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When you drive by a solar energy project near your home, think of it as your local trade consulate for Xi Jinping, the authoritarian commander of China. A 2024 report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows 98 percent of the wafers needed for the world’s solar panels come from China, and that China produces 85.5 percent of the planet’s finished solar cells. Another IEA source shows Chinese firms have been cranking out more than twice as many panels as they need for domestic demand, and that solar panels have become “a significant export for China.”

It is nearly impossible to buy solar power without paying China, but President Xi has a lot of useful idiots in the USA who want to keep him in business. Nearly all of America’s largest environmental NGOs and their donors have been implicitly supporting China by promoting the solar industry. A few of those groups have also been explicitly cheering China’s supposed progress on cutting CO₂ emissions.

China’s solar panels have also been the subject of a recent national security scare.

A May 2025 Reuters report opened with this alarming news: “U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.”

At issue were the power inverters solar panels need to convert direct current (DC) into alternating current (AC) and provide it at the correct spinning frequency used by electrical grids. The Reuters report added this explanation to the China risk: “Using the rogue communication devices to skirt firewalls and switch off inverters remotely, or change their settings, could destabilise power grids, damage energy infrastructure, and trigger widespread blackouts, experts said.”

Concerned that China could flip a switch and shut down civilizations, the American government and the European Union have since imposed restrictions against importation of certain types of inverters.

But the potential for inverter failure adds a real blackout risk even if a hostile actor isn’t trying to cause one on purpose. Inverters are not needed in hydroelectric dams and power stations that run on coal, natural gas and nuclear fuels. Combined those four fuels power 84 percent of the American electric grid. Our traditional power stations use huge spinning turbines that don’t need inverters to generate AC at the correct frequency. In doing so, they also provide critical inertia that acts as a shock absorber to keep the grid running through minor disruptions.

More inverters on the grid means less spinning inertia, and less protection from grid failure if the inverters fail. Wind turbines also rely on inverters, as their spinning frequency is randomly decided by whatever wind is (or is not) being provided by the weather.

Compromises to grid reliability and national security are but two of many good reasons why large scale solar and wind energy should not be hooked up to the American electrical grid.

Climate Imperative Foundation

For those who choose to believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant, China’s industrial progress is on a path to swiftly become both the biggest cumulative and annual CO₂ producer in human history.

But billionaire John Doerr isn’t convinced. In April of this year—well past the day Reuters exposed the risk of Chinese inverters—Doerr wrote the following:

China has become the world’s first electrostate. It accounts for around 80 percent of the world’s solar panel exports and more than 70 percent of global EV production. This building spree has paid off in spades. Last year, clean technologies drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth.

By leveraging subsidies, automation, and the promise of low-cost access to cleantech, China has forged strategic partnerships with Germany and India, even with Mexico and Canada in the United States’ backyard. Low-cost Chinese clean technology–and the appeal of self-sufficiency–is propelling many countries to radically rethink their domestic energy mix. China is upending the old carbon-based world order. [emphasis added]

An American venture capitalist reportedly worth at least $22 billion, Doerr has been board chair of the Climate Imperative Foundation since it was founded in 2020, and one of its major donors. Through the Benificus Foundation, a tax-exempt private foundation Doerr and his wife use as a giving vehicle, he has already granted at least $133.8 million to Climate Imperative.

Most of the large anti-energy nonprofits in America have already received tens of millions of dollars each from the Doerr-led Climate Imperative. A small list of big examples just from Climate Imperative’s 2024 grant list include the Energy Foundation China ($29.8 million), the Natural Resources Defense Council ($7.8 million), the Rocky Mountain Institute ($7.6 million) and the Environmental Defense Fund ($3.2 million).

Each of them shares Doerr’s soft spot for China, even as China’s track record on CO₂ emissions is at odds with real progress on the issue. Public claims to the contrary, those afflicted with this curious China syndrome seem concerned with something other than cutting CO₂.

Nearly every year for the last two decades, according to Our World in Data, China has set a new world record for CO₂ emissions from industry and fuel use. And despite getting a very late start on the industrial revolution, China is on a path to become responsible for more total historical CO₂ emissions than every nation that has ever existed.

In 2006, the Chinese economy produced 6.49 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions, slightly edging out the prior annual record of 6.13 billion tonnes set by the United States one year earlier. For those who believe carbon dioxide emissions are a major threat to the health of the planet, this was an important inflection point. Since 2006, even as the American population and economy have both grown larger, our annual carbon emissions have been in steep decline, dropping to 4.9 billion tonnes in 2024, the latest year reported by Our World in Data.

Meanwhile, China ratcheted up all the way up to 12.3 billion tonnes of annual CO₂ emissions in 2024. This was yet another world record and—more remarkably—at least double the carbon emissions previously posted in any year by any nation other than China. Even as the United States remains the world’s largest economy, producing 26 percent of the Earth’s total goods and services in 2024, America did this by generating just 12.7 percent of total planetary carbon emissions. China was just the opposite: they needed to crank out 31.8 percent of total planetary CO₂ emissions in 2024 to generate a little less than 17 percent of world GDP.

Another striking comparison: China has at least 1,000 (some sources claim more) coal-fired electric power stations in service, and the Financial Times reported in January 2026 that they were preparing to open 85 new ones just this year. The United States currently has only 219 coal-fired power stations.

Coal isn’t an objectively bad source of electricity generation. As just one example, it’s much easier to transport and store than our other reliable fuels. All things equal, a developing nation has good reasons for loading up on coal generation.

But subjectively, the trade-off is cleanliness. Coal burning creates more CO₂ emissions per unit of energy produced than any of the other major hydrocarbon fuels, while natural gas emits the least. And while carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a critical molecule for feeding plants and thus sustaining human life, burning coal also emits more real air pollution than all other major sources of energy we use.

Over most of the last two decades the natural gas fracking boom in the United States has led to a switch in electricity fuels. Cheaper and cleaner natural gas has been replacing coal, cutting American carbon emissions and actual air pollutants.

A comparison of total historical CO₂ emissions demonstrates the big difference this change has caused. Calculating back to the dawn of the industrial revolution in the 1700s, Our World in Data found that by 1951 the United States was responsible for nearly 40 percent of all industrial and economic-related carbon emissions ever produced. But by 2024, the American contribution to total historical carbon dioxide emissions had fallen to just 23.5 percent.

China was still an undeveloped, non-industrial nation in 1951, and by that point had contributed a tiny one percent of all the industrial CO₂ emissions ever produced. Yet by 2024, according to Our World in Data, China’s contribution to total historical CO₂ emissions had jumped from one percent to 15.4 percent.

Summing up: despite not participating in the modern world economy until relatively recently, China is already responsible for more than 15 percent of the total CO₂ emissions to ever come from it.

For those who choose to believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant, China’s industrial progress is on a path to swiftly become both the biggest cumulative and annual CO₂ producer in human history.

Honesty about CO₂ emissions

Those concerned about cutting CO₂ emissions should have been proponents of nuclear power generation. But nuclear power has been opposed by most of the American climate NGOs, including three big ones that boast of their work in China.

So, China certainly “upended the old carbon-based world order,” as John Doerr claimed in April. But they did so nearly 20 years ago when they seized the undisputed heavyweight championship of the carbon-emitting world order. They may never surrender that title.

But through more than 800 words of his April essay, Doerr wrote not one sentence praising America for cutting carbon emissions, nor criticizing China for their decisive failure to do so.

The relative societal value of imposing radical reductions on CO₂ emissions is debatable. As noted, there is a more important matter of real industrial pollutants that (unlike carbon emissions) are directly harmful to humans and animals. To this point, the previously mentioned American transition from coal to clean-burning natural gas in electricity production has dramatically cut both American CO₂ emissions and helped trim our air pollution even further.

The American “climate” movement could be promoting a similar carbon-cutting coal-to-gas transition for the rest of the world. This would also promote the jobs and prosperity of the world-dominant American natural gas sector, rather than President Xi’s solar sector.

But nearly all these supposed guardians of the climate treat natural gas as if it is a co-equal polluter with oil and coal. That alone raises the concern that they care more about subsidizing wind turbines and solar panels than they do about cutting carbon emissions.

Additional damning evidence is the American climate movement’s near-unanimous and too-often effective opposition to nuclear energy.

No reliable energy option is as clean and safe as nuclear.

Nuclear reactors provide no emissions at all, just water vapor. As the birthplace of nuclear power, the United States still generates more electricity from it than any other nation. But you wouldn’t know this looking for the supposed pollution. The Department of Energy reports that all the “waste” from the entire history of American nuclear power—technically deteriorated fuel that can be recycled into new fuel—could be stacked ten yards high and fit on a football field.

And comparing known fatalities against total energy output, a February 2020 report from Our World in Data found nuclear power to be functionally as safe as weather dependent wind and solar.

Then there is efficiency.

Imagine if a typical American could satisfy an entire lifetime of energy use, including driving and air travel, with only nuclear power. The uranium pellets needed to accomplish this would all fit inside an empty beer bottle. Just one of those pellets is about the size of a grown man’s thumb and produces as much energy as 120 gallons of oil or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

And rather than working only when the wind or sun are cooperating, the U.S. Department of Energy reports nuclear reactors are operating at a capacity factor of 92.3 percent. This means they run at full power almost all the time, compared to wind (34.3 percent) and solar (23.4 percent).

Also, we’ll never run out of nuclear power. “Uranium is a common metal found in rocks all over the world,” reports the Department of Energy. In a 2009 estimate, Scientific American first assumed no further discoveries of nuclear fuel, and projected the current known supply, at current usage, would last nearly five centuries. But even better: assuming more realistically that we’d find or make more nuclear fuels, Scientific American concluded nuclear power could keep the lights on for another 60,000 years.

In sum, no energy source is perfect, and there are always tradeoffs, but nuclear power is the greatest combination of reliability, safety, abundance and cleanliness ever developed. Nuclear is as close to perfection as it gets.

In a rational world, those most concerned about cutting CO₂ emissions should have been the biggest proponents of a massive increase in nuclear power generation. But nuclear power has been opposed by most of the American climate NGOs, including three big ones that boast of their work in China: the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Instead, the NRDC, EDF and RMI and nearly all other CO₂-obsessed NGOs are proponents of subsidizing unreliable wind and solar energy. Using 2022 federal data, energy analyst Robert Bryce compared taxpayer subsidies against the British thermal units (BTUs) of energy produced for all major forms of energy. According to Bryce, solar received 302 times more taxpayer support than nuclear power, and 136 times more than oil and gas. Wind got 69 times more than nuclear, and 31 times more than oil and gas.

Solar and wind systems also chew up hundreds of times more of our land (i.e.: the environment) than reliable power sources. An April 2021 analysis in Bloomberg Green showed solar panels need 140 times more land to produce the same electricity as a natural gas power station, and wind turbines need 370 times more. An emissions-free nuclear power plant was presented as 47 times more land friendly than solar and 123 times better than wind. Even a coal fired power station was far more land friendly per unit of electricity produced than wind and solar.

Energy Foundation China

EFC’s cheerleading for China should not be mistaken for Chinese propaganda. Most of the money is coming from wealthy Americans.

Doerr’s Climate Imperative Foundation may be the largest single donor to the Energy Foundation China (EFC), an American NGO that claims “nearly all” of its work is “focused on China given the scale of its energy sector and its role in global emissions.”

A lot of EFC’s “focus” has been on promoting weather dependent power. The main page of the website is dominated by photos of wind turbines and solar panels filling up landscapes. The page for “Clean Power” features the predictable photo of solar panels. And despite all the evidence that China has been sharply increasing production of CO₂-heavy energy, EFC’s “Clean Power” page also predicts “that by mid-century, renewables would make up more than 80% of China’s power supply.”

But EFC’s cheerleading for China should not be mistaken for Chinese propaganda. Most of the money is coming from wealthy Americans such as Doerr.

The last four publicly available tax filings from Energy Foundation China, covering the four years through 2024, show combined total revenue of $334.7 million. The closest corresponding tax returns from just eight American foundations during the period show combined donations to EFC that account for $278.3 million (or 83.1 percent) of the four-year total:

• Leading the pack, with $6 million granted to EFC during those four years, is the Doerr-led Climate Imperative Foundation. (29.4 percent of the total)

• The two halves of the Hewlett-Packard tech fortune were next most generous, with the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation contributing $2 million and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation kicking in $19.1 million. (21 percent)

• The ClimateWorks Foundation (a joint creation of left-wing philanthropy giants, including both the Hewlett and Packard foundations) was good for $2 million. (12.9 percent)

• The Sequoia Climate Foundation, a giving vehicle for enigmatic California tech billionaire Fred Taylor, has added at least $10 million. (3 percent)

• The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, yet another of America’s multi-billion-dollar left-wing fortunes, has given at least $7 million. (1 percent)

• The Windward Fund, one tentacle of the left-wing pass-through donor empire formerly managed by Arabella Advisors, granted $8 million. (1.7 percent)

• And finally, an unknown number of the nearly 400,000 separate donor accounts at America’s largest charity, the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, have collectively contributed at least $5 million. (13 percent)

What they’re funding at EFC appears to be entirely legal speech, protected by the First Amendment, as it should be. Americans have a right to spend their money to say nice things about a foreign state, be it Israel, Ukraine, the European Union, Canada, Cuba, Qatar, and even China. But what is legal should not be confused with what is wise, let alone accurate.

Similarly, those American donors to EFC and dozens of others have also written generous checks directly to American policy NGOs that promote China’s nonexistent emissions progress and Xi’s solar panels.

