UK Aid Money Going To Green Blob

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

The Telegraph is up in arms about the latest fat cat to benefit from taxpayer largesse:

The head of a taxpayer-funded environmental charity has become one of the highest paid bosses in the voluntary sector after his pay package rose by 50 per cent to £232,000.

James Thornton, the head of ClientEarth, is now the highest paid green charity boss in Britain with his pay outstripping the heads of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth.

The charity, which is based in East London, received nearly £1 million worth of funding from the Department for International Development last year.

It rose to prominence after mounting three successful legal challenges against the Government which forced it to overhaul its air pollution strategy in towns and cities.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/11/02/boss-taxpayer-funded-green-charity-sees-pay-soar-60pc-232000/

In a way however, the story misses the real point – why is the DfID funding what is essentially a political organisation with little if anything to do with international aid?

This is Client Earth’s mission statement:

We use the law to shift the balance in favour of the public good. This approach is innovative, bold and a game-changer in the global fight to protect the environment. We take governments to court – and win. We force polluting industries to shut down. We protect irreplaceable forests and vulnerable species. We empower people and NGOs with the legal rights to bring forward environmental battles of their own. Using the law means that we create real, long-lasting and embedded change

https://www.clientearth.org/what-we-do/

It is of course Client Earth, which defines the public good, but interfering in other countries’ affairs, whatever the motives, can hardly be regarded as aid or assistance.

And imposing western liberal values on third world countries can often be highly detrimental to their interests.

Climate change inevitably is one of their main areas of focus:

At ClientEarth, we serve the needs of the people. The people need clean air and water and a future in which their children can thrive. We use the power of law to deliver a healthy environment and to stop dangerous climate change .

As for aid itself, precious little seems to filter through to the third world. According to their latest accounts, their annual expenditure of £7.3m all goes on personnel costs, consultants, travel, publications, and Head Office costs.

.

https://www.documents.clientearth.org/library/download-info/consolidated-financial-statements-for-the-year-ended-31-december-2016/

They have 83 staff on their books, equating to average remuneration of £50K a year.

The £1m they get from DfID each year is clearly an important slice of their total income. Amongst other funders, the European Climate Foundation (ECF) stands out:

The ECF is the shadowy outfit that David Rose exposed in the Mail in 2014 in his report on the Green Blob. The ECF was set up to channel millions of pounds, much from progressive foundations in America, to British and European green lobby outfits, as Rose explained:

At the heart of the Blob is a single institution – the European Climate Foundation (ECF) – which has offices in London, Brussels, The Hague, Berlin and Warsaw.

Every year it receives about £20 million from ‘philanthropic’ foundations in America, Holland and Switzerland, and channels most of it to green campaign and lobby groups.

It refuses to disclose how much it gives to each recipient, and does not publish its accounts. But it admits that the purpose of these grants is to influence British and EU climate and energy policy across a broad front.

The most significant source for the ECF’s millions is a body called Climate Works – a private foundation which channels colossal sums to climate campaigners worldwide.

The Climate Works manifesto was set out in 2007 in a document entitled ‘Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming’. It said that to be effective, a campaign to change government policies on energy and emissions would need at least $600 million from donors.

It was driven by the belief that without radical action, ‘we could lose the fight against global warming over the next ten years’.

It advocated the giving of generous grants to local campaigners in countries such as Britain who had detailed knowledge of the way their political systems operated.

As well as better energy efficiency, carbon taxes and emissions caps, they must ‘promote renewables and low emission alternatives’. Utility companies must be given ‘financial incentives’ – in other words, enormous subsidies from tax and bill payers – to make this happen.

Climate Works soon achieved its ambitious fundraising target, with a grant in 2008 of $500 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which spends the fortune amassed by the co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard computer firm. This was followed by further grants of up to $100 million, and donations of $60 million from the sister Packard foundation. In July, a report by a US Senate committee named the Hewlett foundation as a key element in a ‘billionaires’ club’ which effectively controlled the environmental movement, pumping more than half a billion dollars a year into green groups around the world.

It claimed these ‘wealthy liberals fully exploit the benefits of a generous tax code meant to promote genuine philanthropy and charitable acts’, but instead were transferring money to ‘activists’ to ‘promote shared political goals’.

One of the US-based Climate Works’s first acts was to set up and fund ECF as its European regional office. All ECF’s main funders are represented on ECF’s board, including Charlotte Pera, who is also Climate Works’s CEO. Susan Bell, ECF’s vice-chairman, was formerly the Hewlett foundation’s vice-president.

It is hard to assess the ECF’s full impact for a simple reason – although it publishes the names of some of the organisations it funds, it does not state how much it gives, nor exactly how this money is used.

The ECF’s Tom Brookes said: ‘The projects we fund all fall within the overall mission of the Foundation to support the development of a prosperous low-carbon economy in Europe.’

He would not explain why no amounts were stated, saying only that ECF’s annual report ‘describes the objectives of each ECF programme area and its significant grantees.

‘We are confident that this is a sufficient level of detail to provide insight into the work of the Foundation… Our policy on the information we publish reflects our responsibilities to our grantees and donors.’

Nevertheless, it is clear from the information that is available that the list of ECF funding recipients is a Who’s Who of the green movement, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the WWF, Client Earth, Carbon Brief, the Green Alliance, and E3G, the elite lobby group that persuaded the Government to set up the £3 billion Green Investment Bank.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/how-the-eciu-is-funded/

Client Earth, not to mention many of its funders such as ECF, are clearly overtly political organisations. Serious questions need to be asked as to why the government is throwing millions of pounds of aid money at it.