December 10th, 2024
The climate nonprofit, formally known as the Energy Foundation but which dubs itself “Energy Foundation China,” wired grants to Harvard College, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Maryland to support research and education on building a “clean energy future” and advancing “low carbon cities.” The Energy Foundation gave a total of $630,000 to the four universities in 2023. All four of those universities promote far-left climate policies.
The Energy Foundation also funneled another $1.5 million to the following left-wing climate nonprofits: the Rocky Mountain Institute, International Council on Clean Transportation, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, and Natural Resources Defense Council. Those groups all are dedicated to promoting the phase-out of fossil fuels and mass expansion of costly green energy alternatives.
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“The Energy Foundation’s direct ties to the CCP are incredibly alarming, as they’ve spent millions to push for radical climate initiatives that favor China and harm American energy production,” Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of ethics watchdog Americans for Public Trust, told the Free Beacon.
“Their dark money has been funneled to groups that want to ban gas stoves and phase out fossil fuels,” she continued. “Next year, Congress should continue their investigation to determine the extent to which China is undermining American energy dominance through this group.”
The Energy Foundation was founded in the 1990s in San Francisco as a pass-through organization taking contributions it received from anonymous donors and funneling that cash to environmental programs nationwide. In 2020, the group split into two groups, the Energy Foundation China and the United States Energy Foundation. The Energy Foundation has given nearly $12 million for climate initiatives in the United States since 2020, according to a Free Beacon analysis.
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The group leased two offices located in China last year, audited financial statements obtained by the Free Beacon show. Its staff is also rife with Chinese nationals who have ties to the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.
Energy Foundation CEO and president Ji Zou, for example, previously served as the deputy director general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy, an agency within the Chinese government’s National Development and Reform Commission. Ping He, a senior policy adviser at the group, worked for eight years at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a leading state-run research institution.
Other top Energy Foundation officials include Liu Xin, who previously served as a high-ranking official at the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau; Wei Han, who worked for China’s National Institute of Standardization, a government economic agency; and Sha Fu, a former professor at the Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, a think tank under the auspices of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.
And the group’s top international cooperation officer Yunfei Xing previously managed energy development projects in developing countries for the China Machinery Engineering Corporation.
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Overall, the Energy Foundation reported revenue of $84.5 million in 2023, which was almost entirely made up of anonymous donations and which marked a nearly 46 percent increase year over year. It wrote grants worth $55.9 million, the vast majority of which were given to organizations in Asia. Those organizations were not named in the group’s tax filings.
The Rocky Mountain Institute received $350,000 from the Energy Foundation in 2023, the same year that the Colorado-based think tank emerged as a leader of the movement to ban gas stoves in America. The Energy Foundation sent its largest check—$770,000—to the International Council on Clean Transportation, a Washington, D.C., group that pushes for aggressive electric vehicle mandates.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, the recipient of a $200,000 Energy Foundation grant, was founded to spearhead lawsuits promoting climate policy and has led litigation opposing fossil fuel production, coal, and projects like the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, which received $255,000 from the Energy Foundation last year, promotes the electrification of public transportation and advocates for policies discouraging car usage.
