AEP, Carbon Brief & The European Climate Foundation

By Paul Homewood

As reader Brian RL Catt points out, AEP, along with many other media sources, relies on an outfit called Carbon Brief for his so-called information:

 

 

 

The impression we are fed with implies that Carbon Brief are some kind of reliable, scientific source.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, Carbon Brief are no more than a political, climate lobby group, set up to promote the climate alarmist agenda.

Its director is Leo Hickman, one time editor at the Guardian, which alone should erase any suspicions about its objectivity. Other members of the team also put into question Carbon Brief’s reliability as an impartial, fact based resource. The team includes such impartial luminaries as Zeke Hausfather, Simon Evans, and former Independent “journalists” Daisy Dunne and Josh Gabbitas. Then there are the Contributing Editors, like Piers Forster, Richard Allen, Gabriele Hegerl, Simon Lewis, Tim Osborn, Camille Parmesan and Peter Stott.

The idea that any of this lot would give impartial advice on climate issues is an insult to the intelligence of anybody with an IQ above single figures.

But most of all, let’s see who funds this cornucopia of climate propaganda:

 

https://www.carbonbrief.org/about-us/

Yes, our old friends the European Climate Foundation, or ECF.

And just who are the ECF? This is what David Rose had to say about them a few years 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.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/how-the-eciu-is-funded/

In short, far left political foundations, funded mainly by US billionaires, have been using their money to influence public policy for years, both here in the UK and in Europe.

Just why naive idiots like AEP are buying into what is quite obviously a propaganda exercise is up to them to explain.