Robert Bryce has written a disturbing essay about the Climate Imperative Foundation, which received $221 million in donations in its first year of operations. The donors include Steve Jobs’s widow, as well as Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, and their priority is to ban natural gas, starting with your gas boiler. All very well for private-jet-owning billionaires, Bryce argues, but what impact will the ban have on working-class communities? Here’s how it begins.
The Climate Imperative Foundation is the newest and richest anti-hydrocarbon, anti-natural gas group you’ve never heard of.
How rich is Climate Imperative? According to the latest report from Guidestar, the group took in $221 million in its first full year of operation. (Guidestar calls the income “gross receipts”.) That means that Climate Imperative, which is less than three years-old, is already taking in more cash than the Sierra Club, which bills itself as the “nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organisation”. According to Guidestar, the Sierra Club collected $180 million in its latest reporting year. Climate Imperative is also taking in more money than the Rocky Mountain Institute which collected about $130 million in its latest reporting year. I use those groups for comparison because they are pushing anti-gas initiatives across the country. More on them in a moment.