From Tablet magazine, September 16:
China’s Net Zero Advantage
Beijing is pursuing a climate strategy that weakens the West while strengthening its own competitive position
In its competition with China, the United States holds a natural advantage: abundant oil and cheap natural gas. Reliable energy powers factories, data centers, transportation networks, and military operations. It lets the United States combine technological innovation with industrial scale, an advantage that China, dependent on imported oil and gas, cannot easily reproduce.
But China has found a partial answer: the Net Zero movement. For years, a large, influential, and well-funded Western network has campaigned to restrict the production and use of fossil fuels. Many of the same campaigning organizations also oppose nuclear power, the largest source of emissions-free electricity in the United States. Climate advocates seek to persuade the American government to surrender its energy advantage voluntarily. Beijing agrees.
Over the past two decades, therefore, an alliance in all but name has taken shape. On one side stands the Chinese party-state. On the other stands a Western climate community much broader than its activist core: environmental organizations and the philanthropies that finance them, research institutes and international agencies, journalists who cover the transition to renewable energy, officials drawn from the movement’s own ranks, and the investors, asset managers, and financial institutions whose returns depend on the policies the movement secures.
The Net Zero community is not uniform. Its radical wing seeks to end capitalism and usher in a new socialist experiment. Its wealthiest participants intend to profit from the transition to wind and solar. What binds them is not a pact or a chain of command but a convergence of interests. Many, if not most, of them would deny that the alliance with China exists at all.
On the surface, it looks like a relationship of strange bedfellows. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the largest producer and consumer of coal. Its power system still runs mainly on coal, and it burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. By the climate movement’s own stated goal, the reduction of emissions, China should be its principal target. It is not. The organizations working to avert climate change aim their strongest instruments—divestment, litigation, regulatory pressure, public shaming—at Western energy and industry, and at the governments that decline to restrict them.
Of China, they speak in an entirely different register. The respect accorded to Beijing by Christiana Figueres, who ran the U.N. climate secretariat and midwifed the Paris Agreement, is instructive. In November 2025 she said that in three decades of climate diplomacy, the Chinese had “always under-promised and over-delivered,” a habit she attributed to integrity and humility. John Kerry, then the United States climate envoy and the movement’s most senior American official, put the matter more starkly. At the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021, on the day Washington announced a cooperation agreement with Beijing, Kerry was asked about the forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, where most of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon is produced. The subject, he said, was “not my lane.” His job was to move the climate agenda forward.
Figueres credits Beijing with integrity. Kerry declines to look at what Beijing does. Neither is an outlier. Between the diplomat who built the climate regime and the envoy who bargained with the world’s largest emitter lies the settled disposition of the Net Zero movement: Contrary to all available emissions evidence, China is the morally serious party, and the West is the laggard. Why?
Several well-publicized cases suggest that one reason China appears to be above Net Zero criticism is that Beijing is playing a major role in funding the climate movement. For example, Neville Roy Singham, an American technology entrepreneur, has reportedly been the subject of a federal grand jury inquiry in New York. Singham sold his consulting firm Thoughtworks in 2017 for $785 million, moved his operations to Shanghai, and began financing a global network of nonprofits and media outlets. In August 2023, The New York Times reported that Singham, working closely with the Chinese government’s media apparatus, financed the spread of its messaging worldwide through nonprofits and shell companies. Singham denied receiving funds or instructions from any government or party, including the Chinese Communist Party.
One recipient of his philanthropy has been Code Pink, the antiwar group cofounded by Jodie Evans, whom Singham married in 2017. In November 2025, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) asked the attorney general to investigate Code Pink under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
At the heart of the grand bargain is an agreement over Western and Chinese policies defined by simple arithmetic. China adds. The West subtracts.
Cotton’s letter noted that, before her marriage to Singham, Evans had demanded that Beijing stop repressing women’s human-rights defenders. After it, she discovered China to be a defender of the oppressed. Code Pink stopped criticizing Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs and instead took up its defense, launching, in 2020, a campaign under the slogan “China is not our enemy.” Entities linked to Singham, Cotton’s letter said, had supplied Code Pink with more than $1.4 million since 2017, roughly a quarter of its funding, a figure the letter drew from the Times investigation.
Code Pink also praises China on the climate question. But if Chinese money is shaping American energy policy, the organization under the most serious scrutiny is Energy Foundation China, a California charity that keeps a San Francisco address and a large office in Beijing. By its own account, its China office is registered with the Beijing public-security bureau and supervised by the National Development and Reform Commission, the ministry that writes and administers China’s five-year plans. That self-description, and a report by the national-security group State Armor, was enough to prompt a December 2025 letter from 26 state attorneys general, led by Montana’s Austin Knudsen, asking the Justice Department to investigate the foundation as an unregistered foreign agent. The attorneys general likewise relied on Energy Foundation China’s published statement that the Beijing office is “supervised by” the NDRC.
Energy Foundation China’s chief executive, Zou Ji, is a Chinese national. He previously served as deputy director general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, an NDRC agency, and was a member of the Chinese negotiating team in the years leading to the Paris Agreement. He also sits as a special adviser to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, the State Council advisory body chaired by a Chinese vice premier. Other senior staff have come out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Beijing Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau, and the National People’s Congress system. The foundation partners with Chinese ministries and state institutes.
