Who Are The ECIU?
By Paul Homewood
Next to Greenpeace, one of the most influential forces behind climate and energy reporting in our media is the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, or ECIU.
We came across them again last week in a Telegraph article which claimed that renewables were saving us billions of pounds. The claim, which was utterly false, came from the ECIU.
So just who are the ECIU, and who funds them?
According to their blurb:
https://eciu.net/about/who-we-are
Informed debate? Accurate briefings? You must be joking!
The ECIU was founded in 2014 by Richard Black, who you may recall was the BBC’s Environment Correspondent for many years. He was its Director until last year, but remains as Senior Associate.
With this background, the ECIU clearly is not a reliable source of anything.
But what about the funding?
Again, from their website:
From the start, they have relied most heavily on the European Climate Foundation, or ECF.
David rose wrote an damning expose on the ECF in the Mail a few year ago:
At the heart of the Blob is a single institution – the European Climate Foundation (ECF) – which has offices in London, Brussels, The Hague, Berlin and Warsaw.
Every year it receives about £20 million from ‘philanthropic’ foundations in America, Holland and Switzerland, and channels most of it to green campaign and lobby groups.
It refuses to disclose how much it gives to each recipient, and does not publish its accounts. But it admits that the purpose of these grants is to influence British and EU climate and energy policy across a broad front.
The most significant source for the ECF’s millions is a body called Climate Works – a private foundation which channels colossal sums to climate campaigners worldwide.
The Climate Works manifesto was set out in 2007 in a document entitled ‘Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming’. It said that to be effective, a campaign to change government policies on energy and emissions would need at least $600 million from donors.
It was driven by the belief that without radical action, ‘we could lose the fight against global warming over the next ten years’.
It advocated the giving of generous grants to local campaigners in countries such as Britain who had detailed knowledge of the way their political systems operated.
As well as better energy efficiency, carbon taxes and emissions caps, they must ‘promote renewables and low emission alternatives’. Utility companies must be given ‘financial incentives’ – in other words, enormous subsidies from tax and bill payers – to make this happen.
Climate Works soon achieved its ambitious fundraising target, with a grant in 2008 of $500 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which spends the fortune amassed by the co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard computer firm. This was followed by further grants of up to $100 million, and donations of $60 million from the sister Packard foundation. In July, a report by a US Senate committee named the Hewlett foundation as a key element in a ‘billionaires’ club’ which effectively controlled the environmental movement, pumping more than half a billion dollars a year into green groups around the world.
It claimed these ‘wealthy liberals fully exploit the benefits of a generous tax code meant to promote genuine philanthropy and charitable acts’, but instead were transferring money to ‘activists’ to ‘promote shared political goals’.
One of the US-based Climate Works’s first acts was to set up and fund ECF as its European regional office. All ECF’s main funders are represented on ECF’s board, including Charlotte Pera, who is also Climate Works’s CEO. Susan Bell, ECF’s vice-chairman, was formerly the Hewlett foundation’s vice-president.
It is hard to assess the ECF’s full impact for a simple reason – although it publishes the names of some of the organisations it funds, it does not state how much it gives, nor exactly how this money is used.
The ECF’s Tom Brookes said: ‘The projects we fund all fall within the overall mission of the Foundation to support the development of a prosperous low-carbon economy in Europe.’
He would not explain why no amounts were stated, saying only that ECF’s annual report ‘describes the objectives of each ECF programme area and its significant grantees.
‘We are confident that this is a sufficient level of detail to provide insight into the work of the Foundation… Our policy on the information we publish reflects our responsibilities to our grantees and donors.’
Nevertheless, it is clear from the information that is available that the list of ECF funding recipients is a Who’s Who of the green movement, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the WWF, Client Earth, Carbon Brief, the Green Alliance, and E3G, the elite lobby group that persuaded the Government to set up the £3 billion Green Investment Bank.
In short, money from billionaires in the US is funding a massive propaganda effort in Europe, designed to radically restructure our society regardless of the wishes of the public.
I find it ironic that left wing organisations are now happy to collaborate with billionaires, who act against the wishes of the working classes they are supposed to represent.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
a prosperous low-carbon economy in Europe
That’ll be the day. The whole thing stinks.
