The monolith of climate smear-mongering

Claims that oil interests fund climate scepticism and impede climate policy-making have long been at the centre of green mythology. But it's a fantasy, and a grotesque inversion of the facts.

Established thinking has it that ‘oil money’ explains the existence of climate scepticism. According to this view, ‘Big Oil’ funds all manner of outfits and individuals, such as yours truly, to shed doubt on otherwise established ‘consensus science', to protect their profits. This in turn explains the failure of politicians, so far, to save the planet with climate policies.

Take, for example, these delightful messages left under our recent film, Why there is no climate crisis (and why people believe that there is):

These are angry and ignorant whinges that I hear daily. Many of a green bent seem utterly confused by the existence of opinions that run counter to their convictions about the world — articles of faith — even though the facts I, and many others offer are easily checked.

But if these furious commenters are right that the evidence of a climate crisis happening is ‘overwhelming’, it would surely be easier and more effective to counter the arguments made against it with the evidence than to posit such a conspiracy theory that manifestly lacks it. Better it seems, on the green view, to make an accusation of irredeemable bad faith — being ‘funded’ by ‘oil money’ — that can not be disproven, pour encourager les autres.

It is as if fact is subordinate to financial interests — the truth of a claim can be established by understanding who it most benefits, or perhaps by the virtue of the person who makes the claim. Is this green metaphysics?

After all, how could anyone possibly disagree with a planet-saving climate warrior in good faith? And so climate change scepticism must be bad faith. And so the idea of an entire industry of climate denial servicing the interests of big oil companies has become the most respectable conspiracy theory at all levels of society — the online troll is as comfortable reproducing the the smear as the chair of the internationally-renowned scientific organisation.

But as I shall demonstrate, there remains very little evidence of this conspiracy in fact. This is a very, very long article. It starts with what I believe is a simpler explanation of why greens fail to persuade people intellectually. Then it examines the evidence pertaining to the idea that oil interests fund misinformation. Then it attempts an objective analysis of competing interests in the climate debate. And then it draws some conclusions about the nature of climate politics from what can be established as facts.

Changing minds through reason or harassment?

A major part of the ‘Big Oil’ conspiracy theory is that climate sceptics have carefully-crafted ‘tools’ and ‘playbooks’ by which to brainwash people into receiving their ‘messages’, many developed from the tobacco wars. But how plausible is this notion? It is useful, I believe, to take it back to first principles, and to attempt to understand how and why people either make up their mind or even change it in debates that require them to take a position. The idea that people are brainwashed or easily ‘misled’ is, I believe, deeply condescending and wholly inaccurate.

I am either a convert (to climate scepticism) or an apostate (from environmentalism), depending on your perspective on the climate wars. And I was as much moved to this position by another convert-apostate as by his angry inquisitor. In the early 2000s, Bjorn Lomborg gave a book reading at the Oxford branch of Borders bookshop, and was accosted by environmental activist, Mark Lynas, then styled as ‘Pie Man’, with a custard pie. ‘That’s for everything you say about the environment which is complete bullshit’, said Lynas to Lomborg.

This had a profound impact on my thinking. I was at the time (as I have explained elsewhere) quite young, and of a particularly green persuasion myself, although doubts were setting in.

What answer to a book is a custard pie?

Lomborg had set out to confront the work of the late Julian Simon — an economist who had argued, among other things, that the world was in a much better state than environmentalists, especially neomalthusians, had claimed, contradicting the green narrative of worsening ecological problems. But as Lomborg and his students gathered the data for their analyses, they began to agree with Simon. The result was Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Having learned of the climate activist having nothing to say to the statistician’s book (other than a custard pie) I jumped on my bike to go and buy it, from the very scene of the assault. And just as Lomborg had changed his mind, I found his work compelling enough for me to begin to change mine.

Moreover, I found Lynas’s actions, which was even by then a dominant characteristic of the green movement, a demonstration of its, as well as his own, intellectual vacuity. ‘Direct action’, they called it. I think it was just a dick move. And nobody can claim that the character of the environmental movement has improved in the two decades since. There is no evidence of environmentalism nurturing in its adherents any intellectual depth or commitment to reason, much less debate and democracy. And in that time, an entire generation of new obstructive activists has been raised from birth on its bleak narcissistic nihilism.

So rather than being ‘Big Oil’, might the real obstacle to environmentalism be the fact that so many environmentalists are simply utter pricks, and proud of it? Might it be the case that environmentalism, in its broadest sense, is not as much premised on scientific consensus as it is an infantile rejection of reason, debate and democracy? I can only speak for myself. And I can only claim that I am yet to receive even as much as a single penny from ‘Big Oil’. But it seems to me very obvious that the fact of the dominance of the conspiracy theory, and its lack of evidence, among other things, mark the green movement as the one most obviously characterised by bad faith. It is perhaps entirely and exclusive driven by bad faith — the most monstrous act of bad faith in history.

The big fat green conspiracy theory: where’s the evidence?

We make and change our minds through reason. But, of course, some have tried to give substance to the hypothesis that this process has been subverted by dark forces. The conspiracy theory is reiterated at the Nonversation in an old-ish (2019) article by Professor of Climate Alarmism at UCL, Mark Maslin. Maslin claims that ‘The fossil fuel industry, political lobbyists, media moguls and individuals’ have constructed ‘five corrupt pillars of climate change denial’. These pillars are constructed by a spend of ‘US$200 million a year on lobbying to control, delay or block binding climate policy’. Maslin is a professor, so he should be able to connect us directly to the unimpeachable facts, right?

But, unfortunately Maslin is as charming and just as keen to check his own claims for evidence as Pie Man was. Rather than pointing us to academic literature — as we might expect of a professor, no less — Maslin’s claim is second hand — plagiarised, even — from a Forbes article by ‘data journalist’ Niall McCarthy, who writes,

Every year, the world's five largest publicly owned oil and gas companies spend approximately $200 million on lobbying designed to control, delay or block binding climate-motivated policy. This has caused problems for governments seeking to implement policies in the wake of the Paris Agreement which are vital in meeting climate change targets.

