Hedge fund investor John Arnold was once an energy trader at Enron, where he was dubbed the “king of natural gas.” His fossil-fuel trades generated the largest single bonus check — $8 million — that Enron ever wrote.
After years of trading in coal and natural gas, Arnold started his own firm and eventually became a billionaire. But instead of promoting the cheap, reliable energy sources that made him rich, Arnold is now pouring millions into political activism. He is promoting causes and campaigns that would make natural gas and other forms of energy most Americans rely on both harder to get and more expensive to pay for.
Arnold is hardly alone. From Wall Street to Hollywood, affluent Americans are funding political candidates and activist groups pushing green policies that drive gas prices and electric bills higher.
Millionaire actor Leonardo DiCaprio, whom many Americans consider their “most trusted authority on climate change,” according to a recent National Research Group survey, frequently flies private jets — ironically, often to climate change events — and owns multiple homes.
John Kerry, who married into the multi-billion-dollar Heinz family fortune, serves as the Biden administration’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate and also owns multiple homes and flies private jets. (“It’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle,” Kerry has explained in the past.)
That’s part of the reason the top 1 percent of American earners generate 15 percent of the country’s carbon emissions, according to a study recently published in PLOS Climate.
What angers their critics is that they are using this wealth to push energy policies that would drive up the cost of electricity or take away gas stoves from working-class Americans.
For example, The Boston Globe reported that until Kerry was appointed energy czar, his extensive investment portfolio included holdings in “three dozen energy-related companies dealing in electric, oil and gas — even nuclear — precisely the kind of energy Kerry and his climate crisis pals want us all to get rid of.”
But the one-time “king of natural gas” may be today’s leading example of elitist hypocrisy on hydrocarbons.
Since 2010, Arnold Ventures LLC, formerly the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, has given more than $36 million to groups advocating for decarbonization policies and investments likely to drive dramatic increases in energy costs for most Americans. For example, the Clean Air Task Force, which has received $2 million from Arnold, says its mission is “to reduce climate change by applying an overwhelming amount of force to some of the biggest levers to reduce carbon and other climate-warming emissions.”
That overwhelming force includes, in part, pushing the development and implementation of expensive decarbonizing technologies in the electricity generation, transportation, and manufacturing sectors. Those industries would no doubt pass the added costs on to consumers.
Citizen Climate Lobby, the recipient of $750,000 from Arnold, believes ever-increasing taxes on carbon-based fuels are the answer to climate change, regardless of how such levies might impact middle and lower-income families that rely on carbon fuels to cook, heat the house, and get to work.
The Climate Leadership Council (roughly $3 million from Arnold) also advocates for a carbon tax, along with a carbon tariff on imported goods, which would likely drive up the price of goods purchased by nearly every household.
“Having the federal government inside your home, dictating what kind of stove you can have — or lightbulbs for that matter — is the height of dysfunction,” said Pete McGinnis, Communications Director of the bipartisan Functional Government Initiative.” FGI is working through FOIA and transparency litigation to discover the administration’s reasoning and intentions, but the evidence to date points to a special interest agenda leading the way with scientific support hard to find.
“The hypocrisy of these same special interests trying to influence the legislative arena is simply icing on the cake,” McGinnis added.
Arnold isn’t the only billionaire using a carbon-based fortune to fight carbon-based energy. He was not even the first. Hedge fund owner (and short-lived presidential candidate) Tom Steyer has spent the past several years advocating for and funding decarbonization efforts. He owes much of his wealth to well-timed carbon-based energy sector investments.
President Joe Biden recently brought his family to vacation in Steyer’s $18 million waterfront mansion, raising questions about the billionaire’s current business interests in the green tech investing funded by the administration.
Special interest groups, such as those funded by Arnold, clearly impact Democratic energy policies, including those of the Biden administration. And as the 2024 election cycle heats up, voters can expect a flood of political rhetoric — often paid for by affluent activists who can easily afford higher energy costs.
The same can’t be said of the millions of working-class families who will be stuck with the bills.
