While many Republicans for years have railed against the official narrative around climate change and many of the solutions promoted to mitigate it, climate finance is poised to make a comeback over the next 4 years, despite Republicans taking both the White House and the legislature by a significant margin. This is because many of the most influential names in the incoming Trump administration, as well as the previous one, have become intimately involved in creating carbon markets in recent years, while others have a long-standing track record of pushing carbon taxes and other forms of “carbon pricing.”
Chief among these is Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team who has stated that he is tasked with finding the “talent” for the incoming administration. Lutnick is the long-time and current head of Cantor Fitzgerald, which was one of the earliest players in emission trading and has since become a global leader in ESG investing, “sustainable infrastructure” financing and green bonds. For example, Cantor’s sustainable infrastructure fund is expressly committed to “digital transformation, decarbonization and the improvement and modernization of aging infrastructure,” while “a primary focus for the Fund will be to invest in issuers that are helping to address certain United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through their products and services.” In addition, the top constituent of another Cantor infrastructure fund is Invenergy, a renewable energy company that has received a significant amount of subsidies from the Biden’s controversial Inflation Reduction Act and is run by the country’s first “wind billionaire” Michael Polsky.
Lutnick also servers on the board of a satellite surveillance company called Satellogic. In addition to Lutnick, former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin chairs its board and also on the board is Joe Dunford, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military under Trump. Satellogic is an integral part of a consortium attempting to use opaque contractual agreements at the municipal level to impose a massive, blockchain-based carbon market on Latin America. That carbon market, operating under the name GREEN+, is poised to be built on a Bitcoin side-chain and, as previously reported, its carbon credit scheme is deeply inequitable for Latin American communities. For instance, the only money communities could make from the scheme would be only available for GREEN+-approved “sustainable” projects while GREEN+ members would reap the bulk of the profits. The program would also subject communities to Satellogic’s satellite surveillance apparatus (tied to the U.S. government and Israeli intelligence) without their consent.
In addition, GREEN+ is notably tied to figures close to Trump’s allies in the region. For example, a major figure in Nayib Bukele’s political party – San Salvador mayor Mario Durán – is a vice president of one of the main groups orchestrating the GREEN+ scheme while the Endeavor Argentina network, which has very close ties to Argentina’s Javier Milei, is also very closely linked to Satellogic. For instance, Satellogic itself is an Endeavor-backed company while Endeavor’s first billionaire entrepreneur, Marcos Galperín of MercadoLibre, serves on Satellogic’s board. In addition, a major investor in Satellogic, the dollar stablecoin issuer Tether, is also closely connected to Howard Lutnick. Lutnick is a long-time major advocate of Tether and Cantor Fitzgerald custodies the bulk of Tether’s U.S. Treasuries that back up their stablecoin and its peg to the U.S. dollar.
In addition to Lutnick, prominent Trump backer and donor Elon Musk, who has pledged to work with Lutnick to usher in an unprecedented age of government “efficiency,” has invested heavily in carbon removal technology and even created a $100 million prize to spur new carbon removal methods. Musk also previously broke ties with Trump during his previous administration after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017. He is also a long-time advocate for carbon taxes. Musk previously lobbied the Biden administration on implementing a carbon tax, a policy supported by Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Yet, under the Trump administration, the push for a carbon tax was led by Republicans, reflecting the policy’s bipartisan support. That Trump-era proposal, known as the Baker-Shultz plan, called to repeal emissions regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and a roll-back of some Obama-era climate policies in exchange for replacing them with a carbon tax. The plan was framed as a way to “let the market decide” how to price carbon as opposed to government. Something similar could be deployed by the next Trump administration as a “compromise” that would see the Biden-era climate policies that Trump campaigned against rolled back in exchange for the implementation of some form of “carbon pricing,” like a carbon tax.
The Baker-Schultz plan is named for James Baker and George Schultz, two Republicans who served in the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. This is notable as it was during the Bush Sr. administration that emissions trading was first created with government support. The father of emissions trading, first for sulphur dioxide and then again for carbon, is Richard Sandor, a former executive at the scandal-ridden, corrupt Drexel Burnham Lambert (Drexel’s most notorious criminal – Michael Milken – was pardoned by Trump during his previous term). Drexel was a key figure in the financial scandals of the 1980s, including the Savings & Loans crisis which had intimate ties to James Baker and the Bush family as well as the CIA and organized crime.
