Our guest tonight is Lew Daly, Senior Fellow for Climate and Energy Policy at Just Solutions, where he works in partnership with state and federal organizations and networks in pursuit of a just and equitable clean energy transition. 

His previous 15 years work in the public policy field includes appointments such as:

• Director of Policy and Research and Senior Policy Analyst for Climate Equity at Demos
• Deputy Director of Climate Policy at the Roosevelt Institute 

Lew is a lifelong resident of New York State--Born and raised in Onondaga County, Central New York State, and has been based with his family in Wester Harlem, New York City, since 1999. His New York service in the field includes:

• Steering Committee member of the New York Renews Coalition from 2017-2020.
• Co-coordinator: New York Renews Policy Development Committee, supporting the development and passage of the nation-leading Climate Leadership and Community Protection act in 2019.
• Member of the New York City Offshore Wind Advisory Council in 2022 and 2023.

He has also worked internationally as a US member of the Global Well-Being Lab of the Presencing Institute and Germany's Global Leadership Academy, and as an International Advisory Board Member of the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation at the University of Pretoria.

With Doug Koplow of Earth Track, Lew is the author most recently of the report, Taxpayer Costs for Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage, just out from Just Solutions and Earth Track. 

In addition to his extensive policy work, Lew's commentaries and feature articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Democracy Journal, Boston Review, Grist, and many other publications. 

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While the fossil fuel industry continues to promote "natural gas" as a relatively "clean" energy source, Dr. Robert Howarth has argued since since his seminal report in 2011 that methane (which makes up roughly 5% of "natural gas") poses a greater threat to humankind than "dirty" options like coal and oil. This is particularly true of methane produced through hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") Join us for a conversation about what we've now known for more than a decade, and how much more convinced Dr. Howarth is now that we should not be fracking for gas, nor otherwise be using methane as an energy source.

Dr. Howarth is the David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology & Environmental Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. He’s an Earth systems scientist, ecosystem biologist, and biogeochemist. He has worked extensively on environmental issues related to human-induced changes in the sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon cycles, the impacts of global climate change, the interaction of energy systems and the environment, and implementation of 100% renewable energy policies. He is the Founding Editor of the journal Biogeochemistry.

Currently, Howarth serves as one of 22 members of the Climate Action Council, the group charged by law with implementing the aggressive climate goals of New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act of 2019, often referred to as CLCPA. Howarth has published more than 200 research papers, and these have been cited in other peer-reviewed articles more than 70,000 times, making Howarth one of the ten most cited aquatic scientists in the world. In 2011, Time Magazine named Howarth as one of 50 “People Who Matter” for his research on the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas produced from hydraulic fracturing, better known as “fracking”.

Topics Discussed Include:

• Why methane is such a concern with regard to climate change
• Why methane emissions are greater than predicted by the gas industry
• Why Dr. Howarth believes methane is worse for the climate than coal
• How some methane leaks are accidental while others are routine, and therefore can't be eliminated
• How OGI thermal cameras are able to see methane and other greenhouse gasses

Further Reading

Dr. Howarth maintains a web site featuring many of the works he's published over the years, including the April 2011 paper on methane leaks from gas fracking.

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Michelle Solomon is a Senior Policy Analyst in the Electricity program at Energy Innovation, working to accelerate the transition to a clean, affordable, and equitable electricity sector in the United States. We’ve invited her to talk about their recent publication of the third edition of their report - Coal Cost Crossover – which argues that over 90% of coal-fired power plants in the U.S. could be replaced by renewable energy generation at a net cost savings.

Prior to joining Energy Innovation, Michelle earned her Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at Stanford University, where she studied nanoparticles with applications in purifying chemicals for use in medicine and the environment. During graduate school, she also pursued an interest in energy policy and spent a summer working on electric vehicle policy at the California Energy Commission. After graduating, she transitioned full-time into policy as a Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow. As a fellow, she had the chance to work on energy and environment policy for Senator Ed Markey, focusing on a wide range of issues spanning environmental justice to electric vehicle charging.

Michelle holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. from Stanford University in materials science and engineering. She also completed her B.S. in physics at Boston College.

Further Reading:

·      Coal Cost Crossover 3.0: Local Renewables Plus Storage Create New Opportunities for Customer Savings and Community Reinvestment

·      Coal Cost Crossover Interactive data visualization

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In this climate fight will Big Fossil Fuel, it is hard and rare to have a clear-cut victory. The last time we did a podcast episode with Mike on 7/12/22, his group was fighting to prevent a closing coal-based power plant in Farmington, New Mexico from reinventing itself to keep open using the questionable technology of Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). This was described a June 29, 2022 High Country News article. A company named Enchant led this effort with the backing of financial groups to force this unproven technology through to keep the highly polluting plant open. Once they could not raise enough money privately, they were trying to get federal money to keep the plant going. However, this did not work out and the activists like Mike kept pushing to stop it. Last month, Enchant abandoned its efforts. We wanted to have Mike back on the program to explain what led to the closing of this plant for good and to explore and celebrate the loss of one less coal power plant.

Mike points out that this project was billed as a “demonstration project”, intended to show the potential of carbon capture and sequestration as an approach to combatting climate change. Back in December of 2021, the General Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report titled, “Carbon Capture and Storage: Actions Needed to Improve DOE Management of Demonstration Projects” which showed essentially no success among demonstration projects. Of eight projects, for which we, as taxpayers, paid $684 million, only one achieved operational status. That one plant operated for only three years, closing due to economic infeasibility.

Eisenfeld questioned when DOE and companies promoting these projects will be held accountable for this poor track record. Within the aforementioned report, DOE was described as addressing this by creating a dedicated Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. After waiting nearly a year, the Biden administration appointed David Crane, the CEO of NRG, the company in charge of Petra Nova, one of the failed carbon capture projects described in the GAO report.

Climate Money Watchdog will be following up on this and other appointments relevant to environmental spending.