This is a big claim. There is the big pot of money. There is the stated intention. And there is the effect of this money and intention on policy. We would expect then, wouldn’t we, a Professor at a top British University, and a ‘data journalist’ to have really got to the bottom of these figures and these claims. But the story, which started out at the Nonversation, seems to be turning into something of a rabbit-hole. The claims belong, not to either Maslin or McCarthy, who merely repeat them, but a report by an organisation called InfluenceMap. InfluenceMap, claims McCarthy,

…used a methodology focusing on the best available records along with intensive research of corporate messaging to gauge their level of influence on initiatives to halt climate change.

The report requires an account to be created on the InfluenceMap website to obtain it.

It turns out that this ‘methodology’ is far more subjective — some might say ‘woolly’ — than McCarthy let on. Rather than finding money and Big Oil actually commissioning evil deniers, a tower of ‘estimates’ are produced. This is largely guessing, not the discovery of a cache of receipts.

In brief… This stack of assumptions involves ‘defining… areas of corporate activity that might be used for climate lobbying…’, then estimating ‘spending associated with these activities’… and estimating ‘the proportion of this spending directed at climate change related issues’… before finally categorising ‘as lobbying or branding based on whether the activity pertains to a policy agenda…’ and ‘aggregating’.

Denying… what?

The problem for the likes of McCarthy and Maslin is that this extremely nebulous system of quantifying energy companies’ interventions in cash terms does not measure anything remotely approximate to ‘denial’. Maslin’s claim, for example, was that ‘The fossil fuel industry … [has] spent the past 30 years sowing doubt about the reality of climate change - where none exists’. This doubt, explains Maslin comes in five forms: Science denial, Economic denial, Humanitarian denial, Political denial and Crisis denial.

But that is not what InfluenceMap detected.

For instance, the report estimated $200 million spent on ‘climate lobbying’. But this is a figure that includes lobbying that is both supportive of and opposed to ‘climate related policy’, a guesstimated proportion of which is then counted as ‘denial’. It doesn’t even really detect ‘lobbying to control, delay or block binding climate policy’. It just guesses.

What constitutes an ‘opposition’ to a ‘climate-related policy’ is not at all clear, and neither is its A-to-F grading scheme. Why are only A and B counted as ‘supportive’, whereas C, D, E and F — twice as many categories — are counted as ‘opposition’? Why have such a scale? Why not =-10 to +10, with neutrality positioned at zero?

InfluenceMap’s ‘methodology’ consists of seemingly comparing superficially pro-vs anti positions. For example:

In consultation with EU policymakers in 2017, Shell supported a transition to a net zero economy in Europe ‘before 2070’ based on its ‘2C aligned’ Sky Scenario. However, Shell CEO Ben Van Beurden has suggested that ambition beyond a 2C scenario should not be explored to avoid disappointment.

To what extent is the suggestion that ‘ambition beyond a 2C scenario should not be explored to avoid disappointment’ equivalent to ‘denial’, or even anti-climate policy, per Professor Maslin’s taxonomy? It isn’t.

And in what way are the statements either side of the ‘…however…’ counterposed, opposites, or as antagonistic as the putative science versus ‘denial’? They aren’t, except to victims of green ideological demonology. Are they even ‘lobbying to control, delay or block binding climate policy’?

Similarly:

ExxonMobil claims to support a carbon tax as long as its revenue-neutral. However, when questioned on its lobbying activities around US carbon tax bills in 2015-2018, the company has failed to disclose the specific messaging conveyed to policymakers through this lobbying.

This ‘methodology’ is not based on anything resembling quantitative measurements, but seems to have been used to form quantitative claims. ‘Failing to disclose .. messaging’ is, perhaps, non-compliance with self-appointed rule-makers’ hostile demands. But it’s a world away from what Maslin — and legions of social media trolls — seem to mean by the term ‘denial’. It does not even do the job that the report itself claims to — to produce a reasonable estimate of spending on ‘climate lobbying’.

Of major concern to InfluenceMap seems to be the use of anti-climate policy lobbying via trade associations.

Again we see that the pseudo-metric underpinning the analysis is not ‘denial’, but supposed alignment to the Paris Agreement. Is this a sound basis for Maslin’s conspiracy theory? No. InfluenceMap’s ‘methodology’ means nothing more than counting any reaction of any kind from any part of the industrial sector to the demand that it must volunteer to die as ‘denial’. Criticism of the Paris Agreement, and of its adoption, implementation and design of policy by national governments, and of the consequences for industries, firms employees and markets is not equivalent to ‘denial’. It is democracy. And perhaps that’s why it upsets the green lobby.

Performative ‘research’ invents ‘denial’

There seems little point in any further point-by-point exploration of InfluenceMap’s ‘methodology’. Suffice it to say that the report’s conclusion that ‘The five global oil majors have invested over $1Bn since the Paris Agreement on misleading climate lobbying and branding activities’ is itself misleading and no better than guesswork. Not even educated guesswork. There is no objective basis for the claim that the imagined $billion ($200 million per year) has, as InfluenceMaps claims, ‘stall[ed] binding and increasingly crucial policy designed to implement the Agreement by national governments’. It is simply assumed, after so much sleight-of-hand 'methodology’ obscure the absence of fact.

It is the routine of climate trolls of all kinds to assume that mere money is sufficient to have caused the failure of the policy agenda. In fact, they generally don’t even need the estimate to reproduce the conspiracy theory. It is axiomatic, on the green view, that the failure of the policy agenda is the consequence of those that criticise it. But work such as InfluenceMap’s is entirely performative. It gives the impression of an investigation. But in reality it’s more ritual than research, that seemingly makes real one of green ideology’s major articles of faith: its demonology.

After all, as we have already seen it is greens that are their own worst enemy. It was green characteristic intransigence and wholly undue arrogance that changed my mind, not carefully-constructed ‘playbooks’, psychological techniques, ‘misinformation’, put out by think tanks, industry associations, or PR machines.

I can’t be alone in this transformation, from green-to-anti-green, either because of the manifestly unreasonable and irrational nature of environmentalism, or because of arriving at a different view on climate change science or policy through independent thought. It’s surely far more plausible than the claim that so many people have refused to sign up to radical green agendas because their minds have been controlled by oil companies. At the very least, somebody might side with the hydrocarbon energy companies, whether or not climate change is real, because energy is useful, and it might be better to face climate change with an abundant and affordable supply of it, than in a condition of austerity.

