Big Bend Coal Power Station in Apollo Beach, Fla. |
Board members and endorsers of the Apollo Alliance, which successfully promoted "clean coal" funding as part of President Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" bill, also have endorsed a group led by Al Gore that opposes the White House's "clean coal" efforts, going so far as to claim "clean coal" doesn't exist, WND has learned.
The Apollo Alliance board of directors includes a slew of extremists. The group has boasted in its own literature of its role in helping to craft portions of the multi-billion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that Obama signed into law last year.
The Alliance helped draft "clean energy and green-collar jobs provisions" of the bill, for which $3.4 billion was earmarked to "work toward making coal part of the solution and reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from industrial facilities and fossil fuel power plants."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lauded the Alliance for helping craft the "stimulus" bill.
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"The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them," Reid said in a statement.
The Alliance has long pushed "clean coal." In 2007 Senate testimony Apollo Alliance President Jerome Ringo talked about a blueprint his group drew up, claiming "hundreds of thousands of additional jobs will be created in the clean energy technology sector, including renewables, clean coal and bio-fuels."
A slew of groups that support the Apollo Alliance as well as individuals on Apollo's board endorsed what was known as the "New Apollo Program and the Apollo Economic Recovery Act," a mock recovery act on which sections of Obama's "stimulus" bill was partly based. That act also called for funding for "clean coal."
However, WND has leaned many of those same Apollo endorsers and board members also are members of Gore's lobby group that opposes "clean coal" initiatives.
In 2008, Gore launched the Reality Coalition, a national grassroots and advertising effort with a simple message: In reality, there is no such thing as clean coal. Coal, Reality Coalition argues, cannot be considered clean until its carbon dioxide emissions are captured and stored. Gore's group has backed a multi-million dollar ad campaign, running in print, broadcast and online media, opposing Obama's "clean coal" initiatives.
At the launch of Reality Coalition, Gore wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that until coal is truly clean, there should be no new coal-fired power plants built in America.
Gore's group is backed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the United Steelworkers Union and the Sierra Club. Leaders of all three groups also are board members of Apollo Alliance, which promotes "clean coal."
Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, previously stated, "We need to clean up coal, not spend billions on a scheme to market coal as clean."
However, the National Wildlife Federation is an Apollo Alliance endorser.
Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, previously declared of Gore's group that "the coal industry is running a cynical and dishonest campaign to mislead the American people, while they stand in the way of real solutions. The 'Reality' Coalition is aimed at holding them accountable for their outlandish claims."
However, the League is an Apollo Alliance endorser.
Other Apollo endorsers who also support Gore's anti-"clean coal" include the Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club. Sierra's executive director, Carl Pope, is an Apollo board member as well.
The Apollo Alliance claims it was founded in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks "to catalyze a clean energy revolution in America."
Discover the Networks notes that in July, Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Apollo Alliance Chairman Angelides to serve as chairman of the newly created Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Among its board members is a grouping of radicals, including:
- Van Jones, President Obama's controversial former "green jobs czar," who resigned in September after it was exposed he founded a communist revolutionary organization and signed a statement that accused the Bush administration of possible involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Jones also called for "resistance" against the U.S.
Jones himself decried the Apollo Alliance mission as "sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes."
- Joel Rogers, a founder of the socialist New Party. WND reported on evidence indicating Obama was a New Party member. In an interview with WND, New Party co-founder and Marxist activist Carl Davidson recounted Obama's participation with the New Party.
- Jeff Jones, a founder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group who spent time on the run from law enforcement agencies while his group carried out a series of bombings of U.S. government buildings.
Jones joined the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, from which the Weathermen splintered in the fall of 1965. Two years later, he became the SDS New York City regional director, a position in which he participated in nearly all of the group's major protests until 1969, including the 1968 Columbia University protests and the violent riots that same year at the Democratic National Convention.
In 1969, Jones founded the Weathermen with terrorists William Ayers and Mark Rudd when the three signed an infamous statement calling for a revolution against the American government inside and outside the country to fight and defeat what the group called U.S. imperialism. President Obama came under fire for his longtime, extensive association with Ayers.
Jones was a main leader and orchestrator of what became known as the Days of Rage, a series of violent riots in Chicago organized by the Weathermen. The culmination of the riots came when he gave a signal for rowdy protesters to target a hotel that was the home of a local judge presiding over a trial of anti-war activists.
Jones went underground after he failed to appear for a March 1970 court date to face charges of "crossing state lines to foment a riot and conspiring to do so." He moved to San Francisco with Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn. That year, at least one bombing claimed by the Weathermen went off in Jones' locale at the Presidio Army base.
Jones' Weathermen took credit for multiple bombings of U.S. government buildings, including attacks against the U.S. Capitol March 1, 1971; the Pentagon May 19, 1972, and a 1975 bombing of the State Department building.
With research by Brenda J. Elliott
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