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Kayley Shoup is an activist with the Citizens Caring for the Future, an environmental group that is affiliated with New Mexico Interfaith Power & Light in Carlsbad, New Mexico. When she moved back to her hometown, she became alarmed at the increase of pollution from the nearby expanded oil and gas fields of the Permian Basin, and is determined to do something about it. Recently, a NASA satellite from its EMIT program, which is designed to measure and characterize mineral dust sources to find new minerals, found a massive methane leak near the Carlsbad gas and oil fields. Kayley describes how her organization works to inform their community using data from a wide range of sources, including NASA and other non-profits such as Earthworks.

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Dr. Steve McDaniel and Beth McDaniel, JD founded and run Reactive Surfaces, and intellectual property firm that develops and patents paints that do more than turn buildings attractive colors and protect them from the elements: They react to the atmosphere in intentional and desirable ways. They are currently in the running to win the most valuable X-Prize contest ever by creating a paint that captures CO2 from the atmosphere more simply, cheaply and scaleably than any direct air carbon technology before it.

The McDaniels founded Reactive Surfaces in 2001 in response to the events of 911. They wanted to know if they could stabilize an enzyme in a coating to protect surfaces against a chemical weapons attack. This original technology is called WMDtox, and it works to decontaminate organophosphorous nerve gases virtually on contact. From there, they have developed other various functional platform technologies using non-toxic bio-based organisms, such as self-cleaning coatings and coatings that are antimicrobial and antiviral.

Carbon Capture Coatings have the power to significantly reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thereby lessening the impact of global warming. Carbon Capture Coatings are bio-engineered such that, when exposed to sunlight, they capture and fix atmospheric carbon dioxide. These coatings support living cells capable of carrying out photosynthesis, the process by which Nature captures and fixes atmospheric CO2.

Further Reading:

·      Carbon Capture Coatings: Next Generation Biomimetic Coatings for Carbon Capture & Removal

·      Carbon Capture Coatings: Can Paints and Coatings Save Humanity?

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Ryan Foelske a Carbon Free Electricity Program manager at RMI (previously the Rocky Mountain Institute) decided to put his money where his mouth is by buying a home in Babcock Ranch, a community designed to both reduce human contribution to climate change and to be more resilient to the effects of climate change, especially hurricanes. He tells us about his experience weathering hurricane Ian.

Prior to joining RMI, Ryan worked at Deutsche Bank and Brookfield Asset Management as a buy-side equity analyst specializing in global regulated utilities and other publicly listed infrastructure companies. He built financial models, understood and quantified risks, and sought benchmark-beating returns for investors. In addition to his company coverage duties, Ryan helped develop the modeling framework, standardized and aggregated data outputs, and worked on index construction and inclusion.

As we discuss in the episode, resilience is an area of extensive funding under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Babcock Ranch has not received any funding under these pieces of federal legislation. Nevertheless we think its resilience measures are worth considering as background for other projects that may receive such funding in the future.

For more information...

• Check out Babcock Ranch on Google Maps
• Read Ryan's account of hurricane Ian on RMI's web site

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While pollution mitigation and control is vital to the environment, scientists are finding more and more problems for the humans that live near polluting corporate sites. Unfortunately in the name of jobs and profit, companies have produced pollution while ignoring or hiding the human health from their work, often producing what is known as "sacrifice zones" -- areas where the pollution is dangerous for people who often cannot leave. The Environmental Health Project has taken on the difficult job of using health science discern the short and long term effects of gas fracking and plastic production on local populations. On this week's podcast we welcome Alison Steele, who tells us the good, the bad and the ugly of trying to help communities protect their health from the perils of corporate practices that could affect these communities for generations.

Alison L. Steele, MBA, is the Executive Director of The Environmental Health Project (EHP), a nonprofit public health organization that assists and supports residents of Southwestern Pennsylvania and beyond who believe their health has been, or could be, impacted by shale gas development and other polluting industries in the area.. Alison earned her undergraduate degree in physics from Drew University in Madison, NJ and her MBA in Sustainable Business Practices from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. As part of her graduate work, Alison studied sustainability tools and practices used by leading companies in Europe, performed consulting services for large Pittsburgh-area companies, and published research on organizational behavior techniques used to aid adoption of sustainability initiatives. Prior to starting at EHP, she led policy and education efforts at Conservation Consultants, Inc. and developed the company's flagship grassroots community engagement program, which focused on advancing home health and energy efficiency in low-income Pittsburgh neighborhoods. She joined EHP at the beginning of 2020, and since then, she and her team have been taking advantage of our increasingly virtual world to extend their reach as they work to defend public health in the face of shale gas development.

Some links for further reading:

• Environmental Health Project (EHP) policy white paper mentioned in the episode
• EHP fact sheet page
• Eyes on Shell, a community awareness web site focusing on the Beaver County cracker plant described in the episode

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Dr. Surinder Singh’s distinguished career has focused on advancing and incubating technologies that address climate emergency with a focus on fundamentals of science, systems engineering, and business models. He is spearheading Relyion Energy Inc’s strategic business development to create second-life sustainable solutions for Lithium-ion batteries.

Previously, Dr. Singh worked as Director of Engineering and Center of Excellence Leader for NICE America Research (that’s the National Institute for Clean and Low-Carbon Energy), an incubator for China Energy (CE), and a program leader at General Electric. China Energy is the world’s largest overall power producer and renewable power producer by assets. He utilizes system-level thinking to address climate change via clean energy technology developments. He has led initiatives funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Energy, General Electric, NICE, and others on low-carbon technologies such as alternative fuel production for transportation with low greenhouse gas emissions; carbon capture and storage (CCS) including direct air capture and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage for decarbonizing the power sector, biofuels and biochar production, fuel cells, hydrogen, and energy storage. He has led multi-million-dollar programs, developed partnerships with renowned universities and technology developers, and developed calls for proposals for funding programs.

