Dozens of wealthy American liberals fund a nonprofit organization that is a major backer of green activist groups using radical and often law-breaking tactics to draw attention to what they see as a “climate emergency.”
Founded in 2019 by Aileen Getty and Rory Kennedy, sister of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) aims to “support disruptive climate activism, because [it believes] it is the fastest way to create transformative change,” according to CEF’s website and its 2022 annual report. [emphasis, links added]
Its donors are a “who’s who” of wealthy liberal elites, including Hollywood writer Adam McKay, former Harvey Weinstein lawyer Lisa Bloom, “Succession” star Jeremy Strong and Hillary Clinton’s Onward Together foundation, according to CEF’s 2022 annual report.
Since its establishment, CEF has bankrolled at least 106 different activism groups, training over 30,000 activists and mobilizing an additional 1 million protesters, according to its website.
CEF’s 2022 annual report states that the organization dished out over $5 million in grants to 44 grantees across 34 countries, mobilizing about 45,000 activists.
Many of these groups, including Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, engage in “direct action” protests where activists block highways, shut down airports, throw soup on priceless displays, and engage in other headline-grabbing acts in order to push society toward rapidly ditching fossil fuels.
“They are trying to make normal people think that climate change is a dire emergency, but it isn’t,” Elizabeth Nickson, author of the book “Eco-Fascists,” told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Their purpose is to scare middle-class voters into voting for more regulation and suppression, which allows their very wealthy funders to buy up more land for their portfolios.”
Getty, Kennedy, and McKay all sit on CEF’s board of directors, and longtime climate activist Bill McKibben serves as an advisory board member, according to the 2022 annual report.
CEF promotes its aim to “provide a safe, legal, tax-deductible way to support the boldest activism,” according to its 2022 annual report.
“We fund climate activists who treat climate change like the emergency it is,” CEF Executive Director Margaret Klein Salamon said in a statement to the DCNF. “Our grants support only legal activities, and all the groups we fund are strictly non-violent. We are proud to support brave, highly effective climate activists,” she added.
Salamon previously told The New York Times that CEF exclusively funds legal activities, like training and recruitment costs. CEF grantees must confirm that they are only using the funds for legal activities, according to the NYT, but CEF did not provide specific details of that confirmation process to the DCNF.
However, law-breaking and civil disobedience are central to the missions of many of the groups CEF has funded over the years, including the U.K.-based activist group Just Stop Oil.
“The disruption has to break laws in order to get the attention of the media and to pressure the governments,” a Just Stop Oil spokesperson told the DCNF. “Time and again, we see that public disruption is necessary to spark the conversations that result in much-needed political pressure.”
Members of other CEF-backed groups routinely break the law and get arrested while conducting “direct-action”-style protests.
Their tactics tend to interrupt everyday life for ordinary citizens and target high-impact cultural events and locations, including professional sporting events and art museums.
Just Stop Oil exemplifies the tactics and targets selected by CEF-backed groups: their activists have disrupted the British Open golf tournament, interrupted play at the Wimbledon tennis tournament and stormed the field at a cricket match in the U.K., according to its website.
Their activists have also attempted to throw soup at a van Gogh painting in a Paris museum, but authorities stopped them before they were able to launch the soup, according to Artnet.
Just Stop Oil activists are also known for blocking roads and stopping traffic during rush hour, often to the dismay of inconvenienced motorists trying to go about their days.
British authorities arrested 21 Just Stop Oil protesters who blocked rush hour traffic on July 17 around London, according to the Evening Standard.
British lawmakers passed tougher anti-protest laws in May 2023 in the wake of disruptive Just Stop Oil protests, according to the U.K. government’s website.
Under the Public Order Bill, protesters who interfere with key infrastructure, including roads and airports, could face up to a year in prison.
The law also attaches a maximum six-month sentence to protesters who “lock on” to objects or buildings, according to the U.K. government’s website.
Some British citizens are also fed up with the tactics and messaging of Just Stop Oil’s disruptive climate protests. A group of citizens calling themselves “Just Stop Pissing Everyone Off” have started to counter-protest the group as of mid-July.
The first publicized counter-protest occurred July 20, one day before a Just Stop oil road blockade in London enraged a mother trying to drive her baby to the hospital.
“The disruption will end only when the government ends all new consents and licenses for fossil fuels in the UK,” the group promised in a July 18 tweet.
“It is incredible that people would think defacing the Mona Lisa is a way to achieve progress of any kind,” Patrick Moore, a former green activist and co-founder of Greenpeace, told the DCNF. “That is sacrilege, fascism — I hate the word but it comes to mind; to them, any means is acceptable to stop the Earth’s doom, which there is no evidence for whatsoever.”
Moore left Greenpeace in the late 1980s after their tactics grew too disruptive for his liking, and he said that the new generation of climate activists is even more confrontational and scientifically errant than the activists he knew and worked with at Greenpeace.
“These days, they refuse to answer to anything that doesn’t fit their narrative,” he told the DCNF.
Top image Just Stop Oil protest/Twitter
Read rest at Daily Caller
Despite their claims, it is obvious that CEF is deliberately funding illegal activities. I’m sure this is illegal and they should be prosecuted.
In which way t do they benefit from these crinimal acts? It must pay them off to haul around these idiots to Block Fuel Trucks while using Fossil Fueled Buses