Joe Biden’s Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, immediately after her Senate confirmation, met with Microsoft’s billionaire co-founder Bill Gates, agency’s records reveal.
Gates, who is also the co-founder of the climate activism organization, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, funds worldwide climate initiatives. The meeting between Granholm and Gates took place on Feb. 26, 2021, at noon, just around 24 hours after her confirmation by the Senate, according to records obtained by the government watchdog group, Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT).
This meeting was marked as Granholm’s first “private meeting” with a non-government official, as per her calendar.
“This is just another example showing D.C. as an insiders’ game for the wealthy and powerful, and regular people need not apply,” PPT Director Michael Chamberlain told Fox News Digital.
“With all of the media interviews and getting acquainted with the employees she’ll be working with, on her first day she made sure to make time for Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world,” he added. “And that wasn’t even the only time they met. It’s easy to see who has the real influence in Washington.”
Just before meeting Gates, Granholm held another meeting with the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, the Department of Energy’s political appointees, and lastly, with her predecessor and former acting Energy Secretary, Dave Huizenga.
And this was not her first meeting with the billionaire. Just a month after her appointment, Granholm held another meeting with Gates on March 30, 2021.
“Upon taking office, Secretary Granholm hit the ground running meeting with energy leaders— from public utilities, nuclear power companies and car manufacturers — as well as Bill Gates, the founder of the clean energy innovation company Breakthrough Energy and TerraPower, which received $80 million from DOE in 2020 to build small modular nuclear reactors,” the DOE told Fox News in a statement.
Bill Gates is a prominent supporter and vocal activist of green energy and in recent days has aggressively pushed the transition from fossil fuels to “alternate” energy sources like wind and solar power.
“We have to replace every single piece of infrastructure dedicated to doing things the old way with infrastructure dedicated to doing things in a new way — and that doesn’t happen instantly, especially considering the mind-boggling scale of the job,” Gates wrote in a blog post in October.
“For example, there are currently 2,412 coal-fired power plants in the world, and that number is still going up. Every single one of those plants will have to be replaced,” his blog further read.
Gates is also a prominent speaker at global climate activism groups like the World Economic Forum and has also founded an investment group, Breakthrough Energy, that has invested upwards of millions of dollars in green energy development.
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