If my hypothesis — that the reason for the failure of greens to convince the world of the necessity of saving it is down to their characteristics, not to a conspiracy of interested parties — is not yet sufficient for you, let us try taking their claim at face value, and seeing where it takes us…

How big is the green blob, compared to big oil?

Objectivity in politics, and in all matters that are of the domain of humans rather than solely the material universe, is extremely difficult to achieve. But comparison lets us rescue ourselves from subjectivity. And it is telling that InfluenceMap’s ‘methodology’ makes no attempt to see itself in the same terms as the thing that it claims to have identified, but which it may have merely conjured the illusion of into existence.

Is $200 million a lot of money? Is it really enough, as greens seem to claim, to derail a global political agenda that is now over half a century old? What are the quantities of money flowing in the other direction?

Where to start with such a set of comparisons?

I know… Let’s start with InfuenceMap’s own benefactors:

Luminate is a subsidiary philanthropic funding arm of the Omidyar Network of organisations established by French-Iranian-American tech billionaire, Pierre Omidyar, who founded eBay. It claims to be “a global foundation working to ensure that everyone – especially those who are underrepresented – has the information, rights, and power to influence the decisions that shape society”. Over the 13 years 2010-2022 (inc.), Luminate has made grants of nearly $406 million, with an annual average of $31.2 million.

(Not all of Luminate’s grants are made to organisations active in climate. However, Luminate does not provide an accurate breakdown of the organisations it makes grants to, listing for example, donations to both Greenpeace UK and environmental lawfare outfit ClientEarth under the category of ‘financial transparency’. Moreover, though, Illuminate’s donations are manifestly political, and drive so-called ‘civil society’ organisations towards particular policy agendas. A $630,000 grant to ‘independent’ media organisation, OpenDemocracy for example, isn’t going to allow it to make space for climate sceptics. Similarly, its $300,000 grant to the Sundance Institute isn’t going to end up helping me make my films about how rotten climate philanthropy is. If you think this is unfair of me, whinge away in the comments. It doesn’t make a big difference to the final outcome anyway.)

The Sunrise Project is an Australian philanthropic fund (apparently distinct to the US-based Sunrise Movement) that claims to be ‘Driven by the imperative of climate justice’, and ‘a global network of changemakers’, but declines to say who those ‘changemakers’ are. Since being founded in 2012, its annual revenue, most of which seems to go on grants, although it employs a large staff, have risen from AUS$4 million to AUS$52 million. Using today’s exchange rate, AUS$52 million is roughly US$35 million.

The Laudes Foundation makes the bold claim of ‘Redefining value for the good of all’, whatever that means, and whether or not ‘all’ have agreed with it. Founded in 2020 by the German Brenninkmeijer family of clothing manufacturing and retail tycoons. They make grants that ‘contribute to systemic industry change’, which sounds sinister, frankly. The foundation reports that in its first year, it committed €66.9 million in grants, and a further €70.7 million in 2021. In total, the fund has €220 million committed to grantees, including commitments made by the C&A Foundation, which the Laudes Foundation appears to be a reformulation of.

The Quadrature Climate Foundation had income of £130 million in 2022, £60 million in 2021, and £31 million in 2020. It is a mysterious and opaque foundation, established by Quadrature Capital Limited — apparently a trading platform, whose USP is their capacity to “partner sophisticated data with powerful technology to trade in a way that’s impossible for humans, and look to bring automation to everything we do”. AI gambling, might be another term for it.

The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation describes itself as a ‘a global venture philanthropy firm’, which supports ‘early stage, high impact social enterprises’ with offices in Menlo Park, Boston, Dallas, The Hague, and Nairobi. Established by venture capitalist William H. Draper, though, it seems to depend on a very broad lists of philanthropic benefactors, grants from which it redistributes to organisations working across a number of areas. In 2021, the Foundation received $28 million in donations, of which it passed less than $13 million to beneficiaries — perhaps much of the rest was spent on real estate. Either way, it does not break down how much it spends on each area, but only 8% of the beneficiaries are organisations working in the climate and environment field. And 8% of $13 million is about a $million.

The IKEA Foundation probably needs no introduction — the philanthropic arm of the huge flat-pack furniture store, and boasts having made grants of €1.8 billion to organisations working for ‘people and the planet’ so far. THe Foundation reports that ‘In 2021, the board of the IKEA Foundation decided to make an additional €1 billion available over the subsequent five years – on top of our annual grant making budget – to accelerate a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions’. According to OECD analysis, IF gave $118.7 million to organisations for ‘climate action’ in 2020. If these figures are correct, IF is now giving approximately $334 million per year to organisations working for ‘climate action’.

The Climate Change Collaboration is a partnership of already related philanthropic funds of parts of the wealthy British Sainsbury family in 2011. However, the Collaboration’s website reveals no funding. The partner funds’ annual reports are sporadic and inconsistent and reveal relatively small donations of less than a £million each. In 2021/22, the Ashden Trust seemed to make £780,000 grants through the collaboration. It seems likely that the total grants amount to approximately $1.5 million per year.

The European Climate Foundation is a large philanthropic pass-through grant-making fund, taking large donations from the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Sir Christopher Hohn and strategically coordinating many smaller organisations. This secretive organisation does not give a full list either of its benefactors (dark money!) or its beneficiaries. Yet, somewhat ironically, it funds transparency campaigns such as InfluenceMap. In 2021, its annual report states that it received €95 million, equivalent to $102 million.

The Wallace Global Fund is a US-based philanthropic fund established by the former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, that claims to ‘drive people-powered, movement-led solutions’, across a number of issues, namely ‘democracy, environment, corporate accountability, and women’s rights’. The Fund’s website gives no detail and published no annual report, but its filings reveal disbursements of $23 million in 2020. LEt’s assume that this is split between its four main interests, to make $5.75 million of grants to organisations active in climate change.

The Climateworks Foundation is the parent and seed funder of the European Climate Foundation, and built on the same model of passing donations from larger philanthropic interests to strategically-aligned beneficiaries. In 2021, it raised $478 million for its grantees to lobby, campaign, and fight for climate policy.

The KR Foundation is a Danish fund that is operated by the family of Velux window designer and manufacturer, Villum Kann Rasmussen. in FY2021-22, the KR Foundation made DKK 133 million in grants, equivalent to approx. $19 million.

