Why does New Orleans’ little do-gooder charity, the Alliance for Affordable Energy, push the most expensive power sources and fight the cheapest? It’s dancing on the money strings of Big Green and feeding at the taxpayer trough at the same time, of course. With a half-million-dollar budget, it operates anti-fossil fuel campaigns and a U.S. Labor Department “Green Corps” grant training local disadvantaged youth to work on environmental restoration projects.
The alliance was created in 1985 by a group of typically sincere and reasonably well-to-do benefactors, some rich enough to have their own private foundations. They earned a good bang-for-the-buck reputation because their volunteer activists didn’t need a day job.
Their first executive director, a carpenter turned activist named Gary Groesch, began the outfit with an unsuccessful protest against the Waterford 3 nuclear power plant near New Orleans (which is still operating), but his bulldog tenacity just pushed them on to the next issue-of-the-month.
Groesch and his volunteers quickly became known as prickly consumer advocates, gadflies pestering city and state regulatory agencies for reductions in electrical utility rates and lobbying for or against whatever came along.
In 1992, unknown to the alliance, one of their future high-dollar donors, the Surdna Foundation, was about to change all that and turn the consumerists into instruments of Big Green.
It was at a members-only retreat of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a loose coalition of nearly 200 donor foundations. The Surdna member explained how they were wasting money on green groups that failed to produce the results they wanted — laws, regulations, election outcomes.
He had a solution: “We have to get prescriptive.” “Prescriptive” is foundationese, meaning, “We create the projects, you get paid to make them work, we hold you accountable for return on investment.”
The alliance was below the radar then, but its influence was growing. In 1997, the Louisiana Legislature appointed Groesch to a commission studying the effects of global climate change on the state, starting the alliance’s war to replace low-cost fossil energy — oil, natural gas and coal — with high-cost (and unreliable) wind and solar power.
If you look in the grant records of the Blue Moon Fund — money originally from the Citgo Oil fortune — you’ll find they gave $50,000 to the alliance “To focus attention on the need for action to address climate disruption, including its impacts on sea level along the Louisiana coast.”
In that instance, the money came after Groesch did the job. But a year later, he was named a director of a Ford Foundation project to show the compatibility of economic development and the new left-wing buzzword, “social justice” — and the big foundations noticed.
By 2000, the Energy Foundation — a notoriously prescriptive donor that was founded as a consortium of seven big foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts and its Sun Oil fortune — began directing grants to the alliance: $25,000 “To support an advocacy effort to rapidly advance low-income energy efficiency efforts in Louisiana.”
Groesch died in 2002, but his projects lived on. The Energy Foundation pumped $50,000 more into the energy efficiency campaign, a bid to get government and utilities (not the foundation) to pay for the home improvements.
When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the Big Green grants strangely vanished. Actually fixing things didn’t interest them. But they reappeared in 2008, when the Surdna Foundation, figuring the Alliance for Affordable Energy was now powerful enough, sent $100,000 for an undisclosed purpose.
But we can guess, because Surdna’s companion in arms, the Energy Foundation, simultaneously sent $97,000 and instructions “To oppose new conventional coal-fired power plants in Louisiana.”
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