Sandor is also considered the father of financial derivatives and helped draft the cap and trade component of the Kyoto Protocol. He did so in direct collusion with Maurice Strong, the architect of Agenda 21 – the pre-cursor to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Strong was also a long-time associate of David Rockefeller, an oil magnate and a notoriously corrupt UN official who later had to flee North America to China due to his involvement to the UN’s oil-for-food scandal. Sandor subsequently was a major influence on Obama-era climate policies, but also has close ties to Trump-era figures, like J. Christopher Giancarlo – who was made chair of the CFTC by Trump in 2017. Giancarlo, a major advocate of turning the U.S. dollar into a programmable, surveillable private sector digital currency, has called Sandor “one of the true visionary developers of new financial products.”
Ultimately, emissions trading itself was originally a Republican policy and has since been promoted in bipartisan fashion for several decades. While Trump did pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement, the out-sized role of Lutnick and Musk (who cut ties with Trump last time over climate policy) in shaping his next administration’s policies and cabinet picks suggests that Trump has now softened his stance on “market-based” climate solutions. For anyone that has followed Trump’s policy record from his first term, it was quite clear that Trump – like any American politician – is usually willing to give Wall Street what it wants. Some examples of him doing this include giving Larry Fink, the veritable king of ESG, near complete control over U.S. fiscal policy during Covid, resulting in a massive wealth transfer, and Trump also deregulated the banking industry despite campaigning in 2015-2016 on reinstating Glass Steagall and other regulations on the biggest banks. (Other industries whose products have major environmental and public health consequences, such as GMO crops, were also heavily deregulated during the first Trump administration.)
Though it’s certainly true that Republicans in the legislature have largely rejected carbon taxes and markets earlier this year, the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with climate finance advocates and the fact that Wall Street needs climate finance to unlock an entire new asset class to fuel their casino (lest it collapse) are strong indicators that some sort of “carbon pricing” is in the works. Even prominent figures in the “MAHA” “unity” movement, like former RFK Jr. VP pick Nicole Shanahan have advocated for using tokenized carbon credits to facilitate U.S. government money printing (i.e. “quantitative easing”) and U.S. debt management. With a U.S. debt crisis in the cards and Howard Lutnick, one of the biggest traders of U.S. government debt, at the helm of choosing Trump’s next cabinet, the likelihood of a carbon market has never been higher, despite the recent Republican victory.
Featured Image: Elon Musk (right) speaks at an October 2024 Trump campaign rally alongside Howard Lutnick (left)
Thank you for explaining this so we can see what’s most likely to be in the pipeline, first in the USA and coming our way in the UK soon after. Carbon markets seem the most likely option whereby our evil overlords will seek to control us. It gives me the jitters to see Musk and Vance à la Thiel potentially assuming great power in the near future. It was helpful also to have a rogues’ gallery, so we can put faces to the many names. Your reports are so brimming with information that I find the information sticks if they are read, rather than always listening to podcasts, so one can take in the names of people and organisations, etc.
very good stuff Whitney
you’re very intelligent
the foolish voters will have serious pain
the sheeps don’t vote for their butchers , humans do
it ‘s over for this involuted humanity
“Rebuilding trust” is the admitted globalist agenda after Trump’s/Biden’s C19 trust destruction that’s taken place in the last half decade, or so. Whitney warns here that financial “carbon markets” were created by some of the usual globalist minion suspects; and these are another psyop to move humanity further down the financial road to the UN’s “Sustainable” goals. No matter which side of the US’s “uni-party” pushes these agendas — right or left — these minions are out to lock-down globalist control over the entire world.
Greart Job i truly enjoy your publications.
One day, I would like to read an article by Whitney Webb that is positive or hopeful about something.
Eye-opening, as always Whitney. For a brief moment, I thought we might be headed in a better direction. And yet, perhaps we are. I want to believe this is the right direction. I have held great trust and hope in RFK Jr. But I must say that there are so many unholy alliances in this game, I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that either outcome (Harris or Trump) isn’t just more of the same. Just a different ensemble. The information you have put together here makes me truly pause.
Who knows. Perhaps this scenario needs to unfold in order for a truly deep awakening of the people to occur. Seems we often need to be very uncomfortable before we are ready to step into our own sovereignty and to be our own medicine.
A voice of truth amongst the hopium after the election. All roads leading and providing support to the same outcome, just different characters and ideologies
I wish you would enlighten your audience on the deep ties between Trump’s puppet players and the Opus Dei takeover in DC. The coming government is controlled by people that derive their philosophy from the Franco dictatorship and Jesuit extreme catholicism.
And of course, the Zionists.
Don’t forget to mention the Jew.
Haw many of those faces are Jewish or Shabbos-Goy?
Hey Whitney,
It’s absolutely ridiculous that no one talks about the biggest threat to climate change are the global war mongers. Carbon taxes/caps were passed into law in Canada back in 2019 and has continued to increase exponentially. Just another tool for corrupt politicians and their cronies to fleece the working class.