So now that we have, in most cases, a fairly robust estimate of what green philanthropic foundations that fund InfluenceMap are spending every year on climate campaigning, we are in a position to put InfluenceMap’s estimate of the influence of ‘big oil’ lobbying into meaningful perspective.

In total, InfluenceMap’s funders are making grants of roughly $1.2 billion per year to climate change lobbying. That’s six times larger than the lobbying it claimed to have detected coming from the world’s largest oil companies. And, of course, we have only counted those philanthropic funds with which InfluenceMap has a direct relationship.

We have not counted the $billions that flow to green ‘civil society’ organisations from most of the billionaires active in this field, such as the Rockefeller family, Bezos, Bloomberg, Gates, Hohn, the Hewletts and Packards and Gettys, and so on.

Moreover, whereas it was difficult for InfluenceMap to distinguish ordinary climate lobbying from specifically anti-climate policy lobbying (it had to invent a dubious “methodology”) we can be far more confident that the $1.2 billion is spent entirely and directly on influencing the political and policy agendas, as we shall see. Because it’s not as if these organisations also produce useful stuff, such as oil, that energy companies produce, which requires their lobbying.

No, who funds you?

And this is why the who-funds-you line of attack against climate sceptics has always been ridiculous. Since the earliest attempts to locate a stream of cash flowing between Big Oil and ‘deniers’, any objective analysis very quickly establishes that the amount flowing from special interests to green organisations is vastly larger. As I pointed out in 2010, whereas Greenpeace’s Exxonsecrets claimed to have ‘exposed’ the oil company’s ‘secret’ funding of US think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute with $2.2 million between 1998 and 2006, that funding didn’t compare to green giant WWF’s income of $2.5 billion in the half decade 2003-07. Neither did it compare to Greenpeace’s own income of $2.3 billion income between 1994 and 2008. Yes, much of it from billionaires and corporates and energy interests. Sauce for the goose… and all that.

Why are organisations, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, which seem to each have income orders of magnitude greater than their putative counterparts so anxious about funding?

The UK hellmouth, according to green demonology, is a small suite of serviced offices in Westminster — 55 Tufton Street. It is home to a number of small organisations who only really have in common the fact that they are somewhat misaligned to the dominant ideologies of woke western politics and media. Here is that small, albeit grand, office block:

Most of the organisations there are charities — including the manifestly evil Feeding Britain, which supports ‘anti-hunger partnerships comprising more than 600 local organisations’ — and so their accounts are filed with the UK Charity Commission. From data there, and in a few other places, I was able to estimate the size of the monster that has, according to its critics, destroyed the planet…

I was unable to find accounts for the European Foundation, Global Vision, Migration Watch UK and the New Culture Forum. So let’s assume, since these four of nine fit into the same building as their five neighbours, that they are the same as the average of those for whom data can be found. This means that the nine organisations have a total income of approximately £5.3 million ($6.7 million).

Is this really sufficient to control the UK political agenda? It’s worth making the point that these are really very small organisations, with very few staff. By contrast, here is Greenpeace’s London HQ, which is occupies all by itself.

Greenpeace no longer disclose its global budget in a straightforward way. But in 2014, it was in excess of $300 million. Which is why Greenpeace is able to fund a yacht with a helicopter on it. (No organisation at 55 Tufton St. has a yacht with a helicopter on it.)

And here is WWF’s UK HQ. According to UK government transparency data, the taxpayer has handed over £30 million to WWF since the 2000s, helping to push WWF UK’s income to £91 million, enabling WWF to fund the illegal violent eviction of indigenous peoples from lands they have occupied for countless generations, as well as rape, torture and murder. (No organisation at 55 Tufton St. has been accused of violent illegal evictions, etc.)

Similarly, Friends of the Earth UK’s annual reports reveal that the organisation has 190 employees housed at nearly as many UK offices as organisations call 55 Tufton St their home.

We are discovering that greens who promote conspiracy theories about Tufton Street organisations’ and climate deniers’ ‘funding’, do not have any sense of proportion.

Transparency for thee, opacity for me

At this point, climate trolls typically attempt to change the subject, to distract us from discussing the vast disparity between the sizes of the green blob vs their counterparts, and from our aim to use that comparison to estimate the actual impact of climate change ‘denial’ versus pro-climate lobbying. The issue, they claim, is first and foremost one of transparency.

Climate activist organisations and their kind, they claim, are honest and straightforward about who funds them and who they fund, whereas, as you can see above, we don’t know who funds the Tufton St outfits, and in some cases, we don’t know how much they receive to spend on their campaigning.

In late 2018, George Monbiot wrote an article expounding this distraction, claiming that, ‘Dark money is among the greatest current threats to democracy’. In the article, Monbiot claimed to have exposed funding that online magazine Spiked (which I used to write for) from the infamous Charles Koch Foundation — infamous, that is, because the foundation doesn’t seem to use its money to further the agenda that all the billionaires and corporate philanthropic foundations discussed above are all united by. ‘[T]he Charles Koch Foundation has now given Spiked US Inc a total of $300,000, “to produce public debates in the US about free speech, as part of its charitable activities”’, said Monbiot, citing correspondence with Spiked.

But is the funding of a free speech tour of US campuses, which Spiked explains (and which the record shows) is what the money was used for really the same thing as ‘dark money’ operating in the public sphere, ‘fuelling the hard-right cause’, as one chap puts it?

No. First, the money was declared — that is how Monbiot discovered it.

Second, a series of debate events for American students is hardly the stuff of psyops — of elaborate PR campaigns subverting the public’s understanding.

Pretty soon, however, the exposure became the proof of a conspiracy: ‘fossil fuel money funding the Spiked network’, as this Tweet from European Climate Foundation’s Executive Director Communications, Cultural Change & UK Programmes, Joss Garman shows.

I had long been observing the role in UK and EU policymaking played by the actually secretive European Climate Foundation (ECF). But I had difficulty finding out which interests were the fund’s benefactors, and which organisations it funds in turn, to do what. I found Garman’s Tweet to be somewhat ironic. So I gave the ECF a call. Here is that conversation with a strategic communications wonk at the ECF, Benjamin Jullien, who was on his way (by plane) to COP24. Here is that conversation, in full, unedited, except for sound processing for clarity.

Did you catch that?

