantaged communities, which the Biden administration refers to collectively as “LIDAC.”
The EPA emphasized arranging all three CPRG plans around LIDACs. Tribes and territories won’t be required to include special LIDAC provisions in their plans.
The EPA guidance on LIDACs explained that the equity lens for the CPRG funding constitutes a greater pledge by the Biden administration per the Justice40 Initiative to issue 40 percent of federal investments to those marginalized, underserved, or overburdened by pollution.
LIDACs are determined by federally defined burdens concerning climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, workforce development, low median income, and poverty. The agency recommended the use of the Biden administration’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST).
The billions for energy and climate initiatives may address something advocated for greatly by Democratic leaders like Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ-03): extreme heat and urban heat island effects. The EPA cited both on page 8 of their LIDAC guidance.
Public comment during Wednesday’s meeting largely represented opposition to the federal funding to implement net zero goals. Members of the public warned that such climate agendas would result in energy poverty tantamount to shortages and scarcity experienced in third-world countries.
Last year, China permitted coal burning plants at the rate of two new plants every week. High costs with lower supply, as seen in Germany, which resulted in an energy crisis last winter that plummeted the population into the freezing winter temps.
Members of the public also expressed concerns over the financial impact on taxpayers, citing woes faced by the taxpayers of neighboring California. Despite all public comments expressing opposition during the meeting, MAG approved the EPA funding as one part of its consent agenda.
The EPA received $5 billion for the CPRG Program through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): $250 million for noncompetitive planning grants, and $4.6 billion for competitive implementation grants.
The White House issued a comprehensive, searchable guidebook on the IRA funding for “clean” energy and climate change initiatives. IRA funding to reorient the economy for “clean” energy totals around $369 billion.
Of the planning grants, states received $156 million, local governments received $67 million, tribes received $25 million, and territories received $2 million.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
A Pew Research poll released July 20 found that 70% of Democrats think the government should restrict what appears on social media, a dramatic change from five years ago when a majority of Democrats supported a free marketplace of ideas.
It’s no wonder, considering the drumbeat of warnings from leftist politicians and their liberal media allies about “disinformation” and “misinformation.”
But be warned: Democracy cannot survive for long if one of the nation’s two major political parties wants to put blinders on the public, limiting their access to information and canceling political opponents. That’s a rigged system. Ask the Iranians, Russians or Chinese.
A House hearing on July 20 held by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government showed that the Biden administration is already censoring social media on a massive scale, putting blinders on all of us.
Hearing witness D. John Sauer, special assistant attorney general for Louisiana, described preliminary findings by a federal judge that Biden staff in the White House, the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services, and almost every other executive department meet regularly with social media executives and pressure them to remove or demote criticisms of Biden economic and energy policies, Biden family members, and even items that depict the first lady in an unflattering way. According to Sauer, “millions of American voices” have been silenced in violation of the First Amendment.
Sauer cited some 18,000 communications from Team Biden to tech executives orchestrating a vast ongoing censorship operation.
Yet Democratic lawmakers were unfazed by this shocking evidence, and hardly questioned the witness. The U.S. Constitution and the future of our democracy be damned.
Rep. Stacey Plaskett laid out the Democratic Party’s distorted interpretation of the First Amendment, insisting that not all speech is constitutionally protected and offering hate speech as an example.
Plaskett and like-minded Dems need a refresher course on the Constitution and American history. The Supreme Court has ruled again and again that all speech, especially speech we like the least, is protected. That includes Nazi marches and cross burnings, as odious as these are. Who needs a constitutional amendment to protect speech everyone likes?
In 2017, the Court ruled unanimously in Matal v. Tam that the First Amendment requires “we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate,’” citing Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s dissent in the 1929 case United States v. Schwimmer.
Rep. Gerry Connolly aimed his wrath at witness Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose views on vaccines and other pandemic policies were censored. Connolly said this censorship “was not big brother government trying to exercise its will on an innocent population. It was public health measures to protect lives.”
