Green money is a threat to democracy

I was simultaneously outraged and amused by a tweet from Dale Vince, the British owner of Ecotricity Group, a large collection of wind and solar farms.  He was complaining about the alleged influence of fossil fuel related money on Reform UK and provided a link to a DeSmog “report”.     

In posting this tweet, Dale Vince apparently failed to reflect on his own position as the sole owner of a large £ 540 million turnover group of renewable energy “businesses”, whilst also recently becoming one of the largest funders of the Labour Party.  His businesses have provided more than £ 1.7 million in donations to Labour since April 2022.

Here’s the thing though, wind and solar “businesses” are almost entirely dependent upon huge government subsidies to operate.  It is hard to quantify exactly how big those subsidies are, Net Zero Watch identified £ 9 billion in renewable subsidies for 2017-2018 which would be treated as a cost for U.K. electricity consumers¹.

It is not hard to see that there is a conflict of interest in owning probably billions of pounds worth of subsidy dependent “assets” whilst being a major funder of the Labour Party which will be setting the size of green subsidies in the near future. 

Dale Vince is part of a group of uber-wealthy climate crisis acolytes.  The financial resources that these individuals are able to bring to bear in the political arena are staggering.  One of the largest climate alarmists, hedge fund manager Sir Chris Hohn, has around $ 6.8 billion in assets in his foundation, The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF).  This capital allowed the foundation to comfortably provided $ 335 million in grants in 2020 and $ 782 million in 2021.  Around half of the 2020 figure was solely devoted to the topic of climate change.

To put that into perspective, the foundation’s total 2020 grant spending was more than three times the combined expenditure of the U.K.’s three main political parties.  The grants that went just to climate change topic were 50% higher than the combined expenditure of the U.K.’s three leading parties (see chart)².

I was amazed at the disparity between the lobbying resources available to this one foundation compared to the political parties who, at least theoretically, represent millions of citizens.  This group of green billionaires also includes Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and others who can dominate the policy debate via C40³ and similar mechanisms.

There is a case to say that we should be thanking these philanthropists for applying the skills which allowed them to become successful billionaires towards policy setting.  I am not convinced by this argument and one of the few good things to come out of the COVID vaccine debacle is that many people are now less inclined to “trust the experts”.  In a wider context, it is slightly disconcerting to see foundations who simultaneously have very large investments in financial assets whilst running what amounts to large lobbying operations.  The value of financial assets is influenced by government policy, particularly in areas like subsidy hungry green “assets”, vaccines, defence and so forth (more on this later).    

In addition, any attempt to control carbon emissions provides a carte blanche for liberty crushing totalitarian control⁴.  The U.K.’s carbon budget runs to hundreds of pages of targets to 2050 and seeks to regulate how people heat their homes, when they travel and even what they should eat.  Even Soviet planners did not attempt this level of centralised control over their citizen’s consumption habits.  So as well as altering the value of financial assets, these policies justify the creation of a neo-feudal technocracy giving the key players enormous power over the citizenry. 

DeSmog is right to raise the issue of funny money in politics, but they need to move on from the phantom of oil money and focus in on the tsunami of green money.  It is green money which seems to dominate the policy setting agenda and together with its media and political flunkies is drowning out the voice of nearly two thousand scientists who have signed the World Climate Declaration stating that “There is no climate emergency”⁵.   In many ways this feels like an action replay of the COVID debacle where credible scientists were shut down in favour of Left wing political activists, media talking heads and vested interests who lobbied for the catastrophic policy response.  Here again the Malthusian views of a handful of billionaires seem to be driving the rest of society into yet another economic and political train wreck.  

Let me have your thoughts below and please don’t forget to circulate our material and support our work, we have already had to suspend various parts of our activities due to lack of funding!

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model⁶, he is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach (www.thinkingcoalition.com)

1. https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/current-costs-of-british-renewables-subsidies-per-household

2. https://rumble.com/v176de9-interview-with-investigator-ben-pile-on-billionaire-funding-behind-climate-.html

3. https://www.c40.org/funders-partners/

4. https://rumble.com/vvb2km-how-much-will-net-zero-really-cost-and-who-wants-it.html

5. https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/WCD-240529.pdf

6. https://twitter.com/ThinkingSlow1/status/1257578069797339137?s=20