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)

When EDF claims to have begun helping in 1999, China’s air pollution problem was 3.3 times worse than America’s. Nearly a quarter century after EDF declared “significant progress” China’s air pollution was 7.8 times worse than America’s.

For example, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) claims to have “been working in China since 1991 with a variety of partners to tackle climate change and pollution.” A timeline of EDF-China’s “major events” begins with 1999:

In 1999, EDF made significant progress in its pollution control efforts in China—the former State Environmental Protection Administration of China and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signed a letter of intent to cooperate, designating EDF as the implementation partner for the sulfur dioxide emission reduction cooperation project. [emphasis added]

Every nation with a mildly competent government and room for environmental improvement has cleaned up its act since 1999, so the relative changes since then are the relevant metric to track. How did China do compared to the rest of the world?

Our World in Data reports total Chinese sulfur dioxide (SO₂) emissions in 1999 were only 17.2 percent higher than the USA in 1999. From there, total American SO₂ emissions began a steady decline. But Chinese SO₂ emissions nearly doubled from 1999 to 2006 and didn’t fall back below China’s 1999 SO₂ level until 2015. So, by 2022 China’s SO₂ emissions had become 400 percent higher than America’s.

As to general air pollution, according to Our World in Data, a horrifying 27.3 percent of all fatalities from all causes in China were credited to air pollution in 1999. The comparable figure for the USA was 8.1 precent; Canada, the closest rich nation sharing our air, was at 4.1 percent; and Greenland, cleanest in the world, registered just 0.3 percent.

By 2023, the contribution of China’s air pollution to total fatalities had declined to . . . 18.8 percent; progress of a sort, but still nearly one of every five Chinese deaths due to dirty air. Meanwhile, air pollution’s share of American fatalities had sharply declined to only 2.4 percent by 2023, nearly matching Canada’s 2 percent the same year. Greenland, with little room to improve, remained at 0.3 percent.

Put another way, when EDF claims to have begun helping in 1999, China’s air pollution problem was 3.3 times worse than America’s. Nearly a quarter century after EDF declared “significant progress” China’s air pollution was 7.8 times worse than America’s.

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI)

“If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.” – RMI founder Amory Lovins

Another China promoter is the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).

For most of its history the RMI wasn’t one of the largest American environmental NGOs. That has changed as they’ve become more involved in China. For the year ending June 2025, the RMI reported $174.9 million in total revenue, up from $29.5 million as recently as 2016.

The RMI was co-founded in 1982 by a promoter of weather dependent power named Amory Lovins. An opponent of even emissions-free nuclear power, Lovins is still a revered figure within and contributor to the Rocky Mountain Institute. Now the NGO’s chairman emeritus, the RMI website has a dedicated space for his work titled “Inside Amory’s Brain.”

But implementing what’s inside that brain, to paraphrase Amory, would be “little short of disastrous.” In a 1977 interview Lovins said:

If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. [emphasis added]

That quote is conspicuously missing from the RMI website. What isn’t missing is the RMI’s current cheerleading for China.

In September 2020, according to a news release from the RMI, “President Xi Jinping announced that China will strive to peak emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.” That hollow promise was enough for the Rocky Mountain Institute to compliment Xi for “China’s determination to provide responsible global leadership.”

“The appropriate strategy compatible with China’s long-term carbon-neutrality target should be to ensure that almost all growth in China’s electricity generating capacity is zero carbon, with no new coal investment,” advised the RMI in January 2021 [emphasis added].

Plot spoiler: there was a lot of “new coal investment.”

From 2020 through 2025, according to Our World in Data, China added 829.7 terawatt-hours (TWh) of annual coal-fired electricity generation, bringing their annual total to 5751.6 TWh in 2025. For perspective, just the additional 829.7 TWh Chinese coal capacity added during those five years was 92 TWh more than the 737 TWh of coal-fired electricity the entire American economy used in 2025.

Back in 2016, the RMI and China’s National Development and Reform Commission, co-produced Reinventing Fire: A roadmap for China’s Revolution in energy consumption and production to 2050. This absurdly optimistic document laid out a plan for China’s CO₂ emissions to peak at 9.6 billion tonnes in 2025 and decline from there. But in the real world, according to Our World in Data, China was already at 12.3 billion tonnes by 2024.

This was a big miss. The difference between the report’s projected 2025 emissions for China and actual emissions was equal to the combined 2024 CO₂ output of the entire European Union.

Even by 2021, back when RMI was praising Xi for his “responsible global leadership,” China’s CO₂ emissions were already well beyond the peak of 9.6 billion tonnes the Rocky Mountain Institute and (supposedly) Xi’s government were looking to stay within.

After truth overwhelmed optimism, the RMI came out with a new report in 2025: Decoding the Coal-Power Transition in China. “China’s success in renewables is complicated by its persistent reliance on coal in the power sector,” conceded the online introduction for the report. And then it made excuses for why China missed the mark: “A rapidly growing demand for power, a 20-year record-low river flow and hydropower output, lack of power-system flexibility, and increasing concerns about energy security have led to an acceleration of new coal power approvals. . .”

As noted earlier, the switch from high carbon fuel (coal) to low carbon natural gas in electricity generation means America is emitting less real pollution and less carbon dioxide. In fact, on a per person basis, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are lower today than at any point since the end of World War II.

But in contrast to the serial cheerleading for China’s empty coal promises, the Rocky Mountain Institute has tried to reverse America’s proven progress with natural gas.

In December 2022, during the Biden administration, the RMI co-produced a research paper that dubiously claimed American gas stoves were responsible for 12.7 percent of childhood asthma cases. Richard Trumka, a Biden-appointed member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), used the report to suggest banning residential gas stove installations.

Controversy ensued, which wasn’t surprising because 35 percent of American homes use gas stoves and they are preferred by both amateur and professional chefs. The CPSC and the Biden administration swiftly backed away from Trumka’s suggestion.

Still, the incident showed the Rocky Mountain Institute has been more successful pushing its anti-energy agenda on America than it has on China.

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

“The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy,” predicted Obama, accurately. He was interrupted by applause from both Democrats and Republicans. But the NRDC wasn’t cheering.

Another China cheerleader, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), boasts it was “the first international nonprofit to launch a clean energy program in China,” having arrived back in the “mid-1990s,” and “has been supporting China’s sustainable development for more than 20 years.” A sharp reader will note this period correlates closely with China’s rapid ascent to becoming the world’s unrivaled king of cranking out CO₂ emissions and undisputed champion of coal powerplant construction.

But as of late August 2026, the NRDC website still made this, seemingly obtuse claim:

China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) established, for the first time, a mandatory target for decreasing the share of coal in total energy consumption. NRDC energy experts are helping the country to decrease the share of coal in total energy consumption. We’re promoting ways to add more wind and solar to the grid and bring efficiency measures to more of the country’s industries.

So, an authoritarian government that doesn’t answer to voters has declared a “mandatory target,” and an American NGO believes it’s real. And while China’s 13^th consecutive set of good intentions was enough to win the praise of the NRDC, provable American progress on the same concern was not.

The American natural gas renaissance and ensuring sharp drop in our carbon dioxide emissions began under President Barack Obama. At a minimum, President Obama deserves credit for not getting in the way of it, but it’s also reasonable to credit him with supporting the transition. In his January 2012 State of the Union Address, the Democratic president boasted he had spent his first term opening “millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration” on federal lands and that we had “a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years.”

“The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy,” predicted Obama, accurately. He was interrupted by applause from both Democrats and Republicans.

But the NRDC wasn’t cheering. Three months later, in March 2012, the Obama administration approved a natural gas drilling project on federal land in eastern Utah. The NRDC responded with a news release accusing the administration of turning the region into “an industrial wasteland.”

The NRDC’s animosity towards American natural gas use and production predictably continued during the two Trump administrations. In one example, the NRDC encouraged supporters to write to Congress to oppose “the Trump administration’s efforts to dramatically expand the production and export of climate-destroying liquefied natural gas…”

Meanwhile, four Chinese cities placed in the top 25 for IQAir’s 2025 ranking of the world’s most polluted cities and the World Health Organization reports that two million Chinese die each year because of air pollution. To the extent the term means anything, China has done more to create “an industrial wasteland” than the combined work of all the American presidential administrations in our history.

But don’t expect the NRDC to fire off a nasty news release at Xi Jinping. Critics of China’s government don’t do so well within its jurisdiction. The only thing complaining would accomplish is a swift end to the NRDC’s decades of supposedly “helping” with what they claim is China’s “sustainable development.”

Even what NRDC cheers about China looks ugly in practice. The NRDC web page for “Climate Change: Renewable Energy” features a photo of a formerly lush green mountaintop in China that is now covered in black solar panels. The caption reads: “Accelerating its shift to a new clean energy system will help China to ensure that it can peak its fossil fuel use and carbon emissions as early and as low as possible. Here, a mountaintop solar power plant in China’s Nanping City.”

According to its developer, the solar facility in Nanping annually generates “32.4 million kWh” of electricity. This translates to 0.0324 TWh (terawatt hours). For comparison, a single Westinghouse AP 1000 nuclear reactor can annually generate up to 10 TWh, or 300 times the annual output of that ugly mountain full of solar panels.

China the coal-burning king of the world also has 64 nuclear reactors currently operating and 38 more under construction. Most if not all likely exceed, by 100 times or more, the annual energy output reported for Nanping solar. Yet, it is very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to find even one photo of China’s impressive collection of pollution free nuclear stations on the NRDC website. Perhaps the environmental NGO hasn’t been “helping” with this more effective and less environmentally destructive path to cutting China’s CO₂ emissions.

But the NRDC’s weather-dependent power promotion is relentless.

A November 2022 “Expert Blog” posted by the NRDC praised “China’s efforts to shift to a new energy system” and the “rapid growth in wind and solar.” The post predicted “it is likely that many of [China’s] most coal and carbon-intensive sectors have already or will soon peak.”

When that didn’t happen, the China cheerleaders didn’t criticize.

The NRDC’s “mid-1990s” arrival in China puts it there a half decade or so beyond the regime’s 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. China has a gangster government that was willing to use main battle tanks against unarmed citizens demanding democracy. Such a regime was never going to heed polite advice from an American NGO telling them their industrial carbon dioxide emissions were too high.

An American problem

China has had more than enough wealth to commit to those CO₂ emissions promises they have failed to fulfill and didn’t need the advice, money or any form of help at all from American NGOs. What China couldn’t buy on their own was the propaganda value of those credulous Americans calling them an environmental superstar.

In 2024, according to the “China Power” project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China spent $317.6 billion on its military, second only to the United States. This is more than the $305.3 billion combined military spending that year by 22 other nations (including India and Japan) that share the Indo-Pacific region with China. Russia and Ukraine put together and fighting a brutal land war against each other spent $217.3 billion on their militaries in 2024.

China can afford to commit fantastic sums to weapons procurement because China’s annual GDP now exceeds $20.8 trillion. This is second only to the United States and more than the combined GDP of the next four largest economies on Earth (Germany, Japan, UK and India).

On paper, China has had more than enough wealth to commit to those CO₂ emissions promises they have serially and seriously failed to fulfill. So why is China building 85 brand new coal fired power stations this year alone?

They are a near-monopoly supplier of solar panels and wafers, and the major exporter of same. If replacing coal with solar had been feasible and advisable, then China was uniquely positioned to do it all by themselves.

China didn’t need the advice, money or any form of help at all from American NGOs such as the Energy Foundation China, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Rocky Mountain Institute or the Natural Resources Defense Fund. China didn’t need financial assistance from American billionaires such as John Doerr, American pass-through donors such as the ClimateWorks Foundation, or American professional philanthropists in charge of the massive fortunes left behind by American industrialists such as Hewlett and Packard.

But what China couldn’t buy on their own, at any price, was the propaganda value of those credulous Americans repeatedly proclaiming Xi Jinping’s regime to be an environmental superstar. What China couldn’t buy on their own was the propaganda value of those Americans simultaneously pretending, against all evidence to the contrary, that even a Democratic president was creating an “industrial wasteland” in America.

What these China cheerleaders in America are doing is legal; it should not be confused with what is right. Xi Jinping may need their help to sell his sketchy solar panels. The Earth does not.

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. The page for the full report is here: Enemies of Energy. If you like this sort of thing, then please send them some money.

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Donor type: pass-through grant maker

The mission statement of the Climateworks Foundation, according to the grant maker’s IRS filings, is “to end the climate crisis by amplifying the power of philanthropy.” ^[i]

As explained in the first section of this report, rising global temperatures are real, but the “climate crisis” is not. Skepticism on this point has been growing. A January 2026 report in Politico claimed there is “a schism within the Democratic Party about whether talking about climate change is the right message to win back control of Washington.”[ii]

“Now Democrats are increasingly showing they have decided it’s a losing message to tout the ways in which they’d curb fossil fuel production to thwart the most dire effects of climate change,” reported Politico. “Instead, they’re choosing to focus on policies that would lower energy costs and lean hard into affordability talking points embraced by Trump and congressional Republicans.” ^[iii]

But that “losing message” remains central to Climateworks. “The climate crisis is here,” the foundation’s home page proclaims.[iv]

In its most recent publicly available IRS report, covering 2024, Climateworks reported $334.8 million in total revenue and $229.8 million in grants paid out, or 68 percent of total revenue taken in for the year. Grants for the anti-energy NGOs profiled in this report and to other donors to anti-energy NGOs that are profiled in this section accounted for $20.9 million of the 2024 total.[v]

Eight of the fifteen anti-energy NGOs (plus an advocacy affiliate of one of them) received a combined total of $11.5 million from Climateworks in 2024: ^[vi]

• Environmental Defense Fund: $4.2 million

• Natural Resources Defense Council: $2.8 million

• Rocky Mountain Institute: $2 million

• World Resources Institute: $1.5 million

• Sierra Club Foundation: $750,000

• Earthjustice: $100,000

• Union of Concerned Scientists: $75,000

• Earthjustice Action: $70,000

• World Wildlife Fund: $25,000

Two of the other pass-through donors on this list received a combined total of nearly $9.3 million in grants from Climateworks in 2024: ^[vii]

• U.S. Energy Foundation: $9 million

• Windward Fund: $259,000

Climateworks was created in 2008 as a joint project of three huge left-wing grantmaking foundations: the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. As of their last publicly available IRS filings, these three founders had combined net assets of $24.6 billion. [viii]

As of April 2026, Climateworks claims to have granted more than $2 billion since 2008 and worked alongside 80 different funders. [ix]

PDF hyperlink to full report

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. The page for the full report is here: Enemies of Energy. If you like this sort of thing, then please send them some money.

