Faison, Jay
clearpath and sis BS org provide cover for bogus CCC
off bs
Jay Faison
Founder
Biography
Jay Faison founded ClearPath in 2013. Prior to founding ClearPath, Jay was the founder, CEO and Chairman of SnapAV, the largest supplier in the custom audio video industry. SnapAV’s explosive growth won Jay the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Southeast region. Jay sold SnapAV in order to pursue his passion for philanthropy.
Jay currently serves as the Chairman of the American Flood Coalition, is a member of the Nuclear Energy Advisory Council, and the American Energy Innovation Council. Jay was named by Politico Magazine as one of the top “Politico 50” ideas changing politics and the people behind them.
Education
B.A. in Economics from UNC Chapel Hill, MBA from University of Virginia Darden School of Business
Area of Expertise
Entrepreneurship
Featured Content from Jay
Learn More
Duke’s Bold Step for Clean Energy Transition
North Carolina utility, Duke Energy announced a bold plan to decrease carbon emissions 50 percent by 2030 and ultimately be net-zero by 2050. This means the company would be among the first major investor-owned U.S. utilities to set forth a plan to transition to clean energy.
Duke’s Bold Step for Clean Energy Transition
Learn More
Following in the Climate Footsteps of Global CEOs
Leaders of some of the world’s largest corporations have used best-in-class data to determine that climate change is a dire global risk deserving of serious solutions.
Following in the Climate Footsteps of Global CEOs
Learn More
The Role DOE Must Continue to Play in U.S. Nuclear Power
The next generation of American nuclear power is going to rest largely on the shoulders of the private sector, as it should. But the Department of Energy will continue to play an essential enabling role in nuclear.
The Role DOE Must Continue to Play in U.S. Nuclear Power
Learn More
What Carbon Capture Means For Natural Gas
Carbon capture is not just crucial to the future of coal, it’s a valuable insurance policy for our booming natural gas industry. Tax credits for the technology will allow us to scale up carbon capture from natural gas technologies.
What Carbon Capture Means For Natural Gas
Learn More
2018: Turning The Corner Toward U.S. Clean Energy Dominance
2017 may have been merely a crossroads for U.S. global clean energy dominance, but 2018 has the potential to be a truly banner year. With your help, we at ClearPath intend to make that potential a reality.
2018: Turning The Corner Toward U.S. Clean Energy Dominance
Learn More
A Vision For Clean Energy Dominance
It’s January 2040 and the U.S. leads the world in clean energy. Thanks to a massive innovation boom, it is our fastest growing export, creating a global economic and climate win-win. Jay lays out his vision for how we can get there.
A Vision For Clean Energy Dominance
See more posts from Jay
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http://grist.org/climate-energy/getting-warmer-more-republicans-are-starting-to-take-climate-change-seriously/
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) is angling to turn herself into a Republican leader on climate change — at least in part to fight a 2016 reelection challenge from a climate-hawk Democrat.
On Sunday, Ayotte became the first GOP senator to express support for President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which will rein in CO2 emissions from electric utilities. On Wednesday, she released
touting that position and her other efforts to protect the environment. And on Thursday, she announced the formation of a new Senate Energy and Environment Working Group, which a spokesperson said will “talk about ways to build support for protecting the environment and climate and promoting cleaner energy production while also helping the economy.”
The new working group will include three other Republican senators who’ve acknowledged that climate change is a real problem: Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), and Mark Kirk (Ill.). Kirk, like Ayotte, is facing a tough reelection race in a moderate state. He appeared to waffle on climate science earlier this year, but has apparently settled on saying it’s a real, human-caused problem and trying to do something about it.
Politico’s Andrew Restuccia writes, “The establishment of the working group shows the shifting political dynamics at play over environmental policy, with some in the GOP worried that Republicans’ skepticism of mainstream climate science and opposition to air and water regulations isn’t sustainable in the long-term.”
We see a similar dynamic at play in the House, where Rep. Chris Gibson (R-N.Y.) is rounding up a handful of Republicans who want to shift the party’s approach on climate change (and inoculate themselves against election-season charges of obstructing climate action). Last month, as noted by Grist’s Ben Adler, Gibson and 10 other House Republicans introduced a resolution affirming their acceptance of climate science and their support for (as-yet-undefined) action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
And these more climate-friendly congressional Republicans have some big-money backers. Jay Faison, a wealthy North Carolina businessman, has donated to Graham and other GOP candidates, and he plans to spend $175 million to push the GOP to address climate change. Andy Sabin is another wealthy businessman supporting Republicans who want to cut carbon emissions. In an interview with Grist earlier this month, Sabin named Ayotte, Kirk, Graham, and Gibson as Republicans he’s excited about.
