by Ben Pile
A mainstay of the green lobby in the face of its growing number of critics is that climate sceptics are funded by oil, gas and coal interests. By claiming that commentators such as yours truly are merely the PR front for Big Oil, green campaigners feel that they have excused themselves from the need to make rational arguments. Profit, not reason, they claim, drives scrutiny of the climate agenda. But not only do their accusations lack any evidence, they ignore the much greater flow of money between private interests and green lobbyists. So, what’s in it for them?
If only we were funded by Big Oil, perhaps I would be as wealthy as Britain’s top green officials, such as the outgoing Chief Executive of the U.K. Climate Change Committee (CCC), Chris Stark. The civil servant’s total salary and benefits for the financial year 2020-21 amounted to a whopping £400,000. That’s more than the annual total income for the organisation at number one in the green demonology – the Global Warming Policy Foundation – for four out of the last five years. The CCC’s former Chairman, John Gummer, restyled as Lord Deben, was revealed to have made £600,000 from his business dealings with green companies, which he failed to declare in the register of interests – profits that helped him employ a butler, no less, at his Suffolk mansion. Gummer’s predecessor at the CCC, Lord Adair Turner, saves the planet by heating the swimming pool at his country retreat using solar power.
But as it happens, our alleged fossil fuel overlords are really quite mean. According to green activist sleuths InfluenceMap, the biggest oil companies in the world spend approximately $200 million per year on climate-related propaganda. That’s a lot of money, right? However, despite this being framed as ‘denial’ by InfluenceMap’s coreligionists, the group’s investigations expose no such thing. Rather than finding receipts, InfluenceMap’s analysis merely estimates the costs of its enemies’ advertising and lobbying campaigns – mere guesswork, in other words, forms the backbone of its research. And rather than finding ‘denial’, that analysis includes lobbying in support of Net Zero policies and global agreements. Using actual receipts, not merely estimates, I counted the total grants made by the organisations that fund InfluenceMap to green campaigning organisations. It amounted to over $1.2 billion per year – six times more than InfluenceMap guesses their enemies allegedly spend. And that is not even a remotely exhaustive survey of the green blob.
With so much money sloshing between billionaire philanthropists and ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations, the question must be, what is the quid pro quo? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, after all. And if one can peddle misinformation on behalf of oil barons, one can peddle great big fat lies for green billionaires too.
Real estate is one of the under-explored issues at the centre of green blob business plans. Despite green claims to prioritise ‘efficiency’, green policies massively decrease the productivity of land. And there is nothing that a rent-seeker values more than scarcity. Consider, for instance, the 1.5km2 physical footprint of Hinkley Point C, the 3.2 gigawatt nuclear power station being developed in Somerset. An onshore windfarm with the same output, albeit unreliable (since the wind is variable), would occupy an area a thousand times larger. Even the Guardian recognises the swindle, reporting that the Crown Estate made £443 million in 2022, thanks in large part to the seabed it rents out to offshore wind farms. In the 2010s it was pointed out that the then-Prime Minister’s father-in-law, Sir Reginal Sheffield, made £600,000 per year from rents charged to two wind farms on his land. The upper classes are so keen on green because the relics of feudalism profit from neo-feudalism.
Zealots gotta zealot. And society has always had to deal with ideological zealots of one kind or another, who service the interests of their masters by confecting ideological imperatives. As Joel Kotkin, Martin Durkin and Vivek Ramaswamy have all documented in their analyses of the emerging political order, a new clerisy has been established as society’s moral guardians, standing between the eco-billionaires and the rest of us to enforce adherence to green diktats and other elite ideologies. Occupying countless positions across the non-wealth-creating sectors in the Civil Service, civil society, the ‘third sector’, academia and the news media, these culture war front-liners are nonetheless extremely well paid.
Greenpeace is currently hiring a Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-racism Lead for its London HQ, and will pay up to £66,192 per annum. Climb the greasy green pole to become a director of the ‘charity’, and you can expect renumeration of £95,000. Last year, the Telegraph revealed that the Vice Chancellor of Imperial College – the source of all dodgy air pollution, Covid and climate modelling – was paid a basic salary of £365,000, but earned as much as £527,400 for overseeing the prestigious institution’s crystal ball-ocks factory. The wellspring of green ideological garbage, the Guardian, claims to be supported by its readers, “not billionaire backed”, and its favourite green godfather, George Monbiot, routinely rails against mega-wealthy conspiracies that threaten to slow our slide into eco-austerity. But the newspaper is supported by a host of philanthropists directly and through its own ‘foundation’. Bill Gates’s donations to the newspaper total an equivalent of $116 per reader of the print edition. And the BBC’s role in reproducing official orthodoxy needs no rehearsal here, nor do its staffers’ generous renumeration packages.