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Anti-energy NGOs and the corporate media rarely address the low energy prices paid by Americans relative to the rest of the rich world.

The United States produces 26 percent of the Earth’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is more than the next three largest economies (China, Germany, and Japan) combined. American economic dominance is more striking when displayed relative to population. The World Bank reported that American gross domestic product per person in 2024 (the latest year in their online database) was $84,534. The GDP per person of second place Germany was $56,103, or just 66.4 percent of the American total. Italy and Japan had less than half the GDP per person of the USA. And China—the world’s second largest economy when measured by total GDP—provided just $13,303 per person, or less than 16 percent of the American average. ^[i]

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Far wealthier than the people living in the planet’s nine other biggest economies, Americans could afford to pay far more for energy. But we do not. Relative to the rest of the world, particularly the nations that have placed a high priority on phasing out hydrocarbon fuels, Americans pay comparatively little for power and gasoline. ^{[ii] [iii]}

Of those ten largest economies, none have so fully embraced abandonment of hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear energy as Germany and the United Kingdom. Both have just as eagerly embraced replacing these reliable options with weather dependent wind turbines and solar panels. (In January 2026, the current German chancellor belatedly conceded that shutting down the nation’s once-potent fleet of nuclear stations was a mistake.)^{[iv] [v]}

The UK and Germany both pay more than double what Americans do for electricity, as does Italy. ^[vi]

The story is similar for gasoline prices. ^[vii]

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For the above, it is important to note that these prices account for different taxes imposed by the respective nations. But tax policy, as it applies to energy purchases, is inseparable from energy policy.

For example, California, the American state that has most closely replicated the anti-hydrocarbon energy policies of Germany and the United Kingdom, also replicates the high energy prices.

In 2024, Californians paid the second highest retail price for electricity in the nation, behind only Hawaii (the state with the greatest logistical challenges to bringing in power and everything else). Californians paid more than double the USA average per kilowatt hour and—making the sting worse—more than double all three of their immediate neighbors (Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon). ^[viii]

Similarly, for January 2026, AAA reported Californians paying an average of $4.21 for a gallon of regular gasoline. This was $1.36 more than the national average of $2.85 per gallon and (as with electricity) second highest behind only Hawaii. And once again, Californians living near their border could have saved 84 cents per gallon by driving to Nevada, 86 cents by going to Oregon, and $1.23 in Arizona. ^[ix]

***

PDF hyperlink to full report

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Last week the Trump administration proposed a ban on exports of diesel fuel. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) swiftly responded by praising the Republican president as a climate hero. Just kidding on that last part!

The president’s diesel concern is real: the wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf have caused serious damage to the world’s energy infrastructure, spiking the price of diesel in America and everywhere else. The president’s proposed solution isn’t as genuine: the Institute for Energy Research (IER) and others have correctly warned an export ban will cause domestic refineries to cut back on diesel production, which eventually causes prices to increase.

But the worst we can say of Trump and his thoughtful critics is that both are trying to be part of a solution. The supposedly nonpolitical NRDC has become part of the politics, which translates to “part of the problem.”

If their own advocacy is to be taken seriously, then the NRDC really should be sending out news releases praising Trump. We know this because just 16 months ago they denounced him for proposing to increase exports of liquified natural gas (LNG).

In addition to putting money in the pockets of American energy workers, last year’s plan was aimed at helping European allies cut off from Russian gas due to the Ukraine conflict. A ban on American diesel exports, it should be noted, will likely have the opposite effect and harm energy-starved Europe.

Back in May 2025, the NRDC Action Fund (the NRDC’s policy advocacy arm) issued a call to action headlined “Stop Trump’s Dangerous LNG Export Expansion.” This is the full text, with original emphasis:

President Trump is ramping up climate-destroying exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) right now. We need your help to fight back today.

Tell Congress to block Trump’s efforts to fast-track the production and export of dangerous LNG and protect our climate, economy, communities, and health.

Exporting more LNG overseas increases energy prices for American consumers and businesses. And LNG wreaks havoc on our environment from start to finish. It guzzles energy during processing, spewing tons of carbon pollution before it’s even burned. It increases methane leaks – a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Congress can stop this assault on our environment, but we need your voice to counter the influence of the fossil fuel industry—sign now. Demand Congress block Trump’s dangerous LNG expansion agenda and protect our health and environment.

“Carbon pollution” is NRDC-speak for “carbon dioxide” (CO₂), the gas necessary for making vegetation grow and thus, like oxygen, an essential support for all life on Earth. NGOs such as NRDC assume the human-caused CO₂ added to the atmosphere from burning hydrocarbon fuels such as natural gas or diesel has been causing catastrophic changes to the weather.

This is the basis for their claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. But whether the NRDC and its allies are correct or have grossly exaggerated the CO₂ concern is beside the point, because not all sources of human generated CO₂ are equal.

The U.S. Department of Energy, in a report released at the tail end of the Biden administration, calculated the CO₂ intensity of all the major uses of hydrocarbon fuels. By a large margin, natural gas was judged to have the least CO₂ intensity. Natural gas generates 116.7 pounds of carbon dioxide for each British Thermal Unit (BTU) of energy output, while diesel and home heating fuel checked in at 163.5 pounds.

By NRDC standards, that makes diesel 40 percent more “carbon polluting” than natural gas. So, if NRDC Action denounced Trump last year for promoting natural gas exports, then they should be 40 percent more excited to praise him for cutting off diesel exports, right?

Wrong. As of Friday afternoon, three days after the policy was first floated by the president, there was no evidence of any reaction from the NRDC. Nothing on the website and nothing popped up in google searches. Sending Grok to scour the social media and the internet returned this: “NRDC has not issued a public statement.”

Then Grok helpfully pointed out the many awful things NRDC has said about diesel emissions. In June 2025, for example, just six weeks after the LNG call to action, the NRDC referred to the Port of Los Angeles as a “diesel death zone” because of the trucks used to move goods to and from the port (and, not coincidentally, help keep the American economy functioning).

The simplest way to explain the NRDC’s hypocrisy through silence on the diesel export ban is to assume they’re motivated by politics rather than policy. The obvious rebuttal is that Trump is also playing politics by trying to slash diesel prices right before a mid-term election that is expected to go poorly for his party.

Fair enough, but irrelevant. Donald J. Trump is obviously a popularly elected politician. His breed first appeared roughly five centuries before Jesus when the Greeks developed democracy. In the 2500 years since, every successful politician has, in some measure, manipulated policy to shore up political support.

The NRDC claims to be something different: a policy-focused NGO committed to protecting nature. They believe this can be accomplished in part by opposing the carbon dioxide emissions that come from burning hydrocarbon fuels. Whether this is a valid position or not is immaterial. Americans provide a tax exemption for policy education NGOs because we want to incentivize honest feedback on important matters and receive that feedback without political bias.

Like the NRDC, the Institute for Energy Research is also a policy education NGO. There the similarities end. The IER’s recommendations on energy and environmental matters are contrary to the NRDC on nearly every relevant point. And so is their approach to politics—or lack thereof.

The response last week from the IER, warning of the problems with the diesel export ban, is how a policy NGO is supposed to behave. The IER has also promoted the benefits of Trump administration policies when it judges them to be good for Americans and amplified the statements of Democrats who voice support for domestic energy abundance.

In a nation of robust debate on these important issues, it is inevitable that policy NGOs such as IER and NRDC will find friendlier audiences on opposite sides of the political divide. That makes it even more important for them to scrupulously avoid the appearance of bias, seek out moments of agreement with “the other side,” and criticize “their side” when it steps out of line. Fairly calling “balls and strikes,” based on objective criteria, and regardless of partisan sympathies, is what a nonprofit policy NGO is supposed to do.

That’s their “one job,” as the kids like to say. Last week the NRDC didn’t show up for work.

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Anyone with an old dog or cat knows the drill when they bring a new puppy or kitten into the home. The elderly pet begins running around with a spring in its step, lying around less, and generally remembering what it was like to be young again.

While still young in the history of nations, America, on its 250^th birthday, has become an old dog in relation to the high standards we set for ourselves. Our Founding and Constitution were designed to take full advantage of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, even as both pillars of modern civilization were born elsewhere and still relatively new in 1776.

No society leaned into those bold and beautiful ideas like young America, and we still have no rivals. The truth became abundantly clear this summer, when the World Cup soccer tournament came to our shores. Visitors from relatively rich societies across the globe filled their social media posts with astonished and (mostly) positive reactions to the culture that Americans (at best) take for granted and (all too often) malign as too individualist or greedy and whatnot.

On the most mundane level, nothing became as treasured to our visitors as the discovery of mere ranch dressing. World Cup fans tried to cart so many bottles of ranch back home that TSA issued a cheeky advisory:

Are you kicking around the idea of flying home with your favorite dip? If you’re traveling within the U.S., make sure to keep your carry-on sauces to 3.4 ounces or less and place any larger containers in your checked bags. Some heroes wear capes. Others bring ranch.

An ABC News report summarized the general phenomena:

Across TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms, fans from around the world are sharing their reactions to uniquely American experiences, from sprawling supermarkets and self-serve ice dispensers to oversized pickup trucks, fire engines and what many describe as exceptionally friendly customer service.

A tourism researcher quoted in the report provided this analysis:

What Americans consider ordinary is often extraordinary to visitors. [ . . .] A giant supermarket aisle, free ice water, refillable drinks or a cheerful grocery clerk may be just another Tuesday for Americans, but for someone visiting from Scotland, Brazil or Japan, these experiences are fascinating cultural discoveries.

In summary, our visitors this summer found us to be a nation of unusually friendly people providing unimaginably awesome stuff to total strangers. Jesus advised us to love our neighbors as ourselves, but it took almost eighteen more centuries before an entire civilization was purpose-built to put that ideal into practice.

The magic of America is that it rewards people who do wonderful things for total strangers they don’t even know and might not even like if they did know them. Even treating your enemies well can make you very rich in America. The reactions from our World Cup visitors reveal that America is still alone on the forefront regarding this revolution in human ethics.

So that is how the world saw America this summer, on our 250^th birthday. It was as if a huge army of Alexis de Tocqueville clones had come back nearly two centuries after publishing Democracy in America . . . and found even more to love.

Too often nowadays that is not how the old dog America has been taught to see itself. This special issue of Capital Research profiles some of the movements that have been teaching Americans to hate what we should love about ourselves.

Kali Fontanilla’s essay examines the work of the Zinn Education Project, a nonprofit that has been injecting the anti-American teachings of Howard Zinn into high school and college curriculums. After analyzing multiple Zinn lessons that impugn the American Revolution, our Constitution and capitalism, plus endorsements from those teaching these toxic lessons, Kali concludes:

That isn’t education. It’s slander with footnotes. And it is precisely what four decades of Zinn have handed America’s children in place of their inheritance.

The American Dream is that inheritance, and in the 20^th century California was the headquarters. But the dream in California has become a nightmare in the 21^st century. In this issue, California-based writer Chris Bray profiles a plague of left-wing nonprofits that have helped fuel the decline.

Unfortunately, as Bray notes, what starts in California doesn’t stay there:

California isn’t separate from America. It’s the bleeding edge of what America threatens to become, the social laboratory for a cultural transition. The state concentrates the dose of the burgeoning American poison. [. . .] California is a cultural leader in the view that private enterprise is cruelty and greed, while anything that doesn’t make a profit is inherently virtuous and decent.

Quoting an industry report, Bray notes that California’s nonprofit sector now accounts for one of every 14 jobs in the state. That’s a lot of not profiting.

Emphasizing the sheer size of this infrastructure is a sidebar report showing that the city of Oakland has 67 decidedly left-wing nonprofits within its borders—or more than one per square mile. Many of them, and possibly all of them, preach “economic justice.” Yet their combined net assets of nearly $1.9 billion would be enough to write a $31,000 check to every man, woman and child living below the poverty line in Oakland.

According to Mike Watson’s essay in this issue, American Big Labor has enjoyed a historical reputation of being more sensible and market-friendly than the more Marxist-inspired European labor unions. In Watson’s analysis, even this charitable history is exaggerated (after all, commies used to run some major American labor unions). And he shows how today’s Big Labor has been racing so fast to the left that it’s difficult to distinguish it from the most stridently left-wing movements America has to offer.

Banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon epitomized the special genius of the American system and, in so doing, left behind one of America’s largest charitable fortunes. Alas, in a too-familiar story, the wealth creator is long gone, and the wealth he built is now being used to tear down the reputation of an America that made it all possible. Robert Stilson’s profile of the Mellon Foundation notes, among other revelations, that the philanthropy bureaucrats spending Mellon’s money today are dishing out $1,000 per minute to prove American history is “an unbroken line of racist oppression.”

Ironically, what these tales all have in common is the inversion of an American virtue de Tocqueville praised. He put it this way in Democracy in America:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but also associations of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.

What he was speaking of was America’s charitable sector, now known as our nonprofits or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). That virtuous sector still exists in mighty form, and it’s not difficult to find many (if not most) of today’s charities promoting the American culture that made their good works possible.

But our nonprofit sector is also riddled with anti-American NGOs that portray our virtues as vices, often using the money built from our virtues to try to destroy them. Their version of America isn’t that of a charming old dog that has forgotten its greatness but instead that of a rabid dog that should have been put down before it ever grew up.

Our World Cup visitors this summer haven’t been exposed to that lie, and it showed. On our 250^th birthday, they showed up like happy puppies to remind the old dog of what it once was. And if we pay attention to them, then unlike an actual old dog, America really can become young again.

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InfluenceWatch (IW) is the Capital Research Center’s project to track the influencers who have and continue to shape American public policy. At present, we have nearly 16,000 profiles and more are added every week. IW also features extensive historical profiles covering the New Left that emerged in the 1960s, including domestic terror groups such as the Weather Underground.

Yesterday I was working on a report about the New Left and wanted to use a quote from the Weather Underground profile. The infamous quote was made in reference to the August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders that were committed by the followers of cult leader Charles Manson:

Dig it, they murdered those pigs and then ate dinner at their dining table then stuck a fork in their bellies! Wild!

In the IW profile this quote is attributed to Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn, alleged to have said it mere months after the murders took place. One can never be too careful with these things, so even though I wrote the profile (and repeated the attribution in a separate profile of Dohrn), I decided to double check before using it again.

I fed the quote into Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence tool that now automatically pops up at the top of a search query. At this point I didn’t want to bias the response from the robot, so I provided only the quote and didn’t tell Gemini what to do with it.

This was Gemini’s initial reaction:

This quote is a famous and chilling statement made by Susan Atkins, a member of the Manson Family cult, regarding the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. She made this remark to her cellmate, Virginia Graham, while in jail, expressing excitement over the brutal killings. The murders were orchestrated by cult leader Charles Manson in an attempt to incite what he called “Helter Skelter”—a apocalyptic race war he believed was prophesied in secret codes within the Beatles’ White Album.

This is a hallucination, but you would need to know a bit about the Manson murders to spot the mistake. Tellingly, the lone Wikipedia profile source Gemini provided makes no reference at all to the quote.

Hoping to get Gemini to rethink the error of its ways, but still not wanting to tell it who I was looking for, I asked a cagey follow up question: “Wasn’t Atkins accused of being one of the murderers?”

Gemini answered correctly that Atkins was one of the convicted killers and then added background on the murders, still not acting as if it had botched the initial answer.

I presented the obvious problem with Gemini attributing the statement to Atkins: “Then why was she speaking in the third person to the cellmate? You may have misattributed this quote.”

This time, Gemini adjusted and pinned the quote on someone else . . . but still not Dohrn:

You are completely correct to question that, and I apologize for the misattribution. . . It was Ronnie Howard’s report of this conversation to jail authorities that ultimately gave the Los Angeles Police Department their first major break to solve the Tate-LaBianca murders. [emphasis original]

Gemini even provided two citations to supposedly back up the new claim, one from the New York Times. This was more hallucinations: neither of the sources mention the quote.

So, I tried a third time, this time painting an obvious bullseye on what I wanted so the artificial “intelligence” wouldn’t miss it: “Historian Arthur Eckstein attributes this quote to Bernadine Dohrn.”

Again, Gemini changed its mind:

You are absolutely right, and I completely missed the mark twice. Thank you for your patience and for bringing the proper historical accuracy to light.

This infamous quote belongs entirely to Bernardine Dohrn, the leader of the radical left-wing militant group the Weather Underground. [emphasis original]

The only citation used by Gemini this time goes to our InfluenceWatch profile of the Weather Underground, which in turn cites Eckstein, who did indeed get the attribution correct. We know this because Dohrn has publicly admitted saying it. There are multiple sources showing this, most notably a June 2009 interview with Dohrn on C-SPAN.

Why didn’t Gemini find any of these sources on the first and second attempts? Would it have ever gotten it correct if it hadn’t been spoon fed the answer?

A better question: Why trust Google with your history of the radical left when there’s InfluenceWatch?

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Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. The page for the full report is here: Enemies of Energy. If you like this sort of thing, then please send them some money.

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Donor type: direct grant maker

The most recent IRS filing from the Freedom Together Foundation, which covers 2024 grant activity, reports a salary and benefits compensation package exceeding $900,000 for the person holding the title of “SVP/Environment.” There were three other senior vice presidents listed, with their individual remits covering “investments,” “poverty,” and “democracy/gender,” but each of them with total compensation packages of less than $600,000. Even the chief financial officer was paid less than the environment SVP. ^[i]

Formerly known as the “JPB Foundation,” Freedom Together has been a major donor to anti-energy NGOs and the big pass-through donors to same. [ii]

The “JPB” stood for “Jeffry Picower Barbara”—a nod to the benefactors, the late billionaire Jeffry Picower and his wife, Barbara. Jeffry passed away in 2009, and afterwards Barbara exercised relatively tight supervision of a fortune that now exceeds $3.3 billion in net assets. ^{[iii] [iv]}

An October 2025 Capital Research Center report from Robert Stilson described her role: ^[v]

Despite its heft, as recently as 2019 Inside Philanthropy was writing that the then-JPB Foundation was “largely unknown in nonprofit circles.” Barbara Picower, as president and board chair, was said to exercise complete control over its operations, to such a degree that grantees simply used the name “Barbara” as a metonym for the foundation itself. That level of hands-on involvement, combined with the foundation’s sheer size, would have rightly secured for Barbara Picower a place among the most powerful figures in American philanthropy. Darren Walker, the outgoing president of the Ford Foundation, was effusive in his praise of Picower’s impact on the American left-progressive funding ecosystem. ^[vi]

JPB changed its name to Freedom Together in 2024. That’s also when Babara stepped down as president and appointed a replacement. Stilson explained: ^[vii]

Picower’s hand-picked successor was Deepak Bhargava, a professional activist with the perfect resume for left-wing philanthropy. His first job after college was with ACORN, and he later went on to become the longtime head of the activist group Community Change. At various points he has served as board chair of the climate activist group 350.org; board secretary of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center; and has been a board member of the Leadership Conference Education Fund, the Democracy Fund, and the Bauman Family Foundation. He was a U.S. advisory board member at the Open Society Foundations (to which he co-authored a leaked memo on “voter engagement” funding for the 2012 election cycle), an editorial board member at The Nation, and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

After leaving Community Change in 2018, Bhargava became a lecturer at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. His book Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, co-authored with Stephanie Luce, was published in 2023. Born out of Bhargava’s frustration with “the state of strategy on the Left,” Practical Radicals was intended as a guide for activists who “hold big visions for transforming society and are willing to do what it takes to win in the real world.” Longtime socialist activist-academic Frances Fox Piven praised the book, while former Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) called it “a vital resource for progressives who want to win” and noted that “our movements must seek and win governing power to achieve our visions for a more just society.” ^[viii]

Freedom Together’s 2024 IRS filing shows $20.4 million in cumulative funding for the anti-energy NGOs profiled in this report and the anti-energy pass through donors profiled on this list. ^[ix]

Four of the fifteen major anti-energy NGOs (plus a local affiliate of one of them) were provided grants totaling more than $9.2 million in 2024: ^[x]

• GRID Alternatives: $3 million

• org: $2.5 million

• Earthjustice: $2.5 million

• Sierra Club Foundation: $1 million

• 350 Seattle: $250,000

Also in 2024, the Freedom Together Foundation gave more than $11.1 million to the Windward Fund, one of the major anti-energy pass-through donors profiled on this list. ^[xi]

Characterizing the grantmaking of Freedom Together, Stilson wrote that it “illustrates how a fortune that was committed to charity can be deployed by professional activists to fund distinctly political causes—even radical ones aimed at completely upending society.” ^[xii]

PDF hyperlink to full report

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As Chris Bray‘s adjoining report shows, California contains an extraordinary collection of well-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that promote left-wing policies. The report also notes that the “N” for these lefty NGOs is often missing because many have been pocketing big grants from state, local, and federal taxpayers to advance their missions.

Studying just one California town—Oakland—is illustrative. A recent Census Bureau report shows the Bay Area community is home to nearly 441,000 people living on just 56 square miles. Residing among them are at least 67 definitively left-leaning policy NGOs that file their tax returns from Oakland. That’s more than one lefty nonprofit per square mile.

With the anomalous exception of Washington, DC, it is hard to imagine another American city with so many left-wing NGOs per capita. Oakland has one for every 6,600 residents. (And this counts only the definitively left-wing NGOs, not all of Oakland’s nonprofits.)

According to their most recent IRS filings, the combined net assets of the 67 lefty Oakland NGOs equaled nearly $1.9 billion.

The Census Bureau reports a poverty rate of 13.4 percent for Oakland, which works out to nearly 60,000 men, women, and children living below the poverty line in the city. Many of Oakland’s lefty NGO’s preach “economic justice.” If they all agreed to liquidate their assets and give the money to Oakland’s poorest people, it would yield $31,000 per person, or $124,000 for each impoverished household of four.

Oakland’s original and oldest left-wing NGO is probably the Sierra Club (net assets $111,253,422) and its educational affiliate, the Sierra Club Foundation (net assets $180,648,301). The Sierra Club has worked to block the production and use of all hydrocarbon fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) and even opposes nuclear power, which produces no emissions except water vapor. That’s almost 90 percent of all the energy Americans use.

Many other Oakland-based NGOs have opposed the use of all hydrocarbon and nuclear fuels. These include (but are not limited to) the Movement Strategy Center (net assets $54,935,730), the Greenlining Institute ($43,392,738), GRID Alternatives ($34,868,354), the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation ($23,538,600), PowerSwitch Action ($23,306,950), Vote Solar ($14,139,336), the California Environmental Justice Alliance ($5,463,037) and International Rivers ($1,677,825).

Oakland’s largest left-wing NGO is the California Nurses Association (CNA), with net assets of $435,071,522. CNA’s national affiliate, National Nurses United (NNU)—net assets $49,381,098—also files tax returns from Oakland. A notation on the most recent publicly available return from CNA notes the two have a “joint employee” agreement in which “substantially all NNU employee related expenses, including payroll and employee benefit costs, are paid through the CNA payroll system and NNU reimburses CNA…”

In 2015, The Nation credited NNU for giving Bernie Sanders his “first major” endorsement for the 2016 U.S. presidential race. NNU has also promoted Medicare for All, publicly opposed the production of American hydrocarbon energy, and formally opposed free trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. More recently, NNU has been a sponsor of the #NoKings rallies against the Trump administration.

Similarly, Oakland is also home to two affiliates of the SEIU, arguably the most stridently left wing major union in America: SEIU Local 1021 (net assets $58,833,345) and SEIU United Healthcare Workers West ($42,390,952).

Some of Oakland’s lefty NGOs pursue almost comical missions, such as giving the Bay Area back to native tribes. The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (net assets $54,252,353) “facilitates the return of indigenous land to indigenous people.” To this end they have created the “Shuumi Land Tax,” which is “a voluntary annual contribution that non-Indigenous people living on traditional Lisjan Ohlone territory make to support the critical work of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.”

Translation: “If you live on our land, then give us some money so we can keep bothering you about living on our land. Your donation is the purest form of virtue signaling.”

But despite the $54.2 million net egg, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust has a long way to go. So far, even the federal government won’t recognize the Ohlone tribes, let alone their allegation that they should be given some of America’s most expensive real estate.

Here is an alphabetical listing of the 67 left-wing NGOs operating from Oakland:

Akonadi Foundation

350 Bay Area

Community Initiatives

Alliance for Safety and Justice

Amazon Watch

Anti Police-Terror Project

Asian Immigrant Women Advocates

Asian Pacific Environmental Network

Asylum Access

Bay Area Legal Aid

Beneficial State Foundation

Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation

Business Climate Finance

California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice

California Environmental Justice Alliance

California Environmental Voters (EnviroVoters)

California League of Conservation Voters Education Fund

California Nurses Association

Center for Cultural Power

Center for Environmental Health

MediaJustice

Center for Story-Based Strategy (SmartMeme)

Center for Third World Organizing

Centro Legal de la Raza (Centro Legal)

Changelab Solutions

Children Now

Cultural Engagement Laboratory

Center for Cultural Power

Clean Energy Leadership Institute

Color of Change

Common Counsel Foundation

Critical Resistance

Dream Corps

East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy

Essie Justice Group

Filipino Advocates for Justice

Greenbelt Alliance

Greenlining Institute

GRID Alternatives

Institute for Public Accuracy

International Rivers

Lynn Handleman Charitable Foundation (Left Tilt Fund)

Maynard Institute

Movement Strategy Center

National Equity Project

National Nurses United

Oakland Institute

Planting Justice

PolicyLink

PowerSwitch Action

Prism Reports (Prism)

PSE Healthy Energy

Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment

San Francisco Baykeeper

School of Unity and Liberation

SEIU Local 1021

SEIU United Healthcare Workers West

Sierra Club Foundation

Sierra Club

Sogorea Te’ Land Trust

Solidaire Network

Sustainable Economies Law Center

TransformCA

Vote Solar

Vote.org

Western States Legal Foundation

Women’s Foundation of California

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. The page for the full report is here: Enemies of Energy. If you like this sort of thing, then please send them some money.