Some of those same names cropped up last week at the Conservative Clean Energy Summit in Washington, D.C., a first-of-its-kind gathering of Republicans pushing for “energy reform.” Amanda Little, who’s been interviewing conservative climate leaders for a Grist special series, attended the conference and reported on it for The New Yorker. From her piece:
The summit was organized and hosted by Michele Combs, who heads up the group Young Conservatives for Energy Reform (Y.C.E.R.), and her mother, Roberta Combs, the president and C.E.O. of the Christian Coalition of America. … “Clean energy is not a Democrat issue, it’s a family issue,” [Michele] told me. … The summit was part of an ongoing effort to move the issues of climate change and clean energy from the margins of the Republican Party to its mainstream. Although the Combses scarcely spoke at the event, they chose others to make their case — the executive of a solar-power company, a three-star and a four-star general, two congressman, and six U.S. senators. …
The long-term goal of Y.C.E.R., Michele Combs told me, is to help get “a comprehensive energy-reform bill” passed in the Senate soon after the next administration takes office — a bill that could also, in effect, break the congressional climate-legislation stalemate. … “We’re building grassroots to provide cover — to keep senators politically safe when they support energy reform,” Combs said. “First, we’re establishing common ground and a new terminology. Terms like ‘energy reform’ will bring a lot more conservatives to the table than ‘climate change.’”
No matter what they call it, changing most Republican politicians’ hearts and minds will be a tough slog. The majority of GOP members of Congress still don’t accept the well-established science of climate change, and even those who do are more likely to criticize Democrats’ proposed solutions than to propose their own.
It’s a good sign that Ayotte feels she needs to support climate protections if she wants to be reelected. We might see more of that from her GOP colleagues in the Senate, all of whom need to be elected by statewide constituencies. But in the House, Gibson and his fellow resolution signers are anomalies — they’re in moderate districts, while most of their Republican colleagues are in dark-red districts and risk being primaried out of office if they call for cutting CO2 emissions.
If Combs and her allies could change that dynamic, it would be huge. It’s highly unlikely to happen anytime soon, but you won’t find anyone better positioned to lead the charge. As Little wrote in the intro to a Grist interview with Combs, she’s “possibly the most impassioned and unexpected messenger on clean energy and climate change the GOP has ever seen.” And with a mom who’s president of the Christian Coalition, she’s certainly got conservative cred.
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A North Carolina businessman is wading into the 2016 big-money slugfest, planning to spend $175 million to back action on climate change. But unlike Tom Steyer and the other big donors focused on the issue, this guy is a Republican. And though he hopes to influence the candidates, he also hopes, more generally, to change the conversation Republican voters are having.
“There’s a lot of good solutions, but we are not going to get there if we keep arguing about the problem,” the donor, Jay Faison, told Reuters.
With the exception of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is a long-shot candidate, and former New York Gov. George Pataki, who is a really long-shot candidate, the Republican presidential contenders all either dodge questions about or outright deny climate science. “Here’s a question you need to ask everybody running as a Republican: What is the environmental policy of the Republican party?” Graham said on CNN’s State of the Union this Sunday. “When I ask that question, I get a blank stare.”
Faison has contributed $25,000 to Graham’s campaign, and $50,000 to a PAC supporting Jeb Bush. Bush has at least said he’s “concerned” about climate change, though he continues to waffle. Faison told Politico that he has not yet decided which candidate to endorse.
Faison thinks a good chunk of Republican voters do care about global warming. He, for instance, came to his views because his love of hunting and fishing begat concerns about the environment. He’s launched a new organization, the ClearPath Foundation, that has a list of recommendations for what environmentally conscious conservatives can do to fight climate change — including rooftop solar installation and environmentally conscious investing. (True, they aren’t the kind of drastic measures we need to actually deal with climate change, but plenty of Democrats aren’t endorsing drastic measures either.)
And the polling — at least some of it — supports his position. According to a poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 56 percent of all Republicans support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant:
Click chart to embiggen.Yale Project on Climate Change Communication
A separate poll by The New York Times, Stanford University, and research group Resources for the Future arrived at similar results, and a *Washington Post*-ABC News poll found that younger Republicans are particularly supportive of climate action.
Even if Republican politicians almost universally decry Obama’s executive actions on climate change, some policy-minded people on the right are trying to figure out an answer to Graham’s question: What should Republicans do instead? There’s some support among conservative wonks for a market-based solution — like a carbon tax — as an alternative to EPA regulation. And some Republicans on the front lines of climate change, like in Florida, are also increasingly admitting that a discussion needs to happen.
