For years American politicians have been complaining and threatening their European counterparts over EU regulations that put restrictions on mostly US-based Internet and social media companies. There were talks of trade wars whenever EU officials penalized US tech giants with fines for non-compliance and illegal operations. When European countries started to consider stricter age and content limits on social media users, the US threats of retaliation became even louder.

But within one week in August, when a group of 42 US State Attorney Generals, supported by several large tort law firms, reached an $18 billion settlement in a lawsuit with Meta, the restrictions on social media use in the US were far greater than any European regulator could ever have dreamt of. The distinction between legislative regulation (lawmaking practiced in most countries) and adversarial regulation (lawmaking by litigious conflict practiced mostly in the US) could not have been better defined.

Regulating as Risk Management

In the traditional sense of the term, regulations are a series of laws proposed and passed through a legislative process, often voted on after a public deliberation by democratic or representative bodies. If leaders are confronted with harms, for example, to young people from freely available and uncontrolled content on the web, they would propose, discuss and pass laws to restrict or control the hazards. This is the basic risk management process – identify harms (risk assessment), determine exposure levels and then manage the exposures to as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA). Measuring exposure levels to harms from social media content has been a challenge for risk managers meaning that most regulations have been far from acceptable or even workable.

Adversarial Regulation

This approach to lawmaking can be messy, time consuming and subject to external factors (like lobbying and special interests). Activists driven to change policy and public behavior have adopted an alternative tool: adversarial regulation. Rather than the democratic risk management approach to legislation, these political campaigners would orchestrate a relentless litigation strategy against a company, industry or product, coordinated with NGO, media and policy campaigns, academic research publications and foundation funding (often the glue to the entire process). If the companies won’t change to fit the activist ideology, and regulators can’t do what they want, then they will litigate the hell out of them until the company either goes bankrupt or relents to the campaign demands.

Adversarial regulation is technically speaking, not a regulatory process. It has its roots in Naomi Oreskes’ tobacconization of industry strategy. Her view, from her 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, and the strategic La Jolla conference in 2012, is that the tobacco industry did not relent in the 1999 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement because of regulatory pressure, overwhelming new scientific evidence or a sudden sense of corporate responsibility, but rather due to the fear of bankruptcy from overwhelming, coordinated litigation.

Oreskes’ logic is that this same strategy that worked against Big Tobacco could be implemented against other industries, like the fossil fuel industry. In La Jolla, she brought together lawyers, scientists, NGOs and academics to formulate what is today known as the “tobacconization of industry” strategy. This was refined by academics like Bernard Goldstein into an alternative policy strategy he referred to as adversarial regulation.

Adversarial regulation advocates proliferated as activists grew disenchanted with the slow, unpredictable nature of the regulatory process. Many retired regulatory scientists, like Goldstein or Chris Portier, saw how their overwhelming evidence of health consequences from smoking were ignored due to tobacco industry lobbying. So they began to work with the litigation industry, NGOs and political activists to impose a type of extortion-based litigation. Companies, faced by threats of shareholder revolt, quickly caved and simply encouraged the proliferation of the tobacconization process.

The Meta Evolution

What was interesting with the Meta case, is that it confirmed the La Jolla coordination strategy involving State Attorney Generals, often politically savvy and open to working with external “motivating forces”. (Recall how shortly after La Jolla, the New York AG subpoenaed ExxonMobil for 40 years of internal documents, emails, and financial records that were fed into the “Exxon Knew” campaign.)

Several of the AGs in the Meta suit, from Texas and Arkansas, acknowledged they had subcontracted large tort law firms as external counsel (including controversial Predatorts like the Lanier Law Firm). These firms have their own interests and are gathering thousands of plaintiffs for lawsuits against social media companies so having the support of lawmakers further cements their adversarial regulation strategy (and the standard 11% contingency fees from the multi-billion dollar Meta settlement also helps).

The Firebreak has been observing how State AGs have been getting further in bed with special interest tort law firms, to effectively do their bidding and encourage further litigation avenues. See the case study on the extent to how the climate lawfare firm, Sher Edling, lobbied the Michigan AG to file a lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry, or how the outspoken California AG, Rick Bonta, took a donation from the foreign-funded law firm suing ExxonMobil, to then coordinate a parallel case at the state level against the company’s claims on plastic recycling.

Meta is just the latest chapter in this choreographed strategy to tobacconize industry.

Other Adversarial Achievements

Pesticides

The traditional regulatory process for conventional crop protection products was science-based. Regulatory risk assessments measured exposure levels on crop residues or to applicators, tested levels on rodents to determine toxicity levels (known as LD-50 levels), gathered real-use exposure data and worked to reduce these exposures to as low as reasonably achievable (often by factors of thousands of times lower than any actual hazardous levels).

Activists who felt these levels were not low enough were campaigning to have zero risk (ie, no pesticide use). Unable to change the regulatory process (that also was concerned with providing farmers with the means to produce food), they took the adversarial avenue, targeting companies (like Bayer-Monsanto or Syngenta) and particular pesticides (like glyphosate or paraquat) with relentless lawsuits until the companies either changed their practices or went out of business. So the law may still allow these products onto the market, but no company will dare produce or sell it.

What was interesting from the glyphosate story was how the research community used a network of adversarial regulation advocates aligned with the Collegium Ramazzini to manufacture evidence of carcinogenicity via the manipulated and flawed methodology of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The IARC monograph claiming that glyphosate probably causes cancer, to this day, is the only evidence from any agency that has been used in lawsuits against Bayer. The law firms paid for that evidence. The IARC-Ramazzini-Predatort strategy has also been used, with lower success rates, for the adversarial regulation strategy against talc, aspartame, gasoline and atrazine. The practice has become so common and so corrupted that the US government had to restrict the use of evidence coming from IARC.

Plastics

The regulatory process would consider scientific evidence on environmental-health risks from plastics, as in cases of microplastics, plastic waste management or food migration issues. In these cases, government risk assessors have determined the evidence presented by researchers tied to anti-plastics campaigns to be insignificant or based on poor methodology. See, for example, The Firebreak report on the EFSA rejection of most microplastics studies. Claims to regulate plastics as a fossil fuel ignores the data showing how plastics are more sustainable than alternatives in 15 of the 16 applications.

As activists do not want plastics (for emotional and political reasons), but they don’t have the scientific evidence, so to succeed on the regulatory front, they have to take the adversarial approach. See reports in The Firebreak on lawsuits against ExxonMobil funded by the Minderoo Foundation, a foreign steel special interest lobby, the copper industry’s campaign against plastic, and how foundations are funding strategic litigation NGOs like Earthjustice to file lawsuits not based on science but on politics.

Climate Change

A normal regulatory process would look at the evidence of climate change, the sources, the effects of mitigation on society (including economic damages from accelerated mitigation measures) and determine the best strategy, if any, for adaptation, transition and investment in alternatives. Some governments have increased fossil fuel taxes to encourage alternatives while investing in public transport, home improvement subsidies and flood/fire preventions, knowing that, in a democratic system, they are accountable to the will of the public (making any transition gradual and opportunistic).

As the planet does not get a vote, climate campaign activists are not democratic. Their goal of forcing the energy/food/economic transition as fast as possible, regardless of the harsh impact on the economy, consumers and public well-being, has only left them with the adversarial regulation alternative. Following the La Jolla tobacconization strategy, there have been a multitude of lawsuits at state and local levels against fossil fuel companies for damages from the effects of climate change.

As attribution of climate change (caused potentially by atmospheric movements of a wide range of greenhouse gases and CO2 and methane sources) upon a single oil company in a particular judicial county is next to impossible, most of the climate lawfare cases have been funded by professionalized activists managing funds in large philanthropic foundations. Pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into this sure-loss strategy, the foundations hope to overwhelm the fossil fuel industry and drive away their investors.

The Firebreak has shown how foundations are quietly underwriting the legal costs of tort firms like Sher Edling, strategic litigation NGOs like Earthjustice or EarthRights International and heavily involved in regranting fiscal sponsors to fund NGO strategic litigation campaigns. One particular case, Suncor v Boulder County, is coming before the Supreme Court next month. The lawsuit is coordinated and led by the foundation-funded NGO, EarthRights International, whose ambition is to use the outcome as a carbon tax to be imposed on the American public and eventually wipe out the fossil fuel industry. In the build-up to the deliberations, the La Jolla coordination strategy is evident: scientists rushing reports to publication to support the case, the media dusting off climate fear stories to amplify public interest, and foundation-funded NGOs, law firms and academics contributing amicus briefs for the case.

An Undemocratic Process

Adversarial regulation is more common in the US, where people tend to have their lawyers on speed dial to manage their daily litigious needs. There are many factors behind this, including: the weak, reactive regulatory structure that gives more reign to free market forces, the common law approach, the variations in political interests at the state level as well as a distrusting civil religion that eschews government intervention in a wide range of public activities.

Under such a system, when change happens, it happens very quickly and without public consultation or consideration of all interests. The Meta case was settled within a week, with sanctions on the social media company’s model that was not subjected to open dialogue or considerations of alternative policy measures. European lawmakers were beginning the regulatory process, assessing the risks and considering the viable options to protect society while enabling benefits. In the US, a group of self-interested tort lawyers quickly pushed through a settlement on the basis of a large payout and some operational restrictions as add-ons to justify the process. As with most adversarial victories, the decisions post-lawsuit are often more severe than traditional regulatory conclusions, and more beholden to interest groups.

I have strong reservations about the legitimacy of the adversarial regulatory approach. It is not democratic, not open to all interested parties and is fueled by financial opportunism. It puts too much power in the hands of tort lawyers whose theatrics and caseloads tend to be motivated by greed more than the public good. Often the US government only comes in after the damage has largely been done (when farmers lose important crop protection products, dark foundation funding tools interfere with economic development…) and only if it conflicts with the ideologies of the political party in power.

Adversarial regulation is lawmaking based on vengeance, opportunism and greed rather than science, evidence and risk management.

Flipping through the glossy reports of EarthRights International, I feel emotionally pulled to commend their social justice goals, how they present themselves as saving indigenous peoples from the evil exploits of Western capitalism and stand on the frontline as a force for good in the fight against global corporate oppression. This emotional comfort is intended to blind me from their marketing strategy, campaign opportunism, massive budgets and political ambitions.

It is worth taking a closer look at EarthRights International within the context of the most recent evolution in professionalized philanthropy through foundation funding and implementation of a strategic litigation tactic managed by a closed group of shrewd political activists. As they try to hide in the shadows, the Suncor v Boulder case is shining considerable light on them.

Strategic Litigation

The term “strategy litigation”, as an activist campaign tool, has only come into widespread discussion in the last few years. NGO-like groups have been formed via foundation-led fiscal sponsors to coordinate a cascade of lawsuits against corporations, states and other representatives of the capitalist system. The “strategic” part is to ensure that lawsuits are filed in coordination with wider campaigns and stakeholders in order to make the greatest impact. It is not about one person seeking justice, but rather about using the justice system to seek vengeance.

Lawyers can be bought, that has never been an issue. But with professionalized philanthropy, activist consultants within these foundations now have access to sufficient funds to afford the lofty timesheets of these opportunists. If $10 million dollars can kick up a lot of dust in a courthouse, buy substantial media time, attract lobbyist and policymaker attention, just imagine what $100 million can do. These lawsuits though are not about righting wrongs and achieving justice, but rather about making significant impact within campaigns, effecting reputational damage and harassing industry actors.

If you can tie these lawsuits to loftier terms like justice, habitat or health protection, retribution and a defense against capitalist exploitation, it will sit well in a foundation’s annual report and please its board members.

The Firebreak has already covered a series of strategic litigation cases within the context of developing how professionalized philanthropy is changing the nature of environmental health campaign management.

• The salmon aquaculture debate in Chile has recently been influenced by a group of large foundations coordinating to create a “litigation infrastructure” in a remote region in Patagonia.

• Sher Edling is a tort law firm created by a fiscal sponsor on behalf of seven large foundations with the sole purpose of filing lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for the damages from climate change. From their dozens of lawsuits, they have yet to win a case but the funding keeps coming.

• EarthJustice is a law firm funded by foundations to be the activist NGO’s litigator ($207 million raised in the last financial year). Income from settlements is extremely low but the reputational harm and bad PR that industry receives from their lawsuits makes it worth every penny.

But these Firebreak case studies looked more at the graft, exploitation and lack of integrity behind these fiscally-sponsored “projects”. They mostly file nuisance lawsuits done by inhouse lawyers (and thus carry high overhead). What if you could create an NGO without any deep legal expertise that functions as an aggregator, identifying potential plaintiffs that align with a political objective and then raise funds from a wide network of activist consultants working within 20 to 30 large foundations? This NGO could then pay external law firms to file cases that fit within the foundations’ wider campaigns.

You would have the strategic litigation approach of the NGO called EarthRights International.

The NGO Behind the Lawsuits

Most people have never heard of EarthRights International for good reason. They wish to serve as the strategic litigation invisible hand, identifying victims that play into their activist ideology and then arranging the funding to hire law firms, the NGOs and reporters to amplify the cases and the lobbyists to pump their intended objective. But this invisible hand slings a lot of mud.

EarthRights is not a law firm, they do not have deep legal expertise and do not try the cases themselves. They target industry actors and governments to implement their post-capitalist activist agenda and then hire law firms to litigate. Their website provides glossy reports on cases in developing countries, with indigenous peoples and minorities fighting capitalist oppression, but most of their work takes place in the US from their K Street offices and in US courts. It is not about change for a better world, improving regulations or ensuring justice; the campaigns EarthRights International are running are about annihilating companies and industries.

I learnt about EarthRights as the instigators and co-counsel behind the climate nuisance lawsuit coming before the US Supreme Court next month: Suncor v Boulder. Their claim is that Suncor and ExxonMobil knew their products contributed to climate change and now need to pay their “fair share” for the damages. This is the strategic litigation Holy Grail, set out by Naomi Oreskes at La Jolla in 2012, and after dozens of failed attempts, Boulder is the first court to actually attain the authority to have the case heard (hence the appeal to the Supreme Court).

On behalf of Boulder County, EarthRights has engaged Kevin Hannon and Yohania Santana of Singleton Schreiber, LLP, the Law Office of Marco B. Simons, and Kevin K. Russell of Russell & Woofter LLC, but now that the Supreme Court is hearing the case of whether state and local courts can override federal law, everyone and their dog is getting involved.

Beyond the “fair share“ rhetoric, the goal of Earthrights in filing this case has always been to impose a “carbon tax” to ultimately put the fossil fuel industry out of business. That is their definition of justice.

The Foundations Behind the NGO

While details are, as usual, scarce, EarthRights International does list its funders for 2024 and it’s a Who’s Who of the big post-capitalist foundations often seen in Firebreak exposés (see image), including Schmidt, Bloomberg, Soros, several Rockefellers, Waverly Street and Wallace.

The NGO has declared funding in 2024 of over $11 million from more than 32 of the largest global foundations. Most of it is restricted funding, meaning it is earmarked to specific campaigns. They are managing 41 ongoing legal cases (which may help explain the 32 foundations).

Thanks to the size of the professionalized philanthropy networks, EarthRights doesn’t have a large fundraising budget. They design campaigns that fit within the keywords and objectives of the foundation strategies, tick all of the boxes and, by relentlessly filing lawsuits, provide foundation fund managers with deliverables (regardless of the success rate). After Suncor v Boulder, they are going to need bigger offices.

Many innate EarthRights keywords these foundations want to hear include: “social justice”, “climate change”, “corporate accountability”, “environmental litigation”, “indigenous peoples”, “resilience”, “dignity” and “equity”. Most of all, EarthRights International serves as an implementer of these foundations’ green colonialist strategy, applying an affluent Western ideology on developing countries (via the American legal system).

This is the new activist business model in the age of professionalized philanthropy.

Whatever Happened to Sher Edling?

The Firebreak has been reporting on how seven large foundations, via a fiscal sponsor, had created and sustained Sher Edling as their climate nuisance law firm for the last decade. After pumping tens of millions into Sher Edling and its tort law firm budgets, with absolutely nothing to show for it, the relative success of EarthRights in Suncor v Boulder (ie, not getting their case thrown out before a hearing) would seem like a slap in the collective foundation face for the millions wasted.

To try to appear relevant (and up its foundation-funded timesheet), Sher Edling filed an amicus brief in Suncor v Boulder, but it would seem like their days are numbered. It is far too expensive for foundations to write off all of the expenses of tort lawyers (while removing their incentive to win) when a lawsuit aggregator like EarthRights can achieve more for pennies on the dollar simply by contracting law firms on the ground.

The reality is that the very idea of strategic litigation against fossil fuel companies for the global effects from the rise of atmospheric CO2 emissions is a rather flimsy limb to have hung tens of millions of dollars on. Did they actually expect to be able to attribute damages from the global consumption of fossil fuels (not to mention other greenhouse gas sources) to a single county in Colorado? I don’t believe these countless climate nuisance lawsuits were ever meant to be successful, but rather served more as a flanking tool, a reputational assault, within the wider climate campaigns (that have also since lost their sizzle despite billions of dollars in foundation funds).

Should the Supreme Court rule as expected, that such cases fall under federal jurisdiction, this should put an end to the decade-long strategic climate litigation tactic. History will show that companies, like those in the fossil fuel industry, that stand up to long-term, foundation-funded strategic litigation campaigns and Predatort MDL extortion rackets rarely get sued again. Companies that have a winning card but roll over and settle out of court, like Bayer, Syngenta and J&J, only encourage further litigation harassment.

The back of my envelope would estimate (very conservatively) that foundations have wasted more than $250 million funding these hopeless climate lawfare cases (including groups like EarthJustice). That’s $250 million that could have helped the homeless, eased malnutrition and supported global education. That the professionalized philanthropy consultants don’t see the disgraceful misuse of these charitable funds for their own political ends indicates how far foundations have fallen from their noble roots.

Suncor v. Boulder County, which the Supreme Court will hear this term, asks whether a Colorado county can sue two oil companies for the costs of climate change — essentially, whether Exxon and Suncor owe Boulder money because the planet is warming. But on Aug. 31, NBC’s senior Supreme Court reporter, Lawrence Hurley, published a preview of the case built around the Marshall Fire, a 2021 blaze that destroyed homes outside Boulder.
There is just one problem.

The fire was ignited, investigators said, by downed power lines and hundred-mile-an-hour winds on a single dry December afternoon, with no mention of carbon dioxide in the incident report. Oh, and it occurred three years after Boulder had filed its case. The lawsuit didn’t grow out of the fire. The story just tells it better that way.

Mr. Hurley is not a stranger to environmental advocacy dressed as reportage; before he covered the Supreme Court, he wrote for Greenwire, a trade publication that covers energy and environmental policy for an audience of activists, regulators and lobbyists, and whose reporters are not known for reflexive sympathy toward oil companies.

That background shows. His story treats “attribution science,” the young, disputed practice of pinning a specific wildfire on greenhouse-gas emissions generally, as settled fact, when its own practitioners will tell you it isn’t. It leans on internal oil-industry documents to suggest decades of cover-up, when those same documents mostly show an industry as uncertain about the future as everyone else was at the time. And it never once tells readers that federal and state judges have already thrown out versions of this legal theory as sweeping and unworkable.

