There is a problem with British politics. Dark money from abroad is being funnelled into our system. A complex web of interlocking charities, thinktanks, advocacy groups and campaign outfits is being bank-rolled to push a policy agenda onto the public that makes us poorer, puts us in hock to hostile powers and undermines working people.

According to the left, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are puppets of such shadowy interests: Tufton Street thinktanks bankrolled by oil companies, Christian fundamentalists and perhaps even Russian money. These allegations are well-ventilated and have been exhaustively investigated. Most lead nowhere.

Yet no similar scrutiny is applied to a far bigger lobbying effort – the concerted campaign to push a ruinous net-zero agenda. This is the story of the Dark Green lobby: a network of foundations, research groups and policy shops, often funded through foreign channels. It has been astonishingly successful in shaping policy, controlling debate and overruling elected governments in the courts. It has prevented the exploration of oil and gas in the North Sea, kept energy prices high and made us ever more dependent on Chinese technology.

The politician at the heart of this ecosystem is the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband. While his policies have been challenged, the network behind him has remained in the shadows.

This is a network of foundations, research groups and policy shops, often funded through foreign channels

The first objective is to shape policy. The Dark Green charitable foundation which has the most influence is the European Climate Foundation (ECF). Founded in 2008, the ECF describes itself as ‘a grant-making foundation supporting climate action across Europe and beyond’. It supports ‘700+ partner organisations’ to ‘broaden political and public support for net zero’.

The ECF hopes to ‘embed climate action in robust, future-proof frameworks that withstand political change’. In other words, sod the voters. The foundation, which is based in the Netherlands, last year spent a staggering €171 million via a huge variety of organisations across Europe, including many in Britain.

Much of this money funds research for perennially cash-starved British thinktanks. The ECF donated £338,000 to the left–leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) last year, having previously funded a programme of work which produced a report arguing for the closure of the North Sea basin. The IPPR told The Spectator ‘all of our research and published outputs are editorially independent’ and pointed out that it has an A rating from Who Funds You?, the thinktank transparency campaign.

The foundation also gave £114,000 to the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the radical left-wing thinktank where Zack Polanski launched his economic vision earlier this year. The NEF was previously headed by Miatta Fahnbulleh – formerly Miliband’s junior minister – who is rumoured to be leading Andy Burnham’s putative policy unit. It has campaigned for fossil fuel divestment and has argued that oil and gas extraction will be a ‘financial burden’.

The ECF also funds the Labour Climate and Environment Forum (LCEF), which hosted Miliband at last year’s Labour party conference. Launched in 2022, the LCEF aims to strengthen the ties between politicians, trade unions, industry leaders and policy thinkers to make ‘tackling the climate emergency’ a ‘core Labour value’. It has called the argument that extracting oil and gas from the North Sea strengthens our national security a ‘myth’.

The ECF is canny enough not to limit itself to seeking to influence the political left. It has also donated to centre-right thinktanks such as Onward, the Centre for Policy Studies, Policy Exchange and the Conservative Environment Network. The latter has produced papers suggesting, among other things, that we must have an international ‘fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty’ and that Britain should institute a carbon border tax.

One experienced think tanker told The Spectator that ECF money was influential because there was ‘no comparable funding’ from those sceptical of the fundamentalist net-zero case, and so ‘SW1 thinktanks’ are attractive targets.

Where does all this money come from? One major donor is the California-based Sequoia Climate Foundation, which grants between $300 million a year to climate–related causes. Another is Bloom-berg Philanthropies ($300 million a year). A third was the Ballmer Group, an American investment group founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (more than $1 billion since 2022).

The second objective of Dark Green money is to distort the energy debate by de-legitimising opponents. To that end, the ECF contributes financially to tackling what it calls ‘climate disinformation’ – or what anyone else might think of as informed free speech. It funds Carbon Brief, an outlet focused on attacking ‘net-zero misinformation’ – in other words, science. Carbon Brief’s director, Leo Hickman, has suggested that the Telegraph’s questioning of Miliband’s desire to block oil and gas exploration is ‘hysterically and ludicrously obsessed’.

The most prominent of the various net-zero bodies which tackle ‘misinformation’ is DeSmog UK, which accuses opponents of North Sea closures of being funded by fossil fuel interests. DeSmog receives money from the European Media and Information Fund, which was founded by the Gulbenkian Foundation; its endowment is worth around €4 billion. It has denounced both Badenoch and Farage for the crime of wanting the UK to use our own oil and gas rather than Norway’s or Russia’s.

DeSmog’s targeting is wide-ranging. It has attacked The Spectator’s own Toby Young for opposing Covid lockdowns. It has also condemned anti-abortion activists who appeared at last week’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference (an event co-founded by the proprietor of this magazine, Sir Paul Marshall). DeSmog’s expansive definition of who to go after also means it has compiled a guide to what it terms the ‘pro-Brexit climate science denial network’, thereby neatly linking belief in British independence with – in its supporters’ minds – atavistic, nature-destroying superstition.