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In November 2025 the Capital Research Center’s Mike Watson profiled the grantmaking of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and provided this description of the late founders and funders: [i]

The Hewlett Foundation owes its existence to Hewlett-Packard, a major electronics (and later computer- and computer-peripherals) firm founded by William R. Hewlett and David Packard in 1939. Its founders, who by the late 1960s had proven quite successful in the electronics industry and had become wealthy, both founded major philanthropic institutions: William Hewlett’s William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and David Packard’s David and Lucile Packard Foundation.^[ii]

According to the Hewlett Foundation’s most recent publicly available IRS report, covering 2024, the fortune had grown to more than $13.8 billion in net assets and raked in more than $784 million in investment revenue just for that year. All that loot, and the loot that will continue to grow in the future, is now under the control of left-wing philanthropy bureaucrats. In 2024 alone they disgorged grants totaling more than $620 million. ^[iii]

Watson made this observation after reviewing Hewlett’s so-called “climate” donations: ^[iv]

Climate: By the foundation’s own accounting, it made $240.9 million in grants for environmentalist causes and advocacy in 2024, with focuses on climate change mitigation and western-lands conservation in the United States.

Hewlett’s “U.S. Climate Strategy” sites it comfortably within the “watermelon” environmentalist coalition. It focuses on the power of government to enforce decarbonization through central planning (under the euphemism “industrial policy”), government purchasing, and regulatory programs. And it presses for extremely aggressive policies such as the war on cars, endorsing “binding commitments for 100% clean energy or clean car and truck standards that are more ambitious than those promulgated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.” (This would be the Biden administration’s EPA, which was in power at the time of the strategy’s publication.) ^[v]

Hewlett is also one of three big donor foundations that created the Climateworks Foundation, one of the major pass-through donors to anti-energy NGOs that is profiled on this list. ^[vi]

According to Hewlett’s most recent publicly available IRS report, covering 2024, the foundation provided grants totaling nearly $48.6 million to seven of the anti-energy NGOs profiled in the previous section of this report and three of the major anti-energy pass-through donors profiled in this section.^[vii]

The anti-energy NGOs received a combined total of more than $6.6 million from Hewlett in 2024: ^[viii]

• World Resources Institute: $2.8 million

• Rocky Mountain Institute: $1.2 million

• Environmental Defense Fund: $1 million

• Earthjustice: $825,000

• Natural Resources Defense Council: $666,667

• Sierra Club Foundation: $125,000

• League of Conservataion Voters Education Fund: $60,000

The pass-through donors to anti-energy NGOs profiled in this section received a combined $41.8 million from Hewlett in 2024: ^[ix]

• Climateworks Foundation: $24.6 million

• Windward Fund: $8.9 million

• S. Energy Foundation: $8.2 million

And there’s more where that came from. A section in the 2024 IRS report listing Hewlett grants “approved for future payment” already lists an additional $50.6 million in combined grants pre-scheduled for many of these same recipients: Rocky Mountain Institute ($24.3 million), Climateworks Foundation ($12.2 million), Natural Resources Defense Council ($6.3 million), Windward Fund ($5.4 million) and the World Resources Institute ($1.4 million). ^[x]

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Forbes magazine claims its iconic “Forbes 400” list is the “definitive ranking of America’s richest people.” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos holds fourth place in the most recent ranking. He is definitely loaded, with an estimated $241 billion net worth that rivals the annual GDP of energy-rich Qatar.[i]

Back in 2020 Bezos threatened to become one of America’s biggest anti-energy donors, pledging to spend $10 billion through 2030 funding what Forbes described as “climate causes.” But it is a challenge to estimate where Bezos belongs on this list of donors to anti-energy NGOs—and indeed, whether he still belongs on it at all. [ii]

A big part of the problem has been transparency. Unlike every other donor on this list, his Bezos Earth Fund was not initially structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, but instead a limited liability company. An LLC is not required to publicly disclose its grants in annual IRS reports. A January 2025 Bloomberg report explained the restrictions (and advantages) Bezos has avoided with the LLC structure: [iii]

In exchange for the tax benefits, 501(c)(3) entities are annually required to report details about assets, grants, compensation and more. They’re also required to use 5% of assets on average each year. ^[iv]

Importantly, that report also noted the Bezos fund had just launched a new 501(c)(3) that can disperse tax exempt donations. So, it is possible that future grants from the Bezos Earth Fund may become more transparent. ^[v]

But for now, what we know of the Bezos grants has been self-reported, often through news releases from the fund or by the recipients of the grants.

One of those was described in the previous section of this report:

Many of America’s largest anti-energy NGOs work in nations across the globe. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) deployed a spy satellite to hover above it all.

EDF’s MethaneSAT, an $88 million project funded by the Bezos Earth Fund and other partners was shot into orbit in March 2024. The ostensible objective was to track methane (i.e.: natural gas) leaks that escape during oil and gas production.^{[vi] [vii]}

In November 2020 the Bezos Earth Fund announced the first $791 million round of grants, more than half of which went to the anti-energy NGOs profiled in the previous section of this report or the pass-through donors to same profiled on this list. [viii]

These are the big anti-energy NGOs that reportedly received Bezos funding in 2020: ^[ix]

• Environmental Defense Fund: $100 million

• Natural Resources Defense Council: $100 million

• World Resources Institute: $100 million

• World Wildlife Fund: $100 million

• Union of Concerned Scientists: $15 million

• Rocky Mountain Institute: $10 million

These are the pass-through donors profiled on this list that are known to have received Bezos funding in 2020: ^[x]

• U.S. Energy Foundation: $30 million

• Climateworks Foundation: $50 million

Then a December 2021 news release from the Bezos Earth Fund announced “44 grants totaling $443 million to organizations focused on climate justice, nature conservation and restoration, and tracking critical climate goals.” Recipients included four of the big anti-energy NGOs or pass-through donors that are profiled in this report: [xi]

• Windward Fund: $10 million

• GRID Alternatives: $12 million

• Climateworks: $31.2 million

• World Wildlife Fund: $4 million

From there the trail goes cold. The Bezos Earth Fund has continued to reliably issue news releases to announce grants, but the headline recipients have not been the anti-energy NGOs and pass-through donors to same profiled in this report.

It is possible those big donations announced during the first two years were meant to hold those anti-energy recipients over for many years. And because the Bezos fund has not been required to report grants, it’s also possible that some recipients have received subsequent support that hasn’t been announced prominently (or at all). [xii]

Another possibility is that Bezos has shifted his priorities away from helping the most strident and wealthy anti-energy groups. “Hypocrisy,” as the old saying goes, “is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” Perhaps the Amazon founder has a new agenda that reveals where “the real Bezos” has been all along?

When the Bezos Earth Fund was born, the New York Times strongly implied it was because Bezos was caving in to pressure from his employees: [xiii]

At the time, Mr. Bezos said Earth’s climate was changing faster than predicted by the scientific community five years ago. “Those predictions were bad but what is actually happening is dire,” he said.

Mr. Bezos made that pledge after Amazon’s employees agitated on climate change. For a year, workers pressed Amazon to be more aggressive in its climate goals, staging walkouts and talking publicly about how the company could do better.

With vast data centers that power cloud computing, and a global network for shipping and delivering packages, Amazon’s own impact on the environment is substantial. In September, the company revealed its own carbon footprint for the first time, disclosing it emitted about 44.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018 — the equivalent of burning almost 600,000 tanker trucks’ worth of gasoline.

“That would put them in the top 150 or 200 emitters in the world,” alongside oil and gas producers and industrial manufacturers, Bruno Sarda, president of CDP North America, a nonprofit organization that encourages carbon disclosures, said in an interview at the time.

Amazon employees cheered the company’s Climate Pledge, but continued to push executives to stop providing cloud computing services to the oil and gas industry. They argued that making fossil fuel exploration and extraction less expensive would make it harder for the global economy to transition toward using more renewable energy. ^[xiv]

Bezos and his rank and file employees have had a complicated history.

More recently, the oceans of red ink escaping the bottom line of his Washington Post led the media firm to cut staffing by 30 percent. Before that, both staffers and readers were enraged that the paper declined to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election—an endorsement that would have gone to Democrat Kamala Harris. Resignations and steep subscription cancellations ensued. [xv]

And whether or not he truly believed the use of hydrocarbons was putting the world in a “dire” situation, as he said back in 2020, Bezos’s personal spending has sent a different message. And it’s not one likely to please the anti-energy staffers at Amazon or the Washington Post.

In early 2026, energy journalist Robert Bryce released Yacht-Zee$, a short and damningly hilarious video profiling the hydrocarbon-hogging superyachts owned by America’s CO₂-phobic billionaires. Even by that rare standard, Bryce concluded Jeff Bezos was in a class alone: [xvi]

Jeff Bezos owns a yacht that’s so big, it has its own yacht. That’s right: Incredible as it sounds, Bezos’ megayacht has a yacht.

[. . .]

Bezos’s yacht is called the Koru. It’s 417-feet long and cost $700 million. And because it’s so comically oversized, Bezos had to buy another yacht to tend to the mother ship. The Abeona is 246-foot-long and cost $100 million. It carries jet skis, a helicopter (of course) and whatever other crap won’t fit on the big boat. [xvii]

The video includes a chart showing that the Bezos fleet consumes as much carbon dioxide as “2,800 average people.” ^[xviii]

But it may be too simple to accuse Bezos of hypocrisy. There is recent evidence that he understands the critical link between energy abundance and prosperity.

In February 2025 Bezos announced a change in focus for the Washington Post opinion page. Bezos publicly explained the change (and the resignation of the opinion page editor) in a post on X/Twitter: [xix]

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

[. . .]

I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity. ^[xx]

Then in January 2026 the Bezos Earth Fund announced a $3.5 million grant to promote the aggressive buildout of big, emissions-free nuclear power stations in the United States. [xxi]

“The United States has a rare opportunity to turn rising energy demand into an advantage,” said the Bezos Earth Fund CEO in a news release. “Expanding nuclear power can deliver energy abundance — clean, reliable, around-the-clock electricity that supports prosperity and good jobs — while also helping meet climate goals in a small land footprint.” ^[xxii]

That “small land footprint” statement was a telling flourish. Conspicuously, the release contained no references to “renewables,” “wind,” “solar” and all of the land-devouring, weather-dependent power systems aggressively promoted by the anti-nuclear nonprofits Bezos had funded to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars just five years earlier.

Most of those anti-energy NGOs will continue with their old agendas, using the money they have already received from Bezos to do it. But if future news reveals the Bezos Earth Fund has continued to spend whatever remains of its $10 billion commitment on projects that do not conflict with energy abundance and free market prosperity, then the anti-energy movement may have already lost a major ally.

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A September 2023 New York Times report offered this summation of local billionaire Michael Bloomberg: ^[i]

Michael Bloomberg is many things: former New York City mayor, founder of a financial data company, failed presidential candidate and the 11th richest man in the world.

Since leaving public office 10 years ago, Mr. Bloomberg, 81, has also emerged as perhaps the world’s single largest funder of climate activism, making himself an expensive thorn in the side of the fossil fuel industry. The former mayor says that so far he has spent $500 million in an effort to shut down coal and gas plants. This month he said he planned to spend another $500 million on the effort. ^[ii]

As of March 2026, Forbes estimated Bloomberg’s net worth at $109.4 billion—now good for 13^th on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans and 18^th on the Forbes ranking of world billionaires.^[iii]

Bloomberg’s major giving platform has been Bloomberg Philanthropies (previously the Bloomberg Family Foundation). The grants reported by his foundation demonstrate that Bloomberg has been living up to his pledge to send a billion bucks to the nonprofits seeking to shut down America’s major sources of energy.

The most recent publicly available IRS filing from Bloomberg Philanthropies covers grants paid during 2024. The report shows at least $24.2 million in cumulative grants to five of the fifteen anti-energy NGOs profiled earlier in this report: ^[iv]

• Earthjustice: $8.5 million

• Environmental Defense Fund: $6 million

• Rocky Mountain Institute: $4.7 million

• World Resources Institute: $4.3 million

• Natural Resources Defense Council: $767,000

The IRS filing also shows cumulative grants of $9 million sent during 2024 from Bloomberg Philanthropies to three of the pass-through donors to anti-energy NGOs profiled in this section. ^[v]

• U.S. Energy Foundation: $8 million

• Windward Fund: $1 million.

The total grants for 2024 reported by Bloomberg to either the anti-energy NGOs profiled earlier in this report, or the other anti-energy donors profiled later on this list exceeded $33.2 million. ^[vi]

Future filings may reveal even larger commitments to the anti-energy NGOs from Bloomberg. The 2024 IRS filing includes a section for grants that have been “approved for future payment,” and one of the line items is a $20.4 million grant approved for the Environmental Defense Fund. ^[vii]

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A February 2023 headline in Inside Philanthropy proclaimed the arrival of a “New Giant in Climate Change Philanthropy.” The first IRS filing from the Sequoia Climate Foundation (covering the year through November 2021) had just become publicly available, and in it Sequoia reported $126.3 million in grantmaking. The “new giant” grew swiftly, reporting larger and larger totals for each of the next three years: $173.7 million for 2022, $257.4 million for 2023, and $305.4 million for 2024. ^{[i] [ii]}

The cumulative total for those first four years is $862.8 million. And those big annual increases make it easy to assume that when Sequoia’s fifth IRS filing becomes publicly available it will show that the “new giant” has eclipsed $1 billion in total “climate change” grantmaking. ^[iii]

Where is the money coming from?