None of this would be objectionable on the opinion page, where readers know what they’re getting. The trouble is that Supreme Court previews are not supposed to double as advocacy briefs, and NBC would have readers believe this is straight-shooting analysis. What Mr. Hurley has produced is an editorial with a dateline — masquerading as objective news and footnoted with the plaintiffs’ preferred data. In court that’s called an amicus brief.

Worst-case climate scenarios are wrong

The premise underwriting most of the alarm in Hurley’s piece, that unchecked warming puts Colorado on a trajectory toward ever-worse fire seasons, leans heavily on the kind of high-emissions climate projections that a growing body of expert literature has deemed unrealistic.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and energy researcher Glen Peters made this case directly in a 2020 Nature commentary, writing that the field’s own worst-case pathway “was intended to explore an unlikely high-risk future” rather than describe where the world is actually headed. Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie went further in a 2021 assessment, calling the continued reliance on that scenario one of the more significant failures of scientific integrity in climate research and calling for a course correction.

Treating that scenario as a likely baseline rather than a tail case has real consequences for how a story like this gets framed, and Hurley’s piece never flags the distinction.

Wildfires less frequent, burned area declining

The single biggest fact missing from Hurley’s account is the global trend line. A widely cited satellite-data study published in Science found that global burned area fell by roughly a quarter over an 18-year period, driven mostly by agricultural expansion and intensification in savanna and grassland regions. That’s the opposite of the “fires are getting worse everywhere” backdrop the NBC piece takes for granted, and it comes from peer-reviewed satellite observation. It’s a finding replicated in multiple recent studies, all pushing against the narrative driving this litigation.

A specific fire, in a specific place, on a specific dry and windy day, can still be devastating. But a single local disaster is not evidence of a global trend, and Hurley’s story repeatedly blurs the two. This distortion is obvious because he notes in passing that the lawsuit was filed three years before the Marshall Fire was ignited — but not before using the blaze to justify the lawsuit as an attempt “to hold energy companies accountable for the costs of adapting to a climate altered by fossil fuel emissions.”

Weather-related economic damage is declining, not rising

The story leans on the framing that climate-driven disasters are an escalating and unmanageable cost, hence the suggestion that oil companies should be made to help cover it. But normalized for the size of the global economy, weather- and climate-related losses have been trending down since 1990. Heat mortality tells a similar story: even as average temperatures have risen, deaths attributed to extreme heat have declined over the past several decades as urban areas and populations have adapted.

A 2021 study in The Lancet found that cold, not heat, remains the far larger climate-linked mortality risk worldwide, with roughly nine times as many excess deaths tied to cold temperatures as to hot ones between 2000 and 2019. These trends undercut the “costs are spiraling out of control” framing that gives the lawsuit, and the story, its emotional urgency.

Attribution “science”: preliminary and timed for litigation

Hurley’s piece treats the link between climate change and any specific fire as a matter of settled science. It is no such thing. The field of “attribution science,” which purports to calculate how much any single weather event owes to greenhouse gas emissions, remains young and methodologically contested, to say the least. Its own leading practitioners acknowledge that it is poorly suited to explaining what happens in one place over a short period of time, as opposed to global, long-run trends.

That caution hasn’t stopped activists from deploying the field on a suspiciously convenient legal timeline. The National Academies of Sciences released a major report in July declaring that individual weather events can now be robustly attributed to climate change. Its acknowledgments include a Sher Edling-affiliated attorney (the firm suing the oil industry on behalf of multiple jurisdictions), researchers tied to advocacy-funded climate communications work and a Washington Post reporter who briefed the committee on how attribution stories perform with readers.

Notably, the report landed just eleven days before the plaintiffs’ merits brief was due at the Supreme Court.

At least one federal judge (and a half-dozen state courts) have already rejected the underlying legal theory as groundless. Ruling on a similar public-nuisance claim brought by the city of Oakland in 2018, US district judge William Alsup called the scope of the plaintiffs’ theory “breathtaking,” writing that it would reach the sale of fossil fuels anywhere in the world, including all past and otherwise lawful sales, wherever the seller knew that burning fossil fuels contributed to global warming.

A reader of Hurley’s piece is left believing attribution science is settled, uncontroversial evidence rather than a still-developing field whose most prominent recent showcase happened to arrive on the eve of a Supreme Court filing deadline.

The “Exxon hid what it knew” narrative doesn’t hold up

The entire legal theory in cases like Boulder’s depends on the claim that oil companies possessed internal knowledge about climate change and concealed it from the public. But the industry documents most often cited to support that claim, the same trove historian Naomi Oreskes has drawn on for years, don’t actually show a company suppressing settled internal findings. Instead, they reveal an industry that was as uncertain about future climate change as anyone else at the time was. Consider this 1980 memo from the American Petroleum Institute.

Court rulings dismissing similar claims have noted that the state failed to show the public lacked access to the same climate information the industry supposedly hid, undermining the “greenwashing” theory at its foundation. One Delaware judge pinpointed the absurdity underlying the plaintiffs’ claim: they allege that climate change is an undeniable disaster while the oil industry successfully suppressed evidence it was happening.

Allows us to explain the fallacy to the journalists reading this. It’s impossible to know that human-caused climate change is a pending disaster if you’ve been deceived about humanity’s role in climate change. Only one of those statements can be true, but the plaintiffs want everyone to believe both.

That gap between the internal-documents narrative and what the documents themselves show deserves far more scrutiny than a single-sentence characterization in a wire-style Supreme Court preview.

This isn’t an isolated lapse in Hurley’s coverage

Hurley’s April 2023 piece, “Supreme Court deals blow to oil companies by turning away climate cases,” covered a narrow, procedural ruling: the Court simply declined to hear a set of climate suits, deciding nothing about whether the companies are actually liable. His own text called the ruling “relatively narrow.” Yet the headline and lead adopted the plaintiffs’ framing of that non-decision as “a loss for business interests,” and quoted an activist accusing oil companies of planning to “defend their climate lies in front of juries,” with no comparable counterweight.

Another leftward hook out of bounds is his August 2026 story on the Federal Judicial Center’s climate chapter, part of a guide the federal judiciary publishes to help judges weigh scientific evidence. Hurley introduced his piece as “the curious tale of the right-wing attack on the climate change chapter,” casting critics as aggressors rather than the ones flagging an egregious conflict.

This was no obscure dispute; it drew sustained coverage across outlets from Bloomberg Law to Fox News, a rebuke from President Trump and a direct question to Justice Kagan from Sen. Susan Collins in a Senate hearing, after a coalition of Republican attorneys general objected that Michael Burger, of counsel at Sher Edling, the firm representing the plaintiffs the chapter’s conclusions stood to help, had reviewed it before publication.

The clearest instance of Hurley inserting his own opinion comes in a follow-up post on Justice Kagan’s recusal from the case that would decide those same climate-litigation theories. Writing in his own voice, not as a quote from any source, he declared “ethics experts say no need for recusal,” settling the very question the story was meant to be reporting on. That same post labels the recusal push “activists on the right,” a tag never matched for the senator he quotes making the opposing case.

Conclusion

None of this disputes that the climate is warming, that the Marshall Fire was a real tragedy or that Colorado is dealing with genuine drought and fire risk. What’s in dispute is whether NBC’s framing serves its readers or serves the litigation. A Supreme Court reporter covering a case built on disputed science has an obligation to tell readers the science is disputed.

Hurley’s story instead borrows the plaintiffs’ framing, cites the plaintiffs’ preferred data points and leaves out the body of research that would complicate the narrative. Readers deciding what to make of Suncor v. Boulder County deserve a preview that isn’t written from inside the plaintiffs’ brief.

An ongoing lawsuit in Missouri was brought to my attention as a case that ticks many of The Firebreak’s boxes:

• An activist news organization omitting facts to go after a company

• A large number of left-wing professionalized foundations funding the news organization’s attack agenda

• A rogue scientist who seemed to have lawyered up to try to extract a large settlement

• A journalist with sharp scissors cutting corners to produce a story to fit her ideology

Just another day implementing the activist playbook? But this story contains one element rarely seen in this post-capitalist political agenda: a company standing up and fighting back, suing the news organization and its freelance journalist for deception and a series of unsubstantiated claims they have refused to retract. This is the story of the lawsuit filed by Averhealth against ProPublica for defamation.

The Parties Involved

Averhealth is the largest forensic drug-testing provider in the US, conducting roughly 2.5 million tests annually for courts, probation departments and child welfare agencies. Their test results have profound effects on people’s lives so accuracy is important.

ProPublica is a media group whose mission is to “expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.” But ProPublica doesn’t seem to expose the abuses of power of NGOs and foundations because, well, the non-profit is largely funded by many of the largest left-wing foundations (2025 income of $79 million with almost 90% of the grants being restricted to reporting on the earmarked special interests).

ProPublica had spent many years trying to “expose abuses” at Averhealth, but while they felt they had the “moral force” to claim malpractice at the testing company, their fact-checkers lacked any force. In January, 2026, Alice Hines, a freelance journalist contracted by ProPublica, published an article riddled with half-truths and omissions.

In her article, Hines tried to portray Averhealth as being:

• more concerned with speed than quality and accuracy in their testing;

• not forthcoming with their client (Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services) about being audited or on probation;

• a target of lawsuits and probation (at risk of losing its accreditation).

But it seems that ProPublica itself has been more concerned with speed than quality and accuracy in its journalism. So many facts were omitted or twisted to fit the narrative the journalist wished to weave, with cherrypicked claims and qualifications to Averhealth’s responses.

The claims Hines was making were strong enough to lead to significant client loss, threatening the existence of the company. Averhealth contacted ProPublica to contest the article’s claims, requesting that the media organization correct or retract the article. The messages were met with insolence leaving them no other choice but to sue ProPublica. On 26 August, Averhealth petitioned for defamation against ProPublica and freelance reporter Alice Hines in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County.

Averhealth V Propublica

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The Article Behind the Defamation

The ProPublica article was published on 20 January 2026 under the headline “A Child Welfare Agency Doubted the Accuracy of Drug Tests Used in Court. The Testing Company Dodged Questions”. The heart of the case begins with two Michigan vignettes: a foster care supervisor saying an Averhealth methamphetamine result conflicted with tests performed elsewhere; and a state child welfare supervisor writing that her office distrusted the company when deciding whether to remove children from homes.

The article then builds through several load-bearing claims:

• that Averhealth’s accreditor placed the lab on probation;

• that several former employees, speaking anonymously, described understaffing and pressure from management to work faster;

• that it faced serious accusations from a whistleblower;

• that the Justice Department investigated them and pursued a case;

• that parents sued over false positives in litigation Averhealth had settled.

Across seventy-eight pages and twenty-four exhibits, Averhealth’s defamation filing lays out a documentary record that reads less like a complaint and more like an indictment of a ProPublica newsroom that had every fact it needed and published the opposite.

A caveat: ProPublica’s internal deliberations have not been made public (yet). Averhealth is a commercial company with a stake in protecting its reputation, and this filing presents its case, not a verdict. The sources, quotes and images for this article come from the court filing and include letters, deposition transcripts, court orders and government filings. The court filing can be tracked via the 21^st Judicial Circuit (case number: 26SL-CC05899).

The Seven-Week Whistleblower

The entire ProPublica story rests on one person: Dr Sarah Riley, hired as a laboratory director in September 2020 and gone by 3 November, less than two months later, while working part-time. Four days before she quit, she emailed colleagues that she was “looking forward to working with everyone.” During her employment, she made no formal allegation that the results were inaccurate.

Then her attorneys sent a demand letter. It claimed wrongful termination (reminder: Riley quit her job after seven weeks), a claim she later conceded under oath was never filed and never paid. The demand asserted that Averhealth was producing “a 30 percent positive rate even where individuals had consumed zero drugs.” She demanded $1.25 million. Averhealth refused, and Riley sued the company.

If Riley’s claims were accurate, there would then be hundreds of thousands of erroneous results. This would lead to custody rulings, probation revocations and criminal sentences unraveling across multiple states. The company would have been finished. This is an extinction-level charge and Riley almost certainly knew that.

Questioned under oath in December 2024, Riley was asked about her claims. According to her deposition, she said she had “no idea” what the false-positive rate was for hair tests. “No idea” for urine tests. Her 30% estimate, it emerged, came from a single email involving only Michigan samples and only oral fluid — a tiny slice of the business — plus the reasoning that a laboratory using three calibrators has “a one in three chance on any given day.” She conceded the true figure “could be 0.” She could not name a single sample that had ever yielded a false positive. Confronted with her own lawyer’s “zero drugs” assertion, she answered: “I actually don’t know… I don’t know where this… I don’t know.”

Any competent science desk in any serious news organization should also have caught the irony. The calibration practice Riley misunderstood — using a low point on the curve at or below a customer’s reporting cutoff — would, if it skewed anything, produce false negatives,in other words, missed forensic evidence of drug use and the reverse of the alleged harm. Averhealth explained this in writing to ProPublica in January 2025. Months later, Hines quoted that same letter back to the company.

Averhealth warned ProPublica a year before publication to make sure to provide legal oversight on Hines’ claims. It appears they came up short.

A Litany of Omissions

The petition includes appended records demonstrating how ProPublica possessed evidence before publication they chose to withhold from readers.

• The Justice Department cleared the science. The DOJ issued Civil Investigative Demands, received millions of documents, and had every opportunity to uncover fraud. On 4 June 2024 it declined to intervene on every allegation of inaccuracy, choosing to pursue only one of Riley’s eighteen claims: whether Averhealth had billed Michigan for oral fluid results that were not confirmed by a separate mass-spectrometric method, as the contract required. In other words, a contract-performance question. The US Attorney’s own words were “nonconforming services.” Seventeen states, including Michigan, declined to join at all. The ProPublica article claimed the DOJ “investigated Riley’s claims and pursued a case.” Did Hines realize that the investigation of one out of 18 claims, and not a scientific issue, did not justify her conclusions?

• Michigan hired auditors, who cleared the lab. The state’s health department retained Wagner Toxicology Associates. The firm reviewed the data, spent two days on site, found Riley’s allegations unsubstantiated, and concluded the results could be “scientifically supported and forensically defended in court.” A Michigan family court judge also heard Riley testify in person and rejected her account as “speculative,” noting she “did not provide the Court with any specific examples.” ProPublica and Hines decided that none of this information was valuable for the narrative they wanted to spin.

The accreditor found no safety risk. The College of American Pathologists (CAP) put the lab on six months’ probation after Riley complained, then ended it following a non-routine inspection. ProPublica emphasized that probation but failed to mention that for CAP, this probation is the lowest level of disciplinary action, reserved for circumstances “that do not appear to pose a substantial risk of harm to patients or to laboratory personnel”. Readers were not told that CAP’s own published manual reserves the terms “Probation with Immediate Jeopardy” and “Probation with Suspension” for laboratories posing a substantial risk to patients — categories CAP did not apply to Averhealth. Thirteen months before publication, Averhealth spelled this out to ProPublica’s general counsel in bold and italics but the news organization ignored this.

• The parents’ lawsuit had collapsed. Foulger v. Avertest is quoted extensively in the article as evidence of families harmed by false positives. By publication, a federal court had granted Averhealth complete summary judgment on two plaintiffs’ claims, dismissed a third plaintiff’s claims outright as a sanction for what the court called “willful and bad faith conduct” after the plaintiff “lied repeatedly over a period of two years,” sharply narrowed a fourth’s, and limited a fifth to a three-month damages window. One plaintiff swore she had been sober since 2020, then admitted using methamphetamine, opiates and fentanyl as recently as 2024. Another claimed CPS took her son while she had voluntarily placed him under her own mother’s guardianship. Another plaintiff, deposed, took the Fifth. ProPublica’s readers learned only that Averhealth “settled the lawsuit in September” aware of all the implications such a claim carried, despite the facts.

• The star source’s personnel file. Jennifer Picker was ProPublica’s on-the-record chemist who said the lab valued speed over accuracy. But her claims needed to be considered in light of critical HR records supplied by Averhealth: documented attendance problems, an acknowledged “lapse in judgment” over a written warning and medication that made her drowsy on shift. Her continued employment was conditional on her “increased competence” with the same instruments at issue. The ProPublica article notes Picker’s denial that she had “disciplinary issues or struggled to meet her workload” and reduced Averhealth’s documented HR response to unattributed say-so.

• The corroborating witness was the roommate. After Picker’s file surfaced, Hines produced another former employee, Stephen Penn, who had worked there five months, made no complaint while employed and when he left, had told the company he had found work closer to home. It would seem odd then that grievances would have surfaced three years afterward. Penn and Picker had been roommates while they both worked at Averhealth.

• The false-positive victims who weren’t. ProPublica presented Averhealth with two named individuals who had signed HIPAA waivers. One tested positive for two drugs on three occasions and had signed a drug-court agreement accepting Averhealth results as prima facie valid. The other had one positive for alcohol metabolite, no evidence of error, and a family court record documenting parenting concerns unrelated to any test. Both individuals ProPublica had presented were tested after the CAP probation ended. Neither positive result made the article. Instead, ProPublica readers got the number “50”: 50 parents who say they were wronged, although they were unnamed and unexamined.

“We Decline”

On 13 February 2026, Averhealth’s counsel sent a detailed retraction demand and offered a statement for publication. ProPublica’s general counsel answered that Averhealth “[had] not identified anything inaccurate in the story,” and was instead asking ProPublica to “rewrite the Article according to [Averhealth’s] preferences.” To that, ProPublica’s counsel responded: “We decline.”

Then ProPublica did something extraordinary. Defending the article, its counsel pointed out that Foulger “proceeded past summary judgment on several claims and settled in September, which the Article also accurately reported.” The summary judgment history, including the sanctions, the perjury findings and the claims thrown out, is used as a shield in private correspondence but never appears in print. They knew it. They possessed it. They used it to defend themselves but kept it from readers.

Sometime after publication, the headline changed. “A Child Welfare Agency Doubted the Accuracy of Drug Tests Used in Court. The Testing Company Dodged Questions” (web archive) became “A Drug Testing Company Favored Speed Over Reliability, Some Ex-Employees Say. The Firm Says Its Work Is ‘Accurate.’” (present web version). Note the scare quotes. No correction notice was added and no explanation given. Newsrooms that stand behind their reporting do not quietly retitle articles. In any case, the story had already been syndicated and widely read.

The Standards They Wrote Themselves

What happens when a news outlet with institutional prestige and unlimited foundation funding prescribes beforehand their political narrative and then refuses to budge when evidence cuts against it?

ProPublica is not Vice, where Alice Hines first published this story in 2022 and again in 2023. Hines has been working on this single story for the last four years which would suggest she has invested too much to turn back. The news organization has more than 150 journalists, works with over 200 outlets and has a budget (2024) for personnel of over $30 million. You would think ProPublica would have sufficient funds to hire a few fact-checkers.

ProPublica’s Code of Ethics demands that its “facts are accurate and fairly presented,” that its analyses reflect “our best independent judgments rather than our preferences or those of our sources,” and that there are “no hidden agendas in any of our journalistic undertakings.”

Perhaps the journalist behind this story, Alice Hines, as a contracted freelancer, did not have to sign this code of conduct.

Averhealth’s lawyers cited those commitments back to ProPublica in January 2025 and warned explicitly that this story needed “senior editors, experienced fact-checkers, and legal counsel — who are not invested in this story like Ms. Hines is.”

