On Thursday, Treasury Department Secretary Janet Yellen announced the appointment of a climate czar charged with using the “full force of the Treasury Department” to inflict the climate component of the Biden Administration’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda on the U.S. financial system.
Ethan Zindler, appointed to serve as the new Climate Counselor, comes to the Treasury Department from BloombergNEF (BNEF) - a provider of data, research and analysis used to rate how well companies have succumbed to ESG goals, such as eliminating carbon (“net-zero”) – where he served as Head of the Americas.
Sec. Yellen says Zindler will “take decisive action to fight climate change” and use the “full force of the Treasury Department on domestic and international policymaking.”
Yellen promises that, as climate czar, Zindler will “develop and advance a robust climate finance agenda” and “further spur on historic clean energy investments across the United States.”
Zindler now heads up the Treasury Department’s Climate Hub, created by the Biden Administration in April of 2021. The goal of the Climate Hub is to wield “climate-related economic and tax policy” and influence to skew investment and financing to help favored industries – and crush those, like traditional energy, that don’t align with the administration’s green agenda.
Yellen says Zindler “will be charged with leading Treasury’s efforts to facilitate and unlock the financing needed for investments to achieve a net-zero economy at home and abroad.”
The position of Treasury Climate Counselor has been vacant since last December, when the original climate czar, John E. Morton, resigned, two months after White House Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy stepped down from her post.
Morton had been under pressure ever since Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) sent a letter of inquisition regarding his performance and plans in August of 2021.
In March of this year, Sens. Warren, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Edward J. Markey (D-MA) sent a letter to Sec. Yellen, blasting her for failing to successfully force capitulation to the administration’s green agenda and not yet appointing a successor to Morton.
The Democrat senators also disparaged Morton’s work as climate czar - criticism that Morton’s colleagues have said was unjustified.
The Climate Hub isn’t the Treasury Department’s only weapon used to compel climate capitulation. It also seeks to manipulate financing, investment and insurance through its Office of Domestic Finance:
“The Office of Domestic Finance leads Treasury’s climate-related work with respect to the U.S. financial system, domestic community investment programs, household finances, and engagement with the insurance sector and state and local governments.”