Editor’s Log: Eminence Affront - The Fisherman

Editor’s Log: Eminence Affront

Four banks (J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) collectively hold nearly half of all U.S. customer deposits, while possessing total assets of over $1.7 trillion.   According to the CEO of the #1 bank on that list – Jamie Dimon at J.P. Morgan Chase – if the state and federal government could only seize more private property, the “big four” would become even wealthier!

“Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way,” Dimon wrote in a recent letter to shareholders, adding “We may even need to evoke eminent domain – we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind, and pipeline initiatives.”

Author/journalist Robert Bryce (robertbryce.com) pointed out that J.P. Morgan Chase is one of the two biggest players in tax equity finance, a $20 billion a year business that’s crucial to wind development.  And according to Bryce, if those projects don’t get built, the “big four” banks lose out on billions in profits.  So, to justify his call to take control of private property, Bryce said Dimon invoked the threat of climate change, telling shareholders the “window for action to avert the costliest impacts of global climate change is closing” and we “need to do more, and we need to do so immediately” to meet “science-based climate targets.”

“Dimon uses the word ‘science’ to justify the seizure of private property, but what he’s advocating for is what I call climate corporatism, which is the use of government power to increase the profits of big corporations at the expense of consumers,” Bryce noted in his April 13 column, adding that it’s all “in the name of climate change.”

An April 17th edition news brief at TheFisherman.com spotlighted the 244-189 vote in the House of Representatives to pass an amendment to a larger congressional legal package called the Lower Energy Costs Act (HR 1).  The fairly bipartisan amendment offered by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) would initiate an independent investigation into the environmental review process of industrial offshore wind.  Specifically, Rep. Smith’s amendment would require the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate and report to Congress on the offshore wind projects’ impacts on whales and other marine life, commercial and recreational fishing, tourism, and navigation/vessel traffic.

While 29 national democrats did vote in favor of Rep. Smith’s amendment, all nine from New Jersey – Josh Gottheimer, Andy Kim, Robert Menendez, Donald Norcross, Frank Pallone, Bill Pascrell, Donald Payne, Mikie Sherrill and Bonnie Watson-Coleman – voted no.  “After making significant progress last year, we simply cannot go back,” Rep. Pallone said in a statement of opposition to any GAO investigation of industrial wind, adding “Fortunately, this bill stands no chance at ever becoming law.”

A bill that did become law in New Jersey – sponsored by since unelected New Jersey politicos Stephen Sweeney and John Burzichelli – helped the Murphy administration override local zoning regulations by granting the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities authority to supersede local government power, thereby forcing communities to accept renewable projects they didn’t want.  According to Bryce, that type of overreach is being debated at the federal level too.

“Republicans like eminent domain for gas pipelines. They don’t like it for electric transmission lines,” Bryce wrote, adding “Democrats like it for high-voltage transmission. They don’t like it for pipelines.”  While Bryce said it’s unlikely that Congress will grant broad powers of eminent domain to renewable companies, he did note how an eminent domain endorsement by the head of the nation’s largest bank “demonstrates the merger of big government and big business.”

To see how recreational fishing could be impacted by this merger of big government and big business see NOAA Says Offshore Wind Could Lead To Lower Fishery Quotas in the News Briefs starting on page 6. 

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