Dr. Singh is mentoring startups in Climate and Energy at Breakthrough Energy, Third Derivative/New Energy Nexus, On Deck, and STEP-TIET Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals Mentor. He has led multiple cross-functional and cross-organizational teams with chemical, mechanical, electrical, electrochemical, chemists, and material scientists backgrounds. He is a seasoned executive who has authored and co-authored 11 publications,  and holds more than 40 patents granted and pending in ClimateTech. His scientific work has been extensively cited. He is also an editor for a renowned scientific journal Sustainable Materials and Technologies. He has a Ph.D. from University of California at Riverside. He is cited in Fortune ' s “Unstoppable World’s Business Minds” and “Are Second Life EV Batteries Game Changers for Microgrid Owners and the Grid?”

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Ethan Elkind is the Director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at Berkeley Law and leads the Climate Change and Business Research Initiative on behalf of the University of California at Berkeley and University of California at Los Angeles Schools of Law. He taught at the UCLA law school’s Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic and served as an environmental law research fellow. He has a background in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), climate change law, environmental justice, and other environmental law topics. In 2005, he co-founded The Nakwatsvewat Institute, Inc., a Native American nonprofit organization that provides alternative dispute resolution services and support for tribal governance, justice, and educational institutions. His book Railtown on the history of the modern Los Angeles Metro Rail system was published by University of California Press in January 2014. Ethan is also a regular host of the weekly call-in radio show “State of the Bay” on the San Francisco NPR affiliate KALW 91.7 FM, airing Monday nights at 6pm PT.

This episode is focused on the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which was passed at roughly the same time the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). They were signed by Republican icons Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon respectively.  Mr. Elkind speaks on topics including:

• Successes and failures over CEQA's 40-year history
• CEQA's impact on the schedule of new transmission for renewable energy initiatives.
• The trade-offs between public engagement and the extent to which local, county and state permitting processes can slow projects that help and hurt the environment alike.
• How the US has a problem with doing large projects, especially in large transportation projects and how this is described in his recent report, Getting Back on Track: Policy Solutions to Improve California Rail Transit Projects

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Climate Money Watchdog founders Dina Rasor and Greg Williams recap our first twenty episodes. We cover such issues as:

• Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)
  • Every Dollar Spent on CCS is a Waste - Dr. Charles Harvey and Dr. Kurt House
  • CO2 Pipelines and Carbon Capture - Kert Davies
  • How Did DoE Waste Half a $Billion on Carbon Capture? Bob Bauman
• How Community Choice Aggregation can make renewable energy more accessible
  • Community Choice Aggregation at MCE - Jenna Tenney
• How community organizing can stop dangerous and wasteful projects
  • Citizens Challenging Venture Capitalists and Carbon Capture - Mike Eise
• How oversight by government and private citizens can prevent waste
  • Enforcing ESG Claims through the SEC's Whistleblower Program - Poppy Alexander
  • Government Oversight Lessons Learned - Danielle Brian, POGO

See our main web site, our episode listing on Buzzsprout, or wherever you like to get your podcasts for full listing.

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Today we’re joined by Jenn Tenny, Communications Manager for the MCE (originally Marin Clean Energy), a relatively new kind of government organization called a CCA, which stands for Community Choice Aggregation. CCA’s allow individual consumers to choose where they get their electricity, even if it’s delivered over transmission lines that are owned by a single, monopoly utility company.

As a journalist and am MCE customer, Dina Rasor followed MCE's progress for many years, including writing an article about them in Truthout in 2014.

As MCE’s Communications Manager, Jenna works to share messages of MCE’s mission and achievements in the community through various public engagement and press opportunities. These initiatives include not only making renewable energy more available to consumers, but also providing assistance to individuals installing more efficient appliances such as heat pumps and LED lighting, as well as reducing power usage during peak demand hours through their 4 to 9 program.

Prior to her time with MCE, Jenna worked at the California Academy of Sciences and the Bronx Zoo as a public educator. Jenna has a B.S. in Marine Biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Climate and Society from Columbia University.

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​We’re delighted to welcome back Poppy Alexander, a founding partner at the law firm Whistleblower Partners, a law firm dedicated to representing whistleblowers reporting fraud and misconduct in:

• Healthcare
• Procurement
• Securities and Commodities
• Taxes
• Money Laundering and Sanctions Evasion
• Customs
• Environmental Remediation
• Vehicle Safety

Poppy represents whistleblowers and government entities in qui tam lawsuits, as well as under the various agency whistleblower programs including those administered by the Internal Revenue Service, Securities and Exchange Commission, FinCEN, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Department of Transportation.  Poppy’s practice focuses on issues of international corruption and financial misconduct, with a specialty in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering cases.  She writes and speaks regularly about emerging topics in financial fraud, including sanctions violations, SPACs, and cryptocurrency.
​
We last spoke with Poppy back in July of 2022 when she had already established an impressive track record representing whistleblowers at Constantine Cannon. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2012. She was the co-editor-in-chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and an active participant in the Human Rights Clinic, working on issues related to corporate accountability for human rights violations in Africa and military abuses in Southeast Asia. She was awarded the Dean’s Award for Community Leadership in recognition for her contributions to the school community. Poppy has been named to the Super Lawyers Rising Stars list every year since 2016. Prior to law school, Poppy worked on election reform issues before beginning graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied political and critical theory.

We’ve invited Poppy to talk about her new work, and her new firm, Whisteblower Partners.
​
Topics Discussed Include:

• Poppy’s new law firm, Whistleblower Partners. Why Poppy left her old firm to establish this new legal partnership in March 2024.  She describes a comprehensive approach to whistleblowers and not just file cases.
• The laws Whistleblower Partners uses in environmental cases and how they have changed since the episode we published in July 2023. Qui tam False Claims Act, SEC, IRS, Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS), and various wildlife protection laws.
• Examples of Whistleblower Partners victories.
• Pitfalls of whistleblowing and filing lawsuits and administrative tips programs.