The ECF, as a matter of policy and of standard practice within ‘philanthropy’, does not and will not reveal where or who its money comes from, and the ECF does not and will not explain which organisations they gave money to, how much and for what.

Benjamin in fact seemed to think that it was quite rude of me to ask, and that it was none of my business. But what about transparency? Hadn’t ECF’s Executive Director Communications, Cultural Change & UK Programmes just tweeted out a story claiming to expose ‘dark money’? Benjamin, clearly unused to being challenged, is palpably uncomfortable and flustered.

It seems this concept of ‘Dark Money’ works only when the money in question is moving in the wrong direction. Despite seemingly being ‘hidden’, dark money is only visible when it is going to organisations that other distributors and recipients of dark money do not like. Greens, who as we have shown, have no sense of proportion, are extremely promiscuous with the concept of ‘transparency’.

Dark green money

Dutch regulation of foundations (stichtings) is extremely lax, which is probably why so many ersatz ‘charities’ and ‘civil society’ organisations — which are only coincidentally exclusively financed by billionaires, whose investments only coincidentally are served by those organisations’ campaigns — establish themselves in the Netherlands.

It took me a few more years to get hold of an ECF internal auditor’s report. It didn’t show who they had funded, but it did show where their money had come from. It’s an interesting read.

Regarding the €36 million of anonymous donations, the auditors report says, ‘the identities of these two funders are known to the Supervisory Board, key staff members, and the CEO)’.

ECF money is so dark that only a few staff members know who, what or where, it came from, and with what strings attached.

But what about transparency?! And what about a sense of proportion. Remember: Monbiot believed that he had the scoop of the century because he had discovered that Spiked’s US free speech tour had received $300,000 of support from bad people! But here we discover that, in just one year, dark green money passed through the ECF amounting to €36 million — roughly $39 million.

$39 million is enough to pay for 130 Spiked Free Speech tours. Come to that, $39 million would fund the GWPF for 80 years, or all nine of the organisations at 55 Tufton St. — including the unspeakably evil one that aims to ensure the proper nourishment of Britain’s poorest children — for nearly 6 years.

The failure of environmentalists to develop, let alone use, a sense of proportion is catastrophic for their arguments and their credibility. I suggest that it may be pathological.

Down the rabbit hole, it gets curiouser and curiouser still. You see, the claim from angry green Guardian hacks, shared by ECF’s directors, based on mythology devised by ECF-funded ‘research’ organisations, that all this ‘dark money’ is distorting the public debate is not only not highly partial, and not only lacks any sense of proportion and objectivity…

It is rank hypocrisy. Because it turns out that the ECF funds the Guardian’s environmental reporting.

What is ‘dark money’, if it is not the funding of ‘journalism’ by anonymous interests, passed from opaque funding body to opaque funding body to a ‘newspaper’ who pays the ‘journalist’ to write stories that accuse the entire enterprise’s critics of precisely what it itself is doing?

George Monbiot, who is, as we can now see, funded by dark money — and vast amounts of it — needs to explain or investigate. And perhaps apologise.

But will he?

How dark green money makes policies

So far in this story, we have only been trying to find a way of comparing things — the respective sizes of seemingly opposite sides. This was so that we might have an objective estimate of global and national climate politics, on the terms that greens provided. We now have numbers. And those numbers ought to demonstrate that those who adhere to the idea that climate scepticism or impediments to climate policymaking exist by virtue of ‘funding’ from ‘big oil’ lack a sense of proportion, if they have any sense at all. But perhaps you are not yet convinced. In which case, we need to see how these numbers actually play out in policymaking. This is to go beyond the limitations of a tu quoque rebuttal to green conspiracy theorists’ claims. It’s not enough to simply observe ‘funding’, even in the disproportions that we have shown.

As is discussed above, the ECF was spun out of US-based ClimateWorks foundation as its European limb. The 2010 ClimateWorks Annual Report discusses the birth of the ECF and its role in EU policymaking quite candidly… (Apologies for the full-length quote — there is a lot to reveal here.)

When the European Union announced in 2009 that it would pare its greenhouse gases by 80 to 95 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, a daunting question arose: How to get there?

In the decade leading up to its ambitious announcement, the E.U. had established itself at the forefront of climate and energy policy. Its leaders were among the first to recognize that deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions were needed to help prevent dangerous climate change and build a more sustainable energy future. While they knew that such reductions were technically achievable—and scientifically necessary, if global temperature increases were to be held at 2° C — no country in the world had yet made such an aggressive commitment. To achieve this goal, the E.U. countries would need to craft a comprehensive, Europe-wide energy plan that showed emissions approaching zero over time, something that had never been done before.

As E.U. leaders grappled with their newly defined climate objectives, the European Climate Foundation (ECF) — part of the ClimateWorks Network — was mulling a parallel project to identify rigorous, pan-European emissions reduction targets. Michael Hogan, then director of ECF’s power program, stopped in Brussels to meet with Christopher Jones, then a unit head at the Directorate-General for Energy at the European Commission. Jones was unsure how to comply with the new mandate to slash emissions. An initial analysis had shown that the only way to meet the target was to reduce emissions from the energy sector to almost zero.

“Commission members knew their goal meant fully decarbonizing the power sector, probably by 2040 at the latest,” Hogan says. “But no one had sat down and figured out whether you could do that.”

For a variety of reasons, the European Commission was not ready to conduct its own analysis. The pending appointment of a new commission and the E.U.’s bureaucratic processes meant that even if funding could be found, any study might be delayed for months or years. Meanwhile, the politics were bogging down in traditional rivalries: power companies versus government bureaucrats, NGOs versus industrial concerns. Many E.U. Member States found it difficult to look beyond short-term political agendas; none of them were making a serious effort to work together toward decarbonization.

So when Hogan told Jones that ECF might be able to help, “You could see the wheels turning,” Hogan says. ECF had already established itself as an analytical, nonpolitical organization with independent funding and a reputation for objective, high-quality work. Jones asked whether ECF would be willing to take on the enormous analytical task of charting a pathway to full decarbonization — not with E.U. sponsorship, but independently. “I got on the train back to The Hague and called Jules Kortenhorst, who was then CEO of ECF,” Hogan says. “I told him, ‘You cannot believe the opportunity that has been dropped in our lap.’ Jules immediately recognized the opportunity and the amount of resources it would require.” The ECF board agreed, and the Roadmap 2050 project was born.

