Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s organisation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Climate Emergency Fund, which finances the eco-activists Just Stop Oil.
According to tax documents (pdf), Onward Together has donated $300,000 to the Los Angeles-based Climate Emergency Fund.
According to InfluenceWatch, Onward Together was created in the wake of Clinton’s loss to former President Donald Trump in the 2016 election, with fellow Democrat presidential hopeful Howard Dean.
Just Stop Oil says it gets most of its funding—which it claims is “for recruitment, training, capacity building, and education”—from Climate Emergency Fund. It is the biggest recipient of the fund, receiving $1.1 million.
Climate Emergency Fund thanked Clinton’s nonprofit, among other high-level donors, for going “above and beyond” in its 2022 annual report (pdf). The report does not specify how Onward Together’s funds are spent.
Just Stop Oil is protesting the government awarding new oil contracts to businesses and is behind a wave of illegal actions, such as blocking access to petrol stations and parts of the United Kingdom’s busiest motorway, breaching High Court injunctions, and more.
Just Stop Oil demonstrations have resulted in more than 2,100 arrests and 138 sentences, The Times reported.
Climate Emergency Fund has awarded millions to an international network of activists which they call the “disruptive arm of the global climate movement.” The Epoch Times asked Climate Emergency Fund and Just Stop Oil if donated cash goes toward legal fees.
Dark Money
American author and journalist Robert Bryce, who has been reporting on energy and power for more than three decades, told The Epoch Times by email that “what is clear” is that the Climate Emergency Fund and “similar radical groups are part of the anti-industry industry, a sector of the global economy that is taking in billions of dollars per year to fund anti-hydrocarbon, anti-nuclear activism.”
Bryce has reported that “dark money” nongovernmental organizations are taking in hundreds of millions of dollars per year generally trying to “mandate increased use of weather-dependent renewables, hinder (or stop) hydrocarbon production, prevent the construction of new hydrocarbon infrastructure, mandate building electrification, and of course, ban the use of natural gas in homes and businesses.”
“These groups often have interconnected webs of directors and donors. Their funding is often purposely obscured because it comes from other NGOs that don’t disclose their donors,” he said.
“This dark money applies to Climate Emergency Fund, which lists two foundations among its funders. Those funders are the Onward Together Foundation, which doesn’t disclose its donors, and Earthsense Foundation,” he added.
Confusion Over Activist Crowdfunders
The Epoch Times found there was confusion from British authorities around discussing the model of internationally funded activist groups.
Just Stop Oil is not a registered company or charity, which would otherwise leave it open to rules and regulations.
Last October, the UK’s biggest crowdfunding platform, Crowdfunder, shut down Just Stop Oil’s account. Crowdfunder’s co-founder and director told The Epoch Times at the time by email that “it no longer complied with its terms of use” after a series of acts of vandalism.
Just Stop Oil now has an account with an Australian-founded crowdfunding platform called Chuffed. The site is a vehicle for progressive causes, with one account raising funds so that Nigerian progressives can pursue a “socialist revolution.”
The Epoch Times contacted Chuffed for comment.
The ubiquitous nature of Just Stop Oil’s activities and subsequent arrests have led to the introduction of new legislation that gives police more power to shut down the protests more quickly, including the Public Order Bill, which critics say could curb the right to peaceful protest.
The Epoch Times contacted governmental departments as well as financial, charity, and fundraising regulators who could not comment on Just Stop Oil or its international funding and law-breaking strategies as it fell outside their regulatory remit.
Left Wing Activism
Onward Together, like Climate Emergency Fund, supports what it deems helpful to the progressive movement.
The Climate Emergency Fund is in turn partly funded by Aileen Getty, a U.S. billionaire whose grandfather was the petroleum tycoon J. Paul Getty. Getty co-founded the group with wealthy donors, including renewable fuels businessman Trevor Neilson and Rory Kennedy, daughter of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Climate Emergency Fund donor and Hollywood film director Adam McKay recently pledged to triple donations to Just Stop Oil.
Climate Emergency Fund insists that it “only funds lawful activities, and we are guided by legal counsel with expertise in activism and social movements.”
It claims that it is “roughly three times more cost-effective to send in activists than lobbyists.”