As I may have mentioned before, it is a shame there is no big oil funding for climate sceptics: a couple of full-time researchers are needed to unravel this spaghetti.
I looked up their registered office and discovered that the block houses residential properties and serviced offices.
https://www.buildington.co.uk/buildings/4577/london-se1/180-borough-high-street/brandon-house
https://www.realla.co.uk/details/24954219
It’s funny how an organisation that has so much clout and influence appears not to have it’s own registered offices in a more stable environment. I haven’t been to the property so I’m only guessing that they are not actually there but merely using the address as a convenient London mailbox. Who knows with these types of organisations?
” … that they are not actually there…”
Over recent years radical activists, and not just climate cult ones, make this almost a requirement. A place of residence or vacation requires security. Likewise, organizations have to be in secure buildings. Many of the really rich folks have yachts and or islands where they are safe. I can’t blame them.
Brandon House eh? “Come on Brandon”
There is a similar issue with the stranglehold the Green Blob has over farming (sorry, re-wilding), possibly a more urgent problem:
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/farmers-on-the-brink?s=r
The problem is that they are allowed to spew lies and get away with it.
Not always …not indefinitely …
I’ve been looking into another shadowy outfit that is becoming very influential in policy circles. May I introduce Regen?
https://www.regen.co.uk/project/a-day-in-the-life-2035/
They have been working on trying to persuade ?BEIS that a net zero grid is feasible by 2035. Their study is worth an article on its own: describing a single day with 20% capacity factors on wind as “challenging” rather ignores the 3% we have had in recent days, and many of the other assumptions are classic unicorns. But who are they?
https://www.regen.co.uk/about-us/our-team/
Mostly wet behind the ears recent graduates, the staff of 32 are doubtless selected for their adherence to the cause. Their operation is based in Exeter, close to the Met Office. It was originally set up in 2002 and funded by the SW Regional Development Agency until that agency was abolished in March 2012. Since then, funding has come from subscription-based membership and partner organisations, advisory work, and grant funding. Member companies include many of the usual suspect types involved in renewables. But perhaps the real key here is the local authority memberships. If you wondered who is supplying the green propaganda for climate emergency spending to your local council, it seems this pushy load of youngsters are likely behind it. They do not publish an income statement in their accounts, nor do they reveal any detail about their funding. Certainly some of it has come directly from BEIS.
“Their operation is based in Exeter, close to the Met Office.”
And the Uni of Exeter:
https://www.exeter.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/climatechange/
Regen used to be RegenSW, serving just the SW of England. Every year RegenSW published a progress report showing the massive growth of renewables, due to the big subsidies. When subsidies stopped in about 2015, growth stopped and RegenSW stopped publishing the annual progress reports and then it became Regen. I still have copies of all their progress reports,
Fabulous Expose Paul . . . Thanks !
Our Tax Money hard at work . . . Backwards. The rich liberal donors get credits . . . to pay less tax by donating to foundations accepted by our finance department as ‘Worthy Foundations’. Then these foundations lobby our governments to support the ‘Green Initiatives’ that get funding with our tax dollars to build Useless infrastructure to replace Fossil Fuels with Wind and Solar and EV’s that incur increased Fossil Fuel Consumption when they are being built than the system currently being replaced. Then they get to sell credits from their ‘Scams’ to other companies that ‘Over pollute’ in a global system leading to Net Zero. Scam, Fraud, nonsense almost criminal from it’s roots to the tips of it’s branches that lead back to our Media Establishment and within the towers of Power in the back rooms of Government . . .
https://www.academia.edu/71023588/Batteries_Renewable_Energy_and_EV_s_The_Ultimate_in_Environmental_Destruction
https://www.academia.edu/73548362/Electric_Cars_Burn_31_More_Energy_than_Gas_Cars_Revised_
My Thoughts . . .
“Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, or ECIU.”
Coincidence they have a title reminiscent of MI5/MI6/GCHQ?
“I find it ironic that left wing organisations are now happy to collaborate with billionaires, who act against the wishes of the working classes they are supposed to represent.”
No left wing organisations could care less about the working class.
To the contrary, they despise them.
