Is China funding the climate lobby?

Anyone who questions any aspect of climate doom, or who challenges targets to achieve net zero carbon emissions, is of course funded by the oil industry. We know this because the climate lobby keeps telling us so. While they painstakingly try to convey scientific truths, they are constantly undermined by dark money purveying lies and distortions.

That is what they want us to believe, at any rate – although I have to say I am not sure where exactly in my bank accounts all these bungs from the oil industry are supposed to be.

But could it actually be the climate alarmist lobby and the renewable energy industries which are funded by dark money – from the Chinese Communist party? That, at least, is the claim made by Ted Cruz while chairing a Senate Committee this week. He cited the case of a San Francisco-based not-for-profit organization, Energy Foundation China, whose website openly boasts that it has spent $500 million bankrolling 4,000 climate-related projects, and whose name hardly disguises its origins.

China certainly has a strong incentive to fund climate alarmism and campaigns for net zero in the West: it is manufacturing many of the wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicle batteries which Western climate policies are either hurriedly incorporating into the electric grid or are forcing Western consumers to buy. Meanwhile, Western industries are being undermined by high energy prices caused by carbon taxes and other climate initiatives. Net zero polices could not have been better designed as a vehicle for helping China to gain advantage over the West. While China nods along with net zero targets, its actual policy follows a very different line. Coal, which is being phased out as an energy source in the West – Britain, which built the industrial revolution on the back of its coal reserves in the 18th and 19th centuries, closed its last coal power plant last year – there is little sign of China following suit. In spite of hefty investment in wind and solar, China still generates 60 percent of its electricity from coal. While China notionally has a net zero target of 2060, Xi Jinping has made it abundantly clear that the target will not be pursued at the expense of economic growth.

You don’t have to believe that every single climate activist and green energy corporation is funded by Chinese money to be wary of the immense possibilities for perverting Western democracy. One of Cruz’s claims is that Chinese money is being used to fund lawsuits against Western fossil fuel interests. Western policy – which revolves around legally-binding carbon reduction targets – positively invites bad actors to channel money into cases designed to undermine Western businesses. Such cases, which for example have seen Shell in the dock in the Netherlands, do seem to be remarkably well-funded. It is hard to believe that the money is emanating entirely from the pockets of climate activists – even if there are some extremely well-off charities, such as the Getty Foundation, involved.

Unsurprising, Democrats are quick to dismiss accusations about Chinese money as a conspiracy theory. Yet surely they deserve to be taken at least as seriously as claims about oil money funding climate skeptics. A disinterested person would surely come to the conclusion that both are of concern. Yet politics has become so engrained in climate issues that it is hard to find anyone any more who surveys the evidence with an open mind – it has become a highly partisan issue, where one side’s incontrovertible truths are the other side’s conspiracy theories.     

Chinese money or no Chinese money, Western governments need to be asking themselves: just why are we formulating policies which in so many ways are destroying our own industries while boosting those in China? Even if no Chinese funding was involved, Xi Jinping would be getting one of the biggest freebies in history.