Is the EU About to Cut Off Funding to the Green Blob?

BEN PILE

According to an article in Politico, big changes may be afoot in the relationship between the European Commission (EC) and the big NGOs that the EU monolith has long been funding. The EC “has told environmental NGOs that the money they receive from the EU’s green funds pot can no longer be used for advocacy and lobbying work”. If true, and if the extremely angry backlash from green organisations and their media pals doesn’t reverse the decision, this is big news. The EC has been extremely generous with public money over the years, and it would mean the loss of “€5.4 billion of funding between 2021 and 2027” to organisations such as WWF and Friends of the Earth, whose use of the cash, not only to lobby European and British politicians, has advanced their agendas throughout the public sphere.

Politico’s framing of this putative divorce between Big Green and the EU is that it reflects the “anti-green campaign promises from the centre-Right European People’s Party [EPP] during the EU election”. This would seem to mark the EPP as a climate sceptic group, but that would be very far from the truth. The EPP has long been the dominant group in European politics, and politicians from its fold, such as former European Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, and the current EC president, Ursula von der Leyen, have been nothing but so-called ‘climate champions’. However, the EPP has never been able to win a majority of seats, and so has formed a grand coalition with the Socialists and Democrats (S&D). But even this coalition began to fracture in the 2019 European elections, in which the combined seats won by the partners was insufficient to form a majority. European Greens have not been part of any coalition agreement, and despite claims and perceptions to the contrary, rarely perform well in elections. The better explanation for the divorce therefore appears to be that radical environmentalism, as has been advanced by green NGOs, has at long last been identified as a liability.

So what is all this funding for big green NGOs about? Supranational or intergovernmental bodies such as the EU, and for that matter the United Nations, have always required the support of NGOs for several reasons. First, non-national bodies of this kind have not developed in the way that national democratic institutions were produced, as settlements between parties on different sides of schisms in the social fabric, usually as outcomes of, or attempts to prevent, civil conflict. So international bodies lack the historical attachments that the citizenry typically has to institutions of national governments, such as constitutions, universal suffrage and parliamentary authority. The EU and UN have no ‘public’ as such, except for the constellation of NGOs that surround them. For example, in the UN’s terms, an NGO is an organisation with ‘observer status’ in its structures, similar to how, in a democracy, it is the voter who holds politicians to account. Consequently, the rise of NGOs and supranational politics (part and parcel of ‘globalism’) goes hand in hand with the erosion of national democracy.

Second, supranational bodies, lacking any legitimising basis among the public such as elections, and consequently any meaningful process of discovering what the body politic needs and wants, invariably fail to relate themselves properly to the interests of the public. Whereas in functioning democracies political parties’ offerings, including their ideas and leaders, are tested and contested, supranational organisations have been built on claims to serve higher purposes than national governments are supposedly capable of reaching. In the aftermath of World War II, and throughout the Cold War, that higher purpose was easier to define, for obvious reasons. But though that basis for power above democracy faded, the stronger force was the inevitability of unaccountable bureaucracies’ desires to expand. New and varied emergencies in health and climate were presented to the UN. And the expanding European Union swelled for the same reasons, and to the same effect: the erosion of democracy and liberties as power accumulated, watched over only by the likes of Greenpeace and other large NGOs.

The premise of this arrangement was crystalised by Alok Sharma MP, who was appointed by the Boris Johnson Government to the role of President of the Glasgow COP26 meeting. In an address to Westminster lobbying outfit The Green Alliance, Sharma laid out the conceit of green politics, telling the audience that “I do believe we are at a vital inflection point, where the views of governments, businesses and civil society are coalescing in a determination to tackle climate change”. “Civil society is rightly holding a mirror up to the actions of governments and businesses,” claimed Sharma, “spurring us on to change.

But Sharma’s compact of green politics was based on a false premise. Some might call it a lie. “Civil society organisations” – think tanks, activist and campaigning organisations, charities, pressure groups and NGOs – are not some sector that is meaningfully distinct from governments and business. As I have long been pointing out, “civil society” organisations in the environmental domain, going back as far as the first half of the last century, exist only by virtue of green billionaire philanthropy, which is funded by business. And as has been no less clear, “fake charities”, as they were called by Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs, have long been paid by governments to lobby governments. In other words, Sharma’s schema of civil society “holding up a mirror” to businesses and governments is no more than governments and businesses obscuring their agendas behind organisations that are wholly under their control, as a condition of funding.