The third objective of the net-zero lobby is to use litigation against elected governments to frustrate the will of voters. One big net-zero foundation, which has funded many organisations in this space, is the Quadrature Climate Foundation (QCF), which is, in turn, funded by Quadrature Capital.

Quadrature Capital is an extremely successful hedge fund with $8.4 billion assets under management as of May this year. In 2022, the Times reported that staff were paid an average of £3 million each. The QCF’s chief scientific officer has said its investments in climate organisations were ‘greasing the wheels so we can accelerate the [net-zero] movement’. One of the recipients of its donations is Uplift, an organisation which has judicially reviewed the legality of the ongoing extraction of oil and gas from the Rosebank site in the North Sea.

The consequences are all around us: sky-high energy prices, crippled industries, cities hollowed out

Quadrature Capital gave Labour £4 million in 2024 – the largest single donation the party has ever received. Following Labour’s victory in 2024, QCF’s advisory board co-chair Rachel Kyte was appointed as the UK’s special envoy on climate while remaining on the QCF board. QCF also funds the Energy Climate Intelligence Unit (which receives money from the ECF), a media monitoring group which has been quoted by Miliband.

QCF is far from the only foundation which is a charitable arm of Dark Green money men and which bankrolls efforts to undermine voters’ wishes through the courts. Another major player is the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). CIFF was established in 2002 by Chris Hohn, a billionaire hedge-fund owner. It has an endowment of $6.1 billion, making it one of Britain’s largest private foundations.

Hohn’s hedge fund, TCI, is one of the best-performing in the world and he is one of this country’s richest men, with a personal net worth above $10 billion. He is wealthy enough to have very expensive luxury beliefs, of which the most expensive – for the rest of us at least – are his radical views on climate change. He has backed the eco-fundamentalist group Extinction Rebellion, personally donating £50,000 to its work, and giving another £150,000 from his charitable foundation. Hohn also wants to add costs to other businesses based on their energy use, and make fossil fuels a thing of the past.

He has previously threatened companies in which TCI holds stakes whose energy policies do not accord with his views. He has said he will vote against directors ‘who do not publicly disclose all of their emissions and do not have a credible plan for reduction’.

CIFF has funded ClientEarth, a legal activist group which uses the courts to frustrate moves to cheaper energy. It donated $9.7 million in 2024 alone. ClientEarth sued the previous Conservative government repeatedly – it sued over plans for the creation of a natural gas plant in Selby; and sued again because it claimed ministers had not laid out in detail how they planned to hit climate reduction targets. The legal action led the courts to force ministers to redraw their strategies to ensure net-zero compliance.

CIFF has also granted $34.8 million to the Foundation for International Law for the Environment, which funds climate-related litigation and other academic research into climate change. One of the arguments favoured by clean energy enthusiasts, which Miliband champions, is that decarbonisation is required to wean Britain off its dependence on hostile autocracies.

Yet CIFF has a curiously close relationship to the Chinese Communist party. Kate Hampton, its CEO, has been given a ‘friendship award’ by Beijing, and has a position on the board of the green committee of the Belt and Road Initiative – China’s infrastructure strategy designed to link Asia, Africa and Europe. In 2021, Miliband appeared on a panel event with Hampton at the COP26 summit, alongside Tessa Khan, the founder of Uplift.

CIFF is registered as a foreign NGO in China and has shown its gratitude to Beijing. It has given $15 million to Energy Foundation China, which employs former Chinese government officials. In June last year, US senator Ted Cruz alleged that Energy Foundation China was part of a network funding activist lawyers and climate advocacy groups seeking to undermine American energy independence.

Net zero has given the left a new means of constraining capitalism and growth 

What makes the Dark Green money network so distinctive and so powerful is the interlocking nature of its operation. The ECF has received funding from both the QCF and from CIFF. Institutions such as LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment list all three of these bodies as funders.

The murky nature of how Dark Green money operates is a design choice. By having funds flow from companies and individuals through foundations and charities to campaign groups and activists, the real source and motivation can be obscured. The use of ‘charities’ for political campaigning can be camouflaged with green foliage.

The British left has spent years warning about malign billionaires, ‘industrial complexes’ and dodgy lobbying networks. Yet on net zero it has built such a machine itself: an internationally funded ecosystem that bankrolls thinktanks, campaign groups, media organisations and litigation in pursuit of a single political objective.

The consequences of that work are all around us – high energy prices, industries crippled by those costs, manufacturing in retreat, cities like Aberdeen hollowed out, rising fuel poverty and higher bills for the poor, and an ever-expanding state regulating every-thing from gas boilers to air conditioning.

Net zero has given the left a new means of controlling and constraining capitalism and growth. It has given international billionaires a cause to signal their virtue while they asset-strip and price-gouge elsewhere. When their rapacity is called into question, they can point to their climate credentials, claim benefit of clergy and know the poorest will pay the price. And now the darling of the Dark Green lobby, Ed Miliband, is on the verge of becoming the man controlling the economy. It is hard not to be impressed. And deeply depressed.