What followed was an intense, concentrated study, underpinned by technical, economic, and policy research from some of Europe’s leading analysts: McKinsey & Company, energy consulting firm KEMA, Imperial College London, and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The work also tapped the deep subject-matter expertise of the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), ClimateWorks’ Best Practice Network for the power sector, and E3G, an ECF grantee. ECF simultaneously consulted with academics, transmission operators, and leading NGOs, and convened a core working group of representatives from Europe’s top utility companies.

Arne Mogren represented the power company Vattenfall in the core working group. “For the power industry, it’s very important to support a process in society that stabilizes policies in the long term,” he explains. “ECF played an important role in getting the different interests in the same room to discuss the future rather than the conflicts of today. It would be very hard for anyone else to drive that process.” (Mogren has since succeeded Hogan as ECF’s power program director.)

At the outset, ECF laid out the criteria that would guide its approach, including the decision to avoid prescribing specific solutions. Instead, ECF adopted a “backcasting” methodology, working back from the desired end state: an 80 percent reduction in E.U. greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The only caveat was that any solution must deliver the same level of reliability that power customers enjoy today. Rather than forecasting what technologies Europe should depend on in 2050 — an “inertia-creating discussion,” says ECF Public Affairs Associate Dries Acke — this backcasting focused on the commonalities among multiple scenarios through which the goal might be achieved.

Another guiding principle, Hogan says, was “to ask people to believe as few things as possible.” That is, planners were not allowed to postulate any fundamental technological breakthroughs: no cold fusion, no miracle batteries, not even tidal power. Nor could they lean on carbon offsets or energy imports from outside Europe, like solar power from North Africa or geothermal from Iceland. In addition, human behavior was assumed to remain constant; in 2050, for planning purposes at least, the group presumed that people would still be watching television and driving cars.

The Roadmap 2050 analyses found that the E.U. can achieve its goal of reducing emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 through a combination of:

• Reducing emissions from the power sector to nearly zero

• Dramatically scaling up energy efficiency improvements

• Shifting to electric and fuel cell vehicles, and heat pumps for buildings

That, I claim here, reveals the following key historical points:

• There had been extensive and intensive pre-legislative lobbying by civil society organisations and green NGOs to establish EU-wide (and national) emissions-reduction targets.

• Politicians did not know what they were supporting. No concept existed about how these targets were going to be achieved at all at either continental or national scales. The policy cart had been put before the technology horse.

• EU/EC officials and national governments turned to the ECF to supply the detail on the implementation on emissions-reduction policy that it had led the lobbying for.

• The ECF convened a consensus of parties that had interests in the ‘transition’, from academia, finance, industry and civil society.

• This novel compact, mostly through PR using the green agenda as a fig leaf, passed itself off as ‘apolitical’ (to contrast with radical green NGOs) and uninterested (unlike industry lobbies).

• The consensus offered a false prospectus (Roadmap 2050) in which technological solutions (EVs, fuel cells, heat pumps) existed, such that the assumption of ‘human behaviour [to] remain constant’ could be made, and that implementation of policy would be simple.

As I attempted to explain above, the most obvious failure of environmentalists to advance their agenda is that they are obnoxious — which is an observation, not (just) an insult.

The second most obvious failure of the green policy agenda is that it was implausible from the outset, putting the cart before the horse, with its advocates having no idea how it could be achieved.

As is becoming obvious across the UK and Europe, green promises have not been realised. Only targets are enforceable, not their undelivered upsides. And so anyone with a decent sense of politics and history should understand what the above bullet points signal about the failure of policies built on the ECF’s Roadmap 2050: there was no debate, no democracy, no criticism, and no mandate. So where was the ‘denial’, and what ‘influence’ did it have?

The ECF, in 2010, meanwhile, boasted that, despite the global financial crisis,

… by highlighting the economic benefits of low-carbon policies, the European Climate Foundation (ClimateWorks’ Regional Climate Foundation for the E.U.) and its grantees have managed to maintain most Member States’ climate commitments.

And that,

In the United Kingdom, the Conservative government is making strong headway in prohibiting the development of new coal-fired power plants and has made its push for climate protection and energy security a central tenet of its political and policy platform. … They see clean technology as the next great industrial boom and are actively promoting British clean tech companies.

Because:

The ECF maintains an active presence in Brussels, The Hague, Berlin, and London. ECF staff help ensure that Europe continues its strong tradition of global leadership in climate policy.

The following year, the ClimateWorks 2011 Annual Report reveals more:

Europe continues to evolve as a strong leader on energy and climate change policies. In 2011 — despite the challenges posed by ongoing economic crises — the E.U. made several vital reforms to its energy markets, Member States cancelled several proposed coal-fired power plants, and more than 70 percent of new generators built in the E.U. were wind, solar, or biomass plants. Perhaps most significant is the European Commission’s adoption of a multidecade plan to decarbonize its economy.

The European Climate Foundation (ECF), ClimateWorks’ Regional Climate Foundation in Europe, has played a key role in many of these advances. ECF’s program staff collaborates with grantees and other experts in power markets, economics, renewable energy, and other technologies.

The ECF has contributed to a paradigm shift in the European power sector and regional politics. After the E.U. agreed in 2009 to slash its greenhouse gases by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, the ECF launched an intense study of how to achieve this ambitious goal. ECF worked closely with the Regulatory Assistance Project, ClimateWorks’ Best Practice Network for the power sector, along with other organizations, utility companies, transmission system operators, and manufacturers, to analyze how the E.U. can reduce emissions from the power sector to nearly zero and dramatically scale up energy efficiency. ECF published the analysis in “Roadmap 2050” in 2010, then followed up in 2011 with “Power Perspectives 2030,” which identifies the interim steps — including challenges and solutions — needed to remain on a path to a decarbonized power sector by 2050.

In fact, ECF had been funding all sorts of campaigns, at levels, from local groups, national campaigning organisations, lawfare outfits, and civil society organisations in Westminster and Brussels and global agencies. In the late 2000s, it had made grants to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth — both organisations that claim public membership and support, and independence from private interests — and others:

• ‘To educate parliamentarians in Westminster on the climate impact of coal and the need for a wider consideration of the issues involved with the proposed coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth’,

• ‘To mobilise youth around a public inquiry on the Kingsnorth proposal’.

