By Jo Nova
A story by Greg Roberts in The Australian a couple of months ago seems to have been missed. It exposed a motherlode of funds is flowing into Australia from foreigners to promote Net Zero.
Think of how enormous $343 million dollars is. Even spread over six years, it’s a huge amount of money to any Australia charity to buy teenage rent-a-crowds, social media campaigns, and tin-pot reports.
It’s so sweet that all these foreigners care so much about our environment, right? It’s just the mum’s and dad’s of Shanghai who want Australians to have nicer weather in 100 years…
Or maybe state entities and foreign industrialists want to protect their investments? How could we tell? The largest number of donations supposedly came from the US, but charities are under no obligation to name donors. And large US philanthropic funds can absorb and pass on donations from anywhere if they wanted to disguise the original source.
If, say, the Chinese wind industry (or the Danish one) were able to buy off Australian environmental activists, they win in two ways. Their pet activists demand the government mandate more wind turbines which increases the profits of Big Wind, while at the same time the Australian greenies turn a blind eye as the wind industry kills eagles, chops the forest and clubs the koalas. Whatever money the Chinese may have spent on Australian Net Zero lobbyists, the money surely flows right back to them through contracts for wind, solar and batteries.
We have no specific chain of evidence that this has happened, but if it was happening, no one would know. The wind industry have the means, motive and the opportunity, so to speak. They’d be crazy if they weren’t doing it.
And so we arrive at the charity in Sydney called “The Sunrise Project” which brings in millions from anonymous foreigners. They, in turn, fork out money to groups like the Friends of The Earth so they can call climate skeptics “shills for Big Oil”. Even the CFMEU (Construction Forestry and Maritime Employees Union) scored some cash. Whoever is funding the Sunrise Project apparently doesn’t want the world to know about their generosity. Mark Hepburn is the head of the Sunrise Project and was caught telling one donor via email that they were taking steps to avoid disclosure — saying ” I do have concerns about the potential PR impact of disclosure of both our funding and grantees.””
The Sunrise Project funnels millions from overseas to push net zero
By Greg Roberts, The Australian
Investigations by The Australian indicate that conservation group Friends of the Earth, one of the The Sunrise Project’s donation beneficiaries, teamed up with wealthy overseas companies to back their plans to carve up pristine forest in North Queensland for a wind farm.
Friends of the Earth Australia has received more than $26m in donations and “grant income” in recent years, giving it the resources to boost an increasingly fractious campaign to keep the broader environment movement onside in support of the net-zero emissions push.
The Sunrise Project received almost $343.5m in grants and donations between 2018 and 2024, according to annual financial statements filed with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission. Over the same period, the charity forked out more than $279m in grants to groups and projects in Australia and overseas.
Sunrise has raised eyebrows by making $365,000 in payments to the controversial Construction Forestry and Maritime Employees Union. The charity is also under scrutiny by the Senate over an extraordinary admission that it held a “strategy session” that included discussion about hiding the identity of funding sources.
The funding flowing to the Sunrise project has ramped up massively in the last ten years. While they got less than $5m in 2016 (which still buys a lot of angry teenagers), by 2021 they were raking in $50 million plus. And by 2024 they were pulling in $75 million.
The Green-activists are in bed with industrial renewables corporation
There are some pretty odd exchanges revealing the tight alliances of green groups and industrial wind corporations.
The Australian vice president of the giant renewables corporation called Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners was sending emails to Ark Energy, another renewables giant at the same time as they were sending messages to Friends of the Earth. The big renewables groups were in, or wanted to be in on the Chalumbin wind farm.
For some reason the head of the Copenhagen renewables group were praising the top guy at the Friends of the Earth (Foe) because “ “We’ve worked closely with Foe in the context of Star of the South, and Cam has been very helpful in relaying information from their people in North Queensland.”
That was when the top guy at Friends of the Earth wrote to another environmental charity which was critical of the Chalumbin project and “wanted them to talk to people at Ark Energy and CIP to find a way to get the Chalumbin wind farm approved.” That head was Steve Nowakowski, a passionate photographer who’d been working to stop wind farms, and he was astonished, saying:
“I have been involved with conservation groups all of my life and I have never witnessed a conservation group working with multibillion-dollar companies trying to get a development over the line. This was the most obscene development, hard up against a World Heritage area with gorgeous forests, and Foe didn’t seem concerned about the forests, just focusing on its relationships with Ark Energy and CIP.”
The Greenie types are selling out quickly for the money. Cheap Cheap…
Drew Hutton, a former founder of The Greens says: “You can’t keep an energy or mining company honest if you are accepting money from them. They are holding you hostage. The capture of an environmental NGO usually involves that organisation turning a blind eye to environmentally harmful activities they should be opposing.”
It’s a long article in The Australian from April 2, 2026. Read it all.
Image: AI generated. “Greens are best friends with the Bankers”