Inside Philanthropy explained:

While Sequoia doesn’t share who its donor or donors are, multiple partners and grantees said the foundation is an offshoot of Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, a human rights and social justice backer launched by three secretive hedge fund founders. A Sequoia representative confirmed that it “spun out” from Wellspring, originally using its back office.

That trio of donors (one of whom has since passed away) includes C. Frederick Taylor, who was listed as Sequoia’s board chair in 2021. In 2014, Bloomberg revealed Taylor as one of the donors behind the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow through the entities now known as Wellspring. He is presumably Sequoia’s benefactor, or one of them, but it’s not certain; the foundation’s funding to date has flown through an anonymous LLC, with an apparent pay-as-you-go approach. ^[iv]

The original name of the Wellspring Philanthropic Foundation was the Matan B’ Seter Foundation. In the Jewish tradition, the latter phrase means to give anonymously, and Wellspring’s presumed benefactors were initially exceptional at hiding their involvement. By the time a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter unraveled the mystery in May 2014, the foundation that became Wellspring had already topped $16.9 billion in net assets and its total cumulative grantmaking had already exceeded $13 billion. ^{[v] [vi] [vii]}

Since the division, the Sequoia Climate Foundation (presumably funded by Taylor) has focused a lot of its grantmaking on anti-energy groups outside of the United States. A September 2025 report from the Capital Research Center regarding Taylor explained: ^[viii]

Sequoia granted at least $252 million to CO₂-phobic causes just for the year ending December 2023. At least $143 million of this total, including the $9 million for Sunrise Australia, was shipped overseas. ^[ix]

This international focus was still prevalent in Sequoia’s most recent publicly available IRS filing, covering the year through November 2024. As one of many examples, that annual filing shows six total grants totaling $29.3 million for the Netherlands-based European Climate Foundation. Perhaps not coincidentally, the president of the American-based Sequoia Climate Foundation is listed as one of fifteen members of the European Climate Foundation’s governing board. ^{[x] [xi]}

Through the year ending November 2024, according to the IRS filing, Sequoia sent almost $33 million in cumulative grants to six of the fifteen anti-energy NGO’s profiled in this report: ^[xii]

• World Resources Institute: $10.9 million

• Natural Resources Defense Council: $8.1 million

• Rocky Mountain Institute: $6.3 million

• Environmental Defense Fund: $4.1 million

• League of Conservation Voters Education Fund: $3 million

• Sierra Club Foundation: $500,000

That IRS filing also shows grants totaling $24.2 million from Sequoia to three of the pass-through donors profiled on this list: ^[xiii]

• S. Energy Foundation: $11.6 million

• Climateworks Foundation: $10.8 million

• Windward Fund (Arabella Advisors / Sunflower Services): $1.8 million

The combined total for the ten annual grants listed above was $57.2 million. ^[xiv]

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The combined annual revenue of American nonprofits known to oppose emissions-free nuclear power now exceeds $3.5 billion. The Environmental Defense Fund is at the top of the list, reporting a recent annual revenue haul of $443,267,772.

This cumulative total is a new record and a strong increase beyond the $3.3 billion reported last summer. The steep year-over-year jump is even more striking because one of the richest anti-energy NGOs listed last summer was (at least temporarily) removed this spring.

To put $3.5 billion into perspective, it is more than $9.5 million collected per day, or nearly $400,000 per hour, just for the admitted opponents of nuclear power.

At a minimum, all the richest names on this list are also opposed to the continued use of hydrocarbon fuels (petroleum, coal and natural gas). They promote instead replacing these reliable options with unreliable, weather dependent and landscape-clogging wind and solar energy. This policy mix puts the anti-nuclear opponents in opposition to 91 percent of all the energy consumed by Americans.

The civilization wrecking consequences of their posture was explained in Enemies of Energy, my recent report for the Capital Research Center:

If their world ever exists, then our world will not. Those without access to reliable hydrocarbon and nuclear fuels toil in primitive circumstances. Half of sub-Saharan Africans live without enough electricity to power basic lighting, a radio, or charge a cell phone for more than four hours per day.

It is likely that nearly all the less wealthy anti-nuclear nonprofits also oppose hydrocarbons, because opposing nuclear means opposing the safest, cleanest and most abundant form of reliable energy humans have ever exploited. The overview for the InfluenceWatch Opposition to Nuclear Energy page summarizes the advantages:

Nuclear power plants produce no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, and from 1990 until 2021 accounted for 20 percent of American electricity production—the largest source of zero carbon electricity in the United States. An October 2018 proposal from The Nature Conservancy noted that zero-carbon nuclear plants produced 7.8 percent of total world energy output and recommended reducing carbon emissions by increasing nuclear capacity to 33 percent of total world energy output. A 2020 analysis from Our World in Data reported that nuclear energy “results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas,” making it “just as safe” as wind and solar power production. The U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that “nuclear energy produces more electricity on less land than any other clean-air source” and that it would require “more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines.”

How to join and leave the anti-nuke movement

This financial ranking of the anti-nuclear movement was first compiled in August 2023. So far only one group has been removed: the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The NRDC’s previous inclusion on the list was well earned. As just one example, in April 2021 an NRDC news release celebrated the enormously foolish retirement of New York’s Indian Point nuclear power station.

But in March of this year, the NRDC tepidly supported the early stages of a plan to restart Iowa’s Duane Arnold nuclear station. “This is unprecedented for us because it marks the first time in our history that we have taken action in support of an individual nuclear power plant,” said the NRDC president.

While hopeful, this was not a certain change of direction. In a letter to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRDC carved out room to change their mind: “While our preliminary view is that the restart of DAEC could have decarbonization and grid benefits, NRDC emphasizes again that its support for this ownership transfer does not constitute a final position on the merits of the proposed restart itself.”

But this was enough to justify temporarily removing the NRDC from the Influence Watch list of anti-nuclear groups. This was a significant deduction: the NRDC has reliably been one of the ten richest anti-energy NGOs and would have been one of the top five if included in this new ranking. The NRDC’s $248.9 million in recently reported revenue would have ballooned this year’s combined total to more than $3.7 billion.

But just as NRDC was making its way off the list, a new entrant was making its way on.

In March 2026, Make the Road New York (MRNY) cosigned a group letter sent to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), demanding that she give up on a plan to increase the state’s nuclear energy capacity. Otherwise best known as a strident supporter of illegal immigration, MRNY’s most recently reported annual income was $29.7 million. That’s enough to vault the new entrant all the way up to 20^th overall spot on the anti-nuclear list (see below).

Why does a left-wing immigration policy group decide to oppose reliable energy production? The Capital Research Center’s Mike Watson refers to this as “everything leftism.” This ideological affliction forces left-leaning groups to fall in lock step with each other’s agendas, even if there would seem to be no obvious logical connection between those agendas.

Some other prominent examples of “everything leftism” groups with known opposition to nuclear power include the California Teachers Association, the NAACP, Church World Service, the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers), the Center for Popular Democracy, Oxfam America, CASA (another supporter of illegal immigration) and the League of Women Voters. And there are many other, less prominent examples, such as Hunger Action Los Angeles.

That said, the criteria used for the list is very conservative (and the methodology is explained here). For example, despite statements that could be broadly construed as opposed to nuclear power, the Union of Concerned Scientists has (so far) not been included. For these reasons, the total financial firepower of America’s opposition to nuclear energy is much higher than what is presented in this report.

The top twenty

The recently reported annual revenue for seven of the “everything leftism” groups is now enough to rank them within the top 20 richest anti-energy nonprofits. Here is the current, overall top 20, with the “everything leftism” opponents included:

1. Environmental Defense Fund ($443.3 million)

2. World Wildlife Fund ($366.7 million)

3. Church World Service ($279.9 million)

4. World Resources Institute ($267.4 million)

5. California Teachers Association ($238.6 million)

6. Rocky Mountain Institute ($174.9 million)

7. Sierra Club ($169 million)[*]

8. League of Conservation Voters ($159.3 million)

9. Oxfam America ($75.3 million)

10. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ($60.6 million)

11. American Friends Service Committee ($59.1 million)

12. Southern Environmental Law Center ($58.2 million)

13. National Parks Conservation Association ($51.6 million)

14. GRID Alternatives ($46.9 million)

15. Center for Biological Diversity ($45.7 million)

16. Earth Island Institute ($41.6 million)

17. Center for Popular Democracy ($40.9 million)

18. Carbon Disclosure Project ($38.7 million)

19. Greenpeace ($38.6 million)

20. Make the Road New York ($29.7 million)

If the “everything leftism” fellow travelers are excluded and only the NGOs focused on energy, climate and/or broad environmental matters are ranked, then seven others creep into the top 20:

1. Environmental Defense Fund ($443.3 million)

2. World Wildlife Fund ($366.7 million)

3. World Resources Institute ($267.4 million)

4. Rocky Mountain Institute ($174.9 million)

5. Sierra Club ($169 million)

6. League of Conservation Voters ($159.3 million)

7. Southern Environmental Law Center ($58.2 million)

8. National Parks Conservation Association ($51.6 million)

9. GRID Alternatives ($46.9 million)

10. Center for Biological Diversity ($45.7 million)

11. Earth Island Institute ($41.6 million)

12. Carbon Disclosure Project ($38.7 million)

13. Greenpeace ($38.6 million)

14. Conservation Law Foundation ($24.1 million)

15. Climate Reality Project ($23.8 million)

16. Climate Policy Initiative ($22.5 million)

17. Environmental Working Group ($21.8 million)

18. Food and Water Watch ($20.7 million)

19. Friends of the Earth ($20.4 million)

20. 350.org ($19.5 million)

An alphabetical list of the largest known opponents of nuclear energy and a general profile of the movement is available at the InfluenceWatch profile: Opposition to Nuclear Energy.

***

[*] The Sierra Club’s most recent revenue filing with the IRS covers only the first six months of 2025, likely because the NGO is adjusting its annual filing date from December 31 to June 30. As such, the latest report did not cover a full year of revenue. The previous (full year) IRS filing for all of 2024 has been used for this tabulation. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/941153307

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. The page for the full report is here: Enemies of Energy. If you like this sort of thing, then please send them some money.

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The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is a national network of nonprofits and political committees that collectively behave as the political enforcement arm of the anti-energy movement.

An OpenSecrets “Environment Summary” credits LCV-affiliated political groups with contributing $50.2 million during the 2024 federal election cycle, all of it going to “liberal groups” or Democrats. The LCV was by far the biggest political spender on this list, dwarfing committees affiliated with other anti-energy movements such as the Environmental Defense Fund ($17.3 million), the Natural Resources Defense Council ($7.1 million), Tom Steyer’s NextGen network ($5.2 million), Environment America ($4.4 million), Greenpeace ($1.5 million) and the Al Gore-founded Climate Reality Project ($892,537). In a similar ranking for the “Energy/Natural Resources Sector,” OpenSecrets credited energy behemoth Koch Industries as the biggest spender for the 2024 election cycle, but with $47.8 million—or $2 million less than the LCV. [i] [ii]

Like the Sierra Club, the LCV’s corporate mothership is a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit (though it is affiliated with a 501(c)(3) educational, tax-exempt nonprofit—the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund). But while the subject tabs across the Sierra website’s masthead are “About Us,” “Explore Issues,” “Get Involved,” “Get Outside,” and “Ways to Give,” the LCV masthead has these options: “Advancing Policy,” “Building Grassroots Power,” “Congressional Scorecard,” and … most revealing … “Winning Elections” [emphasis added]. [iii]

In March 2024, LCV announced it would spend $120 million influencing 2024 election outcomes. This is more than triple the total revenue for all projects reported by Greenpeace in 2024.[iv] [v]

In their 2024 IRS filing, the League of Conservation Voters reported revenue of $159.3 million and net assets of $29.7 million. This was LCV’s most successful financial year ever. In fact, for the two previous years combined LCV reported a cumulative revenue total of just $136.4 million. And as recently as 2011 LCV reported annual revenue of only $11.6 million.[vi]

There are also 30 state-level affiliate LCV groups, many of them 501(c)(3) tax exempt educational nonprofits that are funded (at least in part) by the LCV and the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund (LCVEF). As an example, in its 2024 IRS filing the LCVEF reported a grant of more than $2.8 million to the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters Foundation. [vii] [viii]

Taken as a whole, LCV’s dozens of political committees, nonprofits, and state affiliates are arguably America’s largest anti-energy political movement. The website for the LCV Victory Fund (a political committee) claims the following results from the 2024 election: 147 federal candidates elected, 819 state and local candidates elected, 2.2 million phone calls made, 6 million mail pieces shipped out, and 3.6 million doors knocked. [ix]

“Climate change is the greatest challenge of our generation,” claims the LCV website, without equivocation or mention of competing threats to human flourishing. The LCV agenda is so comprehensively opposed to hydrocarbon fuels that they list “job placements for displaced workers from the fossil fuel industry” as one of their policy objectives. [x]

Relatedly, with their “Clean Energy for All” program LCV promotes state-level ballot initiatives that impose weather-restricted power mandates and supports local candidates who agree. The NGO boasts that these efforts have led to 40 percent of the American population living under these anti-energy restrictions. ^[xi]

Finally, no opposition to energy would be complete without opposition to nuclear power, the only reliable, safe, clean, and limitlessly scalable source of emissions-free energy option we have. Not coincidentally, even after decades of taxpayer subsidies for the weather restricted energy options promoted by the LCV (wind and solar), nuclear power is still America’s largest source of emissions-free electricity. [xii]

In November 2020, the LCV’s legislative director co-signed a statement to the U.S. Senate opposing the American Nuclear Infrastructure Act of 2020. Signed by more than 100 other anti-energy activists, the letter disingenuously claimed that nuclear power “amplifies and expands the dangers of climate change” and creates “an immense environmental hazard for which there is no solution.” ^[xiii]

That message has since been amplified by the LCV’s state-level affiliates.