Final Thoughts

I would put four questions to ProPublica’s editors:

• Why was Averhealth’s documented evidence about Picker, actual contemporaneous records, reduced to the company’s “say-so”?

• Why did the two false-positive claimants you brought to Averhealth, whose accounts collapsed, disappear from the story instead of appearing as instructive failures?

• Why does an article citing Foulger’s allegations omit Foulger’s outcome, when your own general counsel relied on that outcome in your defense?

• And why was the headline radically changed without telling readers?

Whatever the verdict, the following points have already been established. A reporter working four years on a story was soliciting sources on TikTok. A newsroom received government filings, audit reports, court orders and deposition transcripts contradicting its thesis, then printed that thesis anyway. When asked to correct it, the institution declined.

The story ProPublica actually had was better than the one it published:

• a rejected seven-figure demand from an employee who had worked in Averhealth for seven weeks;

• her demand was turned into a national accusation;

• a federal investigation finding nothing;

• a lawsuit coming apart under oath.

ProPublica decided to run with the wrong story.

The courts will now determine whether any of this is actionable. Actual malice in a defamation lawsuit is a demanding standard, and ProPublica has capable lawyers and deep foundation-based support. Should Averhealth win a substantial settlement (beyond the news organization’s means), I am curious if the anti-industry foundations funding ProPublica could be held liable.

But discovery cuts both ways. A newsroom that devoted four years and two employers to pursuing one story may find its email archive more revealing than its published work. The Firebreak believes there is public interest reporting on the strategic messages exchanged within a news organization claiming to provide journalism “in the public interest”.

Watch this space!

The Salmon Wars investigation has allowed The Firebreak to highlight the various strands of our research and analyses. This four-part series has shown: how foundations hide their funding sources through different mechanisms like fiscal sponsors and donor-advised funds (Part 1); how professionalized philanthropy coordinates and choreographs a dark network of captive journalists, researchers, lobbyists and NGOs to more efficiently make an impact and control the public narrative (Part 2); how governments can join the foundations (and use their same tactics) through international bodies (Part 3). The most important research area The Firebreak has been investigating, and the subject of this concluding chapter, is how foundations are augmenting their campaigns by funding and directing law firms, lawfare attacks, strategic litigation and public nuisance lawsuits.

A recent development in professionalized philanthropy is how foundations are financing legal costs, often via third parties, to advance campaign goals. Litigation is effective, it gets results and it threatens the viability of targeted industries. But if litigating salmon farmers out of existence is a legitimate strategy for these ruthless activists, then the foundations need to provide their front groups in the local communities in southern Chile with the appropriate resources.

This is an emerging field of professionalized philanthropy known as strategic litigation where foundations are creating or funding NGOs (often via fiscal sponsors) to identify lawsuit targets, employ law firms and coordinate the PR. The most well-known case and the benchmark for this recent strategy, was the creation and funding of Sher Edling. Tens of millions in foundation funding have been channeled through a fiscal sponsor to have this tort law firm file nuisance lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry claiming damages from climate change. The main strategic goal is not to win but to create reputational harm of an industry, and while Sher Edling has yet to succeed in any of their dozens of lawfare suits, the foundation money keeps flowing in. A similar strategy in the war against Chilean salmon aquaculture is emerging.

Part 3 of the Salmon Wars looked at the interventions of the Norwegian state aid agency, NPA, to lawyer up activists in local indigenous groups But that is small beer compared to what the foundations have done to disrupt the southern Chilean economy. This concluding chapter will demonstrate how they have built and funded a litigation infrastructure to harass and interrupt the ability for Chilean salmon farmers to make a living. This is more than just one further strategy by the professionalized philanthropists and foreign state actors in southern Chile; it is intended to be the fatal blow.

Building and Financing an Anti-Salmon Litigation Infrastructure

One tool commonly used by the law firms is to manipulate the 2008 ECMPO classification. ECMPO stands for Espacios Costeros Marinos de Pueblos Originarios (Indigenous Peoples’ Marine Coastal Spaces), a policy framework that allows indigenous populations to claim protection of coastal areas that have been used for traditional practices. With little legitimacy, lawyers are flooding the courts with ECMPO claims and tactics to stymie or hold up salmon farm concessions.

The Norwegians and the foundations are not only funding the lawyers, but also the groups communicating on the lawsuits, the networks connecting the (indigenous) plaintiffs with the law firms and the technical support for the caseloads. They have built, coordinated and financed a litigation infrastructure to strangle salmon aquaculture. Keep in mind this is foreign funding designed to obstruct local economies in southern Chile and that some of the donor parties have evident conflicts of interest in the potential results coming from funding these legal challenges.

Some examples of foundation-funded strategic litigation:

• Packard has given $836,100 across four grants (2024–2025) to FIMA (Fiscalía del Medio Ambiente), the Chilean environmental litigation NGO responsible for five rulings in the Environmental Tribunal against salmon farms in the Kawésqar Reserve and for a salmon project permit revocation. One 2025 grant for $300,100 was designated for a ‘civil society communications campaign’. In other words, Packard is also financing the accompanying public relations campaign.

• Like the Norwegian state agency, NPA, Packard has also funded Observatorio Ciudadano with a series of ten grants, giving the anti-salmon NGO more than $3 million from 2023 to 2026. One grant, for $226,000, is intended to fund the legal network that connects FIMA-type litigators to indigenous-community plaintiffs (see image). These funds were largely used for ECMPO claims.

• Pew has funded technical support (through the Universidad Austral de Chile’s “Austral Patagonia” program) for ECMPO claims. Such applications can hold up the awarding of salmon aquaculture concessions for years.

The millions in strategic litigation funding are designed to decimate the salmon farmers. But as they are foundations, perceived to be virtuous, most look away and pretend nothing illegal or unethical is going on. The Norwegians don’t have similar lawfare assaults obstructing their salmon farmers (perhaps the Chileans should set up some foundation front groups to obstruct salmon aquaculture in Norway).

The Philanthropic Nation State

Is it fair to compare interventions by Norwegian state agencies with philanthropists? In Part 3, the state agencies were portrayed to be acting as quasi-charitable foundations. At the same time, it is difficult to not notice how multi-billion dollar foundations working on campaigns in lower and middle-income countries are behaving like foreign governments.

Some examples of how foundations are now acting like, and in place of, governments:

• When the US left the World Health Organization, the next largest contributor to the WHO was not Germany or Japan, but the Gates Foundation. Governments are no longer ready to spend the billions required for intergovernmental development programs but billionaires are welcoming their UN Global Ambassador titles.

• Bloomberg Philanthropies is running the WHO‘s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control’s MPOWER program. Michael Bloomberg has contributed or committed around $2 billion to a group of NGOs that implement the WHO strategy while adding their own political biases against tobacco harm reduction strategies. The WHO does not have the resources and is powerless to intervene as low income countries pass regulations against the use of health prevention tools.

• The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is promoting a large agroecology program. Agroecology is a Marxist-based agricultural philosophy that promotes subsistence farming techniques as an alternative to modern agricultural technologies. The FAO is doing this because of the influence of the Agroecology Fund, a project of a fiscal sponsor that raised $100 million from a group of large foundations. It seems tech billionaires were convinced peasant farming is the future of food production.

The main difference between governments and foundations is that most governments have to be accountable to their populations for their actions while foundations are run like dictatorships, imposing the will of a billionaire on vulnerable communities. And such is the case in southern Chilean coastal communities, where a small group of professionalized philanthropists have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fund law firms and lobbyists, pay off the media and academics, form activist front groups and fiscal sponsors, while pulling the strings from the shadows.

Accountable governments or organizations with ethical codes of conduct would never be able to execute such beautifully ruthless strategies to manipulate large populations and win campaigns. The professionalized philanthropy motto: To make an impact, you must take total control.

Green Colonialism

The salmon farmers are fighting valiantly against the unlimited resources of these political activists, trying to ensure a continued economic future for these remote regions while providing consumers with healthy, affordable protein. But it is becoming a difficult struggle against organizations with no financial limits, no transparency and no accountability.

This is a new form of “Green Colonialism” where affluent Western political dogma is imposed on vulnerable populations. But in this case, the policies are environmental and the colonizers are the foundations managed by a network of politically active consultants. See several analyses of this green colonialism by Marc Gunther and The Firebreak.

The foundation-driven climate crisis was the benchmark of how professionalized philanthropy could control a narrative, drive policy, disrupt trade and development and impose an affluent green ideology on populations with more basic concerns (food, energy, jobs, welfare...). After the bottom fell out of the catastrophic climate collapse campaign, populations are beginning to see how they were deceived, how the media was funded, how scientists were paid, how net-zero campaigns were run by foundation-driven interest groups, and yes, how even Greta was stage-managed.

Following the Norwegian People’s Aid investigation, there have been calls in Chile for legislation demanding transparency of foreign funding of NGOs. This needs to include foundations who have created such complex webs of fiscal sponsors and front groups, organizations that have thrived in running their campaigns from the shadows. As they tend to operate as extra-legal, transnational forces, this scrutiny needs to be made at a global level.

Foundations should take the initiative on transparency, but every tool they use has been designed to deceive: from dark donor-advised funds to fiscally sponsored “projects” or “initiatives” covering up non-existent entities.

This professionalized foundation capitalism playbook is being executed in other environmental issues now (microplastics, PFAS, tobacco harm reduction, ultra-processed foods...) where hundreds of millions in foundation funds are flowing in via fiscal sponsors, activist front groups, lobbyists and litigators. Chilean salmon aquaculture has provided a good case study of how these dark, deceptive forces are operating.

But after the climate ruse was discovered, the public is starting to wake up to the dark side of professionalized philanthropy. After foundations like Packard or the Norwegian government tried to manipulate indigenous populations to speak out against salmon farming, they did not expect the opposition and the anger. Maybe Packard and other foundations should take a closer look at what their consultants and fiscal sponsors are actually doing and question whether “winning at all costs” is a good public image for a philanthropic foundation.

This investigation will close with a quote from one of the local leaders who was not appreciative of the imperialist foundation dogma being imposed on his community.

“We have seen how imperialism shows its trinkets in our territories. Now its form is more surreptitious and typical of our time. It is no longer about putting the boot on top, but about meddling in the communities, creating some [indigenous people] on demand, acclimatizing them and, then, beating the cloths through social networks and … media to legitimize them as the only and authentic [indigenous people] because they are friends of the settler. … The new Yanaconas are now digital and globalized by the hand of the green colonialists … It cannot be that we are at the mercy of organizations of which we know little or nothing about their interests and for which Chilean citizens have not voted to govern our destinies as they are doing … Today we demand that the Government of Chile set its territorial policy in Magallanes, not that it be dictated by these organizations and their local allies.” Original text

Juan Carlos Tonko Paterito
Kawésqar Indigenous Community
Puerto Edén, Chile

Summary

• The National Academy of Sciences has removed its climate chapter from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence while it conducts an “independent review” of the process used to produce it.

• That sounds reassuring, but NASEM has not said who will conduct the review, who will choose them, what records they will see, or how much of their work will be made public.

• A serious review should examine author selection, conflicts, outside participants, funders, peer review, internal correspondence and the treatment of dissent. It should also ask whether NASEM’s existing rules were good enough, not simply whether staff followed them.

• And if NASEM is serious about restoring confidence in its process, the review should not end with one judicial-manual chapter. The same questions should be asked about its 2026 extreme-weather attribution report and its 2025 greenhouse-gas review, completed on a six-week “fast-track.”

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has decided that its controversial climate chapter for judges needs an independent review. That is welcome news, but it’s only half of what’s needed.

On August 7, the National Academy of Sciences announced that the climate-science chapter in the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence would disappear from its website while an independent review examines the process used to produce it. The Federal Judicial Center had already removed the chapter after objections from Republican attorneys general. NASEM now says it wants to know whether its own procedures were adequate to ensure the “highest standard of objectivity.” The review is expected to conclude this fall.

So far, so good. But who exactly is going to do this independent reviewing? NASEM has not identified the reviewers. It has not said how they will be selected. It has not said what documents they will see, what witnesses they can question, whether their findings will be published in full or even what “independent” means in this case.

It has already told us one thing the review will not examine. According to NASEM, “This assessment is about the process used to produce the chapter and not about the validity of climate science.” Nobody needs another blue-ribbon panel to determine whether carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. But if the issue is process, then let us actually review the process.

What Would an Independent Review Look Like?

The National Academies knows how to describe independent review. Its reports routinely say reviewers are chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise, and that the purpose is to test whether a report meets standards for quality, objectivity, evidence and responsiveness to the study charge. NASEM also normally identifies the reviewers and the people responsible for overseeing the review.

First, publish a written charge laying out exactly what the reviewers are being asked to determine. That means addressing whether NASEM's procedures were followed, whether conflicts were properly identified, whether the group of authors was balanced, whether contrary views got a fair hearing, whether outside contributors were properly disclosed, and whether editors or staff made decisions that affected the chapter's objectivity.

Second, identify the reviewers and disclose their possible conflicts. At a bare minimum, no one who contributed to the chapter, supervised it, funded it, advised the project, participated in its review, or belongs to the management chain whose conduct is under examination should be judging whether the process worked.

Third, give the reviewers the whole record: materials on how authors were selected, nominations, conflict disclosures, correspondence, meeting records, outside submissions, reviewer comments, responses to those comments, funding information and any internal discussion about affiliations or potential bias.

There may be legitimate reasons to redact personal or confidential material. There is no legitimate reason to reduce the final product to “we looked into it and found our procedures were adequate.”

Finally, publish enough of the review record that people outside NASEM can understand what went wrong, insofar as something did. An institution cannot restore trust by asking the public to trust its private investigation of whether the public should trust it.

We Have Seen This Problem Before

Firebreak readers have some context here. Earlier this month we examined NASEM’s new report, Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts. NASEM released the report on July 16, declaring that major scientific advances now allow more robust attribution of individual extreme-weather events and their impacts to human-caused climate change.

As we documented, the committee heard from Michael Burger of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. What the report did not list in his affiliation was that Burger is also of counsel at Sher Edling, the firm prosecuting climate lawsuits against oil companies. In a committee presentation, Burger openly discussed the relationship between developing attribution science and climate litigation. The committee also included, during part of the study, Delta Merner of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate-accountability operation. Researchers from Climate Central appeared in the acknowledgments. Washington Post “Climate Zeitgeist Reporter” Shannon Osaka briefed the committee on how journalists use attribution research and on the declining reader interest in attribution stories on their own.

We also noted the funding network around the project and the litigation campaign, and the oddity of a scientific committee receiving advice from people whose professional work would benefit from stronger, more usable attribution claims.

None of that proves a scientific conclusion false. But the purpose of conflict and bias rules is precisely to guard against public doubts about how judgments were made in the first place.

If NASEM wants to examine whether its procedures were adequate to guarantee objectivity in the judges’ manual, why would it not ask the same questions about the attribution report?

NASEM owes readers a straight answer on who selected the committee, and on which conflicts got flagged as relevant and which got waved off. It owes an explanation for why Burger's Sher Edling position never made it into the affiliation listed in the report. And it owes an account of what the peer reviewers actually knew about the litigation relationships surrounding the project, including whether anyone raised concerns, and if so, what happened to them.

The Report Did Make It to Court

Our previous piece also pointed to the timing of the attribution report. It appeared July 16, as briefing was underway in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, the Supreme Court case involving Boulder’s climate claims against fossil-fuel companies. We said we would soon find out whether the new NASEM report would become useful litigation material.

Notably, on August 3, the Natural Resources Defense Council filed an amicus brief supporting Boulder, and the National Academies’ July attribution report is all over it. The brief’s table of authorities cites the 2026 report on pages 5, 7-9, 12-13, 17-18 and 20-21. It also cites NASEM’s 2025 report, Effects of Human-Caused Greenhouse Gas Emissions on U.S. Climate, Health, and Welfare.

The amicus brief then uses the 2026 report to argue that attribution science has developed credible methods for connecting greenhouse-gas emissions to extreme events and their resulting damages, including harms allegedly suffered by Boulder.

This is why process matters: the National Academies seal is valuable in court because judges are not expected to reconstruct an entire scientific literature from scratch. A NASEM report arrives carrying institutional credibility. Judges, reporters and policymakers reasonably assume that conflicts were managed, competing views were considered and the process was designed to produce an objective assessment. If that assumption is wrong, we’ve got a problem.

Why Stop With the Judges’ Manual?

The 2026 attribution report raises obvious questions because the product is already being used in climate litigation. The interests of committee members, outside contributors, funders and litigation advocates are therefore highly relevant. But so too is the process behind NASEM’s 2025 report on greenhouse gases, health and welfare.

NASEM itself called its prior look a “fast-track review.” It announced the project on August 7, 2025, after EPA proposed reconsidering the 2009 greenhouse-gas Endangerment Finding, and said the report would be completed in September. It was published September 17.

Six weeks is not a long time to assemble a committee, review an enormous scientific literature accumulated since 2009, receive and evaluate evidence, manage conflicts, draft conclusions, put the report through independent peer review, address the reviewers’ comments and produce a consensus document on one of the most politically consequential scientific questions in federal regulation. Maybe NASEM performed this feat impeccably. If so, an independent process review would strengthen the institution.

A Review Worth Having

NASEM’s decision to pull the judicial chapter and review its process could turn out to be window dressing. There are reasons to suspect it will. Announcing an “independent review” without identifying the independent reviewers, the scope of their work or what the public will get to see is not much of a commitment.

But it is also an opportunity, because NASEM has publicly acknowledged something important: the quality of scientific advice depends not merely on whether smart people produced it, but on whether the procedures used to produce it were adequate to ensure objectivity.

Take that principle seriously.

To address this decline, a salmon aquaculture industry emerged over the last 50 years and this wonderful food returned to our plates. Norway became the leader in farmed salmon with their aquacultural techniques spreading to other salmon coastlines around the globe: Scotland, British Columbia, Russia, Iceland, Tasmania, Argentina… But nowhere was the rise in salmon farming as spectacular as in southern Chile, soon becoming the second largest farmed salmon producer in the world, capturing a large part of the US market and becoming the nation’s second largest export. This threatened the Norwegian aquaculture industry’s dominance and foreign trade revenue. Something had to be done.

Norwegian State Interference

The Norwegian farmed salmon industry is massive: an $18 billion industry selling half of the world’s Atlantic salmon, providing almost 60,000 jobs and exporting over 1.4 million tons of salmon yearly. It would make sense for the Kingdom of Norway to then protect its interests. But protecting Norwegian salmon farmers is not the same as aggressively attacking other nations’ farmers from having a right to market or a right to exist. This is where Norway’s engagement with, and funding of, foundation-based political activists crosses innumerable ethical boundaries.

Of course the Norwegians wouldn’t want to foment activist outrage to the point that their useful idiots would succeed in banning all farmed salmon. Their first goal is to spread consumer fear about the safety of Chilean salmon in order to capture their export markets as a safer aquaculture alternative. Then, once these competing farmers are weakened, the Norwegians would fund the local litigation industry to bankrupt them. What’s not to like about such a ruthless strategy?

And with that, the third chapter in this investigation begins.