But as of now, these aren’t loud voices in the party. Most Republicans — unlike a certain segment of Democrats and independents — just don’t care that much about climate change, regardless of whether they accept the science, and regardless of whether they are for action or against it. It may take more than $175 million to change that.
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Last year, Faison founded and put $165 million into his ClearPath Foundation to promote clean energy and solutions to climate change. He’s starting to spend it in a campaign to persuade Republicans to accept the science and start to talk about solutions instead. ClearPath.org just had its official rollout this week.
“Climate change is both the greatest risk and the greatest opportunity of our time,” says the site. “Most experts strongly urge us to act on the risks. The most actionable solution—a switch to clean energy—is already underway. We just need to accelerate the transition.”
“I always felt a little alone out there as a Republican, and so I started ClearPath to create a dialogue around this in a way that hadn’t been done before and sort of be part of the solution,” Faison told Politico. “We think that there are real Republican solutions to the problem.”
Now he’s pledged to put $10 million into a 501 (c) 4 nonprofit, a political advocacy group to push Republicans toward more reality-based positions on climate issues. The group “will reward thoughtful response to the issue,” he said. It’s a sort of conservative counterpart to Tom Steyer’s liberal NextGen Climate, which is working to call out climate-denier candidates.
“Millennials especially want to see forward looking leadership that acknowledges the realities of today,” he told the National Journal. “I think it’s a brand issue. How our party and our presidential candidate talks about it will have a significant impact over voter perception, and I think the Democratic candidates know this.”
“Nothing would be better for the planet than a bipartisan effort to put forward solutions to the tackle the climate crisis,” said Debbie Sease, Sierra Club’s DC Bureau Chief. “Time will tell how effective this approach proves to be, but Jay Faison’s forward thinking investment is hard to ignore. We look forward to the dialogue.”
http://ecowatch.com/2015/06/09/jay-faison-convince-gop-act-on-climate/
grist 2016
https://grist.org/climate-energy/gop-mega-donor-jay-faison-pretends-to-care-about-climate-change-dont-be-fooled/
j Faison made the rounds during the GOP convention in Cleveland, speaking on panels and being presented as a renegade Republican who cares about climate change. It’s a shtick the media loves.Since the wealthy businessman announced last year that he would be spending $175 million to promote climate action to Republicans and promote Republicans to climate-minded voters, he’s gotten loads of positive press.
Too bad it’s not warranted. Neither Faison nor most of the candidates he backs support real climate action.
Faison opposes policies that would cut carbon emissions
Faison has come out against President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a set of EPA regulations designed to cut carbon pollution from the electricity sector. That’s not shocking: Many conservatives who accept climate science oppose Obama’s plan too.
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But conservative thinkers who are serious about the issue — such as Greg Mankiw, formerly chief economic advisor to President George W. Bush — tend to favor a carbon tax. Faison doesn’t like that solution either, even if it’s revenue-neutral.
In fact, Faison has not endorsed or proposed any policies specifically designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, whether from the electricity system, transportation, agriculture, or any other sector.
Faison doesn’t understand what clean energy is
The entirety of Faison’s nominal pro-climate platform is ill-defined support for “clean energy.” That’s a serious shortcoming because encouraging clean energy will only get us so far; we also need to discourage dirty energy. But Faison doesn’t even understand the difference between the two. He enthusiastically favors more drilling for natural gas, despite the many studies demonstrating that methane leakage renders natural gas no better for the climate than coal. He calls for expedited approval of liquefied natural gas terminals, despite the fact that liquefying gas and shipping it overseas makes it even worse for the climate. He also talks up the promise of “clean coal,” even though the carbon-capture-and-sequestration technology that could theoretically make coal less dirty has yet to be proven affordable or widely effective.
Wind and solar power, on the other hand, which have been proven affordable and effective, get just a dismissive mention on the ClearPath homepage. The site gives much more attention to natural gas, coal, hydro, and nuclear. (And the homepage doesn’t mention the word “climate” at all.)
Faison’s chosen candidates don’t support real climate action either
Late last month, Faison announced that his political action committee will spend $5 million to support five Republican congressional candidates for reelection, even though they’ve done very little to push for climate solutions.
Consider Rob Portman, senator from Ohio.In 2015 alone, Portman voted to undermine the landmark U.S.-China joint climate agreement, to increase oil and gas drilling on public land, to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and to block the Clean Power Plan. The League of Conservation Voters recently added Portman to its “Dirty Dozen” list of candidates it wants to defeat. Portman did cosponsor a modest, bipartisan energy-efficiency bill, which was signed into law last year, but that’s about the extent of his climate-friendly efforts.