 
Further Reading / Topics Discussed in this Episode:

• Mighty Earth  vs. JBS in protecting the Brazilian rainforest
• The Securities and Exchange Commission’s 90th birthday

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Dr. Charles Harvey is a professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Kurt House is the chief executive officer of KoBold Metals, a metals exploration company. On August 16th, they challenged the prevailing wisdom that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is key to fighting climate change in a New York Times guest essay titled, Every Dollar Spent on This Climate Technology Is a Waste.

Doctors Harvey and House opinion is driven by their own direct experience starting the  first privately funded company to make use of CCS in 2008. Back then, solar and wind energy were vastly more expensive than generating electricity by burning fossil fuel, even if you added the high cost of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the exhaust. Now, with clean renewable energy cheaper than burning coal, “it’s clear that we were wrong, and that every dollar invested in renewable energy — instead of C.C.S. power — will eliminate far more carbon emissions.” New York times, August 16, 2022

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Dr. Brittany Trang recently made New York Times headlines with an experimental but extraordinarily promising method for turning dangerous "forever" chemicals called PFAS into different, harmless chemicals.

Dr. Trang is a 2022-2023 Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellow at STAT News. Previously, she covered health and science at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Fellow. Her freelance work has been published places like Chemistry World, Chemical & Engineering News, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

She has a bachelor’s in English and chemistry from the Ohio State University and a PhD in chemistry from Northwestern University, where she worked with Prof. William Dichtel to develop per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) remediation methods.

PFAS, a class of “forever” chemicals that don’t break down in the environment, are a common problem on military bases and other places where firefighting foam is heavily used.  As part of Climate Money Watchdog’s mission to investigate spending on environmental protection as well as climate change mitigation, we are tracking the $10 billion the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has $10 billion has allocated to addressing the PFAS problem, including $1 billion for advanced research.

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Elliott Negin, Senior Writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Elliott was UCS media director from 2007 through 2011 and now writes about UCS-related topics for a range of news organizations including:. A contributing writer at HuffPost from 2011 through 2017, he has also written articles and columns for Alternet, The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, EcoWatch, The Hill, Live Science, Mother Earth News, The Nation, The Progressive, Roll Call, Salon, Scientific American, The Washington Post and other publications. Prior to joining UCS, Elliott was the Washington communications director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a foreign news editor at National Public Radio, the managing editor of American Journalism Review, and the editor of Nuclear Times and Public Citizen magazines. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

We have invited Elliott to talk about two recent articles – one on ALEC and its funding and one on the long history of Charles Koch funding climate denial and climate disinformation efforts and how this impacts the ability to fund necessary climate change.

In the course of the episode, Elliott encourages listeners to learn more by reading the following works, or about the following topics:

• Charles Koch - Founder of Koch Industries and long-time climate change denier.
• The Libertarian Party
• The Cato Institute
• The Heritage Foundation
• 2024 presidential aspirants associated with Charles Koch:
  • Ted Cruz
  • Ron Desantis
  • Mike Pompeo
  • Rick Scott
  • Mike Pence
• Resources for tracking ALEC activities
  • ALEC Exposed
  • Color of Change
  • Common Cause

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Mark Z. Jacobson is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Some describe him as the architect of the U.S. Green New Deal. He has authored books, textbooks and articles on transitioning to renewable energy. Recently co-authored the study, “Low-Cost Solutions to Global Warming, Air Pollution, and Energy Insecurity for 145 Countries.

Professor Jacobson came to our attention via his opinion piece in The Hill, “No miracle tech needed: How to switch to renewables now and lower costs doing it.”, which draws heavily on this report. His credentials are impressive:

Director and co-founder, Atmosphere/Energy Program (link), Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, 2004-present.
Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment (link), January 2008-present
Senior Fellow, Precourt Institute for Energy (link), January 1, 2010-present
Co-founder, The Solutions Project (link), July 10, 2011-present.

B. S., with distinction, Stanford University, Civil Engineering, 1988
 B. A., with distinction, Stanford University, Economics, 1988
 M. S., Stanford University, Environmental Engineering, 1988
 M. S., UCLA, Atmospheric Sciences, 1991
 Ph. D., UCLA, Atmospheric Sciences, 1994

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Have you ever dreamed of an approach to carbon capture and sequestration that can be deployed anywhere, and has many years of demonstrated success? It turns out farmers have been employers using this technology – plants – for thousands of years.

Dr. Jeff Creque is a co-founder of the Marin Carbon Project and the Carbon Cycle Institute, where he serves as Director of Rangeland and Agroecosystem Management.  Jeff provides senior leadership on carbon farming and land management, informed by thirty-five years of applied experience and theoretical training. He is an agricultural and rangeland consultant and a Natural Resources Conservation Service certified nutrient management planning specialist and technical service provider.

Jeff’s organizational affiliations include: Founding Board Member, Alliance for Local Sustainable Agriculture (Marin); Co-Founder, Bolinas-Stinson Beach Resource Recovery Project; Agricultural Director, Apple Tree International; Co-Founder, West Marin Compost Coalition.

Jeff holds a PhD in Rangeland Ecology from Utah State University, and is a California State Board of Forestry Certified Professional in Rangeland Management.

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Mike Eisenfeld is San Juan Citizens Alliance Energy and Climate Program Manager

Mike joined SJCA in 2006 following ten years as an environmental consultant in the Four Corners region. Mike works on energy issues including coal, oil/gas, air quality and public lands. He specializes in the National Environmental Policy Act, Federal Land Policy & Management Act, and Endangered Species Act compliance. Mike has a B.A. from Bates College and a M.A. in Environmental Policy and Management from the University of Denver.

Mike's current work and this episode focus on a venture capital backed effort to extend the life of the San Juan Generating Station - a 1.7 gigawatt coal-fired power generation station once scheduled for decommissioning in 2022. As described in a June 29, 2022 High Country News article, this project proposes to implement carbon capture at a scale never before implemented, and to store it underground in areas of questionable geological quality.

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Sarah “Poppy” Alexander is a partner in Constantine Cannon’s San Francisco office.