• ‘To support a grassroots campaign against a proposed coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth’.

• ‘To support the development of opposition movements around other potential new coal plants in England based on the model developed by [the World Development Movement'] around the Kingsnorth campaign’.

• ‘To support local opposition against the proposed power plant at Kingsnorth’

• ‘To provide legal support for an anti-coal campaign at Kingsnorth and other proposed sites, including coordinating the public inquiry or judicial review process’.

The coal-fired plant at Kingsnorth had been due to be replaced, but it became the site of climate activism in a symbolic battle for UK and EU policymaking. The campaign successfully forced the government to cancel the project, not because an actively engaged public had decided that it wanted to see the back of coal, but because a small group of billionaires’ vanity project made Britain’s energy infrastructure its plaything, aligning and dominating civil society, bending it towards its utopian ideological ideals.

Boasting in a 2009 article for the Institute for Philanthropy, then-president of the ECF Jules Kortenhorst wrote

An example of a successful policy intervention is the case of Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in the UK. Coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of carbon emissions, and if we are serious about meeting climate targets, we need to stop building them. A collaborative effort was launched to convince the UK not to build the planned new facility at Kingsnorth. This became a complex, multifaceted effort over a year and a half, with grass-roots mobilisation campaigns, behind the scenes lobbying with the Conservative Party to convince them to take the lead on the issue, and media work with high-profile NASA scientist Jim Hansen. All of this work, backed by substantial philanthropic investment, resulted in UK Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband announcing in April that no new unabated coal-fired power plants would be built, and that it is critically important to move forward on Carbon Capture and Storage demonstration.

But notice that, whereas the ECF were successful in creating astroturf — not ‘grassroots’ — campaigns and lobbying at all levels of government to abolish coal, the technological and economic feasibility of Carbon Capture and Storage, on which ECF’s claims depended, still seems today as far off as nuclear fusion, if not free energy. The cart, again, put before the horse, the consequences of which are now visible across Europe, in its energy price rises and inflation crises.

And Ed Miliband — who is very likely to hold the energy brief after the next UK general election — was not the only sucker for it. How does this flow of cash work in practice? To find out, we again need no special ‘methodology’, to pass guesswork off as ‘research’. We can find out directly from those involved in it exactly how it works.

In the following video, Bryony Worthington, former FoE activist, explains how, having constructed astroturf campaigns for the ECF, and having been seconded to energy companies and the then to work for UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, David Miliband (Ed’s brother), she was called on to further the competition between the then Labour government and Conservative opposition, and draft the UK’s Climate Change Bill.

So what is the purpose of this discussion about what the green movement says about itself and its successes in forcing governments to adopt radical policy agendas?

It is important for considering the InfluenceMap report and the broader green movement’s dependence on conspiracy theories and demonologies to attempt to explain its failures. The ECF-funded InfluenceMap project depended on nebulous ‘methodology’ to give substance to its conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, we have shown, using facts, not subjective estimations, that a group of ersatz philanthropists used vastly more money — many $billions — to advance an ideological agenda, successfully, in Europe and the UK, and throughout the world. We have receipts, showing the entire thing in motion, from the billionaires, through the fake civil society organisations, to besiege democratic policymaking. Fact, not idle speculation.

Where, in this history, were the hydrocarbon energy companies, using their alleged ‘hundreds of $millions’? Where, for example is the fossil fuel-funded counterpart to this:

In these photographs from 2015, the leaders of the UK’s legacy political parties are signing a pledge, in which they promise to put the green agenda before their responsibilities to the voters who appointed them, to debate matters of policy.

The pledge was organised by major Hohn/ECF-grantee, the Green Alliance — Britain’s oldest environmental think tank, which enjoys unusual access to Parliament. The Green Alliance is an instrumental part of the connection between fake ‘civil society’ and policymakers, and was the key player in orchestrating the UK’s Climate Assembly — an attempt to further circumvent democracy, and to further prevent the public having an actual democratic say on climate policy.

So what?

Can you imagine anything equivalent to what I have described above, being ‘funded’ by any part of the global fossil fuel industry, and having been overlooked by the constellation of organisations, funded by ECF and its kind, which claim to be monitoring markets, industries, companies and their political interventions?

Can you imagine a ‘pledge’, instigated by a coal industry lobbying organisation, not to debate the indubitable good of coal, being signed by the leaders of all major political parties, thereby excluding the public and democracy from politics, in the interests of Big Oil?

Can you imagine a series of documents, candidly explaining how, on behalf of oil and gas companies, a raft of astroturf and direct action campaigns was established, to dominate the policy agenda, to strangle vital infrastructure projects that did not use fossil fuels with lawfare, and for this to go uncommented on by journalists and news media?

Can you imagine a lobbying firm of an oil major openly boasting about how the EC commissioners had invited them to draft the policy agenda of the European Union, and for its empty promises to go unscrutinised and unchallenged — no quid for the pro-quo, despite being inflicted on half a billion people?

Can you imagine if virtually every ‘civil society’ organisation — hundreds of them — working in the domain were all strongly linked to such a narrow set of interests, hidden behind such manifestly false ‘philanthropic’ foundations?

Yet that is what we can see happening on behalf of green private interests by virtue of the $billions that InfluenceMap’s benefactors give to such organisations each year.

Meanwhile, no ECF-funded organisation can demonstrate to their billionaire backers anything more than a half-baked conspiracy theory, substituting assumption, ideologically-motivated ‘estimation’, and simple paranoia in place of fact, reason and argument.

We have shown that, on their own metrics, they outspend their oil funded counterparts by getting close to an order of magnitude, which is likely an conservative underestimate, given the involvement of other usual suspects, such as Bezos, Gates, Soros, Bloomberg, Rockefellers, Gettys and so on, whos grants have not been counted here.

We have shown their money being put to use to construct narratives, to found fake civil society organisations, to actively misinform the public, policymakers, governments and intergovernmental agencies, by buying favours from or into research organisations, news media companies, and public institutions.

The measurable influences of ‘big oil’ and big green philanthropy simply do not compare. On the one hand, there is InfluenceMap’s ‘estimate’ of $200 million a year. But what kind of institutional apparatus and PR could you buy for $200 million?