Don’t believe it? Notice that the group that Sharma’s compact excludes is the public. He is not concerned with the alignment of the public’s views on climate change. He is interested in “the voices of the vulnerable countries, of indigenous peoples, civil society and of course, young people”, but not the public at large – only those with status as victims under climate rubric.

But how has this alignment manifested? What is the detail of this compact? How does it turn into decisions that affect our lives?

One of the most revealing stories I have found in my research into the murky world of ersatz “civil society” comes from a 2010 Annual Report by one of the world’s largest, though somewhat obscure, climate change philanthropic interests. ClimateWorks was founded in 2008, and now has an annual income exceeding $300 million, which it distributes to other philanthropic grant-making bodies, NGOs and other “civil society” organisations. This includes establishing and funding the European Climate Foundation (ECF), which is both “part of the ClimateWorks Network” and the backer of countless green organisations that would not exist at all were it not for the cash it moves from anonymous businesses and billionaires to their bank accounts.

The ClimateWorks report explains that the EU had the previous year (2009) announced a target of reducing CO₂ emissions by 80-95% on1990 levels by 2050, but that officials, such as then unit head at the Directorate-General for Energy at the European Commission Christopher Jones, were “unsure how to comply with the new mandate”. “Commission members knew their goal meant fully decarbonising the power sector, probably by 2040 at the latest”, explains the report, but that “no one had sat down and figured out whether you could do that”. “Jones asked whether ECF would be willing to take on the enormous analytical task of charting a pathway to full decarbonisation — not with EU sponsorship, but independently,” reveals the report, and “the Roadmap 2050 project was born”.

Far away from public scrutiny, a network of “civil society” organisations, funded by anonymous billionaires, had been given the task of designing the next half century of energy policies that would be imposed on half a billion people. And this was not an isolated incident. In the testimony of former Friends of the Earth (FoE) activist Baroness Bryony Worthington, she had drafted both the text of the Climate Change Bill (before it became an Act) and the text of a nearly identical bill in the preceding Parliamentary term that had expired. It was, furthermore, the European Commission-funded FoE that had lobbied politicians and mobilised public support for it. The FoE’s “Big Ask” campaign, fronted by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, yielded 130,000 letters demanding “legally binding” climate laws sent to MPs.

A hundred and thirty thousand letters may sound like a lot. But as evidence of public support, it is relatively weak. There are 650 seats in the House of Commons, so the average MP received 200 letters. But MPs were clearly impressed, and as a result of the lobbying the final division of the Climate Change Bill in the Commons received near-unanimous support. And just as the EC Director-General for Energy had no idea how to achieve the targets that legislation required, neither did any single one of those MPs. They knew that they wanted “legally binding” climate targets, but they cannot have known what they wanted the Government to be bound to, and thus be required to impose on the public, who were now excluded from politics, per Sharma’s schema.

All of which has been to the great advantage of “civil society” organisations in the climate domain. It has meant that policies could be imposed on government by such organisations, not through the democratic process but through courts. One beneficiary of green funding from the European Commission, U.K. Government and billionaire philanthropy is ClientEarth. Though the Government awards ClientEarth around a million pounds a year, the ungrateful grantee has taken the Government to court with fellow plaintiffs FoE and the misnamed Good Law Project a number of times to enforce the Climate Change Act. In their most recent action, the plaintiffs argued that the (now previous) Government’s Net Zero strategy was “inadequate”.

The fact of the U.K. Government giving a million quid of taxpayers’ money each year to an organisation that then sues the Government reveals much about Sharma’s compact. And it echoes the funding of fake charities, in which governments fund NGOs to lobby governments. According to the EC, this has been justified on the basis that NGOs “play an important role in raising awareness of environmental issues for a better governance” and can aid in the “development and implementation of EU environmental or climate policy”. But as we can see, this relationship goes far further. It permits a ‘rule by blobs’, whose minions draft legislation that neuters democratic governance while conjuring up a fiction of public support.

We shall see in the near future whether this divorce will really prevent any blob lobbying. And it may cause some pain to organisations that cannot exist without taxpayers’ money. But the green lobby will still enjoy cosy relationships with politicians. And it will still enjoy unfathomable funding. ClimateWork’s own research reveals that fake civil society organisations enjoy as much as $12.8 billion of ‘philanthropy’ globally every year. That amount can buy a lot of nefarious influence, and there is no other sign that either Brussels or Westminster has rediscovered any commitment to putting democracy before cash.

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This article (Is the EU About to Cut Off Funding to the Green Blob?) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Ben Pile