By its own account, its principal business is moving Western philanthropic money into the Chinese policy system. Its major donors include the Hewlett Foundation, ClimateWorks Foundation, Climate Imperative, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and similar houses. Energy Foundation China grants that money onward to Chinese government research bodies and universities: the National Center for Climate Change Strategy, the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and others.
But it also makes grants in the other direction: to American universities and advocacy groups. Harvard University, the University of California, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the International Council on Clean Transportation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have all received money. Energy Foundation China says it accepts none from any government or political party. No published investigation has documented otherwise.
The grounds for suspicion, however, are obvious. An American charity, financed by American and European philanthropy, operates in Beijing under the industrial-planning ministry, is led in part by former Chinese officials, disburses Western money to Chinese government institutes, and then writes smaller checks to organizations that work on U.S. energy and climate policy.
That said, most of the money does not lead where the worst suspicions point. The dollar sums moving west into the United States are relatively modest: hundreds of thousands to low millions per American recipient.
Nor does that make the westward grants harmless or the suspicions unserious. A channel built to put large sums of Western money under the control of former Chinese officials in China and under the supervision of the state is a channel that Chinese intelligence could easily abuse. Energy Foundation China has written checks, for example, to the Rocky Mountain Institute, which in 2022 published the gas-stove asthma paper that Consumer Product Safety commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm helped turn into a national fight over gas in the home. Destroying the much-deserved reputation of natural gas, which is abundant in the United States, as a low-polluting source of cheap energy has obvious national-security advantages for China.
The Rocky Mountain Institute paid for its work using its pooled funds, which included the $820,000 in EFC grants. However, no public document shows Beijing specifically commissioned the U.S. paper. Even if we assume it did not, the mere possibility still explains why the cozy relationship between former Chinese officials and American philanthropy deserves scrutiny. Hundreds of thousands of dollars may not be enough to buy the Net Zero movement as a whole, but it certainly can generate a study designed to arrive when city councils and federal agencies are already looking for a reason to sideline natural gas. The point is not that such an operation clearly took place. It is that the current arrangement makes one too easy for comfort.
Chinese intelligence did not create Energy Foundation China. It began as the China program of the Energy Foundation, a San Francisco grantmaker launched in 1991 with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation under Energy Foundation founding president Hal Harvey. Harvey later led ClimateWorks as its first CEO, founded Energy Innovation and Climate Imperative, and helped establish the European Climate Foundation; ClimateWorks and Climate Imperative now rank among Energy Foundation China’s major donors. What began as a Western philanthropic initiative became the principal channel through which Western climate money enters China’s policy system. It is not an outpost of the Chinese state inside Western philanthropy. It is an outpost of Western philanthropy inside the Chinese state—or so Western philanthropists prefer to believe.
Following the money is nearly impossible. That’s because large climate philanthropy, in no small measure thanks to the work of Harvey, is organized around regranting. Money passes from an original foundation to a pooled fund, from the pooled fund to a national or regional grant maker, and only then to the organization that does the work. Each entity in the chain is separately incorporated and files its own return, and each return shows a single hop: the immediate donor and the immediate grantee. Nothing in the public record connects the whole chain from the first name to the last.
Arrangements of this kind are both lawful and common enough in American philanthropy, and there are legitimate reasons for the arrangement. A foundation with an enormous endowment and a small program staff cannot manage 400 grants across 30 countries or judge which Indonesian transport group deserves the next check. Intermediaries buy that expertise once and deploy it widely. Pooled funds let a dozen donors act as one, with a single strategy instead of a dozen overlapping ones. And the law requires some of it. An American foundation cannot simply wire money to a Chinese state research institute; it can do so only through a registered entity operating under a state supervisory unit.
The architects of Net Zero’s funding system did not design it to cover the tracks of Chinese intelligence. In practice, however, they created a system in which a trustee whose foundation supplies the first tranche of money has no practical way of learning that the last link is a Chinese government institute—which may then reroute American money back into the United States to buy political influence. Outside auditors cannot trace the money from original donor to recipient....
....MUCH MORE
A quick search of the blog (https://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/search?q=China+coal) surfaces this post on top:
June 26 - "China Gives Coal Room to Grow in New Five-Year Energy Plan"
It is quite possible that cheap electricity from coal-fired power plants will win the AI race for China....
We've been chronicling and warning that China was playing the West for chumps for a couple decades. There are hundreds and hundreds more posts on one part of the puzzle or another.
As noted introducing October 22, 2021's Global Warming: London's Mayor "to call for cities like London to have greater powers and funding":
In the introduction to October 14's BlackRock's Larry Fink: "Rich Countries Must Bear the Cost if We Can Ever Hope to Achieve a Net-Zero World":
Having studied the science, economics, politics, finance, psychology, law, messaging, regulation, sociology, and policy prescriptions of global warming since 1992 the overriding lesson learned is:I obviously wasn't thinking large enough.
It's always about the money.
If you take away nothing else from this little blog, take that.
And save yourself an eighth-of-a-million pages of reading.
It's also about power.
And although the two are to a large extent fungible (see the next post for an example) money and power are separate and distinct manifestations of the reality of human existence....
