A little-known climate change advocacy organization heavily funded by celebrities and influential left-leaning foundations has been quietly dishing out grants to various activist groups deploying unorthodox and extremist methods across the world to protest fossil fuels, documents reveal.
Anti-fossil fuels groups have been ramping up protests in the United States and overseas as part of a coordinated campaign to bring awareness to climate change by vandalizing fine art, blocking major roads, and even gluing themselves to sports cars. Many of these activist hubs are being bankrolled by Climate Emergency Fund, a Beverly Hills-based charity linked to Hollywood celebrities and top liberal nonprofit organizations aiming to shape the Democratic Party’s agenda, according to tax forms and other documents reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
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“Climate Emergency Fund has quickly become the ATM that radical environmental activists turn to fund their latest disruptions,” Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the conservative watchdog Americans for Public Trust, told the Washington Examiner. “And as their destruction increases, so should the scrutiny on who is bankrolling the Climate Emergency Fund and their ties to more mainstream environmental groups that might disagree with these over-the-top and dangerous tactics.”
Last week, an entity called Declare Emergency that calls fossil fuels reliance “genocidal” and “criminal” took credit for smearing paint on the display case of a sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Just Stop Oil, a group that made headlines in October 2022 for splattering tomato soup on a Vincent Van Gogh painting estimated to be worth $84 million at London’s National Gallery, has been blocking traffic for days in the United Kingdom.
These groups and those like it are either funded directly by Climate Emergency Fund or are part of coalitions backed by CEF, which touts on its website how it has “trained” tens of thousands of activists since being founded in 2019. Both Declare Emergency and Just Stop Oil are part of a coalition with almost a dozen climate protest groups called the A22 Network, which is primarily funded by CEF.
And, unlike the typical run-of-the-mill charity, CEF boasts a star-studded cohort of financial backers and board members, including Rory Kennedy, daughter of the late senator Robert F. Kennedy, Aileen Getty, the billionaire philanthropist and heiress of the Getty family fortune earned in the petroleum industry, and even Hollywood’s Adam McKay, who pledged it $4 million in September 2022 and directed the 2021 climate allegory film Don’t Look Up.
CEF celebrity funders also include Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy in the HBO TV series Succession, comedian Chelsea Handler, actor and Silicon Valley star Thomas Middleditch, and Abigail Disney, daughter of ex-Disney executive Roy E. Disney, according to CEF’s annual 2022 report.
“We are in an incredibly frightening and precarious time for all people everywhere,” Diane Chaytsina, a Just Stop Oil spokeswoman, told the Washington Examiner in an email. “As you undoubtedly know, the climate crisis is upon us — the megadrought in the west of your country cointiues [sic], likes of which has not been seen for the last 1200 years. This is just the start. We don’t understand how you and everyone is not frightened. Yet, human nature what it is, our governments, both yours and ours, are failing to act like the emergency it is.”
Representatives for McKay, Handler, Middleditch, Disney, Strong, and Kennedy did not return requests for comment.
‘Growing radicalization’
Just Stop Oil is an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, another CEF-funded group that climate activist Greta Thunberg has rallied with, according to CEF. Extinction Rebellion, whose affiliated XR Mobilization group received $200,000 from CEF in 2020, occupied the streets of London for 11 days in 2019, resulting in at least 1,130 of its demonstrators being arrested and 10,000 police officers being mobilized, according to tax forms reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
“Like the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War effort, and the Suffragettes in Britain, non-violent civil disobedience is the tool of last resort in a democracy when the government is not doing what it must,” Chaytsina added. “If you are younger than 45, you have never seen a normal climate, and the worst, with billions at risk, is yet to come.”
CEF states in its 2022 annual report that “nonviolent protest is a crucial tool for creating the political and social will needed to rapidly shift climate change policies and protect a livable future on Planet Earth.” Though its 2022 tax forms are not public yet, CEF also claims in the report and on its website to have steered more than $5 million in grants to 44 global entities last year, trained 45,000 activists, and generated over 24,000 “press hits.”
The group’s executive director is Margaret Klein Salamon, a Harvard University graduate who says on her LinkedIn profile that she is “a clinical psychologist turned climate activist.” CEF was co-founded in 2019 by Rory Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, as well as Trevor Neilson, who used to work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is “an investor with ties to celebrity philanthropists,” according to a 2019 Chronicle of Philanthropy article that CEF promoted on its website.
Getty, who praised Just Stop Oil’s move to vandalize the $84 million Van Gogh Sunflowers painting in an October 2022 op-ed in the Guardian, has donated at least $1 million to CEF, the New York Times reported last year. The charity arm of Onward Together, which Hillary Clinton co-founded in 2017 alongside former Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, contributed to CEF in 2022, according to its annual report that year.
CEF also received $150,000 in 2019 from a private foundation led by Susie T. Buell, a Democratic megadonor who was also a founding member of the powerful liberal donor collective Democracy Alliance. The Marin Community Foundation, a donor-advised liberal California fund chaired by Buell’s husband, Mark Buell, who was also a founding Democracy Alliance member, gave $350,000 to CEF in 2020, according to tax forms.