I tend to agree with that sentiment. Left wingers like the idea of people but seem to hate them. maybe thats too strong a word, and don’t want to have much to do with their individual problems. I dealt with a group of social workers some time back and their lack of compassion was eye watering. They were very good on macro empathy but very bad on individual needs.
To be fair I also met some genuinely caring ones as well but the shock of the attitudes of the rest was what left an impression.
George Orwell made the same point about liberals despising the working class in his 1937 book The Road from Wigan Pier.
As an aside, we are in the 8th day with negligible wind generation, currently 0.52% of demand. How would the activists square that particular circle?
Yes, once it became obvious that the workers just wanted more money and a better future for their children, rather than socialism and all the rest of the Left’s causes, they lost interest and decided the working class were all White Supremacist, Islamo- homo- trans- EU- phones who could be ignored.
“Disregard the man behind the curtain, your electricity bills are really going down even though you pay more each month”. Who do they think they are fooling?
This is not a matter of left or right wing politics, it is lack of numeracy, and almost all fail on that test.
Back in 1837 H-C Andersen wrote the prescient “Emperors New Clothes”. The little boy who exposed the fraud would have been crucified by the fanatics today though!
Terry Pratchett wrote of the Emperor’s New Clothes story “Then the royal guards arrested the little boy and his dad and told the crowd “That didn’t happen! OK?”
As usual, Terry was right on!
Good article from Matt Ridley:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10657721/Madness-worship-wind-despoil-glorious-countryside-add-6bn-household-bills.html
Sounds like a plot from a 007 movie script….. but its REAL
I’ve just had a look at Grid Watch and this morning we were getting 150MW or 0.5% from wind and 0% from solar. Almost two thirds from gas.
Also coal is producing over 7 times as much electricity than wind at 0830 BST
0942 coal producing 10x wind:
Coal 1.8 GW
Wind 0.18 GW
Thank God we’re still using coal in the mix, otherwise the lights would go out, particularly in calm, cold winter conditions. If we got a severely cold winter such as the one in 1963, which persisted for months, half the country would freeze to death. Always good to keep energy mixes diverse in case of adverse conditions. This applies on a personal and national level.
O/T yet again I’m afraid but Mein Gott our windmills are producing half a per cent of our electricity!! This is the eighth day. I’ve used German there because there’s no wind in Germany either! And it’s Equinoctial Gales time isn’t it?
The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will the robin do then,
Poor thing?
He’ll sit in a barn,
To keep himself warm,
And hide his head under his wing,
Poor thing.
I always thought this was ‘The March winds.’
There was a saying that if March came in weather-wise like a lion it would go out like a lamb, and vice versa.
Looking at Gridwatch it does seem to have been quite windy at the start of March if the wind generation was anything to go by, so we now are seeing the lamb.
I say this continually but the root of the problem is that Green groups have been getting away with pushing political policies that they claim are “science” for years now. So what are clearly political entities are treated as charities or philanthropic organisations. Donations are not declared and governments – particularly the UK and EU – fund them. This state funding is not legal in the UK – the state is not supposed to pay “campaign” coats for example. The BBC is a similar problem, having given itself free rein to “follow the science” it has shifted clearly political opinions and policies into that science camp. It has done so knowingly to get around its charter. The reality is that our politics has been corrupted and circumvented on a collosal scale.
There is a reason why the rabid left are in bed with Islam. They are both ideologies and will “use” eachother to further their aims. The only “science” they have is repeating the word. The left have been unceasing in their infestation of institutions both private and public avoiding wherever possible the need to stand for election because then they would have to say a little about who and what they are. They have infested academia and most dangerous of all have infested basic education. There is no age limit for them where the indoctrination begins for their bankrupt ideas. This is child abuse plain and simple and when power is your goal you do not care who gets hurt in the process.
How to reset the clock? I wish I knew because on both sides of the pond they have such a grip that short of revolution I see no way back.
I would be interested to see how much of their funding can be traced back to the man with the body dysmorphic disorder in the Kremlin. I would go further and say not only has he been very supportive of their actions (a case in point is fraccing in the UK) but he saw the weakness these maggots encourage as part of the point system he used as a basis for the invasion of Ukraine. What they and their like produce and indeed encourage is weakness, morally intellectually, financially and institutionally.