The three representatives Faison is backing — Carlos Curbelo of Florida and Tom Reed and Elise Stefanik of New York — are no better. Faison’s apparent reason for supporting them is that they signed a House resolution recognizing the existence of climate change and making a vague call for unnamed solutions. But none have proposed or endorsed specific plans for cutting carbon emissions, and all three voted in 2015 to overturn carbon pollution regulations, for Keystone XL, and against rules governing fracking on public land.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, whom Faison is also backing, has the greenest record of his chosen candidates. She has taken many pro–oil and gas votes, but at least she supports the Clean Power Plan.
Other GOP candidates Faison has backed previously aren’t serious about fighting climate change either. In fact, he supported one of the biggest opponents of climate action: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a dogged defender of Big Coal. During the Republican primaries, Faison gave $50,000 to a PAC supporting Jeb Bush, despite the fact that Bush has waffled on whether climate change is a real problem and has never supported any serious climate solutions. Faison also donated $120,000 to the super PAC supporting South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who used to be active in pushing climate solutions but has done virtually nothing since yanking his support away from a bipartisan climate bill in 2010.
Faison is deluded about Republican politicians’ views on pollution
Faison asserts that Republican candidates can be convinced to support clean energy because they care about clean air. “If you believe in air pollution, then perhaps we could get to the same place,” Faison told The New York Times in June, regarding his outreach to Donald Trump and other climate science deniers in his party. “If we have cleaner energy solutions and it brings more energy independence, more jobs, and lower air pollution, then we would do these things even if we don’t agree with scientists on climate change.”
Where did Faison get the idea that Republicans in Congress want lower air pollution? Certainly not from any honest appraisal of their voting records. Even the candidates he supports vote against regulating conventional pollutants. Just last week, Curbelo and Reed joined most other House Republicans in voting to gut numerous protections for clean air and water. GOP politicians routinely blast Obama’s “war on coal” and promise to bring coal back, even though that “war” consists mainly of stricter regulations of conventional air and water pollutants such as coal ash and mercury.
Faison cares more about the Republican Party than the climate
Faison’s real goal isn’t fighting climate change, it’s supporting Republicans. In fact, he says as much.
As The Wall Street Journal reported in February, “For Mr. Faison, the argument on behalf of forming a clean energy platform for the GOP is a political one. ‘We know the left is going to use this as a wedge issue in this election,’ he said in an interview. ‘I’m dedicated to helping conservatives and the GOP go on the offense on this issue.’ He said offering a conservative clean-energy platform would strengthen the party among key demographics, such as young voters.”
When Faison launched ClearPath a year ago, Politico’s Darren Goode, who has since joined ClearPath as a spokesman, wrote, “the trend among Faison and other green Republicans is to showcase ideas that are or should be pretty well established within the GOP policy framework.” But the policies already within the GOP framework will not avert catastrophic climate change. They won’t even reduce emissions, much less cut them 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, as climate scientists say is needed. (Faison declined, via Goode, to be interviewed by Grist, and Goode said he could not answer emailed questions in time for publication.)
So, other than helping to elect Republicans, what is the point of Faison’s endeavor?
https://www.google.com/search?q=jay+faison+desmog&source
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Conservative Organizations Pushing Republican Politicos ...https://www.desmog.com › 2016/07/25 › conservative-...
Jul 25, 2016 — As we reported earlier this month, conservative climate activist Jay Faison announced that he would be spending $5 million in this election ...
Steven F. Hayward - DeSmoghttps://www.desmog.com › Database Entries
In a Weekly Standard profile he wrote on conservative Republican Jay Faison, who Hayward said “believes climate change is a serious threat,” Hayward ...
GOP mega-donor Jay Faison pretends to care about climate ...https://grist.org › climate-energy › gop-mega-donor-jay...
Jul 22, 2016 — GOP mega-donor Jay Faison pretends to care about climate change. Don't be fooled. His real goal is just helping Republicans win. Jay Faison Lisa ...
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This businessman thinks he can change the GOP's mind on ...https://www.washingtonpost.com › news › 2015/06/10
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References | Project Regenerationhttps://regeneration.org › references
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... Fracking via the Ballot - By Simon Davis- Cohen, DeSmog Blog, August 20, 2016 ... Environmentalists split over Jay Faison and his push for “conservative ...
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Feb 2, 2019 — author, Jay Apt, was director of the Elec- ... By Late 1970s, DeSmog (Apr. 26, 2016, ... Jay Faison, What Carbon Capture Means For.
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