A good friend sent me a link to an interesting diary on Daily Kos titled “Clean Coal”‘s Dirty Hands?. That diary entry used an article written by Peter Montague, titled INSIGHTS: Carbon Sequestration that provides some very interesting documentation of grants provided by The Joyce Foundation to a number of mainstream environmental organizations.
The essential thrust of the article was that carbon sequestration was an untested and potentially risky endeavor that was being supported by a surprising coalition of groups that shared some of the same funding sources. I personally think that Mr. Montague was a little off in his analysis – in my opinion carbon sequestration will never be implemented on a major scale – but he has done a great job in contributing valuable information to an important discussion.
I recommend that you go visit “Clean Coal”‘s Dirty Hands? and participate. It should be an interesting source of opinions and information about how fossil fuel interests use their extensive financial resources and those of long established foundations with huge investment portfolios.
For example, the article talks about the activities of The Joyce Foundation. I did a little poking around and found out that Joyce was originally endowed with a $100 million bequest from a lumber industry heiress in 1972. It now controls an unrestricted portfolio of nearly $900 million. After giving away about $40-50 million each year, they have still grown that endowment by about $35 million per year for the last few years. It can do a lot of very good charitable work and still enable some nefarious and sneaky anti-nuclear activities to protect its interests and those of its donors and leaders.
PS – I had to grin about the magic of Google Adsense when I posted this comment. The link that showed up was titled Energy From Coal. It leads to an interestingly titled organization called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices. Its main point is that coal is essential, affordable and increasing clean. Note: I did not put a hyperlink in this postscript – go ahead and click on the ad link. That is more advantageous to Atomic Insights.