She represents whistleblowers and government entities in qui tam lawsuits, as well as under the various agency whistleblower programs including those administered by the Internal Revenue Service, Securities and Exchange Commission, The Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Department of Transportation.  Poppy’s practice focuses on issues of international corruption and financial misconduct, with a specialty in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering cases.  She writes and speaks regularly about emerging topics in financial fraud, including sanctions violations, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies or SPACs, and cryptocurrency.  Poppy has been selected to the Northern California Super Lawyers Rising Stars list every year since 2016.

Prior to joining Constantine Cannon, Poppy was an associate attorney at Rosen, Bien, Galvan & Grunfeld LLP, where she worked to ensure prisoners received appropriate medical and mental health care and adequate accommodations for disabilities in jails and prisons.

Poppy maintains an active pro bono practice, with a particular emphasis on protecting the rights of children and adults in detention and protecting communities harmed by corporate bad acts abroad.  Poppy is also a board member for the Impact Fund, an organization devoted to funding and supporting cutting edge civil rights litigation.

Poppy graduated from Harvard Law School, where she was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and an active member of the Harvard Human Rights Clinic. Poppy spent one of her law school summers at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, fighting for abortion rights and the rights of pregnant women. After law school, Poppy clerked for the Honorable Martha Craig Daughtrey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Nashville, TN.

Poppy holds an M.A. in Political Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Yale College.

Further Reading:

• SEC Tip Page
• How the SEC Whistleblower Program Is Changing the Enforcement Landscape, American Constitution Society
• Tell Climate Money Watchdog your story through one of our secure communication channels.

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A former Assistant United States Attorney, Josh Russ is a principled and relentless advocate.

In 2013, after practicing healthcare regulation and litigation at a large corporate law firm, Josh joined the firm of Reese Marketos. During his time as an associate there, Josh tried a jury trial on behalf of a plaintiff financial firm involving debt owed to his client under multiple loan instruments. The case was settled just before closing arguments for more than $2 million. In addition, Josh represented two entrepreneurs in a commercial fraud and breach of contract matter that resulted in a favorable judgment for more than $5 million. The Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas affirmed the judgment in 2016.

In 2015, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas offered Josh the opportunity to serve the American public as the Eastern District’s Affirmative Civil Enforcement (ACE) Coordinator. In that role, Josh oversaw and directed most of the Eastern District’s False Claims Act and civil Controlled Substances Act investigations and litigation. In less than five years, Josh’s work contributed to the recovery of more than $85 million in settlements, suspensions, and judgments on behalf of American taxpayers, most of which involved enforcement of the Anti-Kickback Statute and the False Claims Act. Josh was also named the Eastern District’s Civil Healthcare Fraud Coordinator, where he worked to develop the district’s parallel proceedings practices in accordance with Department of Justice policy.

For his work, Josh was awarded the Executive Office of United States Attorneys Director’s Award for Superior Performance as a Civil Assistant US Attorney. Josh frequently lectured internally for the Department of Justice regarding the False Claims Act, the Controlled Substances Act, and parallel proceedings.

In 2018, at the age of 33, Josh was promoted to serve as the Eastern District’s Civil Chief. In that position, Josh supervised all civil litigation across the Eastern District’s six divisions: Sherman, Texarkana, Marshall, Tyler, Lufkin, and Beaumont. In addition to managing the Eastern District’s affirmative False Claims Act and civil Controlled Substances Act dockets, Josh supervised the district’s Financial Litigation Unit as well as defensive litigation against the United States, its agencies, and its personnel.

Josh’s highest priority as Civil Chief became fighting the nation’s devastating opioid crisis. He served as the co-chair of a national Prescription Interdiction and Litigation (PIL) Task Force working group.

In November 2019, Josh rejoined Reese Marketos as a partner, where he leads the firm’s Eastern District office and the firm’s False Claims Act practice.

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Kert Davies is the founder and director of Climate Investigations Center. He is a well-known researcher, media spokesperson and climate activist who has been conducting corporate accountability research and campaigns for more than 20 years.

Davies was the chief architect of the Greenpeace web project ExxonSecrets , launched in 2004, which helped expose the oil giant ExxonMobil’s funding of organizations and individuals who work to discredit the validity of climate science and delay climate policy action.

More recently, Davies appeared in the PBS Frontline series "The Power of Big Oil" and the Paramount Plus series "Black Gold".

Kert came to our attention through the publication of a report called CO2 Pipelines and Carbon Capture: The Satartia Mississippi Accident Investigation, which describes how a small town in Mississippi was nearly wiped out by a leak from a relatively small CO2 pipeline.

Kert describes how recent studies such as Princeton's Netzero America envision vastly larger pipelines, posing far greater threats.

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Sean Moulton is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). We’ve invited Sean to discuss his recent report on how Increased Infrastructure Oversight Falls Short for the Biden Administration’s infrastructure law, while still being an important step forward. Sean explains how new oversight measures are implemented via executive order, which means they can easily be dismantled by future administrations, lacking the permanence and manifestation of consensus of legislation. Also, the new measures rely on executive branch officials accepting the advice of Inspectors General and fail to provide consistency across the multiple f ederal departments, state, county and local governments, and contracts, grants and loans across which trillions of infrastructure and climate money will be spent. These observations echo those in past podcasts by retired U.S. Treasury Inspector General  Eric Thorson, and Contra Cost County Supervisor John Gioia.

Prior to POGO, Sean worked for over a decade on transparency and government accountability issues, leading the Center for Effective Government’s open government work for 13 years. The Center for Open Government, previously known as “OMB Watch”, pioneered making federal government spending visible to taxpayers through an online database. (“OMB” stands for Office of Management and Budget, an office within the White House that oversees the implementation of the President’s financial vision across the executive branch. OMB eventually licensed OMB Watch’s database technology to create usaspending.gov, a detailed, comprehensive and official accounting of federal government spending that’s open to the public.