Suffice it to say that not only are there great rewards available in the public and third sectors in roles advancing the green agenda, there are also significant punishments for those who question it. Don’t expect academic freedom to extend to scepticism of ‘climate science’ or politics. And don’t expect career advancement in the Civil Service if you believe that democracy is of greater importance than Net Zero targets. Aspiring journalists who express heterodox views won’t get anywhere near the BBC or the legacy news broadcasters, whose commitments to the agenda are plainly stated. And of course, nearly all of civil society is committed to silencing the idea that today’s society is built on affordable energy.
Hegemony is a complex idea, but put simply, political elites need to seem to be about something other than power for the sake of power. There is no mistaking the fact that intergovernmental agencies and the institutions of globalism are all aligned with the green agenda. As an earnest and aspiring young globalist wonk explained to me once, “global problems need global solutions”. But the reverse of such glibness is also true: global solutions need global problems. The World Bank and the IMF, the United Nations and its constellation of agencies, the European Union and more have all championed the cause of saving the planet, more to bolster or rescue their authority than to deliver any actual benefits. Stories that serve that political agenda are required, lest the rhetorical phrases of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, like “global boiling” and “code red for humanity”, be made to look like extremely ridiculous unscientific hyperbole.
ESG – Environmental, Social and Governance – is the successor to the notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that businesses should be about more than profit. But more than CSR, ESG has become a tradeable commodity in its own right, as well as a near quasi-religious movement. In its simplest form, ESG is about rehabilitating the public image of billionaires, corporations and hyper-accumulations of capital – hedge funds. To me, at least, billionaire virtue-signalling was always implausible. The Rockefellers, for example, are alleged to have funded both Nazi eugenics research programmes and the United Nations’ Third World population reduction programmes in the early days of the green agenda, but now claim to “promote the well-being of humanity”. Similarly, currency speculator George Soros bet against the pound in the 1990s, leading to recession and a wave of unemployment, but now his foundation claims to help solve the world’s problems, including by funding the ironically-titled Open Democracy media platform. In the same vein, British billionaire hedge funder Christopher Hohn, with the assistance of a young Rishi Sunak, helped to bring about the collapse of RBS, leaving Hohn and Sunak with a fortunes in their pockets, and the public with a £45 billion bail out bill. But just four year later, he was knighted for services to philanthropy.
Such billionaires, and Michael Bloomberg and Richard Branson too, have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into funding organisations that promote ESG. For the most part, this involves generating hype around the idea that ESG products, being perfectly in tune with ‘nature’, are likely to yield a better return than investments in dirty brown hydrocarbon energy. But it also involves generating fear both of climate change itself and of the consequences of failing to respond obediently to the encroachment of ESG into policymaking. As a result, ESG campaigning organisations corral sheep-like investors into acting as a force for activism, in turn making corporations the instruments of ESG lobbyists. The most notable victim of this mobilisation was Nigel Farage, who was debanked by Coutts/RBS (the same RBS bailed out by the U.K. taxpayer) – a problem which has seen reported incidences increase by 44% over the last year, according to the U.K. Financial Ombudsman. Individuals, small businesses and even corporations are thus policed by financial institutions, a new and unaccountable form of governance, which is in turn able to decide who may and who may not make money, and on what basis.
So there we have it – four key ways in which the unimpeachable cause of saving the planet is in fact driven by the same old lust for money, power and influence. The stories are much deeper and broader than can be covered here, of course – this article could be 100 times longer. But what I hope it shows is that whereas green mythology posits a somewhat 19th Century view of climate sceptics defending particular interests against progressive policymaking, those same arguments can be held against the bastions of green ideology, too. That includes their favoured news media channels, institutional science, public broadcasters, charities, NGOs and think tanks. For if an oil baron may not fund a public project, why should an eco-billionaire be free to turn civil society into a constellation of corporate lobbying outfits?
The balance of evidence, as measured by pounds and dollars, suggests that the green lobby has been doing precisely what it has accused the reliable energy sector of doing. Meanwhile, there exists little more than unfounded conspiracy theory to back up green claims that private interests drive scepticism. After all, even those infamous deniers, the Koch Brothers, were revealed to have billions of dollars invested in green tech by Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs in Planet of the Humans. The world is not as simple as wacky green fear-mongers like Chris Packham would have BBC audiences believe.
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