Connolly’s wrong. Censoring scientific debate was a lethal mistake. If competing scientific viewpoints, especially about masking and lockdowns, had been considered, harm to schoolchildren, business owners, and many others might have been prevented. Turns out, official government policy was based on “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
During the hearing, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, battered Kennedy with accusations of antisemitism and racism for his outrageous comments about the disparate impact of COVID on different ethnic groups. But when he tried to respond, she barked “reclaiming my time” and “ask the witness to stop talking.”
Whether you think RFK Jr. is loony or a viable presidential contender, as a witness he should have been treated with civility. Wasserman Schultz’s abuse is reminiscent of how Sen. Joseph McCarthy browbeat witnesses during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. Those hearings ended abruptly when McCarthy was asked, “Have you no sense of decency?” Wasserman Schultz should have been confronted with the same question.
The attacks on RFK Jr. were a sideshow. The main event was the Democrats’ concocted defense of censorship. The Democrats’ own witness — civil rights attorney Maya Wiley — testified that “the ability of every person to have access to accurate and reliable information is a cornerstone of our democracy.”
Wiley’s slippery language is meant to evade the real issue: Who decides what is accurate and reliable?
Wiley was asked directly by Rep. Chris Stewart, “Do you trust the government to determine what facts and views the American people are exposed to?” She replied, “I think I’m struggling with the question.”
Tell Democrats the answer is a resounding “no.”
Trusting government to be your eyes and ears is crazy.
Betsy McCaughey is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Arizona Republican legislators are fighting back against the Biden Administration’s environmental schemes.
On Thursday, Republicans in the state legislature publicized the transmission of two letters to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Ben Toma. The submissions were written to oppose the EPA’s proposed regulations on Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles-Phase 3 and Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles.
The Arizona Senate Republican Caucus argued that “through these massive EPA regulations, the Biden Administration wants to force a transition from gas-powered vehicles, radically transforming our nation’s entire automotive industry and costing billions of dollars to achieve such lofty standards.” The Caucus added that “if these rules go into effect, two-thirds of all new vehicles sold in the United States are expected to be electric.”
In the letter to the EPA on the rule for Greenhouse Gas Emissions, the legislators asserted that the “EPA’s proposed rule will hurt Arizona families and workers by forcing them to buy vehicles they cannot afford, increasing the cost of goods they need, costing them jobs, decreasing the reliability of the electricity they depend on, and weakening our national security by making us dependent on China.”
While Hobbs uses taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries and Mayes won't carry out her constitutional duties as AG, the @AZSenateGOP and @AZHouseGOP are stepping in to protect Arizonans from promised economic turmoil caused by the Biden Administration.https://t.co/mvz38bUEBO
And in the letter to the EPA on the regulation for Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards, Petersen and Toma presented ten reasons why the federal agency should reject the rule, making the case that the proposed rule “relies on unlawful and faulty calculations for the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, fails to consider safety issues, makes erroneous estimates about grid reliability, and makes erroneous estimates about energy security and critical mineral availability.”
Two additional legislators also weighed in on the EPA’s pending efforts. Senator Sine Kerr, the Chairman for the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, Energy & Water, said, “Not only does the production of these vehicles contribute to hazardous impacts on the environment, but their power source creates huge health and safety risks to drivers and first responders in the event of a crash or a fire. These radical regulations will have catastrophic impacts on lives and livelihoods, as well as an already strained power grid. We urge the EPA to do the right thing and protect our citizens by rejecting these rules.”
Senator Frank Carroll, the Vice Chairman for the Senate Committee on Transportation and Technology stated, “Forcing a transition to electric cars will make our country more dependent on China, threaten our national security, stretch our electric grid to the breaking point, make traffic crashes more dangerous and more deadly, increase the cost of goods and kill countless American jobs. The federal government’s assumption that the average person can afford a $60,000 electric vehicle is completely out of touch with reality and will greatly jeopardize our economy.”