What I preach constantly. Create. Yourself, your culture….your world. Collapsing the wave function from a measurement observation is relatively easy. Being a victim is…BEING a victim.
“I mean everybody knows there’s something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; ‘What is to be done?'” ~ Terence McKenna
So use you obviously big brain to come up with some kind of organizational strategy that makes sense in the modern world. You are a machine person along with all the rest of us lest you would not be leveraging technology to bang on the same stuff over and over via this “ medium”. . Fresh ideas? Bring them.
So do you feel like a victim because a solution wasn’t included with the article? Definitely preaching about something, and it doesn’t surprise you do it constantly
Why South America? What is suddenly interesting there.
Satellites over Argentina….
The “climate change” and “carbon credit” advocates are led by the usual money hungry elites (a major proportion of whom are Zionists). These are the very same people advocating for wars which are massive creators of carbon emissions into the atmosphere – the blowing up of Nord Stream by the US and the endless manufacturing of weapons are clear examples. Unfortunately the proletariat consumers are not free of guilt either – consumerism is one of the drivers of the dangerous geopolitical situation the world is in.
Rules to live by:
#1 I don’t believe anything the government tells me.
#2 Government is theft writ large.
#3 Remember rules #1 and #2.
yes but Trump is going to have to focus like a laser on getting inflation down. That was the number one issue for voters. So not sure a carbon tax is going to happen. His mandate is strong enough that they can just abandon a lot of the climate stuff.
Reply to Kay Anne. I think that could happen. Glass half full.
Thanks, Whitney, always a pleasure and a teaching to read your pieces. This was actually what one could fear in beforehand, and now came to light. That globalist control never looked good and now worse t han ever with a bunch of strong guys at the rudder. Why would Dr Trump ever have somebody else pick his collaborators, I wonder, kind of telling. Looking forward to your next article.
Thanks, Whitney. The Right’s hopes in Trump are completely misplaced. But I don’t understand why you seem to oppose “bank deregulation” and favor complex legislation like “Glass-Steagall”. We need to abolish the Fed, restore a free market in banking, get back on the gold and silver standard, eliminate all taxes and subsidies throughout the economy designed to “steer” the market in a certain “socially-desirable” direction, and use the legal system to enforce fair play business laws already on the books, such as protecting property rights and prohibiting ordinary white-collar crimes like fraud, embezzlement, bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, etc. Let’s keep it simple. The Free Market works. Libertarian Austrian Economics works.
If one looks at Tesla’s SEC filings one sees that its operating income and profit is solely due to selling government invented carbon credits to other companies, not selling Teslas. If the carbon credit market was eliminated Tesla would be another money losing company from the government created ‘green’ industry. Musk is no a friend of free speech or free markets and Trump associating so closely with him upon being re-elected does not bode well for those wanting all government downsized. Musk is currying favor with Trump due his companies being dependent on government either via invented carbon markets or the fact that they are the largest private contractor with government. People are easy fooled by what politicians or people like Musk say they hardly ever look below the surface to see what are the same people doing. Trump was the better choice than the communist disguised as democrats. How much better we will know very soon. Has he learned from his first term mistakes? That is the question. The people he is aligning himself with is not encouraging.
A side note is the fact that Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, is a 2015 graduate of the WEF Young Global Leaders. She has been very quiet since Trump’s first term.
Trump really is a numpty……….once more down the rubbish chute. The good news, the coming war3 2027 will solve all these problems….and us !!!!!
James T. Moody who has worked with gases for 12 years has empirical and scientific proof that carbon dioxide, any gases, cannot not cause global warming. You must read his book, The Ladder Out of Poverty. He writes about John Tyndall’s experiment that leftists academics use to justify regulating CO2. The study was done in 1861! He also has an op ed in The Washington Times, July 12,2023, “Carbon dioxide does not cause climate change” “No gas causes warming that is on the net.
Hmmm… first person here that looks at the climate change with science eyes! Thanks. Ive been following CChange (ha) for decades. Seriously, there is so much out there to garner a balanced opinion from… HOW LONG will it take? Who cares about it when there are sooooo many ways to save lives NOW rather than trying to prevent deaths in 100 years due to CO2. What? Scamming? Ugh!
Whitney, great work as always.
I am still delighted with the election results, not because I have any faith in a new regime, but because the incumbent’s power urgently needed dilution. The best we can hope for politically is that a chronic churn kills momentum on all fronts. Meanwhile, your consistent message that any real progress will come from the bottom up remains paramount.
This incarnation of the Trump big wind administration has the distinct odor of the Ulysses Grant pork barbecue hoard!