In the fall of 2010, a diverse collection of California groups – including blue-collar unions, small-business groups and manufacturers – sought to suspend the state’s anti-global warming law, which mandates that California roll back its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. Advocates argued that with its unemployment rate at a stratospheric 12.4 percent, California needed to focus on creating jobs.

But they didn’t count on the financial might of the environmental movement. Greens raised three times as much money as backers of the jobs initiative, known as Proposition 23, and “steamrolled” their opponents with a $30 million campaign, providing an impressive example of the pocketbook that environmentalists have at their disposal – thanks to a small circle of extremely rich Californians.

Their giving goes beyond the Prop. 23 campaign, too, sustaining hundreds of small, community-based organizations, creating the impression that there exists a grass-roots green movement in the Golden State. So rich and powerful is this small group that a recent report from Columbia University’s Journalism School that was largely sympathetic to the movement nonetheless described the concentration of so much money and influence among a handful of players as “troubling.”

The riches of two late Silicon Valley pioneers, David Packard and William Hewlett, have flowed heavily into California environmental causes thanks to their heirs, who wield billions dollars of charitable foundation wealth.

Generous green funders include other Silicon Valley techno-environmentalists like Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife, who operate through the $5 billion Moore Foundation. Google executive Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, have established the $300 million Schmidt Foundation, large funders of big California players like the Energy Foundation and backers of numerous local environmental efforts.

The San Francisco-based Sea Change Foundation, created by Nathaniel Simons, who operates the San Francisco-based hedge fund Meritage, has been described as the “quiet hedge fund manager engaged in massive climate giving.”

The most visible of California’s rich environmentalists, Tom Steyer, led the anti–Prop. 23 effort, spending $5 million.

To combat the notion that the movement is driven by a few elites, these funders direct considerable wealth at hundreds of small, community-based organizations.

The 11th Hour Project of the Schmidt Foundation, for instance, aims grants to small groups whose aim is to stir local green passion among the clergy, journalists, small farmers, college students and other small constituencies.

Some of this local giving bolsters organizations that claim to represent constituencies not associated with environmentalism, to counter the criticism that green groups are essentially composed of “aging, white Americans,” as the Los Angeles Times described the problem in a November article.

Schmidt money, for instance, supports Communities for a Better Environment, a Los Angeles-based group trying to mobilize “people of color – African American, Latino, Filipino” to lobby for policies to limit greenhouse gases. The foundation is also a major contributor to Green for All, the Oakland-based group founded by controversial Obama adviser Van Jones, “which works to make sure people of color have a place and a voice in the climate movement.” Meanwhile, the Hewlett Foundation has given nearly $2 million to the BlueGreen Alliance, a group that is trying to bring blue-collar private-sector unions into the green movement.

The real power and influence of the California environmental movement, of course, is in the lobbying, campaigning and legal advocacy of the larger green groups like the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and the National Resources Defense Council – also heavily supported by this small circle of funders. These groups launch the environmental lawsuits that stall new development, support voter initiatives to impose new taxes and regulations on businesses, and help elect sympathetic politicians.

Still it helps to create the impression that your cause – the campaign of a small group of powerful elites – is also “the peoples’ cause.” Money can do that.

Steven Malanga is senior editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, from which this essay was adapted.