Not Just Billionaire Philanthropies

Norway is a peculiar place. Having accumulated a massive sovereign wealth fund, Norwegians tend to think of their government as a collection of philanthropic entities endowed with the objective of doing good (from a particular political interest).

It is not surprising then to see strategic government objectives, like promoting Norwegian salmon exports, being carried out by its agencies in a quasi-charitable context.

There are at least three separate Norwegian state entities — the Research Council of Norway, Norad, together with Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI), and Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) — who are each independently funding organizations or projects that threaten the existence of Chilean salmon aquaculture and Chilean exports.

State Donations to Journalists

The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), together with Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI), made a $18 million / NOK 170 million five-year joint commitment (2023–2028) to the Pulitzer Center, co-financed alongside the Walton family’s Builders Initiative. The Pulitzer Center program produced the ‘Patagonian Paradise Lost‘ piece on Chilean salmon farming in 2023. The author, Jessica McKenzie, is a Pulitzer Grantee on a project starting in 2023 asking: “Is Chilean Aquaculture a Climate Solution or Crisis?” Her funding, writing and involvement with local NGOs would suggest she considers it a crisis.

NICFI describes the Pulitzer Center grant as part of a NOK 500 million partnership with civil society organizations to:

“reduce deforestation, address environmental crime, strengthen environmental defenders and the rights and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples, and local communities, and advancing sustainable agriculture production and trade in some of the world’s most valuable and vulnerable forest regions.”

What is remarkable here is that NICFI is a Norwegian government initiative dedicated to protecting tropical forests. The last I checked, Patagonia is not tropical. But there are indigenous peoples in southern Chile that the Norwegians have been trying to portray as environmental defenders (see below).

The Curious Case of the Humanities Professor

Ernesto Semán, Associate Professor at the University of Bergen Humanities Department, got interested in the story of Chilean salmon aquaculture, so he applied for a grant from FRIPRO, the Norwegian Research Council’s funding scheme for basic and applied research. Ernesto received NOK 12 million (almost $1.3 million) from 2025 to 2029 for him to study the past and future history of salmon farming in Chile and hopefully earn a PhD. “The goal is to show what consequences the rise of the salmon industry has had and continues to have, both for the economy, society, environment, nature, and the salmon itself.” It is called Project DARKLAX (lax or laks is the Scandinavian term for salmon).

In Part 2 it was noted that Semán received support from the anti-salmon farming NGO, Ecoceanos, to write an article against Chilean salmon farming in the New York Review of Books. It was a poetic look into the life of a salmon with insightful remarks like: “Salmon don’t talk. Their experience isn’t available to us in words.”

Semán is conducting the research alone. It seems all you have to do is go the Norwegian government these days and tell them you want to attack Chilean salmon aquaculture and they will shower you with cash.

Supporting the People or the Activists?

Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) is a Norwegian state aid agency with its Latin America program operating on a budget of around $90 million annually, 82% of which is Norwegian state funded. In March, 2026, a Chilean national news channel, TVN 24 Horas, broadcast an investigation documenting how NPA provided approximately CLP 500 million ($550,000 USD) directly to the Lafkenche indigenous communities in Los Lagos and Magallanes between 2004 and 2014.

The purpose of these funds was to enable these communities the legal costs to try to hold up salmon farming concessions. NPA’s Latin America head, Beathe Torensen, confirmed the figure on camera and stated NPA sees no conflict of interest (even though this was clearly a competitor-government-funded operation with the Norwegian authorities trying to block salmon projects in Chile).

The TVN broadcast triggered an immediate political reaction: Deputy Alejandro Bernales, president of Chile’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Commission, announced a formal summons of the Norwegian authorities and warned of potential legal liability. Deputy Mauro González, also a member of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Commission, stated “that legislation may be needed to require NGOs to disclose funding received from abroad”.

NPA has also funded Observatorio Ciudadano, the policy-lobbying-lawfare NGO discussed in Part 1 of this investigation, and while the amount remains unquantified, the government agency is given prime position on the funder’s list (even above Packard who donated over $3 million).

Foreign government bodies intervening to influence internal policies of a sovereign country raises multiple issues of concern. When these policies may benefit the foreign government’s industry and exports, this raises ethical issues of concern.

Strategic Litigation: A Professionalized Philanthropy Weapon

The Norwegian interference in Chilean aquaculture follows the typical routes of professionalized philanthropy campaigns: funding journalists, funding academic research and funding lawyers. Financing the litigation costs to implement a campaign strategy via the courts (strategic litigation) is perhaps the most effective means to intervene and effect impact, as neither law firms nor foundations show much regard for transparency or accountability.

But is it fair-play? Is it ethical? These are questions professionalized philanthropy consultants don’t ask themselves; it is only about impact and winning.

Building on the evidence that Norwegian state entities are funding lawyers and legal support NGOs to interfere with salmon aquaculture concessions, this investigation will conclude with an assessment of how state agencies are working together with foundations with the objective of litigating salmon farming in Chile to its ultimate demise.

The Wrong Objectives

Every world leader loves to coddle up to a billionaire philanthropist, but are they aware how these titans of wealth and business success have merely become the passive onlookers to a network of political activists running campaigns from the shadows of their foundations, controlling the narrative and creating quagmires that these leaders might struggle to recover from?

Any campaign should have an objective. But what do the professional, political consultants running the foundation programs actually want from their anti-salmon farming campaigns?

These operatives want to ban salmon farming (first in Chile, the second largest global market). The alternative they often cynically propose is more wild salmon, but that sector has been so over-fished, with stocks depleted and incapable of meeting a fraction of global market demand. The rise in aquaculture was in response to restrictions and quotas on wild fishing practices.

What these American idealists are actually trying to impose on other countries and consumers is their anti-industry, post-capitalist dogma and they have muscled into the philanthropic community to execute their strategy. Salmon aquaculture is just the latest line in the sand.

After a rapid expansion to meet an insatiable consumer demand, no one will argue that salmon aquaculture is without challenges, but the industry is addressing them, innovating and solving problems (without support from the campaigners who simply want no salmon instead of better salmon).

How do you spend hundreds of millions of dollars and not only get the world to believe that farmed salmon is bad, but also make the industry unprofitable and get policymakers to impose bans, restrictions or limitations? The foundation capitalism playbook (used so successfully in engineering the two-decade long climate campaign) will require relentless funding of media groups, lobbyists and allies in the litigation industry in an all-out onslaught of activist manipulation, fear and lies.

For these hardened foundation consultants, salmon is not their first rodeo.

The Fiscal Sponsor Veil of Secrecy

Manipulating the media, paying off expensive lobbyists or filing endless nuisance lawsuits (lawfare) may not reflect well on organizations trying to pretend that their philanthropy is noble and values based, so the first step in any campaign built on deception and subterfuge is to create a filter between the funders and the executors. The creation or use of fiscal sponsors to act as front groups for their activism is now a standard operating procedure.

The concept of a fiscal sponsor was originally intended to help an organization or a potential movement by providing them with infrastructure, funding and technical assistance (like an incubator), but this is rarely the case now. Often fiscal sponsors have been recruited to set up phantom organizations to implement campaigns without transparency or accountability. The Firebreak has shown how organizations like Beyond Plastics or the Agroecology Fund might look like NGOs but they do not exist apart from their fiscal sponsor, do not disclose their finances, and cannot be held accountable for the consequences of their campaigns … but that does not stop them from spending or regranting large sums of money on campaigns that the outside world believes are legitimate, grassroot political movements.

Fiscal sponsors don’t consider themselves as bottom-feeders living off of fees and foundation premiums but rather as an essential part of the circle of good the world of philanthropy still pretends to. There are several important fiscal sponsors and front-group regrantors active in the Chilean salmon campaigns.

• The Resources Legacy Fund (RLF) describes itself as a “special interest campaign foundation” and feeds foundation money to Chilean advocacy NGOs and groups like the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership. The fiscal sponsor was founded in 2000 by Packard, a leading foundation in the Salmon War. The front group is no stranger to The Firebreak as it served as the original fiscal sponsor on behalf of seven large foundations for Sher Edling’s climate nuisance lawfare campaigns.

• Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (which is not a Rockefeller associated foundation) is a fiscal sponsor managing more than $4 billion in funding. They call themselves a “philanthropic service organization” that “accelerates philanthropy”. As a fiscal sponsor for both Oceans 5 and ORCA, the executives at this slick Manhattan firm claim to act as a co-decision-maker in grant approvals guiding funders in their impact investing, and not merely as back-office support consultants.

• ORCA (The Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance) started with a founding pledge of more than $250 million from twelve foundations (including Packard, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Lukas Walton’s Builders Vision, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation…). ORCA is the most recent iteration of this pooled-funding architecture, referring to itself as a “bold philanthropic collaborative”. From the outside, ORCA looks like a constellation of independent environmental groups but it is actually a purpose-built campaign funder (a regrantor), providing strategic direction to campaigns without any accountability or transparency. ORCA is becoming the face of the backroom dealings and campaign strategy of a number of professionalized and politicized philanthropic consultants. They aim to redistribute $500 million to campaign activism within five years.

The Greenpeace Problem

Instead of pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into new purpose-built vehicles like ORCA or Oceans 5 to manage the funding and campaigns against Chilean aquaculture, shouldn’t these foundations just donate to existing NGOs with large oceans and fishing campaign infrastructure in place? Greenpeace comes to mind as a group also actively campaigning against Chilean salmon farmers. Packard has donated millions to Greenpeace’s Beyond Seafood campaign, but this seems to be a sideshow and a relic of a past activist campaign model.

The problem with giving a loud, angry NGO like Greenpeace a large amount of money is that the foundations then lose some control of the campaign. Such is the case with Greenpeace. Chills must have spread through the philanthropic world when the Greenpeace Chile Director, Matías Asun, boasted to the Chilean Senate’s Environment Committee that his organization has resources sufficient to ‘easily stop projects of industries like salmon for up to 2,000 days.’ That claim risked drawing the philanthropic funders out from the shadows. Greenpeace had to be isolated.

No foundation, no philanthropist, would want to be associated today with such a vulgar group of opportunists who celebrate fighting dirty, let alone be seen as writing the check for illegal or openly unethical campaign tactics. Perhaps that is why a communications director from Oceana contacted me to demand that any association between Oceana and Greenpeace be removed from a Firebreak report on a what was clearly reported as a joint Greenpeace-Oceana campaign.

The problem is that the original story, from reporters on the ground in southern Chile, observed the Oceana activists working with Greenpeace in their anti-salmon aquaculture stunt, so we stood by our claims (as did the Chilean news organization).

But what is remarkable is that in this Firebreak article that condemned Oceana and Packard (their foundation funder pulling the strings) for unethically trying to manipulate Chilean indigenous groups in a type of green colonialism, Oceana were only contacting The Firebreak to object to us tying Greenpeace to them. In Part 1 of this series, we saw how Oceana was founded and funded by large US foundations so it seems that one of Oceana’s paymasters (Packard) was not at all pleased to see their donations being associated with the vulgar and the unethical of the campaign world. Given Oceana’s poor record of success, perhaps the foundations will need to get together again to create a new front group for their oceans campaigns.

As in past issues where Big Change foundations muscled in with their own fiscal sponsors to take control of the activist campaigns (climate, tobacco control, plastics…), we can expect these groups to offer idealist NGO activists from organizations like Greenpeace large salary packages to join some well-funded multi-sector project. While integrity may be the core to self-worth, six figure salaries are hard to resist. Why struggle on a broken-down boat for peanuts and little media coverage when you could cash in and enjoy a luxury office in Manhattan or San Francisco?

… I suppose idealism doesn’t pay the rent.

Lawyers and Lobbyists

One of the key elements in any multi-sectoral professionalized campaign is to lobby governments and influence policy. American foundations don’t question the ethical ramifications of their funds interfering with foreign government legislation or the lives of people living far from the US shores. Foundations have followed the climate campaign playbook, creating policy and intelligence platforms, stakeholder astroturf groups and campaigners speaking on behalf of indigenous tribes or other vulnerable groups. If you hide behind fiscal sponsors, regrantors and local front groups, no one will question the legitimacy of your tactics.

Packard has “invested” $3 million in Observatorio Ciudadano. This human rights group has produced, among other outputs, a real-time congressional monitoring platform — OLMar (Observatorio Legislativo para Comunidades Marino-Costeras) — that presents one side to the salmon aquaculture policy debate with congressional intelligence and technical briefing capacity that the industry and Chilean state agencies do not have in any equivalent form. Packard’s money and network are publishing two legislative briefings per week to the anti-industry anti-aquaculture coalition.

But in order to control the regulatory narrative and the information legislators are allowed to receive, the foundations also need to fund and control the media narrative, creating outrage at the grassroots level.

Bankrolling the Journalists Against Salmon Aquaculture

The Firebreak has been reporting on how foundation money has been systematically buying large media groups and developing funding mechanisms to finance journalists directly in order to control the public narrative and advance their campaigns (see here, here and here).

The billions behind the professionalized philanthropy climate programs effectively saved mainstream media groups like The Guardian and the Associated Press at a time when their old economic model ceased to exist. So it comes as no surprise that almost every news story against Chilean salmon aquaculture to have reached the Western media has some degree of special interest foundation funding behind it. These journalists for hire cannot pretend to be objective.

Some examples of how foundation-funded reporting against Chilean salmon aquaculture has helped to shape the public narrative and support the philanthropist-driven campaigns include:

• The Earth Journalism Network (EJN), a project of the nonprofit Internews, funds and trains journalists reporting on aquaculture and ocean issues, and is itself funded by Packard, among others. EJN’s own public materials describe a structured program that recruits journalists, funds their travel, and works with them to develop story angles before publication — a model EJN has publicly described as producing pieces later placed in major outlets, including a collaboration with the New York Times.
  An anti-salmon farming article in the New York Times was written by two EJN freelance journalists. So the article was not only funded by Packard, but also supported the Oceana campaign (also funded by Packard). An assessment by the Chilean salmon trade organization suggested that large parts of the New York Times article had been lifted from an Oceana website. As the image below shows, there was a choreography between the foundations, their activist intermediaries and the journalists producing the article. The article was researched five years earlier but published to coincide with debates over salmon farms in the Chilean legislature. (Not the New York Times finest moment for objective journalism.) See The Firebreak’s critique of the undisclosed conflicts of interest and the weak editorial capacity at the New York Times.

The chairman of the Chilean Salmon Council USA, Ricardo Garcia Holtz, claimed: “The Times might call all this “support”, but a better word is corruption, since it violates basic journalism principles of objectivity and independence.”

• JournalismFund Europe — which funded The Guardian’s 2025 attack piece on Chilean salmon — publishes grant terms requiring applicant journalists to submit a working hypothesis for their story before any research or reporting is conducted, and offers to cover logistics, legal support, and data-access costs. JournalismFund Europe’s own donor disclosures list the Open Society, Arcadia, and Adessium foundations as major funders, several of which have separately funded anti-aquaculture advocacy groups active in Chile.

• Packard has made multiple disclosed grants (2021–2024, totaling roughly $2.1 million) to Guardian.org, the U.S. nonprofit arm that funds The Guardian’s environmental reporting series. The Open Society funded the 2025 Guardian article against Chilean salmon farming. The Firebreak was one of the first to cover how The Guardian is relying heavily on foundation funding to survive, revealing how they trade ink for at least $20 million in special interest donations.

• The Walton Family Foundation funded the Pulitzer Center reporting grant that produced the 2023 “Patagonian Paradise Lost“ piece against Chilean aquaculture. This project was cofunded with the Norway’s development agency, Norad, and Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI). More on this in Part 3 of this investigation.

• Centro Ecoceanos is an activist organization that was used as a source in both The Guardian’s 2025 Chile salmon story and the New York Review of Books piece by Ernesto Semán (more on Ernesto in Part 3). Centro Ecoceanos has received at least one documented grant from the Marisla Foundation ($25,000 for lake and river protection work in Chile).

These are some of the declared cases of journalists being paid foundation grants to produce articles, but there are many more regrantors paying out smaller amounts ($5,000 to 10,000) to freelance reporters to use their networks to shape the salmon narrative. Good money to a freelancer for a project that might take a couple weeks to put out an “investigative report” … even sooner if the script and the key campaign information is provided in advance and if the funder is also paying off the news organizations.

Sometimes the goal is just to move the cash to the journalists and influencers as fast as possible to get the stories out. The Firebreak reported on one curious, ragtag organization called the Global Salmon Farming Resistance claiming to protect wild salmon but the small group only seems to exist to hand out cash to anyone who will write against salmon aquaculture. Looking at the rough edges of this group, it is puzzling why most of the anti-salmon foundations fund the “Resistance” either directly or via their fiscal sponsors.

Fighting Back

Oceana and Greenpeace received a hard dose of reality against their carpetbagging campaign against salmon aquaculture when the Chilean communities who rely on aquaculture for their local economy, jobs and livelihoods rose up against them. There have been several protests in southern Chile against the political and philanthropist/NGO campaigns to ban salmon farming. At one event, drawing over 6000 people to a remote region to protest a law that would make it nearly impossible to renew farming licenses, Chilean Senator Fidel Espinoza stated:

“I hope the government realizes that these are the people who, thanks to this industry, have a source of employment and resources for their families. I am an environmental advocate, and I have always overseen salmon farming, but that doesn't mean we will approve a project of this kind, which clearly puts thousands of jobs at risk.”

70,000 families in southern Chile are directly affected by campaigns to ban salmon aquaculture. But they are not being consulted as the US-based foundations methodically implement their political strategy.

How do local communities feel about the ocean conservation campaigns these foundations are running? In a study into philanthropist campaign tactics in Fiji and Palau, local residents were scathing about these political activists. One remark perhaps should garner some reflection from the philanthropists on how their professional consultants are behaving:

“Packard doesn’t have the stigma that a few others have. Some have been absolutely outrageous in their approach to marine conservation. Particularly, I’ll be specific in the sense and say that some of these philanthropies have actually dictated to communities what they should do without proper consultative processes without listening to the actual needs on the ground.”

It is a pity that philanthropists aren’t democratic nor listen to the interests of those communities they are harming. Such is the case in southern Chile where the livelihoods and local economies have been ignored by these coordinated, monolithic foundations. While the protests of the local communities are impressive, I fear, like so many other campaigns, they do not have the resources, the network or capacity to stand up to these bottomless activists.

Professionalized Philanthropy

This is the world of professionalized philanthropy where mountains of cash are strategically directed to win campaigns that will make an impact. The consultants operating from the shadows are not idealists who believe in the goals of the campaigns, they are not working to improve salmon aquaculture, public health or the environment. Not in the slightest. They are simply an interwoven ecosystem of rent-seeking operatives filling out their timesheets with whatever opportunity they can manipulate for themselves. Today it is salmon. Tomorrow it might be microplastics, vaping or fossil fuels.

The most cynical thing about this emerging lobbying force is that the operatives continue to wield power under the pretense of virtue – they hide behind the noble gesture of representing the interests of philanthropists who are charitably donating their wealth to make the world a better place. These billionaires have either long passed or are passively unaware of how a network of political activists have moved in to take over the foundation’s granting operations. And they are using this public perception of the good foundations fighting to make the world better against an image of some monolithic, all-powerful industry and careless capitalism.

But the David v Goliath narrative is the inverse. These local entrepreneurial salmon farmers from these small communities are struggling to survive and provide consumers with affordable, healthy food while an army of activists, lawyers, lobbyists and reporters parachute in with unlimited funding to define the issue and control the debate.

