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To: Brumar89 who wrote (1058027)

3/1/2018 2:21:50 PM

From: Brumar89

Respond to of 1578750

Eco-Billionaire Gave $500K To Oakland Mayor’s Pet Project Shortly Before Climate Lawsuit

Green billionaires bribe politicians to sue energy companies in noble quest to crush the poor.

CHRIS WHITE

An anti-oil California billionaire poured half a million dollars into one of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s favorite educational programs shortly before the city announced lawsuits against energy companies, according to documents The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained.

Tom Steyer provided Schaaf with a $500,000 donation to Oakland Promise Generation Fund and Children’s Initiative, a project the mayor uses to provide financial assistance to low-income students. TheDCNF’s documents also appear to show Steyer and Schaaf meeting less than a year later to discuss a “time sensitive” issue that coincided with the mayor’s decision to sue energy companies.

The Beneficial State Bank, a California bank Steyer founded to fund local businesses with limited access to financial loans, holds all the money for the program, including the sizeable donation that Steyer and his wife Kat Taylor gave to Schaaf’s project. The documents show officials in the mayor’s office organizing the nuts and bolts undergirding the monetary gift.

“She (Oakland Promise’s communication’s manager) will be able to help you … acknowledge Tom and Kat’s recent and generous $500K contribution to the OP scholarships and college savings programs,” Amanda Feinstein, a scheduler in Schaaf’s office, wrote in a Nov. 3, 2016 email to Erin Eisenberg, the director of philanthropy for the TomKat Foundation.

Schaaf reached out to Steyer’s people several months later for additional donations. They mayor wrote to Taylor last August to thank her for going to city hall on Aug. 28 to discuss the previous donations to Oakland Promise. She went on to suggest meeting in the future for additional funding.

“Please let us know when you have gotten a chance to talk with Tom and if there is anything we can provide to support your consideration,” Schaaf wrote in an Aug. 31 email to Taylor, who provided a go-between for Steyer and the mayor. Daniela Castro, a scheduler with Fahr, a group the Democratic moneyman founded to coordinate his philanthropic efforts, responded less than a week later with an email noting the importance of meeting Schaaf.

“Kaylee – pls schedule Kat to meet with Andrea tomorrow at SeaCliff instead as it is time sensitive,” Castro wrote in a Sept. 7 email to Schaaf’s executive scheduler, Lauren Blanchard – the email was an attempt to arrange a meeting between Taylor and the mayor’s office at City Hall. He provided the mayor with Kat’s phone number on Sept. 15, and Schaaf announced five days later that the city would sue ExxonMobil, Chevron and others for their supposed role in contributing to global warming.

Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach are also plaintiffs with Schaaf, as are Santa Cruz County, San Mateo County, and Marin County. They are among a slew of local areas suing to hold Exxon and other energy companies’ responsible what plaintiffs believe are costs associated with global warming.

A report from the Daily Mail last December also showed a close linkage between these lawsuits and Steyer. Two officials inside his nonprofit group, NextGen, were briefed in 2015 on the strategy behind a legal crusade against various oil producers, the Daily Mail report noted at the times. He has repeatedly denied any involvement in campaigns to sue companies like Exxon.

But documents and emails have continued to leak out suggesting otherwise. Oakland, San Francisco and New York City began pursuing lawsuits against major oil companies in early 2016 to flesh out the degree to which they were contributing to greenhouse gas levels. San Francisco announced it would sue companies like BP, Chevron, Exxon and others, shortly after Steyer provided city’s mayor with a $30,000 campaign donation.

dailycaller.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1058027)	3/1/2018 2:33:01 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578750

African Americans will pay a steep price for Trump's new solar tariff Last week, a 30 percent tariff that President Donald Trump tacked onto imported solar panels kicked in. Industry experts are predicting it will end up costing the U.S. 23,000 solar jobs in 2018 alone. There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how precisely the new tariff will impact domestic solar panel sales and jobs, but GTM Research expects it to slow the residential solar market by nearly 10 percent between now and 2022. That could affect the number of solar jobs in the future, especially where the power drill hits the rooftop — more than three-fourths of solar jobs in the U.S. are in demand-side sectors such as installation. The United States was enjoying a 168 percent growth rate in solar jobs since 2010, according to the 2017 Solar Jobs Census report released last week. African Americans in particular have seen a burst in solar workforce participation over the past few years, constituting 7.4 percent of the workforce in 2017, compared to 6.6 percent the year before and 5.2 percent in 2015. This, of course, is hardly proportional to the general working-age black population, but African Americans were the only racial group to see their share of the solar workforce significantly expand between 2016 and 2017 — every other group, save for whites, saw a drop.