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a liberal donor-advised grantmaker that disclosed over $10 billion in assets on 2021 tax forms, granted $100,000 to CEF in 2019, financial disclosures show. Other notable donors between 2019 and 2020 were the Sierra Club Foundation, a top environmental charity, and the Earthsense Foundation, a group that lists a New York City address on tax forms that has been led by CEF board member and Hollywood producer Shannon O’Leary Joy.
“This story reveals the left’s growing radicalization,” Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative investigative think tank, told the Washington Examiner.
‘Sensitive security issues’
Walter, ex-special domestic policy assistant in the George W. Bush White House, was alluding to how CEF boasted on its website recently how its grantees helped “pressure” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to support the Inflation Reduction Act, a $740 billion energy and climate spending bill that President Joe Biden signed into law in August 2022.
Between 2021 and 2022, the CEF-funded and youth-led Sunrise Movement staged various controversial IRA-related protests, showing up at Manchin’s D.C. yacht and also blocking him while inside his Maserati from leaving a parking garage. The Sunrise Movement was one of the first supporters of the “Green New Deal,” a left-wing climate proposal taking aim at fossil fuels that could cost taxpayers $93 trillion, according to American Action Forum, a center-right think tank.
“Was the threat of another negative media cycle painting him as a villain the straw that finally broke the camel’s back?” CEF asked on its website in a blog post. “Tough to say.”
Manchin spokesman Sam Runyon declined to comment on the Sunrise Movement incidents, telling the Washington Examiner, “I’m sorry we can’t be more helpful, but these are sensitive security issues and we just can’t be sharing additional details.”
Sunrise Movement did not reply to a request for comment. The group received $10,000 in 2020 from Getty’s private foundation and $365,000 that same year from the Tides Foundation, a top liberal grantmaker founded by businessman Drummond Pike, tax forms show.
‘The fight goes on’
CEF’s financial support of the Sunrise Movement is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of its ties to groups engaged in unorthodox climate pressure campaigns.
The A22 Network, which discloses on its website that CEF is its “primary funder,” houses 11 projects filled with climate activists who have made headlines for their extreme protest methods.
“We’re in the A22 Network, but we’re not getting funding from them,” a Declare Emergency representative who identified himself as “Donald” told the Washington Examiner. “I believe CEF is helping to fund some projects in the A22 Network, or maybe they’re helping to fund the A22 Network, and the A22 Network then divvies up those funds, but if the latter is the case, that money is going to other projects in the network (so not to Declare Emergency).”
The A22 Network, which fundraises globally through the platform Donorbox, includes both Declare Emergency and Just Stop Oil. It also includes an Italian group called Ultima Generazione, or Last Generation, which sent activists in July 2022 to glue themselves to Sandro Botticelli’s famous Primavera painting in Florence.
Activists for Renovate Switzerland, which is also in the A22 Network, disrupted traffic in early April upon gluing themselves to the road in front of a major tunnel in Switzerland. Last June, an activist for the A22 Network’s Derniere Renovation interrupted the French Open tennis tournament by tying herself to the net with a shirt reading, “We have 1028 days left,” before security carried her away.
Nicolas Turcev, a spokesman for Derniere Renovation, told the Washington Examiner that his group does “not regret” the French Open stunt at all, “because it worked.”
“Since that day, Derniere Renovation garnered widespread attention in French medias [sic] and thus we were able to talk about the urgent need to act about climate change,” Turcev wrote in an email, noting, “the fight goes on and we stay active.”
Derniere Renovation activists also threw paint last week on both France’s Justice Department building and the Ritz at Place Vendome hotel in Paris, which Turcev said was “to denounce our government’s climate inaction and their willingness to favor the rich who pollute the most, amidst uproar towarded [sic] at the current pension reform that delays the retirement age from 62 years old to 64.”
It’s unclear how much CEF has granted to the A22 Network and entities part of it. The A22 Network did not reply to requests for comment.
“Hundreds of meetings on and offline have to be organized in a systematic way to recruit people to engage in the campaigns of civil disobedience,” Climate Emergency Fund says on its website in a section on the A22 Network, noting that its groups “create a coherent strategy and make the key decisions on the operation of the campaign.”
Another CEF grantee happens to be the Washington, D.C.-based Climate Defiance, which protested over the weekend outside the White House Correspondents Dinner. It’s also hiring an “organizing director,” who will “plan and execute peaceful, disruptive, nonviolent direct actions to resist fossil fuels” and earn up to $72,000 per year, according to a job posting.
As far as what the group stands for, Climate Defiance seeks to “end fossil fuel extraction on federal lands and waters” and “elevate climate change to a top-three political issue in American politics,” according to its website, which adds that Climate Defiance stands “in solidarity with our sister-struggles for racial and economic justice.”
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These wishlist policy items would be “devastating to everyday people,” including those in “communities of color and lower income” that Climate Defiance purports to want to help, according to Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a pro-fossil fuels advocacy group.
“It would make everything more expensive across the board and prevent people from having freedom and mobility,” Pyle summed up to the Washington Examiner.