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We’re pleased to have as our guest Melissa Valliant, Director of Communications for Beyond Plastics, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending plastic polution. She grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and graduated from Syracuse University with a plan to pursue magazine journalism. Somewhere along the way, she became hooked on environmental conservation and discovered a love for leveraging her communications abilities to make the world a better place. Melissa had her first letter to the editor published in a kids' science magazine at the age of 11 and has since been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, among others. Prior to her role at Beyond Plastics, she managed communications for Oceana's plastics campaign and worked for the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

Topics Discussed Include:

• How environmental and health problems are connected with micro plastic and nano plastic particles and why scientists are alarmed.
• Why only 9 percent of plastic waste recycled.
• How the plastics lobby/greenwashing industries that were against abatement and reform.
• How the Fossil Fuel believes they can make up for future oil market loss with plastics production.
• How plastic manufacturing is highly polluting, where in the country we produce it, and impacts on local communities.
• What is currently being done to reform and what ultimately needs to be done to start to fix the problem.

Further Reading / Topics Discussed in this Episode:

·      Consider the positive and aspects of “The crying Indian” commercial on American society.

·      How do prominent projects such as “Mr. Trash Wheel” encourage plastics removal/recycling versus reduction of plastics production affect public perception?

·      Media Briefing on Polution in Port Arthur, TX

·      Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act

·      The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act

·      Beyond Plastics Affiliates

·      Beyond Plastics petitions

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For years, activists, scientists and politicians have fought to get enough federal funding to make a start to slow climate change and stop the incessant temperature climb of the planet. Although the job of getting money is far from done, the first large tranche of appropriated money from the infrastructure law is starting to be spent. This  important money will only be  effective if it is spent well and scandals and waste could affect the success of climate goals and deter future and follow-on appropriations. To do this correctly, there has to be strong and workable oversight structure either built into the legislation or established by the Executive Branch.

For this week's podcast episode,  we are lucky to have Scott Amey from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). He is one of the best people in Washington DC on how to build effective oversight into government and what has worked or not worked over his decades of experience.  Every climate activist and the politicians who support climate change legislation should listen to Scott so that  the federal government can be pushed to do it s job and make sure the money is well spent on realistic and effective projects. The whole system that is spending this money, clear down to state and local governments, has to be pushed from the inside and outside the federal government to  make it work the first time. Scott has seen it all and he talks frankly about his concerns of what can happen when well intended money is spent badly. (full disclosure: Dina Rasor is the founder and was the first director of POGO and serves on its board of directors and Greg Williams worked as an investigator at POGO)

Scott Amey is POGO’s general counsel and executive editorial director. In addition to organizational legal demands, he oversees the investigations, research and policy teams, the Center for Defense Information (CDI), and The Constitution Project (TCP). Scott also participates in contract oversight investigations, including reviews of federal spending on products and services, the responsibility of federal contractors, and conflicts-of-interest and ethics concerns. Scott is an attorney and can  practice law in Maryland.

In October of 2021, Scott was asked to testify before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight and Subcommittee on Energy on best practices for federal spending. This podcast provides reflection on that testimony, and his decades of experience.

Scott's October 21, 2021 before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology

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The cost of installing an electric vehicle (EV) charger can vary from  $400 to $150,000. Dave Mullaney of the RMI's Carbon-Free Mobility team takes us through their recent report - Reducing EV Charging Infrastructure Costs - to help us understand why, and how these costs can be reduced.

If you've ever installed an electric oven or clothes dryer where there wasn't one before, you have some idea what it's like to get the necessary 220 volt electrical source installed. Unless you've been involved in building a large factory, electrified rail line or commercial computing center, you probably don't know what it's like to get a megawatt or more of electrical infrastructure planned, funded, permitted and installed. Dave introduces us to some of what's involved and how we can make it less expensive, faster and more predictable.

Dave also explains why we should have different expectations for charging EV's than we have for fueling conventional gasoline and diesel powered cars. Whether you fill your tank all at once in a few minutes, or over several hours, it costs the same. Charging an EV is orders of magnitude less expensive if you do it overnight vs. all at once at the fastest available charging station. One the one hand, this will require big adjustments in people's expectations. On the other hand, wouldn't it be nice to wake up each morning to your car being fully charged, without having to go anywhere?

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This week we meet with Bob Bauman, a veteran government investigator and auditor, to discuss how the Department of Energy (DoE) wasted nearly half a billion dollars on failed carbon capture and storage (CSS) technology demonstration projects.

The failed CSS projects are described in a report released by the Government Accountability Office in December 2021 called CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE: Actions Needed to Improve DOE Management of Demonstration Projects.

Bob uses his 30+ years as a government investigator to explain how this kind of waste occurs, and what it portends for the $3.5 billion the Department of Energy recently announced they're investing on behalf of U.S. taxpayers in CSS projects.

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This week we're joined by Mark Dyson, Managing Director for Carbon-Free Electricity at the Rocky Mountain Institute to discuss his recent report, Reimagining Grid Resilience.  Mark describes how investing in distributed energy resources, such as "behind-the-meter" photovoltaic solar  panels both do more to improve the resilience of the grid and provide carbon and cost reduction benefits when everything is operating well. These "blue sky" benefits pay dividends around the clock and around the year. On the other hand, "hardening" against outages ("black sky") only provides benefits when systems would otherwise be malfunctioning. Such vulnerabilities to the grid itself do exist, as were demonstrated by the 2013 Metcalf sniper attack in the United States and the 2015 Ukraine power grid hack, but efficiency, insulation, and residential wind and solar represent far greater potential.

Mark also comments on the thoughtfulness of grid funding programs that are part of the bipartisan infrastructure law, including Energy Improvement in Rural Areas, Preventing Outages and Enhancing the Resilience of the Electric Grid / Hazard Hardening, Program Upgrading Our Electric Grid and Ensuring Reliability and Resiliency and the Smart Grid Investment Matching Grant Program.

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Eric Thorson has extensive experience exercising federal government oversight, including  as Treasury IG for 11 years, a Congressional oversight Investigator serving on 3 different committees over 10 years. His perspective is also deepened by having been a successful entrepreneur. He is now lecturer at College of William & Mary.

