China’s Green NGO Climate Propaganda Enablers

A very enlightening article from Ruper Darwall over at Real Clear Energy

Climate change is a national security threat – but not in the way the national security elite assumes. By Rupert Darwall December 21, 2020

Shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed, Greenpeace opened an office in Moscow. It enjoyed the patronage of a leading member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and enjoyed Kremlin funding, laundered through a state-owned record company. The green activist group made clear that it would have nothing to do with environmental groups in the Baltic republics. Recycling standard Soviet propaganda, Greenpeace denounced them as little more than separatist organizations.

This pattern, wherein the West’s enemies use the environmental movement – whether NGOs like Greenpeace, foundations, or “concerned scientists,” to undermine Western interests – is now being repeated, this time in respect to China. A report by Patricia Adams for the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation released earlier this month lays bare the role of the green movement in acting as China’s propagandists.

Since Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party eight years ago, almost everyone who believed China’s communist regime would become more benign internally and less threatening externally has revised his opinion – everyone, that is, apart from climate activists. “Rather than becoming cautious about China’s role in the world, these groups lavish it with praise for its environmental efforts,” Adams notes. NRDC’s head of Asia strategy, Barbara Finamore, has even written a book, Will China Save the Planet? Perhaps the only

It’s a very good article, including how the West funds the activities of its enemies.

Beijing doesn’t even need to pay for the propaganda work it wants to do inside the United States. The San Francisco-based NGO, Energy Foundation China, has disbursed over $330 million to U.S. registered organizations operating in China, funding provided by multibillion-dollar foundations such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The CEO of Energy Foundation China is Ji Zou, a Chinese national and former government official and climate negotiator.

I strongly suggest reading the full article.

China is a great power using global warming to advance its geopolitical interests. Unlike the Soviet Union’s sclerotic economy, China’s is far from a state of collapse. Indeed, China is likely to be the only major economy to emerge larger at the end of 2020 than at the beginning. For China, climate change offers a strategic opportunity. Decarbonizing the rest of the world makes China’s economy stronger – it weakens its rivals’ economies, reduces the cost of energy for its hydrocarbon-hungry economy, and sinks energy-poor India as a potential Indo-Pacific rival.