Petersen and Toma’s actions on this front earned recognition from National Review, which featured the letters in a recent article. The Senate President spoke to the publication, saying that “we are stepping in the gap to hold the line against federal overreach.”
Josh Kredit, Chief of Staff for the Arizona Senate Republicans, shared the National Review letter on his Twitter account, adding, “The Arizona Legislature is working to protect consumers and filling the role of what an AG should be doing.”
Arizona State University (ASU) will house the next clean energy facility, established by $70 million in federal funding from the Department of Energy (DOE).
The facility will be the seventh established Clean Energy Manufacturing Innovation Institute, housed within ASU’s Electrified Processes for Industry Without Carbon (EPIXC) in the Ira Fulton Schools of Engineering.
In a press release issued last month, DOE Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alejandro Moreno said the goal of EPIXC is to result in zero industrial emissions through total replacement of traditional energy sources, namely fossil fuels, with electrical energy. The $70 million will extend over the next five years.
“Achieving the nation’s climate goals will require an all-hands-on-deck, multidimensional approach to eliminating industrial emissions,” said Moreno. “Our newest institute, EPIXC, will focus on one of the key pillars of industrial decarbonization—electrification—to dramatically slash emissions while helping to strengthen and secure America’s leadership in the global clean energy economy.”
In a separate press release, ASU shared that they partnered with University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Tuskegee University, North Carolina State University, Navajo Technical University, Idaho National Laboratory, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Strategic guidance for the proposal came from KB Science.
The senior associate of KB Science, Scott Boyce, hails from the same company, Dow Chemical Company, that helped launch the Obama-created organization associated with this DOE initiative: Manufacturing USA. Boyce helped oversee the organization and is characterized as “instrumental in supporting the Dow partnership with the DOE.”
The senior consultant of KB Science, JoAnn Milliken, worked as the program manager, office director, and senior executive for the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy for over 21 years.
A significant portion of benefits derived from this clean energy initiative won’t be returned to the general public, but rather be repurposed for equity-oriented causes. Justification for this flow of taxpayer dollars comes from Biden’s executive order issued on the day of his inauguration, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”
This $70 million in funding coincides with the DOE’s “Decarbonization Roadmap” released last year. EPIXC will comply with President Joe Biden’s Justice40 initiative (issued a week after his inauguration) to prioritize equity in all clean energy initiatives. The initiative directs 40 percent of benefits derived from federal investments into clean energy — as well as clean transit, affordable and sustainable housing, training and workforce development, remediation and reduction of legacy pollution, and development of clean water infrastructure – will go to disadvantaged communities (DACs).
DACs include any communities the government classifies as “marginalized, underserved, or overburdened by pollution.” The Biden administration clarified that racial demographics don’t factor into DAC classifications. However, they also noted that “communities of color suffer disproportionately from some of these burdens.”
Leading EPIXC is ASU professor Stacy Esposito and University of Texas in Austin professor Bruce Eldridge.
All seven of the DOE’s Clean Energy Manufacturing Innovation Institutes are part of the Manufacturing USA initiative. The organization was established in 2014 under the Obama administration, formerly named the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, for the purposes of spurring domestic manufacturing. Initial planning for the network began in 2011 when Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recommended the formation of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP). Leading the AMP were former Dow Chemical Company President, Chairman, and CEO Andrew Liveris and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Susan Hockfield.
The other Manufacturing USA organizations are Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts; American Institute for Manufacturing (AIM) Photonics in Albany, New York; America Makes in Youngstown, Ohio; Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; BioFabUSA in Manchester, New Hampshire; Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE) in St. Paul, Minnesota; CESMII in Los Angeles, California; the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII) in San Antonio, Texas; Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI) in Knoxville, Tennessee; LIFT in Detroit, Michigan; Manufacturing times Digital (MxD) in Chicago, Illinois; NextFlex in San Jose, California; National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL) in Newark, Delaware; Power America in Raleigh, North Carolina; Rapid Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment Institute in New York, New York; and Reducing EMbodied-energy and Decreasing Emissions (REMADE) in Rochester, New York.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
The Biden administration gave the city of Tucson $900,000 to build a biking and pedestrian bridge. The city’s initiative is one of 45 projects nationwide to receive a portion of $185 million in funds, the only one in Arizona to receive this round of funds.