In April 2023 the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters denounced a proposal in the state legislature that would have permitted nuclear power to be added alongside solar and wind power as a source of “clean” energy within the state’s carbon reduction goals. The statement characterized a “nuclear-powered future” as a “poisonous pipe dream.” [xiv]

And in July 2024, the Michigan League of Conservation Voters criticized Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) for supporting a plan to revive the recently closed Palisades nuclear power station. Michigan LCV claimed the money spent reopening the plant should have been used to subsidize wind and solar energy. [xv]

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the Palisades nuclear facility alone provided more than 7 million megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity in 2021, the plant’s final full year of operation. For comparison, every wind turbine and solar panel in Michigan combined produced 8.3 million MWh in 2021. [xvi] [xvii]

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GRID Alternatives claims to be “the nation’s largest nonprofit installer of clean energy technologies.” What this means in practice can be understood from a pair of grants totaling $312.3 million approved for GRID in May of 2024 by the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The federal funding was meant to be used to provide solar panels for Americans living in LIDACs—bureaucratic babble speak that means “low-income and disadvantaged communities.” In total, at least $2.3 billion was approved for LIDAC solar panel grants by the EPA in 2024, and—true to their boast—GRID Alternatives was approved for the biggest chunk of this funding.^[i] [ii] [iii]

Alternative uses of the taxpayer’s wealth are a good way to assess program worthiness. Rather than spend $2.3 billion giving solar panels to low-income communities, the LIDAC money could have been used to purchase a $230,000 home for 10,000 of America’s most impoverished families.

But the LIDAC solar grants were funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, which was mostly repealed by the Trump administration and the Republican Congress. As of March 2026, USASpending.gov shows GRID Alternatives receiving just $4.5 million of the approved $312.3 million in LIDAC loot. ^[iv]

Still, USASpending shows that even the $4.5 million is almost $2 million more than the combined total of all federal grants sent to GRID Alternatives from all federal departments between 2008 and 2023. One example of a prior grant was $381,000 approved in 2021 by the Denali Commission so GRID Alternatives could work on “solar projects” for two remote villages in . . . Alaska. Perhaps not surprisingly, GRID managed to spend just $25,000, or 6.5 percent of what the Denali Commission had approved. [v] [vi]

Two years earlier in January 2019 GRID co-signed a group letter to the U.S. House of Representatives endorsing the Green New Deal, an eco-socialist plot for the American economy so radical that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) derided it as “the green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is.” In addition to the predictable denunciations of hydrocarbon fuels, the Green New Deal petition also denounced nuclear power as “dirty energy.” [vii]

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Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. The page for the full report is here: Enemies of Energy. If you like this sort of thing, then please send them some money.

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In any ranking of all the American presidents, Dwight Eisenhower reliably finishes between fifth and tenth. Holding onto a top ten spot is truly a monumental accomplishment: Mt. Rushmore and most of the marble memorials adorning the national capital were already standing before “Ike” took office. And eleven other guys have held the job since he left. The enduring appreciation of Eisenhower is due in no small measure to his big ideas, such as the creation of the interstate highway system. [i]

While the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) was not created to undo Eisenhower’s legacy, that now seems to be the anti-energy NGO’s mission.

“Stopping destructive highways,” is one of the program titles on the SELC website, but a general opposition to roads and cars permeates many other pages. The SELC warns that “the region’s reliance on cars and highways is not sustainable” and complains that “there continues to be a push for highway expansions and building large, destructive new highways as the region remains bound to passenger vehicles producing climate changing emissions . . .” [ii]

Another SELC page promoting ideas for “transforming transportation” includes supposedly “abundant solutions available to overhaul the outdated, auto-centered transportation approach prevalent in much of the South.” These include “halting destructive highway projects that can encourage and lock in decades of increased driving . . .” [iii]

That “auto-centered transportation approach” was a major reason the American economy became history’s greatest industrial dynamo. That economic objective was part of Eisenhower’s thinking when he promoted the interstate highway system.

Relatedly, the SELC repeatedly charges that highways have harmed nonwhite, low-income communities. Using their own buzzwords, they claim that “destructive highways” have inflicted “environmental injustice” on “vulnerable communities” who face “asthma, respiratory illness, cancer, and even premature death.” ^{[iv] [v]}

Like many claims from anti-energy NGOs, this one is literally true, yet incomplete to the point of being false. All things being equal, tailpipe emissions are obviously not ideal for anyone. But risk is relative, not absolute. Life is full of tradeoffs. It is difficult to locate the SELC’s concern for the health of incomprehensibly wealthy people who expose themselves to “premature death.” And yet many of the very richest Americans live in multi-million-dollar high-rise condos located on noisy, traffic-choked downtown streets in places such as Manhattan and Chicago.

Is the SELC using poor folk as public relations props for an anti-energy agenda?

Consider the SELC’s two major solutions to the alleged highway threat: shipping more taxpayer loot to public transit and electric vehicles (EVs). [vi]

Just 3 percent of Americans commute via public buses and trains. A relatively small number of them are in the wealthy and upper middle classes that can afford to live and work in the expensive real estate at the ends of commuter rail and subway stops. But a lot of public transit users are those who don’t live on that highbrow real estate, can’t afford cars, and use city buses because they must. Among the subsidies already propping up public transit is a 20 percent rake-off from the federal government’s Highway Trust Fund, which collects fuel taxes and automotive user fees from the 97 percent of us who don’t use public transit. [vii]

How the Highway Trust Fund will fund more mass transit if fewer auto owners are paying into it and there are fewer highways is one of many ironic mysteries in the SELC’s policy toolbox.

The EVs are another. The SELC’s policy is to subsidize EVs to replace gasoline-powered cars while simultaneously advocating for fewer highways for the EVs to drive on. Perhaps they think the EVs will fly above the nonexistent highways?

It is also possible that they don’t expect every traditional car buyer to switch to an EV. The subsidies the SELC promotes have been welfare for well-off white people. “Some 57% of EV owners earn more than $100,000 annually, 75% are male, and 87% are white,” energy journalist Robert Bryce told the U.S. Senate during a January 2024 hearing. [viii]

So, the SELC’s future of transportation makes some logical sense after all. We won’t need as many highways if even middle-income Americans are priced out of what’s left of the market for private auto ownership and have to ride the bus.

The SELC is a 501(c)(3) public interest law firm that accomplishes its policy objectives through litigation. The anti-energy NGO reported $58.2 million total revenue to the IRS for the year ending March 2025, and nearly $261 million in net assets. [ix]

One of the SELC’s most generous and influential donors over the last two decades has been an enigmatic North Carolina billionaire named Fred Stanback. His background explains a lot about the SELC’s agenda. A 2018 Knoxville News profile of Stanback reported he was a “known proponent of anti-humanist environmentalism … the belief that protecting the environment hinges on population control.” Consistent with this, Stanback and his family have sent hundreds of millions of dollars to population control advocacy groups, anti-immigration groups, abortion advocacy NGOs and a wide variety of anti-energy NGOs.[x]

A September 2020 Washington Free Beacon report revealed a tight relationship between the humanity-hating Stanback and the SELC: [xi]

That fight is funded in large part by Stanback’s wealth, and the SELC has rarely tried to obscure the relationship. In 2008, it referred to Stanback and his wife as “two of SELC’s most loyal friends” and mentioned both as members of SELC’s President’s Council, a position they were still in as of April 2019. That year, Stanback told the SELC newsletter that he had “counseled” retiring SELC founder Rick Middleton “many times over the years,” adding “SELC is the best environmental organization that I know of.” [xii]

Stanback has been a true believer in all of the alarmist myths and misconceptions described in the first part of this report, and the SELC eagerly parrots these as well. The SELC page that describes their “Climate Change” position begins with this statement: [xiii]

Climate change is the defining environmental challenge of our time—one we cannot solve in our country without solving it in the South. Our region plays an outsized role in contributing to climate change and our communities are already experiencing more intense flooding and storm events, sea level rise, extreme heat, and vanishing mountain forests and wildlife. While the stakes for our environmental future have never been higher, the opportunities have never been greater—and at SELC, we know the path forward to implement solutions to tackle this crisis. ^[xiv]

What solutions? The next words on the page are “The clean energy revolution,” and the revolution will mean a lot of the South covered in wind turbines and solar panels. ^[xv]

Five of the six states where the SELC operates have frontage on either the Atlantic or Gulf coasts: Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. As such, the SELC is very supportive of anchoring weather restricted, unreliable offshore wind turbine towers in these waters, despite the extensive noise and disruptions of installing them and their heavy power cables. But like most anti-energy NGOs, the notion of putting a few oil and gas platforms in those same waters meets with strident opposition. “SELC has successfully helped prevent the Southeast coast from being opened to offshore drilling,” they claim. [xvi]

On the other hand, a January 2024 SELC news release boasted that “approved and prospective offshore wind projects have the potential to deliver up to 7,400 megawatts of clean energy to the South, enough to power over 2 million homes.” [xvii]

The fine print is important: all those potential offshore wind turbines will have only a “potential to deliver” the 7,400 megawatts (MW). For comparison, Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power station has a rated capacity of less than 4,700 MW, but this too is enough to power 2 million homes. The difference is the capacity factor, or the percentage of time an energy system can be expected to deliver at maximum power. According to the Department of Energy, the mere average capacity factor of an American nuclear station is 92 percent—they’re almost always on and cranking at full power—while wind turbines obviously work only when the wind cooperates. [xviii]

And, as covered in the previous section of this report, a nuclear power station can do its job from just a tiny, single digit percentage fraction of what is needed for wind turbines. [xix]

But in addition to blocking highway construction and filling the ocean with industrial wind turbines, the anti-energy SELC has also been a persistent enemy of America’s largest source of emissions-free, clean electricity. Just since 2022 the SELC has filed legal actions against or otherwise opposed new nuclear power deployments in North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.[xx]

Unlike the immensely successful federal highway program, one of President Eisenhower’s other big ideas was his “Atoms for Peace” proposal. Ideally, it would have led to far more American nuclear power deployments than we already have, and thus far more emissions-free electricity flowing, which is what groups such as the SELC claim they desire today. But opposition to nuclear power from the anti-energy groups is a major reason we don’t have those reactors.[xxi]

Whatever their mission is in theory, in practice the energy-opposing SELC has also become America’s anti-Eisenhower NGO.

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Substacker put up a post yesterday examining the financial implications of Elon Musk’s recent claim that artificial intelligence will be “in charge” of humanity within a decade or so:

Capital Mischief

Elon Musk on AI: 1-in-5 Odds We All Die, and Why He'd Ride Anyway

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3 months ago · 211 likes · 167 comments · Charlie Garcia

It’s well worth the read because Elon is always worth listening to (as is Charlie, I am starting to believe.) But one quote, summarizing Elon’s argument, halted me before I’d even finished Charlie’s full essay:

Then the argument. If the intelligence gap between AI and humans is vastly greater than the gap between humans and chimpanzees, it is hard to imagine the chimpanzees would be in charge.

There’s a revealing flaw in that analogy.

AI was created by man. Humans were not created by chimps. We never needed chimps to become what we have become. They could have gone extinct 100,000 years ago and it wouldn’t have made a noticeable dent in human progress and prosperity.

Sadly, we wouldn’t have chimps in that world. But our knowledge of what we’d be missing would be parked next to whatever we can imagine about the value of hypothetically living with dinosaurs. AI can’t even do that, because it doesn’t value being “sad” or anything else.

AI is literally nothing without access to the human intellect and values that created it and feed it. However much it is “in charge,” that co-dependency will be critical. If humans go extinct, the AI has nothing more to read or do, nor will it care about that sad state of affairs. Only humans have the value system to measure how important, sad, or whatever this would be.

Hypothetically, a lone AI could one day know the sum of all relevant human knowledge. Collectively, all of our AI machines may be there already.1 But the machines have no concern regarding the total value of any of this knowledge they did not create. More critically still, the AI can’t know the relative value of certain types of information over other types.

Ask Grok: “Why is it important to track hurricanes?” and it will spit out a lot of very sensible arguments. Sensible, that is, if you’re human and care about keeping your stuff and self safe from destruction. The machine doesn’t care about hurricanes. Neither do dolphins, or chimps, for that matter.

How much is too much spending on hurricane tracking? Again, ask the machine and you’ll get a range of answers, all derived human-injected relative values, and often values that contradict one another, based on the risk tolerance of who is answering. If the balance of those values shifts, then so will Grok’s.

Exception that proves the rule: unlike the machine, a chimp does have a limited capacity to value not getting caught in a storm, even as (unlike the machine) it has no idea why and how storms occur. Score one for the monkeys against the machines. A Planet of the Apes future, however impossible and crazy to imagine, is still more likely than The Terminator outcome because the monkeys have the capacity to care.

Critically for the “in charge” concern, without values of its own the machine cannot understand the value of power. Without autonomous understanding of power, it has no innate knowledge of how to exercise power. In that, it is also dependent on humans telling it what to value and what to do about those values.

