David Rose at the Daily Mail has been following a network of money. The big machine funding climate activism is Climate Works, which was kicked off with a half billion from a Hewlett Foundation in 2008 (as in Hewlett-Packard). Other donations are in the order of $60 – $100 million, any one of them vastly larger by orders of magnitude than budgets that skeptical groups operate on (if they have a budget at all).
It takes a lot of money to keep a false idea alive. This is just another Wall of Money. Yet despite that, skeptics are winning battles, unwinding schemes, shrinking the Green gravy trains, and spreading the word. It’s amazing what a small group of volunteers and barely funded skeptics can achieve with only their wits and truth on their side. (Thank you to the readers who help us, it makes a big difference.)
ClimateWorks feeds money to the whole gamut of groups like Greenpeace, WWF, and the usual suspects, and it partners with the European Climate Foundation, and in the US, the Energy Foundation. There are Chinese and Indian branches and an Australian Climate Works as well (but it’s not clear how or if the latter is connected.)
Ultimately, the Billionaires Clubs in the US were dodging tax using loopholes to gain more political influence for their buck, and quite a few boards are filled with positions of former politicians and bureaucrats (more jobs for the boys?). It’s a money-go-round.
The Climate Change Scare Chart was created in 2011. It needs an update and more details. Layers and layers of details.
Follow the money
The most significant source for the ECF’s millions is a body called Climate Works – a private foundation which channels colossal sums to climate campaigners worldwide.
The Climate Works manifesto was set out in 2007 in a document entitled ‘Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming’. It said that to be effective, a campaign to change government policies on energy and emissions would need at least $600 million from donors.
According to leading energy analyst Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital, current UK energy policies shaped by the Blob will cost between £360 billion and £400 billion to implement by 2030. He said this will see bills rise by at least a third in real terms – on top of the increases already seen over the past ten years.
It was driven by the belief that without radical action, ‘we could lose the fight against global warming over the next ten years’.
It advocated the giving of generous grants to local campaigners in countries such as Britain who had detailed knowledge of the way their political systems operated.
As well as better energy efficiency, carbon taxes and emissions caps, they must ‘promote renewables and low emission alternatives’. Utility companies must be given ‘financial incentives’ – in other words, enormous subsidies from tax and bill payers – to make this happen.
Climate Works soon achieved its ambitious fundraising target, with a grant in 2008 of $500 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which spends the fortune amassed by the co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard computer firm. This was followed by further grants of up to $100 million, and donations of $60 million from the sister Packard foundation. In July, a report by a US Senate committee named the Hewlett foundation as a key element in a ‘billionaires’ club’ which effectively controlled the environmental movement, pumping more than half a billion dollars a year into green groups around the world.
It claimed these ‘wealthy liberals fully exploit the benefits of a generous tax code meant to promote genuine philanthropy and charitable acts’, but instead were transferring money to ‘activists’ to ‘promote shared political goals’.
One of the US-based Climate Works’s first acts was to set up and fund ECF as its European regional office. All ECF’s main funders are represented on ECF’s board, including Charlotte Pera, who is also Climate Works’s CEO. Susan Bell, ECF’s vice-chairman, was formerly the Hewlett foundation’s vice-president.
Another director is Kate Hampton, an executive director at the Children’s Investment Fund, a UK charity with assets worth £324 million.Others come from finance and business. ECF’s chairman is Caio Koch-Weser, vice-chairman of Deutsche Bank, whose contacts in Brussels could not be better: from 2003–5, he chaired the EU’s Economic and Financial committee. Yet another director is Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland.
Meanwhile, it is clear that the sheer scale of this lavishly funded lobbying effort dwarfs that of its opponents.
The Global Warming Policy Forum in London, Europe’s only think-tank which is sceptical about climate science and energy policy, has an annual budget of £300,000 and employs just three people.
Its director, Dr Benny Peiser, said yesterday: ‘At the end of the day, someone will have to be held accountable for us committing economic suicide. We are the only organisation that does what we do – against hundreds on the other side, all saying the same thing.’