Finally on the subject of the “impartial” BBC. I have been a life long supporter of them and the standard of their output. Now I see they are past saving. We all lose from the demise of the BBC but we lose more if they remain as the left wing propaganda outfit which they have become.
The “science” is really just computer modelling, that is what has taken over actual science.
From mad cow disease to covid to climate models.
Its all models and its all bollocks.
Is this what Peter Mandelson was referring to awhile back when he referenced the ‘post democracy’ era?
These NGO’s get huge funding which affords them equally huge influence. It’s all done behind the scenes and immune from the perils of the ballot box. Got to hand it to them; it’s moving mountains.
We need NGOs dedicated to keeping the people of Britain warm and mobile. All the NGOs flogging their climate armageddon propaganda are run by privileged, middle-class socialists, largely indoctrinated in our universities. The same lot who promote multiculturalism, mass immigration, identity politics and who now run most of our institutions. Guess who loses out because of their lunacy? The working class.
Well Said Mr. Hynes . . . No truer words have been said !!
I wrote this paper some time ago attempting to describe more or less the same concept . . .
https://www.academia.edu/49676862/Social_Engineering_Environmentalism_and_Globalization_A_New_World_Order
“I find it ironic that left wing organisations are now happy to collaborate with billionaires, who act against the wishes of the working classes they are supposed to represent”.
Just the everyday behaviour of leftwing ideologs who are so dim that they do not even understand that they are helping promote the marxist doctrine of Critical Theory. They will buddy up with anyone to achieve their aim which is a million miles away from their pathetic primary school at best science referenced argument. Their aim is chaos, the weakening and collapse of Western Society.
What disturbs me most is just how much money is available for such worthless people, in this case £1.000,000 (disclosed). Not a bad little earner for the climate revolutionaries!
And how much of it actually originates from Vlad and Xi ???
This has been fomenting in the west for more than fifty years. Going even further back to George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’ observations -he understood the left better than anyone because he had been part of it. It’s part of the ‘long march through the institutions’ (linked to the Marxist Gramsci). ‘Climate Armageddon’ is the biggest weapon they have devised to bring down western capitalism. Ironic that western capitalism is massively funding it. Marxists (communists & socialists) have never had any qualms about mass genocide in the name of their ideology; the Ukrainian ‘Holodomor’, the soviet collectivization (mass starvation) and dekulakization (Stalin’s Siberian Soviet concentration camps or ‘gulags’) murdered an estimated 60 million souls, while Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ annihilated 40 – 50 million Chinese people.
This doesn’t bode well for the masses trying to stay alive by keeping warm in winter when the lights go out.
I thought it was Russia who funded all the activists….
Am I alone at noticing how these leftie organisations all give themselves authoritative sounding names. “The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit”. What arrogance!
Out of SIXTEEN people on their “advisory board” only ONE has any obvious or relevant scientific background and she shows her colours by having been Co Director ( Have you noticed how they all give themselves authoritative titles) of the Grantham institute. That makes her suspect and anything but impartial. The rest are just economists and glad handing peers no doubt happy to receive the expenses payments.!
Here’s SEPA current mission statement:
‘One Planet Prosperity – Our Regulatory Strategy
As a society we are over-using our planet’s resources. If everyone lived as we do in Scotland, we would need three planets to sustain ourselves. In the 21st century and beyond, only those businesses that operate in harmony with our one planet will thrive.
Everyday SEPA works to protect and enhance Scotland’s environment, helping communities and businesses thrive within the resources of our planet. We call this One Planet Prosperity.
How does One Planet Prosperity affect regulation?
Environmental compliance is non-negotiable. Every Scottish business will comply with the law, and we’ll work to ensure as many as possible will go even further. Compliance has not, and will not change. The One Planet Prosperity approach does not alter any of the environmental regulations businesses must adhere to or how we enforce them but it does change our approach to regulation.
We firmly believe that working with businesses to go beyond compliance is the best way to deliver the ambitious goals of One Planet Prosperity.’
https://www.sepa.org.uk/one-planet-prosperity/
Yawn… Heard it all before!
Just another gang of scientifically illiterate neo-Malthusians who are incapable of learning from history.