On its mission page, it says it works with an “international network of activists” called the A22 Network, of which Just Stop Oil is a part, and which uses a specific method of “building mass civil resistance.” Climate Emergency Fund says the A22 Network has created a “proven method for scaling up disruptive protest.”
Climate Emergency Fund is A22 Network’s primary funder.
In 2022, Climate Emergency Fund made $5.1 million in grants to 44 groups.
Asking potential donors to “support this uprising,” a link says that “history tells us that the fastest way to create transformative change through sustained civil resistance.” It also asks to “help us support Just Stop Oil at 10 other groups in the A22 Network to recruit thousands of everyday people to join our fight for humanity.
In May, German police conducted nationwide raids on Last Generation, an A22 Network organization funded by Climate Emergency Fund, over suspicions of “forming or supporting a criminal organisation,” The Guardian reported. At the time, a spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres defended the activists and said “they should be protected.”
Time magazine credited psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon, Climate Emergency Fund’s executive director, as being behind the tactic of protesters throwing soup at art. In a 2019 essay, Salamon said that “we will do whatever we can in order to spread climate truth, and to build power behind the need for WWII-scale climate mobilisation.”
In November, researchers at the conservative think tank Policy Exchange investigated Just Stop Oil and found that its members had to sign a contract in which they commit to breaking the law.
In the now-deleted form, activists were asked to sign a document that said: “I understand the importance of this action in the context of the unimaginable horror that will occur if the climate and ecological crisis is not dealt with. Only a dramatic life event, such as a loss of a close loved one or illness, will prevent me from taking part in this action.”
The form also presented a commitment to action that would lead to “at least” one arrest.
Activists have sprayed paint on numerous buildings and in October, Just Stop Oil activists attacked Van Gogh’s universally recognizable painting of a vase of sunflowers by tossing a can of tomato soup at it and gluing themselves to the frame.
“What is worth more, art or life?” said Phoebe Plummer, one of the activists.
More recently, activists have been slow-walking down busy roads. Other tactics include scattering powdered paint at high-profile events such as the Chelsea Flower Show and the World Snooker Championship.
Universities
The Epoch Times found that while there is an abundance of studies across British universities about the far right, there is little research exploring left-wing environmental organisations.
“Universities are fervent advocates of activism,” Philip Kiszely, senior fellow at the conservative think tank New Culture Forum, told The Epoch Times. “They see it as a kind of shorthand for applied ethics. It is a measurable commitment. An intervention.”
New Culture Forum says it is challenging the orthodoxies dominant in society’s institutions, public life, and wider culture.
Kiszely said adhering to environmental activism at universities is similar to the rhetoric surrounding anti-racism, where one has to flaunt anti-racist credentials.
“The fact that in so doing, you speak the language of division (calls for black-only spaces), derision (calling people gammon), and so on, doesn’t seem to bother the institutions. In fact, they actively encourage it,” said Kiszely.
Kiszely said that the “eco-zealots are another version of the same thing” in “that the cure is worse than the disease.”
He said that they “champion ‘degrowth’ as a means of combatting climate change.”
“This of course is catastrophic; but obsessive ideological purity always comes with a significant hair-shirting element. It’s a substitute for real thinking. Universities are brim-full of anti-capitalist academics, so they naturally approve of such attacks on wealth (as long as it doesn’t impact on them),” he said, adding that students have “been force-fed a diet of simplistic identity politics and environmentalism.”
Kiszely said that universities “no longer offer an intellectual challenge.”
“They reinforce preconceived ideas and encourage everybody to think the same thing,” he said.
“It’s easier that way. Their ‘values’ (they talk about values an awful lot) are the same as those of the media, the corporations, and the protest groups. They are supposed to be a marketplace of ideas; instead, they sell a way of life. Activism is just that, a way of life. An end in itself. And it provides the illusion of worth—for the individuals themselves and for the degrees they pay for,” he added.
Kiszely noted that there are “many excellent individuals teaching and researching in universities up and down the country,” but higher education as “a sector is completely captured by radical activists—and that’s the problem.”
“It gets harder by the day for dissenting voices to be heard,” he said.
The Epoch Times contacted Onward Together and Climate Emergency Fund for comment.