Why doesn’t the media report on this dark alliance of fiscal sponsors behind the anti-salmon campaign, being fed hundreds of millions of dollars from foundations managed by political activists? Perhaps given the foundation media funding strategy, their editors could not afford such objectivity.

These salmon farmers are fighting a manipulated narrative, a well-funded political machinery and a seemingly unlimited number of NGOs mysteriously mushrooming up around small ports in southern Chile with more money than common sense. What could possibly be worse for these struggling farmers? Perhaps only if other governments (with competing salmon operations) joined in on the Chilean aquaculture onslaught.

That is the subject of the third part of this investigation.

It should come then as no surprise that there are a growing number of campaigns against fish farming. Health activists now are questioning the health benefits of farmed fish and highlighting unknown risks from vaccines, antibiotics or GMO feed. Animal rights groups protest the conditions in the fish ponds, tanks or cages. Meanwhile environmental activists have taken aim, particularly at the impact of salmon farms on the seas and shorelines. All of these groups do agree on one issue: their contempt for big business, technological investments and capitalism.

Although these campaigns have been running for decades and most consumers remain largely ignorant of the activists’ issues, something important has recently changed. With hundreds of millions of dollars of foundation funding now flooding into the anti-salmon activist campaign coffers, into media groups and into the courthouses, attacks on salmon farming are now gaining attention.

Will this expensive narrative shift improve the state of the oceans or lead to better salmon on your plate? Of course not. It will merely demonstrate how activist consultants who have professionalized the philanthropy world can wield control and power in the policy-activist-media arena. See a recent article on how philanthropy has professionalized over the last two decades.

From Rags to Riches

In the 1980s, small local groups started to protest salmon farming by sending a few volunteers in dinghies or kayaks to unfurl banners along the shoreline. The early issues were namely about their concern over escaped salmon and a preference for wild, caught fish. They made their point (but not an impact) on the growing business of aquaculture as a response to regulations to protect wild fish stocks from over-fishing. These protestors were passionate, but they did not have funding, political networks, influencers, media access or legal support.

The NGO campaign model in the 1990s-2000s was built on public donations. So if the public wasn’t interested in the consequences of the activism, like restricting car use or air travel, they wouldn’t donate and without money to fuel the campaigns, there would be no impact. People were not interested in paying double the price for wild salmon so the anti-aquaculture campaigns did not raise sufficient contributions to get off the ground. But with the four wealth creation waves of the last generation (providing a large number of Internet, Web 2.0, crypto and AI billionaires), new foundations, professionalized along venture capital models, started to coordinate impact campaigns. Without much effort, these tie-dyed hippie anti-salmon campaigners were suddenly swimming in cash.

Less than a decade ago, when a professionalized group of foundations entered the debate, particularly in Chile, they brought with them their captive media, lawyers, influencers, consultants and an unlimited pot of money. Almost instantly, the salmon farming debate evolved from a question of providing an affordable, sustainable source of healthy protein to an industry fighting for its survival.

Limitations

Before this series gets into the ethics of the foundations’ tactics, the first part will survey the key foundation actors and the funding they are pouring into a campaign that should never have been given the time of day. While there has been evidence of large philanthropic contributions shifting the narrative against salmon aquaculture in areas like Tasmania, Scotland and British Columbia, this series will focus on the campaign tactics used against the Chilean industry. Half of the farmed salmon sold in the US comes from Chile, with 90% of all seafood sold in the US being imported (a $20 billion trade deficit according to the US government).

Much of the data in this series comes from IRS Form 990 filings, foundation grant databases, published grant documentation, Chilean congressional records, Norwegian government agency disclosures, and public reporting. But the numbers are likely gross underestimations given how foundations are rarely transparent about their funding programs and the consultants driving the operations often try to hide the level of their involvement in campaigns by creating fiscal sponsor front groups or channeling special interest spending through dark, donor-advised funds. Also there are often three or four foundations working together combining funds and resources into larger programs further distorting the money trail.

So while the Firebreak exposé will only be scratching the surface of philanthropic intervention to destroy an industry and harm consumers’ access to healthy food, it should be enough to put into perspective how billionaires have been willing and able to let those activists who have moved into their circles distort markets and economies. The reader is invited, at every million dollar figure quoted in this section, to ask what good this money could have done if it had been donated to organizations truly in need and capable of actually doing something beneficial for humanity.

The Foundations Spawning Dissent

Here is a quick overview of the different (mostly US-based) foundations that have been actively interfering with Chilean salmon aquaculture.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation (between $26 and $480 million): the Packard Foundation has publicly characterized its Chile ocean conservation spending since 2008 as $26 million. But as an article by Marc Gunther in Inside Philanthropy has pointed out, that clearly is an understatement. Their real commitment includes a significant part of their $480 million ten-year (2023–2033) Ocean Initiative strategy. Chile is named as one of four global priority countries (alongside the United States, Indonesia, and China).

Packard has also contributed $81.8 million across 26 grants to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation, an organization that has actively supported groups campaigning against Chilean salmon farmers. Monterey Bay is so much more than an aquarium; it acts as a lobbying force and also operates the Seafood Watch consumer ratings program, which has repeatedly assigned ‘avoid’ ratings to Chilean farmed salmon.

In 2019, the Packard Foundation set up the Chile Marine Strategy stating:

“The total annual philanthropic investment for marine conservation in Chile approached $8 million in 2018, including a long-established program of Marisla Foundation and new investments from the Walton Family Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts, among others. The Chile Marine Strategy is designed to complement much of these existing investments.”

On salmon in particular, the Packard Chile Marine Strategy report states: to “help address the expansion of salmon aquaculture in Patagonia, the Foundation facilitated development and use of new platforms for improved civil society access to information related to the salmon industry’s activities.”

Their position on salmon aquaculture is clear: “Salmon production’s expansion into southern Patagonia and its associated impacts are a primary environmental concern: dozens of concessions are in various stages of development and approval.”

Veteran reporter and philanthropy researcher, Marc Gunther, recently wrote about Packard’s interference regarding Chilean salmon aquaculture.

Packard also work with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and again with the Walton Family Foundation in the SALT program: A Global Alliance for Sustainable Fisheries. But the Moore Foundation is more active in campaigning against salmon aquaculture in British Columbia (again with Packard) where Leonardo DiCaprio offended a large number of first nation tribes with his carpetbagging ignorance.

A curious side note: Christy Walton (daughter-in-law of Sam Walton) owns the aquaculture investment group Cuna del Mar whose portfolio includes Innovasea, Blue Ocean Mariculture, and Open Blue Sea Farms. Walmart still needs its fish.

A new player in the debate: Re:wild: The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation was wound down in 2021, joining the Global Wildlife Conservation and rechristening themselves as Re:wild (2025 IRS 990 Form declares a revenue of $75 million). Tompkins Conservation has joined Re:wild via the Global Rewilding Alliance and has been rebranding its operations. The Tompkins Donate page states:

“The teams in Argentina and Chile with whom Tompkins Conservation has worked for decades are now independent organizations: Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile. ... Tompkins Conservation continues to be a strategic collaborator of both organizations.”

Re:wild is now managing Tompkins donations as its fiscal sponsor.

The Tompkins family has had close ties with Patagonia: Kris was the longtime CEO and co-founder of Patagonia Inc, and Doug was co-founder of The North Face and Esprit. Doug died in southern Chile in 2015 following a kayaking accident while Kris has remained president of Tompkins Conservation where she has been campaigning to remove salmon farms from the Chilean coastline. Rewilding Chile is a partner with the Blue Marine Foundation campaign to rewild the fjords in Southern Chile and is involved in many other anti-salmon aquaculture actions (including with Oceans5 - see below).

The Fog of War: Coordination Vehicles

It would be reasonable to expect just one foundation funding one of the large NGOs campaigning to stop Chilean salmon aquaculture. To the contrary, the main NGOs are sidelined while the foundations run coalitions of campaigns: intertwined and expansive. It gets even more complicated when the foundations set up coordination vehicles to operate in concert. The funders themselves describe it as “coordinated, strategic grantmaking”.

There are three such organizations focusing on campaigns affecting Chilean salmon aquaculture.

• Biodiversity Funders Group (BFG) defines itself as a place “where experienced philanthropists from around the globe share ideas, hone their strategies, and find partners and mentors.” They set up the Chile Conservation Funders program where Packard has paid $370,000 across three grants (2020, 2022, 2024). The Walton Family Foundation separately funds the same BFG program, contributing $122,000 across two grants in 2023. They use the BFG to meet to coordinate their campaigns.

• Patagonia Mar y Tierra coalition: The Pew Charitable Trusts launched an nine-organization working group in December 2018 to align conservation strategy across funder and grantee lines in Chilean Patagonia. Three coalition members — Melimoyu Foundation, Terram Foundation, and WWF — have been actively campaigning against Chilean aquaculture.

• Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Ocean Initiative: Launched in 2014 as a $53 million, five-year commitment (then known as the Vibrant Ocean Initiative), the program named Chile as one of its three original priority countries — with Brazil and the Philippines — for fisheries-policy reform, marine protected areas, and fishing-transparency legislation. In 2019, the initiative was expanded with a budget of $260 million. Like other Bloomberg Philanthropy initiatives, they fund or create NGOs/foundations to implement their strategy.

  • Bloomberg’s initial Chilean implementing partner is Oceana which was itself created in 2001 through the coordination of The Pew Charitable Trusts, Oak Foundation, Marisla Foundation, Sandler Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Oceana’s latest IRS 990 form shows that it had raised $53 million in 2024 with an undisclosed amount regranted to other NGOs. It now receives funding from 23 large foundations, including all of the foundations mentioned in this section. (Part 2 of this series will look at one of Oceana’s anti-aquaculture campaigns in Chile and ask if this was money well spent.)

  • It should be added that one of the groups receiving Bloomberg funding is Oceans 5, a collaborative regranting foundation set up by 14 large foundations, including all of the foundations mentioned in this section. Their fiscal sponsor is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors which raises $20 million a year from 30 foundations for this activist construct to regrant for activist campaigns. They worked, for example, with Rewilding Chile to try to stop salmon aquaculture.

These coordination vehicles, with multiple foundations working in tandem, makes it difficult to gage just how much foundation funding and networks are finding their way into campaigns to stop salmon aquaculture, but it is safe to assume it is in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. When philanthropies professionalize and coordinate strategies, their goal is to win, not to be transparent.

Part 2 of the Chilean Salmon War will look at how these foundations use fiscal sponsors to further distort their level of influence and how their campaigns use the millions pledged to broaden into media campaigns, lobbying and lawfare activities. In seeing the magnitude of the foundations’ relentless David vs Goliath onslaught, it will become clear that salmon aquaculture, particularly for Chilean farmers, never stood a chance.

Summary

• The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a major report on July 16 declaring that individual weather events can now be robustly attributed to climate change.

• The report’s acknowledgments read like a Sher Edling holiday card: an of-counsel attorney at the firm suing the oil industry, researchers at Climate Central, and a Washington Post reporter who told the committee how to make attribution play better in the press.

• Attribution science was not discovered; it was cooked up. The recipe was written at La Jolla in 2012, and the National Academies just delivered the product — eleven days before the plaintiffs’ Supreme Court merits brief in Suncor v. Boulder County came due.

• The taxpayer picked up part of the tab.

On July 16, NASEM released its long-awaited assessment of extreme weather attribution, announcing that “major advancements” now permit robust assessments tying individual hurricanes, floods and heat waves to human-caused climate change. The mainstream media dutifully reported the conclusion. Almost nobody read the acknowledgments.

They should have. The acknowledgments are the story.

The Predatort in the Footnotes

Start with Michael Burger, thanked for his contributions and cited four times in the report. The report lists his affiliation as Columbia University, where he runs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. What the report somehow forgot to mention is that Burger is also of counsel at Sher Edling — the San Francisco Predatort shop running the nationwide lawfare campaign against the oil industry on behalf of Democrat-run states and cities, with his name on the filings for New York City, Honolulu, and Delaware.

This was not a secret. When Burger presented to the Academies’ attribution committee in November 2024 — the video sits on the Academies’ own YouTube channel — he told the committee himself that he was “actively involved” in the firm’s cases. Committee member Deepti Singh, a climate professor at Washington State University Vancouver, then asked him on camera how researchers could do better at designing studies to inform the litigation. Burger’s answer, verbatim: “The science needs to keep evolving and that’s what’s going to inform the litigation.” And yes, he allowed, it will work the other way around a little bit — that, he explained, is how it all becomes most potent.

Read that again. A sitting committee of the National Academies asked a plaintiffs’ lawyer how they could help build the evidence his cases need. He told them. Then they built it, thanked him in the acknowledgments, cited his work four times, and scrubbed the law firm from his affiliation.

In any other field this would be called what it is. In climate science it is called peer review.

And Burger was not alone in the room. Delta Merner, who runs the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate Accountability Campaign, a program whose stated purpose is advancing climate litigation, sat on the committee guiding the report’s development into 2025. Two Climate Central researchers appear in the acknowledgments, and Climate Central studies appear in the citations. The same foundations that have poured $13.4 million into Climate Central since 2017 have poured twice that ($26.5 million) into the fund created to bankroll Sher Edling’s lawsuits. The Heising-Simons Foundation put direct grant money into the report itself; its co-founder Liz Simons wrote a maximum contribution to California Attorney General Rob Bonta shortly after he sued the oil companies, in a cycle when he wasn’t even on the ballot.

Sponsors, committee members, acknowledged contributors, cited sources: every layer of this report touches the same litigation network, funded by the same foundations, aimed at the same defendants. The Academies’ own policy promises advice free from the undue influence of interested parties. Perhaps they meant uninteresting parties.

Fourteen Years From Recipe to Finished Dish

None of this is improvisation. Attribution science is the one field of research that never pretended to be curiosity driven. Its own pioneers admit the discipline was conceived with the courts in mind: a scientific product developed to specification, the specification being “help plaintiffs win.”

And where was the specification written? You already know, because The Firebreak has documented it chapter and verse. In 2012, after cap-and-trade died in Congress, the tort bar, the activist academy, and the Rockefeller network convened at La Jolla to plot the tobacconization of the fossil fuel industry. The workshop identified the missing piece: you cannot sue an oil company for a hurricane until someone in a lab coat testifies that the oil company caused the hurricane. Attribution was the load-bearing wall of the entire La Jolla Playbook, the one product the movement could not buy off the shelf, because it did not exist yet.

So they built the supply chain. Climate Central incubated World Weather Attribution in 2014. The foundations funded it. The law firms filed suits that presumed its conclusions. The friendly reporters amplified every “study” that landed within hours of a storm making landfall. And now, fourteen years after coming up with the recipe, the National Academies has delivered the finished dish: an official-looking, taxpayer-subsidized imprimatur declaring the science settled — with a World Weather Attribution representative on the committee and the Bezos Earth Fund among the sponsors.

Adversarial regulation was always the point. Why endure the messy democratic business of persuading legislatures when you can commission the evidence, launder it through a prestige institution, and hand it to a judge?

The Osaka Connection

But perhaps the most telling name in the acknowledgments belongs neither to a scientist nor a lawyer. It belongs to Shannon Osaka, who presented to the committee under her actual, non-satirical Washington Post job title: Climate Zeitgeist Reporter. We did not invent that. We lack the imagination.

Firebreak readers will remember Ms. Osaka. She is the Post’s reliable amplifier of activist campaign literature, the reporter with Leonardo Trasande on speed dial, the journalist who warned her readers that some products may not be “chemical-free.” When the NGOs need a scare story placed, Shannon delivers, roughly monthly, no questions asked, least of all scientific ones.

So what was a zeitgeist reporter doing briefing a National Academies scientific committee? Her talk was titled “How do journalists portray extreme events and climate change?” Her slides answer a question no honest scientific body should ever ask: how do we make the product sell?

Osaka helpfully periodized climate journalism into three phases, and the periodization is a confession. In Phase 1, her own exhibits show, the prestige press told readers that single weather events simply could not be pinned on warming — she displays the New York Times’ Paul Krugman and the Post’s own Brad Plumer saying exactly that, circa 2011. In Phase 2, attribution arrived as exciting new science, but smothered in caveats: her own 2020 study found roughly 85 percent of attribution articles carried disagreement or uncertainty framing. In Phase 3 (now) rapid attribution is mainstream, blasted out within days of every storm.

And then comes the slide titled “But ...”, which belongs in a museum. Direct quote: “For our audience, attribution alone no longer attracts much reader engagement or interest.”

There it is. Attribution, she told the committee, now works only as an ingredient in bigger stories, not as a story itself; journalists are hunting for conflict and new frames, and the plain made-2.3-times-more-likely formula no longer fits. Her closing prescriptions follow accordingly: rapid, collaborative studies to shrink the uncertainty framing — that is, science engineered to produce fewer caveats in print — and impact attribution, the attribution of specific damages, to supply readers with those new frames.

Translate from Zeitgeist into English. The customer base has built a tolerance. The old product no longer delivers the high. The readers need a stronger dose (harder claims, fewer disclaimers, named events, named damages) or they’ll stop clicking.

In sum, a reporter told the nation’s premier scientific institution that its flagship product was losing potency in the marketplace and that the caveats were hurting sales. The committee then produced a report concluding — what a coincidence — that the science now supports more robust assessments of extreme events and their impacts. The dealer reported the street feedback; the chemists went back to the lab and cooked a purer batch. Walter White at least had the decency to work out of an RV rather than a congressionally chartered academy.

And note that “impact attribution” is not merely a new frame for bored subscribers. Attribution of impacts, this hurricane with these damages and dollars attached, is precisely the evidentiary product Sher Edling’s complaints require. The reader-engagement problem and the litigation problem turn out to have the identical solution, and the committee delivered it to both customers in a single report.

Osaka even notes that conservative-leaning outlets almost never cover attribution studies. Duly logged by the committee. Even the market segmentation analysis was provided free of charge.

The Calendar Never Lies

If you still believe this was disinterested scholarship on an independent timetable, consult the docket. The Supreme Court hears the Boulder climate case, Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, in the October term, the case that will decide whether the entire state-tort climate lawfare campaign lives or dies. Boulder’s merits brief is due July 27.

The report landed July 16. Eleven days of lead time, just enough for the plaintiffs to staple the Academies’ gravitas to their filing. As of this writing the brief has not yet hit the docket, so we will learn within days whether the citation appears. But the litigants’ advisers aren’t waiting to celebrate: one law professor who counsels the plaintiffs’ lawyers predicted to E&E News that a National Academies report of this gravitas would be “a huge boost to the plaintiffs’ cases.” Whether or not the citation shows up on page one, the timing service has been rendered.

The Academies has run this play before. Earlier this year it inserted a climate chapter — built on Burger’s undisclosed handiwork — into the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, the handbook federal judges use to evaluate expert testimony. When twenty-seven state attorneys general objected, the Federal Judicial Center pulled the chapter. The Academies kept it. An institution that will pre-bias the judges’ own manual is not going to blush at timing a report to a briefing deadline.