There is no UNFCCC for big oil, to which nearly every government in the world has signed up to, without testing the commitment with their publics. There is no IPCC or WMO, or other raft of UN agencies, populated by activist and civil servant scientists, overseen by ‘civil society’. There is no ideological alignment of major political parties towards Big Oil, to the exclusion of the public and dissenting opinion. There is no alignment of central banks, and intergovernmental financial agencies towards Big Oil’s agenda, where big oil’s philanthropists get to set the policy agenda, to turn financial power itself in their favour. There are no state broadcasters, such as the BBC, sympathetic to Big Oil, excluding debate and opinion from the airwaves in its interests. And there are not the unholy constellation of ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations themselves, founded by, and funded by and aligned to Big Oil.

Why greens and the green agenda fail

Given the massive, provable, measurable, demonstrable disparity between the funding and institutional machinery available to the green blob on the one hand and Big Oil on the other, it is no surprise that green activists are confused about why we are not yet living in their green Utopia. And greens now experience the need to explain their failures.

1. Greens fail to persuade because they are obnoxious

This started out with victims’ of green ideology visceral hostility towards dissent from their worldview. They felt no need to explain themselves or counter any alternative perspective with reason. They throw custard pies. They block roads. They fearmonger. The smear. They use moral blackmail in place of reason. And they invent conspiracy theories.

2. Green policies fail because they are not economically or technologically viable

It was shown above that the $billions that poured into policy lobbying in the 2000s and 2010s was used in large part to persuade policymakers that technologies were available to enable the ‘transition’ away from fossil fuels. But those technologies had not been developed, tried or tested. Among others, carbon capture and storage, heat pumps, and EVs are still not drop-in replacements for hydrocarbon-powered applications.

The green lobby — the blob — told politicians, to virtually no formal resistance, that these technologies had the approval of academics, experts, and companies, and could be encouraged by policy, such that little or no ‘behaviour change’ would be required of European publics. To the extent that these technologies do exist, they may well work, but an extraordinary cost — higher that the putative ‘social cost of carbon’.

Even after nearly two decades of lobbying, green tech remains a distant dream. Wind power has been a failure, adding huge expense and volatility to consumers. EVs are an expensive luxury, that are far out of the reach of most people. Heat pumps cost multiples of the natural gas-fred alternative.

The public reject have rejected every nudge to embrace green technology, because they can see that the claimed upsides do not add up to a benefit, and the costs outweigh any alleged benefit.

3. Green politics fails because green ideology is categorically anti-human and anti-democratic.

And now nudge has come to shove. Despite their failures, greens demand, not merely that we embrace alternative technology (which are distractions, in any event) but that the whole of the economy, and all of society must be reorganised around the shortcomings of green technology and the principles of political ecology, albeit stated as the ‘climate emergency’, not honestly as green ideology.

This means the suspension of normal, democratic politics, in which competing views within society, typically based on interests, are contested. In turn, it requires the construction of supranational political agencies — technocracies with unprecedented power, beyond democratic control, populated by unaccountable wonks.

Hence, environmentalism is an elite ideology, and climate change fearmongering is a preoccupation only of the topmost parts of society. The rest of us find it implausible, somewhat ridiculous, and manifestly self-serving.

Conspiracy theories rescue green scare stories from failure

The idea that hydrocarbon energy companies have sought to protect themselves from planet-saving green regulations of their industry in nefarious ways is at least as old as the story of global warming, of course. And it appeals to those of a green bent, who prefer simple and easy moral categories and are not capable of more than first-order thinking about interests. But it has never really stood up to any scrutiny as an explanation for greens’ many failures. The obstacles to green policymaking were, as demonstrated above, the consequence of green intransigence, not hostile PR conspiracies, of which there exists no evidence of any consequence. And the interests at stake in the climate debate are not binary opposites. The fact remains obvious to most people that even if climate change is real, hydrocarbon energy is so useful, that it would likely be better to confront a hotter planet with a full tank than to be running on empty.

In other words, though there may well be two camps in opposition to each other — brown and green — there exists at least third camp: the vast majority of humanity, for whom ‘energy’ is not merely an asset class whose profits need to be protected, but a necessity for day-to-day life and even survival. Gas, coal and oil stil flow to where they are combusted — and in ever greater quantities — not because the people who produce them, as evil as they may or may not be, have conned the world’s population into believing that these commodities have utility, but because those commodities do have immense utility. That is to say that even if oil, gas and coal company executives act in bad faith, oil, gas and coal do not.

It is this third camp that governments, as persuaded by the green camp though they may have been, have understood that the so-called ‘transition’ to a ‘post-carbon economy’ can only happen at a certain speed. The technologies and upsides that green organisations promised have not been delivered, and only the targets are legally-enforceable. The increased costs and deindustrialisation are now weighing heavily on European economies, and the blame, on the pandemic and Russia — and even on dependence on fossil fuels — is wearing thin across much of the continent. This failure — of the green agenda, of its own making — has led to the frustration of its advocates, who have sought ways to try to overcome the very inertia that they create.

Meanwhile, the imagined bad faith of hydrocarbon energy companies is mirrored and exceeded by the actual bad faith of green philanthropists. They projected onto ‘Big Oil’ what they were doing themselves: creating astroturf organisations, dominating civil society, misleading the public debate, obstructing democratic control of politics, and so on. They created and funded organisations, such as InfluenceMap, to fuel this mythology, to poison democratic debate and news media coverage, and to harass and lamign those who — rightfully, lawfully, and in good faith — have wanted to criticise climate and energy policy.

The sole function of InfluenceMap’s work, it would seem, is to legitimise the green movement’s ideological mythology. It allows green trolls’ imaginations to cast themselves as heroic Davids, and to suspend judgement about how the world really works and that this grotesque injustice means that normal rules of discussion, debate and democracy do not apply to them and what they believe. Take the cheap shot! It creates a novel moral imperative to actively eschew reason and rational argument, in favour of vanquishing the evil.

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In answer to their questions… No oil company has sponsored this work. The only work I have ever done for an energy company is a visual simulation of a tidal turbine in 2008 — a green energy company.

Whether or not you are an oil company, if you would like to support my work here or at Climate Debate UK, please consider donating at https://climatedebate.co.uk/donate/

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Thanks to Barry Woods for additional research in this article, and over the last decade.