We discuss the importance of oversight in the context of government spending anticipated with the Biden administration's infrastructure bills, and how things can go wrong quickly when safeguards are bypassed, as they appear to have been in the case of Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that was given a $1/2 billion loan guarantee as part of the Obama administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

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California Contra Costa County Supervisor Gioia has been elected and re-elected with overwhelming margins five times, and represents the most urban part of the county, which lies directly north of Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco. 

He considers himself an environmental leader, and serves as the Vice-Chair of the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority.

We spoke with Supervisor Gioia about past, present and future projects in Contra Costa County, including numerous residential and commercial electronic vehicle charging stations.

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Our guest for this podcast is Danielle Brian, Executive Director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). POGO is a nonpartisan independent government watchdog whose investigations have chronicled lessons learned, missed and lost across huge government programs addressing the cold war, two Gulf wars, 911, the war in Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID 19 pandemic.

Danielle joins us today to discuss the kinds of pitfalls to expect with climate change spending associated with the pending infrastructure bills, and how we might avoid them. Examples of effective and ineffective oversight in the CARES Act, oil and gas royalties and other contexts are discussed.

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Bill McKibben is a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. He founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2014 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ in the Swedish Parliament. He’s also won the Gandhi Peace Award, and honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published in 1989, and the forthcoming The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.

In this podcast, we reflect on the recent launch of Third Act, and the need to pursue climate change mitigation and environmental remediation with "equanimity".

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In this introductory episode, we lay out our mission:

Climate Money Watchdog is a nonpartisan independent watchdog that investigates and exposes waste, corruption, abuse of power with a focus on government expenditures related to climate change mitigation and environmental remediation.

When the government and private organizations fail the public or silence those who report wrongdoing, we will be there as an open or anonymous place for them to help expose the corruption and maleficence. 

We champion reforms to achieve more effective, ethical, and accountable federal, state, and local government that safeguards constitutional principles and fiscal responsibility for climate and environmental spending.

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Doug founded Earth Track to more effectively integrate information on energy subsidies. For the past three decades, he has written extensively on natural resource subsidies for organizations such as the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Stockholm Environment Institute.  He has analyzed scores of government programs and made important developments in subsidy valuation techniques.  He has provided input on subsidy reform legislation, served as a peer reviewer on subsidy papers from all over the world, and has published his own work in major journals and as book chapters.  In recent years, his work has focused on subsidies to fossil fuels, nuclear power, and the impact of multi-sector natural resource subsidies on biodiversity and critical habitats.

Working collaboratively with other organizations, Earth Track focuses on ways to more effectively align the incentives of key stakeholder groups and to leverage market forces to help address complex environmental challenges.

He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BA in economics from Wesleyan University.

Topics Discussed Include:

•  Government subsidies - why they are important to think about as we try to decarbonize our economy.  
• How oil and gas subsides work in general and why they are outdated and harmful to climate goals. 
• How taxpayers’ subsidies distort the market for oil and gas produced in Permian Basin.
• The role of different levels of government in supporting oil and gas and whether there are specific challenges trying to reform state-level policies.
• How some subsides were passed in the 1920s when oil extraction was a new industry and haven’t been changed to match the times.
• How three quarters of the subsides support exploration and production, potentially creating a disincentive to phasing out fossil fuel energy.
• How transparency of information on costs and how is paid is often lacking
• Particularly egregious subsidies in the federal realm, in Texas, and New Mexico.
• Examples of federal and state regulations and environmental exemptions that allow the fossil fuel production pollution to walk away from their production pollution and how that is affecting the Permian Basin’s environment for the people.

Further Reading: 

·      The High Cost Well subsidy

·      The Good Jobs First organization

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Matt Renner serves as Vice President of Seneca Environmental, a tribally owned and controlled Earth-healing solutions company focused on helping commercial customers achieve ambitious climate goals while supporting the long-term well-being of the Seneca Nation and other Indigenous people. His work focuses on partnership development and customer acquisition to create unprecedented collaboration and profitably accelerate climate action. 

Matt has worked as a nonprofit executive in clean energy, climate policy, and journalism for over a decade, focusing on the near-term social and economic impacts of climate change. He was the head of Climate Mobilization and now serves on their board of directors. He began his career as an investigative reporter and later became the Executive Director of the World Business Academy to focus on the transition to a climate-constrained economic paradigm.

Matt has a BA degree in Political Science and Government from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Topics Discussed Include:

·      How Seneca Environmental is set up and its main goals.

·      Why the Seneca Nation set up a specific section to invest in clean climate change solutions.

·      How Seneca Environmental made the 2023 Time100 List and what Matt has done to make Seneca Environmental unique.

·      An outline of the work Renner has done for the Native American community and for corporate businesses on producing clean energy.

·      Why Seneca Environmental’s business model is working for both the Native American community and corporate businesses.

·      How Seneca Environmental’s model and efforts can be replicated with other tribes and businesses to help the clean energy movement going forward.

Further Reading:

·      The Seneca Environmental web site

·      Video overview of the Seneca Nation

·      Federal Tax Credits for Businesses

·      Department of Energy Loan Programs

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Our guest tonight is Paul Blackburn of Pipeline Fighters’ Hub. Paul provides legal services on pipeline and renewable energy matters. He has worked on crude oil pipeline issues since 2008, and has experience in renewable energy policy and development. Paul represented nonprofit clients in the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission hearing on the Keystone XL Pipeline, and in the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission hearing on expansion of Line 67, another Enbridge pipeline. He has provided policy analysis and strategic advice on a variety of pipeline matters and authored reports on pipeline safety and oil spill response.

Paul started his legal career in Washington, DC, at the law firm of Van Ness Feldman, where he assisted clients in renewable energy and coal-fired power plant development, a variety of regulatory, legislative, and litigation matters, and Native American commercial law.  After leaving private practice, he began a career in the nonprofit sector, including employment by the Sierra Club, the National Environmental Trust, and Oceana in organizing and media.  He also has experience in community wind and solar energy development.  Paul holds a B.A. in Biology from Macalester College and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.

