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What is the “Climate Imperative Foundation”? Have you ever heard of it? As Robert Bryce writes on Substack, “The Climate Imperative Foundation is the newest and richest anti-hydrocarbon, anti-natural gas group you’ve never heard of.” I recently discussed the issue related to gas stoves. In my investigation, I found the attack on using natural gas for cooking comes largely from the Climate Imperative Foundation.

In its first year of existence, Climate Imperative raised $221 million. It has been here for just three years, and its yearly budget has more than forty million dollars more than the Sierra Club’s, the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. It raised almost twice as much as the Rocky Mountain Institute, which wrote the professional journal article I cited in my previous podcast. Both the Sierra Club and RMI have been on the forefront of the ban on gas stoves.

Bryce notes several reasons why the ban on gas stoves is so compelling to environmentalists. Natural gas is a so-called fossil fuel, so it must be directly attacked. One must only use wind and solar energy if everything runs on electricity. And the Climate Imperative Foundation is bankrolled by the world’s richest elites, including Laurene Powell Jobs, Michael Bloomberg, John Doerr, and Jeff Bezos. The foundation is headed by two former officials of the Sierra Club and has a top EPA official and a former Colorado governor on its advisory board.

But one of Bryce’s important points is that if you are an ardent environmentalist who is concerned that burning natural gas poses an existential threat to the planet, then you should be in favor of natural gas. Why? Because in the new book, Blue Oasis No More: Why We’re Not Going to “Beat” Global Warming and What We Need To Do About It, Glenn Ducat writes:

“Burning gas directly allows consumers to use about 90% of the energy contained in the fuel. Using gas indirectly—by converting it into electricity and then using that juice to power a heat pump, stove, or water heater—wastes more than half of the energy in the fuel … Burning natural gas by residential, commercial and industrial customers is at least twice as efficient and emits about half as much [carbon dioxide] as processes that use electricity produced from fossil fuels. Converting process-heat applications to electricity before the electricity grid is completely carbon-free will increase [carbon dioxide] emissions.”

The goals of the Climate Imperative Foundation are to

“[focus] on the near-term policy decisions in major greenhouse gas-emitting countries and regions that offer the greatest emissions reductions alongside important health, environmental, and equity benefits. These policy imperatives include rapid scaling of renewable energy, widespread electrification of buildings and transportation, stopping the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, reducing pollution from major industrial sources, and economy-wide pathways to reduce emissions from the biggest sources.”

It is all about electrification because you can’t get to Net Zero if everything isn’t connected to the electric grid. Gasoline and diesel engines, coal and natural gas energy generation, and gas stoves must be eliminated. One strategy is to make oil and gas so expensive you cannot afford them. That effort is ongoing. But the goal of the Climate Imperative Foundation is to remove the tools that allow you to use fossil fuels. Governing authorities in Delaware and California are pushing to make it impossible to buy a new gasoline-powered car by 2035. If you cannot buy a gas stove—and gas furnaces and dryers are not far behind—then you will be beholden to the electric grid, and they can control how the grid is energized … and how much you will pay for the energy you take from it.

Bryce notes that demonizing gas stoves coincided with the formation of Climate Imperative in early 2020. The Atlantic published an article in October of that year entitled “Kill Your Gas Stove.” Note that The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, one of those major bankrollers of Climate Imperative. RMI was given ten million dollars by Jeff Bezos to “reduce GHG emissions from homes, commercial structures, and other buildings … the project will focus on making all U.S. buildings carbon-free by 2040 by advocating for all electric new construction.” The Sierra Club has been funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which pledged five hundred million dollars to the Beyond Carbon project with a goal of “stopping the use of gas as a transition fuel.”

Bryce’s article has much more on the interaction between these and other players in the quest to ban the use of household natural gas. It is well-worth the read. The bottom line is that to demonize fossil fuels, the environmentalist agenda must stop not only their production but also their consumption. Their goal is to make energy so expensive you will not be able to afford it. A ban on natural gas use does just that. Electricity costs about three-and-a-half times more than natural gas—even more when you consider that with electricity, you have to wait for the burners to heat whereas with natural gas, the flame is immediate. Moreover, natural gas is, by far, the cheapest source of energy in a home, costing less than half as much as other fossil fuel sources. As environmentalists are wont to say, this disproportionally affects the poor. But when you are saving the planet, hurting the poor and middle class comes with the territory.

This article is adapted from an episode of the Cornwall Alliance’s podcast Created to Reign.

Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash.