Biden’s Multi-Billion “Climate Justice” Kickback Scheme Exposed

Funding woke groups may prove Joe Biden’s greatest achievement as he exits the White House. Case-in-point: the billions of dollars he redistributed from American taxpayers to radical climate groups that denigrate America as irredeemably racist.

In April 2024, the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shelled out a stunning $940 million to a little-known nonprofit run by a constellation of DEI groups, the Justice Climate Fund, created just months before to hoover up “green” grants to fund electric vehicles, solar panels, and a “net zero” transition away from traditional fuels.

That handout was part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established by the Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—specifically a $6 billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator program to subsidize lenders “to provide financial assistance to deploy distributed energy, net-zero buildings, and zero-emissions transportation projects.”

The Justice Climate Fund describes itself as a nonprofit lender “created by experienced, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC)-led organizations” and its founder, the Community Builders of Color Coalition, as including “19 mostly BIPOC-led organizations committed to bring to scale equitable climate solutions in the communities they serve.” Fund CEO Amir Kirkwood is a former vice president of Amalgamated Bank, the bank of choice for virtually every activist group on the Left that’s also owned by the pro-Democrat Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

In its application, the Justice Climate Fund proposed exclusively subsidizing LIDACs—Low-Income and Disadvantaged Communities—while blaming America’s “systemic injustice” for “endemic” distrust. It also plans to “advance[e] net zero targets in 2030 through 2050,” referring to the Left’s goal of drastically cutting carbon dioxide emissions to cease the growth in greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.

“The EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund provides our nation with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stand in solidarity with historically marginalized groups on the frontlines of climate change,” the group’s leadership boasted.

Climate Kickbacks

“LIDAC” is a term created by the Biden administration with roots in Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (VT) socialist Green New Deal first proposed during his 2016 presidential campaign. Sanders’ plan promised to “end the greed of the fossil fuel industry and hold them accountable” while transitioning the nation to “100 percent renewable energy . . . to solve the climate crisis.” It also popularized the cultural Marxist Left’s idea of “climate justice”: Redistributing America’s wealth to “communities of color, Native Americans,” and other “underrepresented” and “under-resourced groups” most devastated, supposedly, by global warming.

Such “disadvantaged communities,” the EPA asserts, are vulnerable to sea level rise, flooding, drought, wildfires, extreme heat, and hurricanes caused by global warming—all baseless claims unfounded in genuine climate science.

Though Sanders lost his two presidential bids, his influence later shaped Joe Biden’s decision to make “environmental justice” part of every federal agency a week after his inauguration in Jan. 2021, implementing a ‘whole of government approach’ to environmental equity.” The EPA now maintains entire pages dedicated to LIDAC resources and “advancing environmental justice” funded by the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act.

In practice, that means funneling $940 million through the Justice Climate Fund to pay minority and low-income families to purchase expensive electric vehicles and charging stations, buy “new net-zero single family homes” with solar panels, and replace natural gas appliances with electric equivalents.

The average cost of a new electric vehicle in June was over $56,000; a new EV truck runs close to $76,000. At nearly 37,000 vehicles subsidized under the plan, that represents as much as a $2 billion kickback to the EV auto industry.

Financing 280 megawatts of solar panels amounts to roughly 700,000 panels, costing $140–280 million (not counting labor and installation costs).

The average cost to install a new home electric heat pump in 2023 was $16,000. At 93,600 subsidized installations, that amounts to $557 million to replace gas-burning heaters. (Recall that natural gas emits relatively little carbon dioxide.)

Then there’s the carbon dioxide “cost.” Liberal eco-groups have pointed out that Biden’s solar panel handout mostly benefits China, the world’s leading solar panel manufacturer using energy generated by burning coal. On balance, producing China’s solar panels may emit as much carbon dioxide as burning natural gas.

The manufacturing process for electric vehicles releases almost 4 tons of carbon dioxide for a single car; liberal groups say that an EV must be driven for 8 years to offset that carbon footprint. Yet the cars’ lithium batteries only last 8–12 years in cold climates, or 12–15 years in moderate climates, with cold weather severely slowing charge times and draining the battery faster.

(READ MORE: Experts Agree: Trump Should Permanently Defeat the Paris Climate Treaty. Here's How.)

Woke Finance

The Justice Climate Fund is part of a larger network of DEI activist groups and “progressive” Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), lenders certified and incentivized by the Treasury Department to fund low-income and minority borrowers and small businesses.

The fund was nominally launched by the Community Builders of Color Coalition, created a year prior to the fund to lap up EPA money from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and spend it on “equity” programs. The coalition consists exclusively of black and Latino-led lenders and far-left groups, among them Prosperity Now, a Gates Foundation-funded think tank for raising the minimum wage and freeing America from “structural racism,” and Hip Hop Caucus, a Green New Deal lobbying group that opposes carbon-free nuclear energy, mobilizes Democratic voters, and blamed Hurricanes Milton and Helene on global warming.

Another coalition member, the Chisholm Legacy Project, publishes Marxist tracts on “transforming climate finance through a black liberation lens”:

Reimagining climate finance through a Black Liberation lens . . . means recognizing that the current climate finance system is rooted in centuries of colonial exploitation, racial oppression, and economic extraction, which have disproportionately burdened Black communities while benefiting those in power.

. . . This reimagining also requires connecting local struggles to global systems of oppression and resistance. The impacts of climate change are felt most acutely at the local level, but they are driven by global structures of inequality and injustice. By linking place-based solutions to transnational movements for climate justice, we can build the collective power needed to transform these structures and advance a more equitable and sustainable future for all.

But the coalition is a front for a different advocacy group: the African American Alliance of CDFI CEOs, which supports “equity” projects “proactively addressing historical and current systemic oppression.” Among the alliance’s partners are a number of major left-wing funders, including the Rockefeller, Tides, MacArthur, Kellogg, Kresge, and Annie E. Casey Foundations, all of which support radical redistributionist and DEI policies.

Alliance president Lenwood V. Long, Sr. has criticized America’s “environmental racism,” voter ID laws, and “systemic neglect that leaves . . . Black communities over-policed.” The inequities Biden sought to address did not start with this administration, he wrote in December. “They are deeply entrenched, woven into the fabric of America itself.”

In May 2024, the alliance published a report lauding “DEI and affirmative action programs” and urging major companies—McDonalds, General Motors, IBM, and others—to expand “inclusivity” in the workplace while battling Republicans who oppose DEI policies.

The alliance is funded by leading companies, netting $250,000 from Mastercard’s foundation to “fuel environmental justice training for black-led community lenders” as part of its “mission to drive economic justice and close the racial wealth gap in underserved communities.” Kaiser Permanente gave the alliance another $500,000 to train black-led CDFIs apply for money from the EPA Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Another $500,000 contribution from Capital One funded training for “women of color . . . to address the racial capital gap.” U.S. Bank gifted it another $1 million to close “racial gaps” in finance.

Green Theft

Historians will one day write that the trillions of dollars spent by Western countries fighting the so-called “climate crisis” did nothing to alter the earth’s ever-changing climate. But it did line gilded pocketbooks.

Since the late 1980s, global warming panic-peddling has justified likely the largest wealth transfer in history from low- and middle-income Americans to wealthy “progressives,” and from Western economies to developing countries like communist China. While groups like the Justice Climate Fund claim they’re aiding America’s poor, they’re really stealing wealth from those who produce it to bankroll junk climate science researchers, “climate resilience” consultants, tony Tesla owners, professional eco-activists, D.C. lobbyists, and “clean energy” companies capitalizing on federal cronyism.

Climatistas proved excellent at raising gargantuan sums of money; what they can’t do is change the climate. “When I hear people pontificating about a temperature change of one and a half degrees ending human civilization,” chuckled Princeton professor emeritus Dr. Will Happer in a recent documentary, “I wonder what they’ve been smoking.”

(READ MORE: Climategate’s 15 Year Anniversary Could Give Momentum to Team Trump