In this episode we discuss topics including:

·      An overview of the Q45 Carbon sequestration tax credit program

·      Who benefits from the Q45 Tax Credit Program?

·      How Fossil Fuel companies take advantage of the Q45 program and use it to continue to justify producing more fossil fuel

·      Problems with the reporting system for 45Q to the EPA and IRS

For more information, see:

·      The Pipeline Fighters Hub web site

·      The Congressional Research Service’s page on the Q45 program

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Our guest this episode is Erandi Trevino of Public Citizen, Houston. Erandi grew up in Houston and has been concerned about the pollution in her neighborhood since she was a young child.

Before joining Public Citizen in Houston as a Climate Policy and Outreach Specialist, she was an Advocacy Fellow with the Fulbright Association in Washington, DC, where she worked on education policy, nutrition, and financial regulations. During her time in DC, Erandi also volunteered for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

Earlier in her career, Erandi assisted the Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations in New York. She has a law degree from Fordham University and degrees in International Relations and Latin American studies from Seton Hall University. Following her graduation there, she received a Fulbright Grant to teach English in Belo Horizonte, Brazil where she became fluent in Portuguese.

In this episode we discuss the following topics:

• The coalition of companies and other institutions that are partners with this new project called the HyVelocity Hub and their claims to be able to build an “ecosystem” from the existing hydrogen and pipeline industry in Houston to make clean hydrogen.
• HyVelocity Hub claims that they will be able use carbon capture to make “clean” hydrogen (called blue hydrogen) using existing hydrogen production plants.
• How credible is Houston’s Clean Hydrogen Roadmap in general?
• Is HyVelocity’s goal of achieving 2kg CO2 / kg of H2 is realistic?
• RMI currently estimates 20 kg CO2 / kg H2 with Texas’s current fossil-heavy power grid.
• How credible is HyVelocity’s vision “to serve disadvantaged communities by providing jobs and higher labor standards, reducing local pollution, and supporting and complying with the Justice40 initiative?
• Who are the powerful investors in this endeavor and how are they affecting the plans for these plants? Are they listening to local concerns or just greenwashing their environmental challenges?
• What is Public Citizen doing as a local activist to get some oversight on this HyVelocity Hub project?

Resources:

Center for Houston's Future

Houston Healthy Port Communities Coalition

Environmental Defense Fund - Better Hubs - Expring Decarbonizing Industry

Greater Houston Port Bureau's Project 11

On Breath Partnership's "What is Port Houston's Project 11?" 

Erandi's Contact Information

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We’re excited to welcome back Mark Z. Jacobson, who joined us last year to talk about a study he co-authored called “Low-Cost Solutions to Global Warming, Air Pollution, and Energy Insecurity for 145 Countries”. He is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Atmosphere/Energy program at Stanford University, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for energy, and also the Co-Founder of The Solutions Project, 100.org and the 100% Clean, Renewable Energy movement.

We've asked Mark back to see what progress the country has made with his prediction that the US and the world can change to clean energy and meet CO2 goals by only using WWS (wind, water and solar) i.e. clean non burning energy without using coal, gas, nuclear, and carbon capture. Mark released a book in February of this year, entitled No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air. His book brings up more questions about the government and the some climate experts are promoting, such as carbon capture, instead of considering the potential of just using WWS. 

Topics covered include:

• How does the time taken to construct different types of power plants effect their impact  in light of the short timetable on lowering CO2 and other greenhouse gases pollution?
• How does the amount of waste heat  released by fossil fuel compare to that released by renewables? For example,  about 65 to 67 percent of energy in oil and coal is released as waste heat, 40 to 60 percent of natural gas energy is also waste heat, 74 percent of biomass is waste heat and 65 percent of the energy in uranium is waste heat.
• According to Jacobson, “By 2021, the cost of a system consisting of wind, solar, and batteries was already less than that consisting of natural gas. For example, even in 2019, a Florida utility replaced two natural gas plants with a combined solar-battery system because of the lower cost of the later.” How do economics affect transition to renewable energy sources? 
• What are the best and quickest energy source for commercial and military planes and cargo ships?
• Is the U.S. grid ready for 100 percent clean electricity?
• What has been the reaction to Jacobson's proposed  WWS solution?

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In this episode we welcome Peter McKillop, the founder and CEO of our new partner, Climate & Capital Media.

Peter is the founder of Climate & Capital Media. Climate & Capital Media is a mission-driven information platform exploring the business and finance of climate change.

Climate & Capital delivers original reporting, intelligence and insight from our global network of journalists, researchers, and investors with a focus on climate-related businesses, technology, and public policy, particularly for the emerging generation of economic leaders who will shape tomorrow’s global agenda.

Prior to Climate & Capital, Peter McKillop was a Managing Director at BlackRock, where he was responsible for leading the firm’s strategic communications and messaging for its iShares ETF and Indexing business. He has also held senior communication leadership positions at J.P. Morgan, KKR, UBS, and Bank of America. Before entering the financial communications field, Peter was a senior correspondent and bureau chief for Newsweek in New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.

Our discussion ranges across the following topics, among others:

·      Why it’s especially important and vital to have good oversight over the hundreds of billions of dollars of climate money about to be spent?

·      Our goals for this new oversight collaboration between Climate Money Watchdog and Climate & Capital Media

·      How the climate community will react to the idea of needing oversight unemployment money and the need to police itself.

·      What we should do as climate money watchers when the climate deniers try to use spending failure and scandals to discredit all climate work.

·      How important sources, especially inside sources within the climate effort are to finding out what is going wrong

·      Why we are concerned about whistleblowers in the past who have dumped un-vetted, un-redacted into the public arena. How practices of people like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning can hurt the communities they’re trying to help.

·      As a long-time journalists, what concerns us now about the state of journalism, it's sustainability, and its ability to do oversight.

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