The Bill

Here is what actually happened, stripped of the letterhead. A litigation campaign, designed at La Jolla and financed by a closed loop of foundations, needed one thing it could not manufacture in-house: institutional credibility. So it acquired some. The committee took money from interested sponsors, seated interested members, solicited strategy from an interested plaintiffs’ lawyer, took market research from an interested newspaper’s reporter, and delivered its product on the litigation’s schedule — all while the federal government supplied the Academies with $200 million a year of your money.

The tragedy is not that the activists did this. Extorting industries through commissioned science is simply what the post-La Jolla movement is; the passion for the planet gave way to the passion for winning a long time ago. The tragedy is that the National Academies — Lincoln’s academy — volunteered for the supply chain.

Institutions spend centuries accumulating trust and one report spending it. When the Suncor plaintiffs stand before the justices this fall waving the Academies’ seal, remember what’s under the seal: a lawyer in the footnotes, a reporter in the acknowledgments, a foundation in the sponsors’ list, and a purchase order from La Jolla, fourteen years old, finally stamped delivered.

The science was never the product. The verdict was. And the bill, as always, arrives at your address: on your utility statement, at the pump, and in a scientific establishment you can no longer take at its word.

The Firebreak has been documenting the rise of foundations as a major player in the environmental-health policy domain. One term that has recently come into the discussion is the professionalization of philanthropy. But what does that mean?

A stereotype of a foundation is an organization built around some philanthropist who had a bit of luck during his or her business career putting a substantial amount into a fund, hiring a few people to answer the phone, reply to email applications and present dossiers for funding to an outside board. The billionaire would then show up at the opening of a self-named university wing, an art exhibition or a hospital in some developing country and everyone would feel good about making the world a better place.

That romantic image of a philanthropist doing good has been erased by political opportunists and the growth of an ecosystem that has not only learnt to follow the money, but also how to manipulate it. Perhaps the best sentence to mark the demise of philanthropy is posted on foundation websites: “We do not accept unsolicited requests for funding”. This does not mean that they have run out of money for this year (their available capital growing in investment funds usually run into the billions) but rather that these groups have their own strategy, their own network and their own interests.

A Recent History of Wealth Creation

When we think of philanthropists, names like Rockefeller, Carnegie or Ford come to mind. These industrialists accumulated their wealth before or during the Roaring 20s (the 1920s) but during the Great Depression the wealth inequity was too great to ignore. There was no other significant wealth creation moment until the “dot-com” era and over last 25 years we have seen four periods (Internet, Web 2.0, crypto and AI) that produced an avalanche of new wealth. For perspective, the recent SpaceX IPO created more than 4,400 new (employee) millionaires and 400 cent-millionaires in one day. These wealth creation periods have been followed by a proliferation of new foundations.

Philanthropy changed though. It is no longer defined by a retired industrialist seeking redemption, but a passive (young) tech donor too busy solving problems and developing the new technologies. They leave a good part of accrued wealth to an office of opportunistic consultants with political interests, seeking a return on investment in terms of impact, change and measurable campaigns. In the last 25 years, billions have poured into the activist policy campaign arenas from these tech-based foundations.

While entrepreneurs, this new tech generation of philanthropists don’t understand industry, business or the capitalist mindset (those things are offshored) so they tend to lean to the post-capitalist, degrowth ideology in their giving. It is important to note that most foundation funding did not go to NGOs that have dominated the environmental-health debates for almost five decades – they were too idealistic and difficult to manage. These professionalized consultants were setting up their own organizations to implement their strategies.

Venture Impact Funding (Foundation Capitalism)

Many tech entrepreneurs’ first meetings as adults were with venture funds where throwing large amounts of money at them seemed normal. All they had to do was show how their projects would make an impact (and make some money). Fast forward a decade, and as philanthropists, they will only fund projects that make an impact. This caused an important shift in trends in giving. Feeding the homeless or delivering healthcare to developing countries is not as impactful as saving the planet from catastrophic climate change.

You could give away a billion dollars in an afternoon if all it took was to identify the needy. But if it means trying to get the best philanthropic return on investment, then funding programs need to go through an intensive tender process. A professionalized foundation is not about helping the most people, it is about making an impact, curing a disease, bringing lasting development or stopping climate change. The legacy of a billionaire is about the legacy of the achievements his or her foundation will be able to nameplate. This takes time and a sustainability of abundant funds.

This is, for lack of a lexicon, a new form of capitalism. The Firebreak has a series of investigations into Foundation Capitalism that looked into the structures, processes and evolution in philanthropy, away from giving and toward capitalistic opportunism. It is about controlling a narrative, dominating a debate and successfully implementing a strategy. As the space is professionalized, it is difficult to distinguish a foundation from an entrepreneurial enterprise.

Providing pots of unlimited funding within the civil society sector is also creating an attractive environment for opportunists. Some NGOs are designing their programs to appeal to impact-oriented foundation funding objectives. EarthRights International, a strategic litigation NGO, has declared funding in 2024 of over $11 million from more than 32 of the largest global foundations. Most of it is restricted funding, meaning it is earmarked to specific campaigns. Does EarthRights have a efficient fiscal sponsor? No. They simply design projects that tick all of the boxes on the foundations’ strategic objectives … and then back up the truck.

The money is there, waiting to be married with the right keywords. But the structure of these professionalized foundations does not favor funding passionate people committed to their cause, but with no time for complex application processes. Instead, they are rewarding abstract analysts and consultants adept at saying whatever is needed to be said. Once in a foundation’s sphere, renewing program funding takes a few minutes a year … and even less time to answer to any internal accounting scrutiny.

Attracting Top Talent

Part of the professionalization strategy is to pay above-market rates to attract and keep the best management available.

Like venture capital firms, the priority for professionalized foundations is to grow their pot, not to dissolve their operations through charitable donations. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative investment page looks like a hedge fund prospectus with more information on its website over its investment team (and their 24 in-house financial directors and analysts) than on its grantmaking activity. Packard, a foundation that does not draw much attention anymore outside of its ocean programs, spent $52 million in 2024 on operating and administration expenses (staff), with substantial payouts to its investment directors. Marc Gunther put this into context:

This is not uncommon in the philanthropy world, and similar salaries are paid to the NGOs and fiscal sponsors down the foundation value chain. A Firebreak exposé showed that the top ten managers in each of the Bloomberg-created tobacco and nicotine control non-profits, where transparently disclosed, receive a minimum salary of $25,000 a month. When the foot soldiers are bought and paid for at that level, compared to market rates for normal non-profit staff, they fall in line pretty fast.

Many foundations operate as hedge funds with a small, charitable front office. The Skyline Foundation, set up by the founder of Yahoo!, David Filo, has grown its reserves from $800 million to $1.2 billion in three years while outsourcing its non-investment operations to Pacific Foundation Services, a professionalized philanthropy bottom feeder. Skyline is not only aware that the consultant is using its funds in combination with money from other foundations they manage, but proudly promotes it.

But without transparency and regulatory scrutiny, how can insider trading and conflicts of interest be avoided when these investments are made beside large political, legal and social lobbying campaigns. Keep in mind, as well, that foundations are considered as non-profits so not only do they enjoy considerable tax advantages, but the taxpayer is subsidizing their largesse.

The Climate Philanthropy Playbook

Two decades of narrative control promoting an imminent climate catastrophe (and the transition to special interest alternatives) did not just happen. The climate movement was fed by billions of dollars consistently donated by a large group of professionalized foundations choreographing campaigns through a series of well-endowed fiscal sponsors. The public was too naïve to realize the control and manipulation of these political actors, but as the veil of ignorance is being pulled away, we are beginning to understand how foundation consultants were pulling all of the levers from the shadows.

Well choreographed campaigns need to take on the issue across a wide variety of fronts: legal, media, scientific research, NGO campaigns, government lobbying (often transnational groups like UN agencies), and alternative special interest groups and business communities. Two decades of climate campaigning had sufficient funding and networks to dominate on all fronts, creating a new power base in the field of public policy management.

The Firebreak has been trying to reveal just how deep these professionalized actors’ tentacles had dug into our perception of climate change.

• We published a translation of the excellent research by Florence Autret into how the European Climate Foundation (not a foundation) was receiving €275 million a year from a basket of tech billionaire foundations to control the climate narrative. They paid off a large flotilla of NGOs (literally every NGO acting on climate issues) to support them in their net-zero campaign, they ran Davos from the shadows (and even brought Greta to the WEF shortly after she was “discovered” and then managed the media for her yacht trip to America), had a dark communications arm (having poached key Brussels lobbyists) that managed the media at all of the UNFCCC COPs. We also saw how this secretive regrantor that pretends to call itself a foundation only needed to submit a two-page balance sheet to the Dutch authorities.

• We also observed how foundations fanned out to form fiscal sponsorships to create and fund tort law firms like Sher Edling that only exist to file climate nuisance lawfare cases against fossil fuel companies for damages due to climate change. This is known as the La Jolla Playbook – Naomi Oreskes’ strategic attempt to relentlessly sue industries until they either change their policies or go bankrupt (the tobacconization of industry).

• Foundations created regranting fiscal sponsors like Covering Climate Now or the Solutions Journalism Network to fund journalists to report on climate issues (claiming that all news is climate news). I put this into context in 2024.

  

  Given that foundations are also funding a large part of the operational budgets of news groups like The Guardian or setting up their own investigative reporting news organizations, there was no difficulty getting their climate campaigns onto the front page. Few people look at the fine print to realize their news is controlled by special interest consultants operating being the foundation veil.

• There were other Firebreak case studies of how foundations directly controlled and manipulated the climate narrative.

  • The Canadian province of Alberta had to conduct a public inquiry with a forensic accountant to learn how years of relentless activist campaigns against their fossil fuel industries were coordinated from the shadows by a group of large US-based foundations donating at least 1.28 billion CAD to disrupt the Albertan economy.

  • The Agroecology Fund was only raising a couple million dollars a year until they changed their fiscal sponsor, who then claimed agroecology could enhance climate resilience (it doesn’t), and within a year of tapping into Silicon Valley foundations, they were able to raise over $100 million to lobby against conventional agriculture and run agroecology programs within the FAO.

This is not spare change tossed into NGO airport drums. The climate campaigns have spent hundreds of billions manipulating how we perceived the climate issue in the secretive consultants’ strategy to dismantle capitalism. It was not that we were too stupid to see how these professional consultants had played us (as well as the philanthropists). We had just never experienced such corruption of the foundation world before.

As the climate shine has worn off the public narrative, the consultants influencing the foundations are moving into new stories to dominate the policy arena: microplastics, ultra-processed foods, pesticides and chemicals like PFAS. Will we continue to be naïve to their manipulation and control?

What do Philanthropists Want?

Every philanthropist is different and puts his or her stamp on not just the objectives and the projects of the entity, but also the definition and operation of the organization within the foundation ecosystem. So what they want depends on who they are, who is influencing them in the charity space and what had shaped them to arrive at that point in philanthropy.

In the 2010 film, The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg was portrayed as a naïve puppy with no idea what do with $100, let alone $100 million. Now the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has been outsourced to consultants and investment managers to operate and they are treating it more like an investment fund. Meanwhile, Mark is still busy solving the last hack and building the next big thing.

Many tech billionaires became accidentally wealthy and are too caught up with changing the world of technology (that they see as changing humanity). In 2017, when Jeff Bezos first became the world’s richest man, many noticed that his only charitable donations went to a project known as Blue Origin. Under pressure to be more like Bill Gates, he noticed how the foundation world seemed broken, unproductive and out of touch so the perpetual problem solver consulted his social media followers for their ideas on how to innovate philanthropy. While most of the contributions were followers suggesting how Bezos should give them his wealth, the idea that philanthropy needed innovation was not misguided.

The Internet generation’s philanthropist’s poster-boy, Bill Gates, took the venture investment model to the next level. Committed to giving away almost all of his wealth during his lifetime, his goal was to make as much of an impact as possible (a return on philanthropic investment). So vaccines, food supplements, water and sanitation projects, nuclear and geothermal energy technologies and agricultural innovations like GMOs cleared the stringent Gates Foundation impact assessment process. His promotion of technology also made Gates the most hated man by pro-nature activists. Or maybe they were still annoyed about losing Netscape.

However people may think it was earned, it is still Gates’ money and he can do with it what he wants. But to donate to get the greatest return on investment, to solve the greatest problems, is a far way away from helping the needy. He could give his billions away in an afternoon, but there would be no legacy achievement to show for it.

But the greatest philanthropic vanity project has to be Michael Bloomberg, who has used his foundations for title and vengeance. With commitments of over $2 billion, he has taken over the WHO’s tobacco control program and shaped it to reflect his prohibitionist political ideology. As he is pushing for the same influence on global food and diet policy, one cannot help but wonder how bitter Bloomberg must still be about his failure as New York City mayor to succeed with his proposed bans and taxes on sugary drinks. He puts his name on every activity, program and donation and lauds titles like WHO Global Health Ambassador or UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions. Philanthropy, however, should not be a consolation for a failed bid to become president of the United States.

If vanity projects are built into the philanthropic sector, nowhere is that more evident than with the rise of groups like Effective Altruism and the School for Moral Ambition. They are built around the appeal of charity and having an impact, concepts quite attractive to millennials and Gen Zs. Effective Ventures’ strategy is built around how best to capitalize on the business of charity, with fund managers taking in donations to redistribute minus significant investment fees. These bottom feeders have carved a niche in the philanthropy world, staining it with fee siphoning, misappropriation, manipulation, sex trafficking and theft. Sam Bankman-Fried did not take six billion dollars from investors out of personal greed but because he was convinced that the more he could give, the more good he could do. No one gave the money back to shareholders or returned the fund management fees.

As Bezos noticed, the world of philanthropy does need innovation but it must first come from the outside.

• There needs to be more regulatory scrutiny to control the misuse of funds and groups.

• The sector needs to be transparent and detail the special interests using tools like dark donor-advised funds to run campaigns.

• There needs to be a delineation between relief, aid and societal support NGOs (like those funding food kitchens, development and health programs) and those Alternative Policy Enterprises (APEs) that function more as lobbyists, consultancies and law firms.

• When foundations give to the APEs, they should not enjoy tax deductible status or accountability shortcuts.

• Fiscal sponsorships (consultants running activist campaigns under the guise of a project while receiving third-party funding from multiple foundations) should be abolished. The ability to amass hundreds of millions of dollars into non-declared, unaccountable entities is a recipe for abuse and corruption.

If foundations are now professional organizations, then professional regulations should apply to them. This weekend, The Firebreak will launch a series on the number of foundations coordinating and choreographing campaigns against Chilean salmon aquaculture. It’s a David vs Goliath story, with stealth networks of foundations pouring hundreds of millions into a professionalized campaign to extricate a small group of fish farmers providing an affordable and healthy source of protein. We have to break out of the bias, spread in their well-funded media, that foundations are inherently good and righteous in their attacks on industry (which they have portrayed as evil).

A Darker Storm Approaching

2026 saw (briefly) humanity’s first trillionaire. But there is no Elon Musk Foundation and surprisingly, given the hype of the bully-pulpit Giving Pledge, there is no expectation that Elon will direct his wealth towards “good”. Rather, there is a fear that Elon will direct his wealth towards expanding power. A few hundred million channeled into a political campaign fund will not even scratch the surface of Musk’s overall wealth but it can certainly interfere with the democratic process in the US, the UK, Germany and France.

But should it only be Elon’s trillion that frightens us? Are we afraid because we disagree with his right-wing politics and how it can influence democracy? That dark storm is already above us and why The Firebreak has been trying to draw attention to such special interest manipulation. Billionaires and their consultants on the left equally direct their donations to promote anti-capitalist, degrowth campaigns that lobby against industry and innovation. Their lightning bolts should be equally feared.

According to the company’s press release, Erik Haas, J&J’s vice president of litigation, declared that the allegations in the lawsuits “lacked scientific merit”. In a series of recent cases, the plaintiff’s claims were thrown out for lack of any causal evidence. Of the 20 non-mesothelioma individual ovarian cases to have come to a verdict, J&J had only lost one.

But then Haas added that the $5.5 billion settlement “allows the Company to put this matter behind it”. The J&J shareprice briefly popped. How could J&J and its shareholders celebrate paying out $5.5 billion to law firms who lacked evidence in cases they were clearly losing?

Several years ago, J&J had tried to settle all of the outstanding cases by folding talc into a subsidiary that would declare bankruptcy with an $8 billion trust to handle the lawsuits (a so-called Texas two-step tactic). This strategy was thrown out by a judge with the simple logic: “If you have $8 billion, you aren’t bankrupt!”. We can assume that in the Kenvue spinoff, J&J had put $8 billion aside for the talc litigation costs. With the Kimberly-Clark acquisition of Kenvue expected to close in the second half of this year, that reserve fund needed to be settled.

What J&J are celebrating is that they did not have to pay $8 billion. But $5.5 billion is still $5.5 billion and if that is the price a company is willing to pay to have certainty and just move on, then investors should take a serious look at J&J’s concept of fiscal responsibility.

Legitimizing Extortion

Putting short-term clarity aside, as well as finality within a business sector that nobody seems to want, giving $5.5 billion to a band of Predatorts legitimizes their extortion strategy. Like glyphosate, there was no evidence to justify fifteen years of litigation. The Predatort Playbook involves a group of law firms assembling thousands of plaintiffs to file lawsuits in multi-district litigations targeting a single company with the intention of becoming a legitimate threat to the company’s existence.

The Predatorts goal is to terrify the shareholders (mostly fund managers) into demanding the management settle the cases so the parasites would go away. If the company’s market value declines more than the billion-dollar settlement target, such an extortion payout could be justified. This tactic was documented six years ago in my analysis of the Predatort Extortion Racket.

Most cases are bogus and the law firms have no intention of actually litigating the hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs they have traded like cattle by a type of misery merchants in a plaintiff victim exchange. Some case numbers were bought for less than a C-note. They are merely listed in caseloads as leverage for the desired settlement where most of the payout would go to the law firms. There will be non-disclosure agreements, but if past settlements are anything to go by, the lion’s share of the J&J $5.5 billion gift will go to the Predatorts.

And here is why this needless settlement disgusts me. J&J had always been a company that stood by its science and social responsibility. For 15 years, they fought these greedy Predatorts, including some of the more disgraceful caricatures like Mark Lanier, who called himself a magician for managing to fleece J&J out of billions without any real evidence. For the last few years, J&J were winning and vindicating their position that they were not responsible for the opportunistic claims made against them. At the same time, the litigation industry was getting schooled on ethics and judicial integrity.

Managing and servicing 76,000 plaintiffs over an extended period of time, before any prospects of coming before a judge, costs a lot of money to these highly leveraged law firms. With payouts often many years away, barring any appeal process, the law firms need to borrow heavily from litigation finance companies at loan shark rates and conditions. With a small law firm of under ten partners purchasing and processing 10,000 talc plaintiffs over five to eight years, facing the prospect of zero return would be enough to bankrupt most firms.

With my 2019 exposé on the litigation finance price gouging practices, I had made a plea to both Bayer and J&J to resist shareholder pressure and hold out, calling the Predatort extortionary bluff, and taking each case to court. I was certain that this approach would bankrupt perhaps half of the law firms drinking from the plaintiff’s bar.

