Green Groups Linked To World’s Top Polluter

Some prominent green groups — including ones that play up Earth Day — also happen to have financial connections to the government of China, the nation that pollutes the planet more than any other.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Energy Foundation China (EFC), Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and other entities that fund climate initiatives in the U.S. have direct or indirect relationships with the Chinese state, according to The Washington Examiner. Many environmental organizations celebrated Earth Day on Tuesday, even while some of the leading groups in the green movement have cozied up to China, the world’s leading emitter and a prolific polluter of the oceans.

For example, NRDC maintains an office in Beijing that is registered with the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and operates under the supervision of China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration, the Examiner reported. Several senior staff members working for NRDC’s China office formerly worked for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including one adviser who worked for a Chinese agency suspected of targeting American corporations for intellectual property theft.

NRDC advised its followers to “let Earth Day be a reminder that we have a future to win” in a Tuesday social media post, lamenting in a separate post that it’s “not quite the case anymore” that “people [stand] together across party lines for cleaner air, water and a healthier future.”

“The NRDC is an independent, non-profit, public-interest group working to protect public health and the environment. We work in China for one reason: there’s not a single global environmental problem that the world can confront, unless China is part of the fix,” NRDC spokesman Bob Deans said in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We work alongside the people and institutions in China that are searching for solutions and progress. That’s what our work there is all about. When developing our institutional positions—in the United States or anywhere else in the world—we rely on our U.S.-based senior leadership and board of independent trustees, and no one else. We do the bidding of no government, in this country, or any other.”

Additionally, NRDC has been a major grantee of the Energy Foundation China (EFC), a now-independent group that was once a part of the Energy Foundation, according to the Examiner. Zou Ji, the president and CEO of EFC, used to be a top official for China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, a state-run organization that helps the Chinese government participate in global climate change initiatives.

EFC is directly involved in efforts to help the Chinese government execute its climate agenda, according to the Examiner.

EFC has also routed hundreds of thousands of dollars to RMI, a U.S. outfit that works “with the U.S. Congress and federal agencies to develop and follow through on ambitious and beneficial electrification policies,” according to its website. RMI teamed up with the Chinese government to publish a 2013 report addressing a global energy transition to favor intermittent renewables like solar and wind, the supply chains for which China happens to dominate globally.

Wei Ding, a Chinese businessman, served on RMI’s board as of at least 2022, according to RMI’s tax filings for that year and the Examiner. Ding formerly chaired an investment bank owned in part by the Chinese government, and a number of other RMI staff members have worked for the Chinese state in various capacities in the past as well, according to the Examiner. Like NRDC, RMI has a presence in China to complement its U.S. operations.

“RMI works in China because reducing emissions there is critical,” a RMI spokesperson said in a statement to the DCNF. “RMI shares its independent research and analysis with governments, policymakers, corporations and fellow nonprofits to accelerate the adoption of market-based solutions for clean energy.”

Notably, RMI received a $750,000 grant from the Biden administration in 2023 to advance its electric vehicle (EV) agenda, and RMI also provided partial funding for a 2022 study purporting to demonstrate that gas stove use and childhood asthma are linked. Several media outlets promoted the study, and the Biden administration indicated it may move to crack down on gas stoves in January 2023 before nominally retreating from the idea.

Additionally, several major left-of-center U.S. grantmakers that support climate advocacy also have financial relationships with China, such as the Ford Foundation, which believes that natural resource extraction will “dispossess and marginalize land-connected communities, driving inequality and injustice,” according to the Examiner and the foundation’s website. The Ford Foundation has poured millions of dollars into China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” a global infrastructure development effort that critics have characterized as a thinly-disguised instrument of debt trap diplomacy.

Similarly, the Gates Foundation — the charitable organization of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates — pumped nearly $12 million into various parts of the Chinese government in 2023, according to the Examiner. The foundation works around the world to “help people in the world’s poorest countries thrive in a climate where droughts, floods, and heat waves are becoming more severe and more frequent” in light of climate change, according to Gates’ website.

EFC, the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.