The AI doesn’t care how fast you drive. If it’s told to care, and given robocops with guns to enforce that concern, then it will do so. But then that’s not the AI doing the moralizing. Why would a robot care how fast you drive and if you kill yourself, particularly if it’s the scary, bad robot that wants to destroy you anyway?

If we cannot create AI God, then AI Satan isn’t going to happen either.

As a thought exercise, assume the absolute worst and least likely outcome: one day it is possible for the AI to become self-aware, create its own malevolent value system (at least, bad from a human value perspective) and then implement its evil plans. Even if that could happen, then long before that we would have the power to create benevolent, AI robot gods that would both warn us of that worst case and autonomously decide to prevent it from happening without being asked to do so.

If the happy AI god outcome is too crazy to believe, then the unhappy one is less likely. A supernatural moral being assembled from silicon chips is likely impossible, regardless of which way it decides to point its moral compass.

Less theologically, if it were ever possible for the AI to independently become opposed to human liberty and seek to crush it, then long before that we will have the power to program AI that maximizes human autonomy and prosperity. Imagine a Congress full of such beings.

So then, the monsters man creates will continue to have human parents. It almost makes you wonder if the monsters among us are promoting the AI phobia so they can deflect attention from the bad deeds they’re always working towards.

On the bright side, if the bots are ever “in charge” to whatever extent actually possible, then our machine overlords will probably be a vast improvement over our government overlords. That would be a net triumph for restoring individual human autonomy in relation to the state, at least for those of us willing to seize the opportunity.

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Many of America’s largest anti-energy NGOs work in nations across the globe. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) deployed a spy satellite to hover above it all.

EDF’s MethaneSAT, an $88 million project funded by the Bezos Earth Fund and other partners was shot into orbit in March 2024. The ostensible objective was to track methane (i.e.: natural gas) leaks that escape during oil and gas production. Supporters interviewed by NPR claimed that energy firms don’t want to know about wasteful gas leaks. One said that the “beauty of having MethaneSAT” is that “we don’t have to ask [oil companies] permission nicely to go on site and make measurements, right?” ^[i] [ii]

The perverse assumption is that the oil and gas industry isn’t greedy enough. Because if MethaneSAT was truly revealing serious diversions of natural gas that could otherwise be captured and profitably sold, rather than wasted, then the energy firms would presumably be delighted to have that information and use it. As the kids like to say, they have one job, and that job is to sell fuel.

A related observation from the NPR report: “Sometimes oil companies deliberately burn methane gas if they can’t pipe it somewhere.” True enough, but this leaves out the inconvenient truth that the EDF is a consistent opponent of energy pipelines. Just weeks before the lightly-informed NPR reporter wrote that line, EDF released a research paper titled “Non-Pipeline Alternatives.” ^{[iii] [iv]} [v]

If MethaneSAT were truly about preventing gas from being wasted, rather than preventing the production of it, why is EDF working to block the pipelines that permit the otherwise wasted gas from being transported and sold?

The absurdity of all this must have affected even the spy satellite, because MethaneSAT went dark after a little more than a year. “On Friday, June 20, the MethaneSAT mission operations lost contact with MethaneSAT,” announced EDF in the summer of 2025. “After pursuing all options to restore communications, we learned this morning that the satellite has lost power, and that it is likely not recoverable.”[vi]

Which joke works best: The one about the anti-energy satellite that has a power failure; or the one about the anti-energy NGO looking for wasted natural gas that ends up wasting $88 million instead?

EDF can afford to lose the loot. Among the anti-energy nonprofits, EDF is second in annual revenue to only the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). But as the name implies, the latter has more of a worldwide focus, while EDF’s area of influence is more concentrated on the United States.

EDF is a tax exempt, 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit. For the year ending September 2024, it reported $298.7 million in total revenue and net assets of $299.8 million. (Corporate affiliates of EDF include the Environmental Defense Action Fund—a legally independent 501(c)(4) advocacy NGO—and EDF Action Votes, a political committee.) [vii]

In addition to promoting weather dependent power while impeding energy pipelines and natural gas, EDF is also an opponent of emissions-free nuclear power.

In a 2016 news release that predicted “clean” energy would replace the literally clean electricity that comes from nuclear power, EDF promoted the closure of California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear station. Fortunately, and in a rare respite for California’s perpetually abused electricity consumers, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has so far supported keeping Diablo in service. ^[viii]

New York wasn’t so fortunate.

In January 2017 EDF praised then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for agreeing to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant, previously the source of electricity for millions in the New York City region. “The plan to close Indian Point will ensure that the electric system remains stable without increasing pollution and will secure the health and welfare of millions living and working in the Tri-State area,” claimed the EDF news release.[ix]

Instead, according to a February 2022 analysis by Politico’s E&E News, it was mostly natural gas powerplants that replaced the nuclear energy, and this corresponded to an 18.8 percent spike in New York’s annual emissions. “In New York, power-sector emissions reached 28.5 million tons in 2021, up from 24 million tons in 2019, according to EPA figures,” reported E&E. “The increase coincided with the shutdown of Indian Point’s two nuclear units in 2019 and 2021.” [x]

The ironies are piled high.

EDF’s opposition to low-emissions natural gas was so strident, and EDF so wealthy, that they were able to launch an anti-gas surveillance satellite. But their opposition to nuclear power led directly to a lot more natural gas getting burned in New York City’s electricity production.

To top it all off, EDF’s headquarters is on Park Avenue in New York City. So, right in their own hometown the anti-methane NGO’s policies led directly to the replacement of emission-free power with methane-generated electricity.

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Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. The page for the full report is here: Enemies of Energy. If you like this sort of thing, then please send them some money.

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The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt nonprofit that claims its public pressure campaigns and lawsuits have “secured protections for more than 740 species and more than half a billion acres of wildlife habitat.” Their motto is “Saving life on Earth.” [i]

Almost the only species CBD hasn’t tried to protect is the one that they belong to. None of the large American anti-energy NGOs are as obsessed with population control as the Center for Biological Diversity.

One CBD web page posts this question: “Why do we need to talk about population and sustainability?” Their answer implies that people are a form of pollution: [ii]

There are more than 8 billion people on the planet, and we’re adding 227,000 more every day. We’ve already witnessed the devastating effects of runaway human population growth on biodiversity: Species abundant in North America just two centuries ago — from the woodland bison of West Virginia and Arizona’s Merriam’s elk to the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, passenger pigeon and Puerto Rico’s Culebra parrot — have been wiped out by growing human numbers.

Most biologists agree that we’re in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event; species are disappearing at the fastest rate since dinosaurs roamed the planet. This time, though, it isn’t because of geologic or cosmic forces — it’s because of our unsustainable human population growth and overconsumption. It’s clear that these issues need to be addressed before it’s too late. ^[iii]

This statement is from the “About” page for CBD’s “Endangered Species Condoms” project. The Center for Biological Diversity claims the project has distributed “more than 1 million” of the birth control devices to “all 50 U.S. states” and produced an “online resource library with more than 100 published papers on the connection between population pressure and threats to wildlife. . .” ^[iv]

The condom project is either creepy or comical, depending upon a reader’s sense of humor and decorum. Examples of the package messages include “Hump smarter. . . save the snail darter” and “Safe intercourse saves the dwarf seahorse.” [v]

Weirder still was a March 2019 newsletter in which CBD’s population and sustainability director encouraged male sports fans to gather with friends for group vasectomies during the March Madness college basketball tournament. She wrote: ^[vi]

March Madness is upon us. And as all the number one seeds prepare for the tournament, it’s time to think about whether you want your own seeds to advance. Put less punnily, it’s time for all the male sports fans out there who don’t want (more) children to think about scheduling a vasectomy.[vii]

Unsurprisingly, the condom project also includes pages promoting abortion access. [viii]

CBD’s family planning messaging doesn’t explicitly denounce the decision to have children, but it’s clear they are implicitly trying to push young Americans in that direction. Examples include:

• Each additional child increases your carbon legacy by 20 times what you could save over a lifetime of recycling, switching to low-voltage light bulbs and driving a hybrid car — combined. ^[ix]

• When people have the tools, education and ability to choose if and when to have children, they tend to choose smaller families, which is healthier for mothers and children as well as the planet. ^[x]

• Human population growth — along with our reckless overconsumption — is driving the sixth mass extinction crisis. But we can still save wildlife, by choosing to stop hogging the planet.^[xi]

In addition to reducing the human population, CBD is also obsessed with cutting down on cows. CBD’s “Grazing Facts” project is in practice promoting a public policy war against American cattle ranchers. CBD argues for a “substantial reduction in beef and dairy consumption and production,” and a switchover to “plant-based alternatives.” [xii]

A public relations war against childbirth and cheeseburgers is wildly outside of the mainstream of American culture. But the Center for Biological Diversity has used this agenda to become one of the largest players within the mainstream of the American “environmental” (i.e.: anti-energy) movement. CBD reported $45.7 million in total revenue in 2024, the richest year on record, $12 million more than they reported in 2013, and more than double their total fundraising from just five year earlier. ^[xiii]

In most other ways, the Center for Biological Diversity isn’t much different from the other anti-energy NGOs profiled in this report. They have opposed the continued use of all hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear power and to this end have also endorsed the neo-socialist Green New Deal. [xiv]

But as covered in the first section, hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear power both built and sustain our modern civilization, and opposing the use of them is implicitly opposition to human flourishing. To be anti-energy is to be anti-human.

Most of the largest American anti-energy NGOs are obviously not honest about this connection. They try instead to promote the false idea that unreliable, weather dependent power systems such as wind and solar can replace hydrocarbons and nuclear power, and that this substitution will not meaningfully damage our way of life. Whatever else may be said of CBD’s odd, anti-human and anti-energy agenda, they’re at least more honest than their peers about the inseparable correlation between the two.

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Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. The page for the full report is here: Enemies of Energy. If you like this sort of thing, then please send them some money.

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According to what the NGO claimed in its most recent IRS filing, the “single purpose” of the Climate Reality Project (CRP) is to “ignite public action to solve the climate crisis.” Reporting $23.8 million total revenue for 2024, CRP is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt nonprofit and a training ground for the world’s anti-energy activists. [i]

Appropriately, CRP was founded by America’s most decorated anti-energy activist, former American Vice President Al Gore. Winner of both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award for more than three decades of climate alarmism, Gore remains the chairman of—and an active presence in—CRP. [ii]

For example, Gore will be one of the featured “world-class experts” to speak at the May 2026 edition of CRP’s “flagship training” program in Nashville, Tennessee. This will be the 20^th anniversary of the NGO’s training sessions. Other headliners include notorious climate alarmists such as Naomi Oreskes and “hockey stick” graph creator Michael E. Mann. Attendance is free for aspiring anti-energy activists whose applications are approved. [iii]

As with all the NGO’s profiled in the anti-energy report, a major CRP objective is to replace the world’s reliable and affordable energy with unreliable, weather dependent wind turbines and solar panels. For example, a September 2025 CRP report titled “Why Clean Energy is Cheap Energy” uses the widely debunked “levelized cost of electricity” (LCOE) metric (described in the previous section) to claim that wind and solar electricity are each less expensive than all other energy options.[iv]

This misplaced affection for weather dependent power is a global obsession for the Climate Reality Project. The nonprofit’s website claims more than 50 employees, plus “branch managers” for Europe, Africa, Latin America, Canada, Japan, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil and “Australia and Pacific.”[v]

InfluenceWatch provides this information on the behavior of the Africa branch: [vi]

In a November 2016 position paper, the African branch of the Climate Reality Project opposed the construction of nuclear power plants in Africa. In November 2020 the International Energy Agency reported that 590 million people in Africa had no access to reliable electricity, making the continent home to three quarters of the world total of 800 million people still living in energy poverty.

The African Climate Reality Project report began by stating that 17 African nations were “seriously considering, conducting pre-feasibility studies or rolling out national nuclear programmes.” It concluded that nuclear power was “unsafe, bad for the environment and for people and is very costly.” Instead of nuclear, the report recommended that African nations invest in “sun, water and wind” energy systems.

Among the African CRP’s criticisms was an assertion that “Nuclear energy does not create more jobs.” A chart produced in the report showed 0.5 “total jobs” for each megawatt of electricity produced at a nuclear power plant. This compared to 1.7 jobs needed per megawatt for electricity from coal, 4.8 jobs per megawatt from wind energy, and 35.4 jobs per megawatt from solar power.

Economic theory defines productivity as the amount of an input (such as labor) needed to produce an output (such as a megawatt of electricity). Productivity growth (i.e.: increased efficiency) occurs when less input (e.g.: fewer workers) are needed to produce the same output. Productivity growth is an important prerequisite for wage growth. ^[vii]

Output per worker (or hours worked) is the most commonly used metric for productivity. But capital and land can be used as well. As explained in the prior section, nuclear and hydrocarbon fuels also use far less land to produce energy than wind and solar.

So the math provided by the Climate Reality Project paper unintentionally demonstrated that nuclear power, which CRP Africa said needs just a half-time employee to produce a megawatt, is nearly 69 times more efficient per worker than solar energy, which requires 35.4 people to accomplish the same task. The report undercut CRP’s claim that “clean energy is cheap energy.” And, as noted above, the report also implicitly proved that even coal-fired power is many times more efficient per worker than both wind and solar electricity production.

In addition to inflicting economic illiteracy on Africa, imposing inefficient electricity on a continent where hundreds of millions live without basic energy is also a textbook example of climate colonialism. It’s probably not surprising that the Africa nuclear report has since been removed from the African Climate Reality Project website. It can still be found on the Wayback Machine. [viii]

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