J&J was doing just that, and being quite successful, until this week when they decided to gift the Predatorts with $5.5 billion. This will allow the law firms to pay off a large amount of their litigation finance debts, live to fight another day and perhaps pay a pittance to their thousands of plaintiffs. Worst of all, J&J’s regrettable action will once again justify the Predatort Extortion Racket and allow these law firms and their ecosystem of bottom-feeders to target another industry without any evidence or legitimate grounds.

J&J may claim a victory in reducing their payout by $2.5 billion; the Predatorts will share in the winnings; but there is one group that certainly cannot declare victory: that is the pathetic body of scientists who answered the Predatort call to link talc to cancer but could not provide sufficient scientific evidence needed to convince judges and juries.

An Embarrassment for IARC

My three-part exposé into IARC’s third monograph on talc (summarized in the Firebreak here) showed how it was designed and executed simply to provide evidence for the ongoing talc litigations. The methodological contortions IARC went through to reach the conclusion that talc was probably carcinogenic not only failed to persuade judges and juries, it also failed to convince many members of IARC’s own panel of experts for the talc monograph.

As seen previously with case studies on IARC’s benzene, glyphosate and gasoline monographs, the international cancer agency’s hazard assessments have become nothing more but an artificial evidence mill for the US litigation industry. Many experts serving on IARC panels then enter the revolving door, taking their credentials to law firms to work as highly-paid litigation consultants. But the twists and turns to declare talc carcinogenic was just too evidence poor to have any legs. As hard as IARC tried to twist the methodology, their conclusions on the carcinogenicity of talc could not stand up in court.

With the US government declaring that conclusions from IARC monographs would have no value within the American regulatory process, and with the US leaving the cancer agency, the game seemed to be up. IARC will soon be as irrelevant as its sister group, the Ramazzini Institute.

Watching a recent webinar on strategic litigation (ie, how NGOs can sue governments and industry) it became clear whenever the activists referred to industry, they seemed to be working from a simplistic, single-minded perception of what industry is. Was this intentional or are these activists actually that naïve?

When activists refer to Big Food or Big Chemicals or Big Oil (all of whom are operating from the same playbook established by Big Tobacco), these present business groups as unified behemoths seeking the same goals and opportunities. When industry lobbies or files lawsuits, it is assumed that all industries are pushing for the same outcome. All that post-capitalist NGOs have to do is count the number of industries filing lawsuits or lobbying government officials, brand it as industry interference, and use it in their anti-industry campaigns. We saw this in activist complaints against industry involvement in UN conferences.

Anyone who has worked in industry will know that nothing could be further from the truth. There is no such thing as the Chemical Industry or the Food Industry but rather a series of companies, traders, manufacturers, importers across a wide value chain, many with competing interests and varying target audiences. To save on costs, for regulatory research issues as an example, a company may join a trade association, but this grouping is usually neutered and tending to represent the lowest common denominator.

When a company lobbies a government, it is not trying to influence decisions to harm the public, consumers or the environment, but rather to protect their interests against other companies lobbying for their advantages. So a company in France with access to a stable supply of nuclear energy, may lobby for stricter CO2 emissions on manufacturing while another company in the US will want to protect its fossil-fuel based energy advantage.

Sometimes companies will run full-out assaults on their competition. I have referred to this as the tyranny of the alternatives where, rather than innovating to gain market share, it is more profitable to invest in fear and outrage campaigns against your chief competitors. When I was working on brominated flame retardants, it was clear that the main lobbying assaults originated in Norway and Washington State, the two main regions for the aluminum industry. After the Greenpeace “Green my Apple” campaign, Apple shifted from plastic computer casings (that would burn without protection) to aluminum. As the US is regulating the replacement of lead water pipes, we see intensive pressure on PVC plastic pipes from the steel and copper industries. Who is behind the PFAS campaigns? Just look at which industries are profiting. In these cases, NGOs campaigning against plastics are not innocent actors in these internecine industry conflicts.

What is an Industry?

I once visited a family farm in the UK and spent time with a father and son as they were negotiating the purchase of a new tractor. To save on taxes, retail processes, subsidies and succession issues, the farm was registered as a public company with a VAT number. To a food activist, they would paint this as a company and part of the massive conventional agriculture industry. If only the tractor company would come under the same heat as this small family farm has.

Is an industry defined by the same market and products? An upstream plastics manufacturer has different markets and issues than the downstream plastics converters, bottlers or packaging companies. And plastics is a general term encompassing a wide range of feedstocks, processes and applications. When researchers at a company I worked for were trying to develop a soft polypropylene alternative to PVC blood bags, I began to realize that that the company was not itself a unified whole. Business sector groups are designed not only to compete internally, but also to eventually become stand-alone businesses or traded like chess pieces with the competition.

To say that all industry is concerned with maximizing corporate profits and exploiting consumers, public health and the environment assumes that these companies all have the same structure and are involved in some identical capitalist system. Private family companies like Cargill take a different approach to business opportunities than publicly traded companies like Archer Daniels Midland who need to report regularly; meet forecasts and pay dividends. When a hedge fund buys a business (in the hopes of converting it into a quick turnaround), its interests are definitely different from market leaders concerned with consumer trust and public reputation.

As markets, consumer preferences or regulations shift, companies obviously want to survive and may need to adapt. Some distilleries may venture into the alcohol-free market, food manufacturers might shift into lower calorie or all-natural products. Or they may try to change the laws to protect their market advantage. By painting them all as one industry, activist campaigners lose the ability to separate the leaders from the laggards.

When several tobacco companies, recognizing the long-term risk to their business model, diversified into alternative nicotine products and carved a space in the growing tobacco harm reduction field, this was a normal business response. When activist health campaigners saw “Big Tobacco” entering into the e-cigarette and nicotine pouch markets, they immediately condemned these products and the good they were doing in helping people to finally quit smoking.

Associating and campaigning against effective harm reduction products only because the market now involved industry actors was stupid. When the WHO, dependent on Michael Bloomberg’s MPOWER activist network for its tobacco control program, sheepishly followed the activist campaign strategy of banning all nicotine products, it was tragic.

Consequences of this naïve perception

It is safe to assume that the activists who have painted this singular perception of industry have never worked in the private sector, have never had to sign a code of ethical conduct on their first day at work and have never worked to innovate and enhance their company’s product line. The naivety and simplistic ideology has allowed their campaigns and influence to be exploited.

• In painting all industry as some singular monolithic source of evil, these activists then put pressure on governments to exclude this important stakeholder group from the policy process. So activists and regulators with no idea of what industry is or does, are left on their own to determine regulatory policy that will have a direct impact on industry, production, trade and the economy. The European Green Deal was a good example of a series of misguided policies against some mythical concept of industry that will likely take more than a decade to unwind.

• By grouping the leaders and the laggards under a single exclusionary class, deeming all companies as corrupt and untrustworthy, there is no mechanism to reward corporate social responsibility. The advocates of this post-capitalist ideology won’t stop until all industries are eliminated. Is this neo-Marxist dogma the best alternative we have?

• Consumers become confused because while they hear the campaigns against industry, they need to use their products. Activist campaigns against anything industrial means that innovative solutions to promote more sustainable production are lost or heavily restricted. GMOs were designed to solve problems, reduce pesticide and fertilizer use, increase yields while reducing impact on the soil and water tables. As activists portrayed the seed companies as wanting to control nature, they got their solutions largely banned and three decades later, farmers, consumers and the environment are still suffering.

• But perhaps the biggest failure of this monolithic approach is how other interest groups exploit these naïve policy activists. The litigation industry (yes, a very big industry) profits from public outrage against large corporations. In exploiting companies with hundreds of thousands of lawsuits, these Predatort lawyers can extort billions from companies facing shareholder pressure to settle. While they share the objective of putting industry out of business, these activists play the role of litigation useful idiots for a corrupt legal class built on greed and deception.

The law firms are ruthlessly efficient in capitalizing on everything these activists had been campaigning against. Now these innocent lambs are getting into bed with these relentless wolves to train their confreres on the benefits of strategic litigation to sue companies out of existence. At what point does “naïve” become" “stupid”?

Editor’s Postscript

My apologies for the negative depiction of wolves in the closing paragraph. It is well-known that wolves are highly intelligent, work well in packs and have a strong sense of justice. The author has advised generations of students to be like wolves in their daily strategies. But the image of their bad public reputation (due in part to their taste for lamb) was too juicy to pass up as a closing metaphor.

Health Warning: Mercenaries at Work

Summary

• Lighthouse Reports releases an investigation claiming the food industry is clogging courts with lawsuits to interfere with food safety measures.

• 81% of the cases are in Mexico, but Lighthouse tries to portray it as a global industry strategy to protect ultra-processed foods.

• Most cases are against the imposition of indiscriminate Mexican sugar taxes on certain foods.

• There was no actual Lighthouse investigation, but a series of articles built around a database.

• The database was built by a group of NGOs and institutes all funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

• Michael Bloomberg’s main (only) health policy strategy, since his failed New York regulation, is to ban or raise taxes on lifestyle pleasures like sugary sodas and processed foods.

What happens when you want to run a campaign, but you have very limited data and evidence? One strategy more increasingly used is to hire an activist NGO like Lighthouse Reports to fabricate an investigation they can funnel through their tried and tested noise machine. What happens if the budget has been cleared but there is no story? No problem. Lighthouse Reports has experienced spinmeisters capable of communicating insignificant research like it was a groundbreaking exposé. Just pay the Dutch NGO enough and they’ll deliver?

Yesterday, Lighthouse Reports released its latest investigation entitled Big Food vs. The People. The subtitle claims to “expose Big Food’s 239 lawsuits against life-saving policies”. There was no actual “report” but a web-page with a collection of clever graphics and links to connected articles from their ten freelance partners (all “copublished” in a coordinated fashion yesterday). What they based this communication campaign on is a dataset they claim to have built that breaks down the industry lawsuits.

A simple visit to the dataset, something most readers, editors and food science activists don’t bother to do, would show some curious things. The 239 industry lawsuits were gathered over 15 years and 193 (81%) were from Mexico where the government had imposed an indiscriminate series of food and drink taxes and bans. If the lawsuits in Colombia and Brazil were removed, then only 11 lawsuits (6 in the US, 4 in India and 1 in the UK) would be able to be considered ... over 15 years. Lighthouse Reports was trying to sell an ultra-processed nothing burger.

Why wasn’t the Lighthouse Reports investigation then entitled Big Food vs. The People in Mexico? This would allow analysts to address the peculiar situation where the Mexican government’s food and drink regulations had become unreasonable and unfairly punished some companies and products with high taxes on obscure categories like “non-essential foods”.

The Lighthouse Reports NGO is not interested in an open discussion on food law or the rights of food producers and manufacturers to participate in the Mexican economy. They were interested in producing a report that would delegitimize the food industry, portray a local situation as a global phenomenon and then blast it across their global network of activist reporters and angry anti-capitalist academics.

Capitalist exploitation, health decline, poverty, big business profits… those are the stories they wanted to sell. The fact that there wasn’t enough legitimate news to create the intended outrage didn’t matter. Lighthouse would just feed it through their tried and tested noise machine.

The Lighthouse Campaign Noise Machine

Lighthouse Reports’ strategy is very simple.

• Get funding from a special interest group via a complex web of pass-throughs,

• assemble a group of hungry, freelance reporters with clear anti-capitalist political biases,

• produce a minimalist investigation,

• ensure a large budget to produce effective graphics,

• pay off your network of angry freelancers to coordinate a series of articles on the launch day,

• try to amplify the noise and let the special interest groups then take over the campaign.

The last article looked at how the Lighthouse Reports Poison PR investigation was a mercenary assault on behalf of the US litigation industry trying to create outrage to time with the bellwether cases against Syngenta on paraquat. The actual evidence they had was very thin, and only enough to bankrupt a small communications consultancy, but the Lighthouse Reports activists, along with their network of angry freelance journalists did what they were paid to do.

But if the Lighthouse network of activists, academics and reporters are merely a group of activist journalists for hire, shouldn’t the NGO be transparent on who was funding them, for how much, and what other levels of cooperation and coordination was shared?

Follow the Money

The Lighthouse Reports Poison PR investigation was motivated by the interests in the US litigation industry and (officially) funded with an $800,000 grant from the Oak Foundation to try to handicap conventional farming and the crop protection industry. Who funded this latest campaign and how much did the activists receive? In the interest of journalistic integrity and transparency, Lighthouse Reports has again chosen to not provide those details, requiring more Firebreak forensic foundation research.

This is important because the Lighthouse Reports NGO has identified itself as a collaborative investigation organization. In other words, they are mercenaries producing reports for the special interest groups operating from the shadows. Once we establish the groups behind this latest publication, we can better understand the objective of Big Food vs. The People.

The main work and resources went into the creation of the dataset of lawsuits in the six countries. There was actually no investigative report published, just a series of articles and postable graphics built around the dataset. Lighthouse reports attributes the work on the dataset to the following NGOs and institutions.

What do these organizations all have in common (or rather, with whom)?

El Poder del Consumidor, a Mexican consumer association, is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and is a partner group of Michael Bloomberg’s regranting body, Vital Strategies.

The Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments acknowledges their interests very clearly:

It doesn’t go unnoticed that the three main countries in the Lighthouse Reports research, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, are also the key focus countries for the Global Center. The Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments is situated in the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law which is situated in the Georgetown University Law Center where the Bloomberg funding is passed through. As a project under an academic fiscal sponsor, The Center does not have to declare their funding or be held accountable.

The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) is a Bloomberg Philanthropies regranting body, developed as an initiative of another well-known Bloomberg NGO, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. It is interesting to see how the Bloomberg flotilla of NGOs developed to fight tobacco and nicotine products are now exercising the same deceptive funding obfuscation on food policy campaigns.

ACT, the Brazilian health policy NGO based in São Paulo, is the last partner mentioned in the groups listed behind building the dataset. Once again, its main funders are Bloomberg Philanthropies, Vital Strategies and GHAI (the last two merely regranting the funds from the Bloomberg flagship).

This is a typical Bloomberg strategy of creating a large number of NGOs to pose as independent organizations while they are simply taking funds from Bloomberg Philanthropies and redistributing them among themselves. Outside of tobacco and nicotine control, Vital Strategies now has a food policy division that is working on implementing bans and higher food taxes. Is it just a coincidence that two of Vital Strategies’ main areas of operation on food policy are Colombia and Brazil? Their policy strategy is to increase taxes on “unhealthy” food and demand front of package labelling.

Michael Bloomberg’s Money, Michael Bloomberg’s Interests

Bloomberg Philanthropies has put aside $435 million to establish the Bloomberg Food Policy Program to wage war on ultra-processed, sugary food and drinks. Compared to Michael Bloomberg’s $2 billion for his war on nicotine, this may seem like small beer, but in any policy campaign arena, $435 million can buy a lot of influence. It can certainly buy a lot of journalists.

“Bloomberg Philanthropies is supporting the enactment and evaluation of policy that aim to move people toward healthier diets in cities and countries around the world. The program focuses its work in Brazil, the Caribbean (Jamaica & Barbados), Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States, all of which have high rates of obesity and are taking action.”

The key areas of initial operation for the Bloomberg Food Policy Program is, once again, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia and that should come as no surprise now that these areas were reflected in the Lighthouse Reports research. In essence, the various Bloomberg entities handed the research to the Dutch NGO as a finished product (along with the financial contribution … for the noise machine).

Like nicotine and tobacco control campaigns, Michael Bloomberg is stuck in a single-minded strategy on food policy: ban products and increase taxes. It doesn’t matter if it has never worked, creates dangerous black markets and leads to worse health consequences. His funding of this Lighthouse Reports investigation is meant to fight back against the mounting legal challenges from the food manufacturers and producers. A kind of “flanking” in lobbying terms. The poor man must still be struggling to accept one of his greatest failures as mayor of New York when he tried to tax and ban sugary drinks. Decades later, with billions wasted, Bloomberg is still unable to see the poverty of his policy strategy or what actual good his philanthropy could have done.

Within this food and soda tax strategy lie the motives to hire the Lighthouse Reports activists. Why couldn’t the Lighthouse Reports NGO, and the lead author, Thin Wei Win, admit that their campaign was funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and that the objective was to feed into the Bloomberg strategy of increasing taxes on sugary food and drinks? Shouldn’t their network of journalists be transparent? Even the draft of the academic paper they hope to publish has no acknowledgement of Bloomberg funding or declaration of conflicts of interest. Without a proper academic structure, it is no wonder the draft remains unpublished.

This is paid-off activism, not journalism or research. Lighthouse Reports think the rules don’t apply to them so long as they win (and continue to gain further funding). There are also no demands for ethical conduct or transparency demanded on foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies. They have created an excellent breeding ground for activist mercenaries like Lighthouse Reports to thrive. For the rest of us, yesterday was merely another day of well-amplified misinformation - more noise and nonsense.

An Afterthought

These mercenary activist media strategies are effective in spreading political campaigns but outside of their ethical repugnance, they are getting quite boring. One thing I did not understand with this latest special interest campaign is why Michael Bloomberg’s hired media gun, The Examination, didn’t pile onto the noise machine assault and amplify this investigation. Michael created and funded this “collaborative” news enterprise in part to attack the food industry. Perhaps there’s a turf war going on with the consultants running Bloomberg’s “in-house” media group, The Examination, having issues with the questionable techniques used by the Dutch activists. … Pass the popcorn.

• Strategic litigation is the latest evolution in the collusion between NGOs, journalists, foundations and the litigation industry.

• It allows special interest groups to fund and participate in anti-corporate campaigns without transparency or accountability.

• The Lighthouse Reports Poison PR investigative report is a case study of the vicious underhanded tactics used by these special interests to attack industry.

• An author of the Poison PR report will be presenting this case study next week at a public webinar on the benefits of strategic litigation.

Ten years ago, when I started writing SlimeGate, many in the activist NGO world felt uncomfortable about getting into bed with these slimeball tort lawyers. While the “enemy of my enemy may be my friend”, some activists were having misgivings about cooperating with a faction of the legal profession that would use NGOs to help them extort companies, not for justice for plaintiffs, but for massive wealth accumulation, private jets and personal excess. How far were these idealists willing to look the other way in order to score a victory against industry, raise funding and enforce positive change for the environment? In the last decade, the answer became clear: Very far!

I have watched the evolution in the activist-Predatort nexus, particularly during the glyphosate saga.

• Early on, groups like Corporate Europe Observatory were using activist scientists like Chris Portier to write reports for them on the risks of glyphosate, knowing full well his services were paid for by the law firms suing then Monsanto and later Bayer.

• Then NGOs like Friends of the Earth started coordinating their glyphosate lobbying efforts with key beneficiary law firms like Wisner Baum.

• It didn’t take too long after for the US litigation industry to start paying off NGOs, reporters and filmmakers to do their bidding, via non-transparent donor-advised funds, as in the funding behind the Into the Weeds campaign.

• Funding activist scientists like Philip Landrigan and Chuck Benbrook to produce court-ready evidence was seen in the financial malfeasance of the Heartland Health Research Alliance, a non-profit set up by the US litigation industry to channel millions into fabricating research to be used in NGO campaigns and further lawsuits.

At this point no one in the civil society movement had any qualms about receiving Predatort millions via foundations functioning as pass-throughs. The passion for the planet was taken over by the passion to win, and these modern-day Machiavellians were wickedly efficient. The money was too good for any ethical introspection and without transparency or public scrutiny, activists found they could say and do whatever they liked.