The bridge would provide a pathway over the I-19 highway to Nebraska Street, as part of the Atravessando Comunidades Project. The funds will cover approximately 56 percent of the total project cost: $1.6 million in total.
The funds come from President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funds allocated to the Department of Transportation (DOT) Reconnecting Communities Program (RCP). In a press release issued on Tuesday, the DOT revealed that it prioritized projects it perceived as benefiting economically disadvantaged communities, as well as engaging in equity and environmental justice. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) assisted DOT in selecting which projects should get federal funding.
10 other Arizona cities, counties, and one nonprofit were denied the IRS funds.
The city of Winslow petitioned for $377,200 for a transportation study on railway-created barriers to mitigate lack of access and opportunities for impacted communities; the city of Eloy petitioned for $400,000 to plan for the revitalization of the Sunland Gin Corridor; Apache County petitioned for $1.28 million to reconstruct Stanford Drive (County Road 8235); Native Promise, a tribal advocacy nonprofit, petitioned for over $1.75 million to reconnect Navajo relocatees through the Pinta Project; the city of Buckeye petitioned for $420,000 for an overpass at Durango Street, over $1 million for road and bridge construction along Watson Road, and $724,000 to plan for Rooks Road and Baseline Road; the city of Bullhead petitioned for $1.6 million to improve a multimodal parkway; the city of Phoenix petitioned for over $5 million for a “cultural corridor”; the city of Kingman petitioned for over $40.8 million for a Rancho Santa Fe Parkway traffic interchange; and the city of Eloy petitioned for over $24.3 million for Sunland Gin Corridor construction.
The DOT explained that Tucson received the funding because of the project’s focus on equity. The project description stated that the predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods of South Tucson were cut off from the Santa Cruz River and the rest of Tucson by the I-19 highway in the early 1960s. The DOT claimed that these neighborhoods experienced over 60 years of air and noise pollution, surviving a food desert, and struggling from more limited economic opportunities.
This isn’t the first round of funding Tucson has received for a bridge. The Biden administration awarded the city $25 million to rebuild the 22nd Street bridge last August.
Today I welcomed @SecretaryPete and @SenMarkKelly to announce a $25M transformative investment in #Tucson's infrastructure. The re-envisioned 22nd Street Bridge will reconnect our communities and create safer ways for residents to drive, walk, bike, and move about. pic.twitter.com/EGOkWkp0om
Vanessa Gallego says, "the trucks from her family's business have to take a detour around it, wasting time." Our $25M investment in this Tucson bridge will make it easier & faster for trucks, school buses, & emergency vehicles to get where they need to go. https://t.co/bl7oSMMe7L
Last August, Buttigieg used the city of Tucson as the location for his major reveal of $25 million in funding through Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) grants. At the time, Buttigieg also cited equity as a reason for choosing Tucson as the recipient of these exclusive funds.
“It’s also important from an equity perspective because it connects the downtown Tucson and the communities and opportunities there to historically underinvested in communities to the east,” said Buttigieg.
Thank you @SecretaryPete for sharing the transformative work happening in #Tucson! With support from this $25M #RAISEgrant, the rebuilt 22nd Street Bridge will improve pedestrian/bicycle safety, allow access for buses/heavy vehicles & create economic opportunity. #BidenHarrishttps://t.co/Lk1cnyKh1p
Phoenix also received RAISE grants last year: $25 million for a bridge over the Rio Salado river connecting downtown Phoenix and South Phoenix, spanning along the river from Central Avenue to State Route 143 near the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