But if it had only stopped there…

Strategic Litigation

Two years ago, the deepest moral decline of the environmental activist profession was put in evidence, and next week we will be witnessing the instigators boasting about it. The Lighthouse Reports affair showed law firms working directly with journalists, NGOs and foundations to put one of their political adversaries out of business in the hopes of advancing a lawsuit on paraquat. This is an example of strategic litigation, and one of the perpetrators is presenting it as a case study at a webinar next week to train other activists.

Strategic litigation (also called “impact litigation”) is the weaponization of the litigation industry to effect change on industries, governments and public perceptions. Born from a La Jolla conference in 2012, the brainchild of Naomi Oreskes’ tormented mind, the strategy was to circumvent the regulatory process (seen as poisoned by lobbyists) with their alternative, later referred to as adversarial regulation. This approach was built around a litigation-led campaign attacking a targeted industry or product. The goal is to use relentless lawfare assaults to effectively tobacconize other industries, destroying their reputation, market and business model (suing them out of business or into submission). There was no need to engage in the messy (albeit democratic) business of regulatory change. Some people call this extortion; Naomi referred to it as “progress” (and personally lucrative).

Fourteen years after La Jolla, it is no longer a convenient coincidence when activists, foundations and law firms have the same goals. Now these campaigns are coordinated with clear strategies and gameplans from the outset. Imagine an activist consultant working for a foundation (or developing a dark fiscal sponsorship organization from a group of foundations), coordinating a multi-pronged attack on a company or regulatory body via a group of NGOs and law firms.

The collusion can take many forms.

Dark subterfuge

These campaigns would usually go under the radar as none of these groups feel the need to be transparent or accountable. Consultants who have worked their way onto foundation boards can act like generals stealthly commanding a flotilla of NGOs. A good example was when the provincial government in Alberta, Canada had to conduct an inquiry with a forensic accounting expert to learn how far these dark forces had gone to obstruct economic affairs in the province (NGOs spent at least 1.28 billion CAD in foundation funding that had “lost its character”). The media, mostly funded by these same foundations, ignored the government’s findings.

Fiscal sponsors

The fiscal sponsor may create its own NGO-like organization to spearhead the campaign (ensuring that the campaign group is not filed as a legal entity to avoid transparency and accountability requirements). The law firms will share their network of scientists, serving as highly-paid litigation consultants, to publish papers to raise doubt about the issue at hand. This was Glyphosate 101. These papers as well as the overall campaign are then amplified by foundation-funded media groups and investigative reporters.

Dark, donor-advised funds

Depending on the potential for payouts, law firms may fund the campaign via dark donor-advised foundation funds (as in the Heartland Health Research Alliance) or the foundations may fund multiple dead-end lawfare assaults on targeted industries, not to win but to merely extract reputational damage to feed into a larger campaign (as seen with Sher Edling or Earthjustice).

Global, transnational reach

As an added touch, this unholy alliance can foster its influence (scientists or foundation funding) into UN bodies to drive another regulatory angle (seen with IARC, the FAO, UNEP and the WHO). The UN conference mill is now captured by the foundations, activist scientists, NGOs and specialty media groups.

Strategic litigation has delivered dividends for a wide range of activist campaigns like those against glyphosate, plastics and microplastics, fossil fuels, salmon farming but the playbook is rarely openly discussed by its perpetrators. That is why next week’s webinar on Strategic Litigation will be interesting.

The Lighthouse Laser Beam

The Lighthouse Reports’ Poison PR investigation is a case study of the backhanded dealings of the NGO, media and foundation special interests covertly working with the US litigation industry in a coordinated assault on a small communications firm. It was driven by law firms attempting to create public outrage of corporate malfeasance as they launched a large number of paraquat lawsuits.

This jury priming tactic (creating anti-industry outrage) was used successfully with the release and promotion of the Monsanto Papers during the glyphosate lawsuits and attempted with Oreskes’ Exxon Knew campaign to link the fossil fuel industry with the consequences of climate change. But this story has an ethical taint that makes the perpetration of the Poison PR campaign even more repugnant.

The Lighthouse-Predatort alliance started when a group of US tort law firms, including the Miller Firm, obtained a series of documents in discovery from Syngenta related to their paraquat activities. They leaked the confidential documents to the Environmental Working Group activist and self-proclaimed “journalist”, Carey Gillam, who claimed she woke up one morning and discovered 10,000 files in boxes outside of her front door.

The Miller Firm has had a longstanding relationship with Gillam, using her to amplify the release of the Monsanto Papers during the bellwether glyphosate case, to which both parties profited handsomely. She also orchestrated a character assassination of Tim Litzenburg when he was challenging their glyphosate evidence (as not actually the main cause of the plaintiff’s cancers) so she has proven to be very efficient at hiding the knives. Gillam promptly published the leaked documents on the EWG website, calling them the “Paraquat Papers” (evidence enough that Carey had exhausted any remaining creative inspiration).

The documents themselves had limited value for the class action suits being gathered against Syngenta, but they revealed a relationship between the company and a small communications firm, v-Fluence. The firm, with 28 employees, was known for its daily Bonus Eventus newsletters that documented activist strategies and campaign events, offering ag-tech and food industry actors a window on their tactics and advice on how to manage the issues.

The story from the leaked documents was not about paraquat (the evidence of a link to Parkinson’s was very weak) nor about Syngenta (who had followed their ethical codes of conduct), but instead focused on how v-Fluence had been internally sharing some of the negative published media about activists, including Ms Gillam.

Gillam took the confidential discovery documents to Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch non-profit mercenary group producing investigative reports at the behest of any special interests that would fund the NGO’s publications. (They call it “collaborative journalism”.) In other words, Lighthouse Reports is another one of those “Reporters for Hire” groups feeding off of foundation funding to publish bespoke investigative journalism attack pieces. For their Poison PR investigation, they assembled a group of reporters from across the globe (essentially eight freelance journalists who had been sharing each others’ anti-industry hit-pieces).

Lighthouse secured funding from the Oak Foundation for this campaign, totalling at least €800,000. Oak has a clear strategy of funding campaigns against industry, promoting agroecology and attacking conventional agricultural practices. The foundation also provides a dark donor-advised funding mechanism (a funding pass-through) so we really cannot say which special interests were behind this report. Needless to say, Lighthouse Reports activists were drunk with cash as both Carey Gillam and Margo Gibbs (based in Amsterdam) had offered to fly to St Louis to personally interview the v-Fluence managing director (see mail below). They even hacked into the closed Bonus Eventus website.

The Lighthouse Reports investigation into this small communications firm was merely the first step in this strategic litigation exercise. Law firms from the US and Europe then started to file lawsuits against v-Fluence, demanding disclosure of all correspondence and documents. Cases were then filed against their clients, ensuring an exodus that would bankrupt the firm. The efficiency of these relentless attacks on a small firm like v-Fluence was brutal, vicious and vindictive.

Meanwhile, the network of journalists amplified the investigation for several months, hoping to snowball the claims against this small organization into a mass global outrage event as the paraquat bellwether lawsuits were being heard in the US. Domiciled in Brussels, I was on Le Monde activist, Stéphane Content’s dance card (but I ignored his correspondence as he had broken at least eight of Le Monde’s ten ethical codes of conduct).

Celebrating Failure

This was definitely not a Monsanto Papers success story. The Lighthouse Report investigation did not reveal any large exposé of corporate corruption. They spent a lot of money and made a lot of noise, but the then ongoing paraquat bellwether cases were thrown out on the basis of bad science. The judge not only dismissed the poor research, she referred to how the litigation consultant “required several methodological contortions and outright violations of the scientific standards he professed to apply”.

Unlike glyphosate, the law firms could not use outrage as a substitute for scientific evidence. The only thing the law firms, working in tandem with the reporters, activists and foundations, had achieved was bankrupting a small communications company (and a reminder, if we needed one, of how weak and cowardly industry trade associations like CropLife America have become).

Despite its failure and evidence of a tired gameplan, the Lighthouse Reports’ tactics show the dark underbelly of activist collusion with the litigation industry. See my critical analysis of the Lighthouse Reports investigation here. There was no transparency (essential for reporters) but rather a concerted effort by law firms, foundations and the journalists to hide their sources, funding and evidence. They hacked, lied and cheated to get their story out.

But their story was a nothing burger.

The intention of creating another ExxonKnew or Monsanto Papers campaign to cultivate jury outrage to augment court payouts and increase the chance of settlements (extortion) in tens of thousands of paraquat lawsuits were weak when the only case they had was a communications firm that was sharing published documents of activist tactics. If vengeance is a measure for success, then Carey should be proud.

Strategic litigation is one more weapon in the activist arsenal to spread distrust, outrage and disinformation against industry. When law firms hire activist zealots to do their dirty work, they are getting value for money. When NGOs get in bed with these slimeball Predatorts, they surrender all integrity and self-respect. It is a toxic activist tool that should only be exercised out of desperation. But now NGOs and foundations seem to use it as their main campaign strategy.

Next week, one of the authors of the Lighthouse Reports Poison PR publication, Thin Lei Win, will proudly present this case study at a webinar on strategic litigation. I’m looking forward to learning how she sleeps at night.

In a recent article, I wondered where all of the activists have gone. Have we stopped caring for the environment? Then again, we rarely hear the term “environmentalist” used today. Is this eco-religion no longer serving as the opium of the masses? Does this cult that once gave meaning to post-religious sophisticates somehow feel awkward now?

When was the last time you heard someone call themselves an “environmentalist”?

A decade ago, self-professed environmentalists would proudly claim to all in earshot that they cared for the environment, that they lived sustainably and answered to a higher calling as agents of change to make Mother Earth whole again. These martyrs for the cause identified themselves by their green choices and eagerly displayed their badges and totems. The implication, a decade ago, was that the rest of us were heathens, polluters and peasants.

But does such eco-prescription resonate today? Do green policies garner as many votes today as a decade ago? Are people willing to pay more for a product based on its ecological claims? The eco-class no longer seems to be held in high esteem or valued on a higher plane.

When did the term “environmentalist” fall out of fashion?

• Was it when the Extinction Rebellion protestors glued themselves to buses and trains, making Londoners late for work?

• Was it after the energy, food and transportation inflation caused by green regulations?

• Did other issues, like wars and pandemics, take over and put the elitist green agenda into perspective?

• Or perhaps the environmentalists have become victims of their own success. We have all become greener and no longer feel vulnerable to stricter ecological prescriptions.

I’d like to think of myself as caring for the planet. I don’t litter, use more energy than I should or consume things I don’t need. I would like to think that I understand enough on how to live sustainably and make responsible choices. I am not shamed by the ever-increasingly stringent standards imposed by the eco-elite (to go organic, drive an electric car or install a heat pump).

This is where environmentalism as a cult religion has reached its limit. If I turn the lights off, take the bus, recycle or save water, my choices are not green, they are rational. When I invested in solar panels on my roof, it was not to seek approval from my neighbors but to save money. When I added a home battery, I felt that I was wasteful, but I no longer trusted my utility and needed to secure my energy supply. These are practical decisions. I don’t think of myself as an environmentalist, but a decade ago, I would have been.

An added problem is in the baggage carried by the word “environmentalist”. It carries a connotation of smug elitism. It suggests a state of being (a purity) rather than a progression toward making the world more sustainable. I know I will always pollute, so I strive to pollute less.

I pollute … and so do you!

In reality, we all pollute from the moment we are born and start having an impact on the planet until the time our ashes are spread across a field as fertilizer (that’s a thing now). Breathing, eating, consuming... all leave a footprint. I wrote an article on this twelve years ago called “I Pollute!” where I set the goal of my ecological decisions to pollute less. Environmentalists believe they don’t pollute, and that others do. On climate change, plastic pollution, wastewater emissions, soil degradation ... they appropriate blame on others and not themselves. And they won’t stop until they fix others, change regulations, ban industries and products in order to transition to their perfect world of zero waste, net zero CO2 emissions, zero plastics ... until we reach some mythical world with zero risks.

Twelve years ago, before it was articulated as “degrowth”, I presented the environmentalist ideology:

Part of the idealists’ dream is a world of micro-economies, locally growing their own produce, goods and services while consuming much less, free from plastics and chemicals (sic) and free from the powers of multinationals and world powers. They have rejected the dream of modernism (that science and technology will continue to solve the problems we face), demanding that the world transform itself with locally generated, green smart grids and small agricultural communes (entailing a Neo-Malthusian drive to depopulate and reverse the present path of development). (I Pollute)

Nobody seems to still be talking openly about this environmentalist utopia today. The climate campaigns eventually drowned in the activists’ own hypocrisy of Davos Man’s private jets, gated mansions and over-consumption. Even Greta’s two large dogs raised some undiscussed ecological challenges.

In any church, the zealots occupying the front pews will claim to be the true believers, loudly judging those at the back who may not be practicing according to their strict interpretation of the scriptures. But zealots often push a religion to its limit, relying on fire, brimstone and the fear of their god. Faith should be humble (as we bow to something greater than us).

In the church of environmentalism, should the activists (the zealots) be given the torch to lead the movement, turning sustainable decisions into a condemnation of the heathens while scaring those who don’t meet their transcending green standards? The humble who recognize that they pollute and strive to pollute less will just find another church (and they have).

Rather than scaring or shaming, perhaps another approach should be taken.

Progression and Pragmatism

It would be best to ignore the zealots, their condemnations and fearmongering and focus development on a continuous improvement within the scope of the best available alternatives. This progressive pragmatism seems to be where environmental policy is today as Green Deal regulations in Brussels are being scaled back and the US deregulation strategy is confronting excessive green restrictions.

Some examples of progressive pragmatism replacing environmentalist ideology:

• We are not scrapping all fossil fuels because of some diktat imposing renewables, especially if that means interruptions in power supply or more expensive utility bills. If there is to be a transition to renewables (not a foregone conclusion), it would need to be gradual (to minimize impact on the poor populations) and only when the technology has matured.

• As populations grow and put greater pressure on food production, we don’t impose low-yield organic farming (especially in developing countries) but rather look at how to improve food production while lowering the impact on soil, water and air.

• If plastics are finding their way into the environment, we don’t ban these products (that are more sustainable than glass, steel, paper and copper) but rather develop means to reduce emissions, manage waste and inform populations.

A progressive pragmatism is about developing solutions and improvements. While it may not reflect the ambitions of the zealot activist elite, the evolutionary development will do more to advance the environment while keeping humans engaged in the process. An environmentalism that only rewards those committed to some static green dogma will not achieve a better environment. Sustainability is a process, a continuous improvement, a development - it should not be considered as a virtue.

Nature First or Human First?

The word “environmentalist” is tainted in its misanthropic superiority, laden with judgement, hypocrisy and rhetoric. Sustainability has become rather hollow as a reference to reduced impact when the term could mean almost anything. Environmentalism has become “anti-human”, campaigning against technology, capitalism and consumerism. The planet would be just fine, they argue, if there were no humans. Human intervention invariably damages nature and the best we can do is stand back and let nature heal itself. This was the environmentalist paradigm of William Vogt presented by Charles Mann in his seminal book, The Wizard and the Prophet.

There are other elements at play than merely bowing unquestionably to the primacy of Mother Nature. One of the issues that had harmed the environmental movement was the drive to put planet first, regardless of the consequences. There was an uncomfortable reaction to a eco-theology that would look the other way when poor economies suffered under our demands for lower carbon emissions; when children died or went blind from of vitamin A deficiency even though Golden Rice could be cultivated; or when food production is lost because Western elites want to impose a Marxist agroecology ideology on subsistence farmers.

The precautionary principle became the most wicked tool of these misanthropic environmentalists. Under the pretence of risk management, they endeavored to delay or reject any innovation or technology that would go up against Mother Nature, regardless of the negative consequences to mankind.

Three decades of precautionary campaigns against GMOs, five decades against chemical disinfectants and six decades against nuclear energy were enough to conclude the game is up. We are no longer willing to tolerate the loss of beneficial technologies because some small group of activists are seeking to impose their political dogma via fear and outrage. This “only if I can be certain it’s safe” precautionaria is a relic of the lost environmentalist perfect-world ideology.

Today the word “precaution” readily draws scowls. If there is an emerging ecological problem, like increasing power demands from AI data centers, we are looking for the best solutions, not running to door and imposing precautionary bans or restrictions. Leaders are learning that they have to make hard decisions rather than sweeping emerging innovations under the rug of some contrived regulatory principle.

A Return to Realpolitik

As we tend to lock ourselves into a binary logic, and if we no longer use the terms “environmentalist”, “activist” or “precautionista” in our lexicon, what alternatives are there?

• The term “ecomodernist” was introduced to refer to a pro-science approach to solving ecological problems. But this has served more as a foil to the emotional environmentalist campaigns. Today, most green activists call themselves ecomodernists, but, like agroecologists, their scientific method is so weighed down by ideological restrictions and caveats that they would cause Francis Bacon and Karl Popper to roll in their graves.

• Recently the term “eco-humanist” has been discussed to guide a more human-centered green narrative. But the prefix is merely an add-on to more deeply integrate humanism. Humanism with a concern for the environment is simply … humanism.

At the end of the day, caring for the environment, using the best available science and technologies to solve problems, and promoting human well-being are all common sense decisions. There is no need to label it to justify some eco-prescriptive policy or virtuous elitism. The environment (however defined as a nexus with humans) should be managed from a pragmatic ideology: a progressive approach along a path of continuous improvement of the environment while protecting humanity, societal goods and well-being.

Several years ago, I argued for a return to the practice of Realpolitik in environmental policies. I defined it more by what it is not:

Realpolitik “refers to decisions not made solely on issues of ideology and morality. In other words, Realpolitik refers to pragmatic decisions based on best possible outcomes and compromises (something done when leaders have to face unpleasant realities). Ideologues can easily ignore scientific facts when imposing their power but Realpolitikers will follow the best available science while appealing to reason.”

This pragmatic approach, going back to the 1850s, rejected ideology, religious dogma and some vision of a perfect world, and realistically sought better solutions. We accept that we pollute, but the goal is to pollute less, either by lowering consumption or adopting better technologies.

Environmentalism and the campaign to put the planet first, over and beyond human aspiration, is dead. Long live pragmatic, progressive environmental solutions. Welcome back to a policy world driven by Realpolitik.

French translation

Here’s a fun question in the spirit of the season: in what world can a government fund an NGO, instruct that NGO to lobby the government’s own legislature, count the resulting pressure campaign as “the voice of civil society,” and then cite that voice as the democratic mandate for its policies?

Only in Brussels. And they got caught.

Rewind to January 2025. EU Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin stood before the European Parliament and admitted — in the carefully sanded language of a man reading from legal review — that it was “inappropriate” for Commission services to sign agreements obliging NGOs to lobby MEPs specifically. The money flowed through LIFE, the EU’s €5.4 billion environmental slush fund. German MEP Monika Hohlmeier had pulled roughly 30 funding contracts from 2022–23 and found that grantees were expected to organize mass protests, run mass mailings, and squeeze lawmakers on the eve of key votes. Some were deployed to lobby against the Commission’s own trade agenda — DG ENVI using taxpayer-funded greens as a proxy army against Mercosur while President von der Leyen championed the deal down the hall.

Call it what it is: ventriloquism. The Commission threw its voice through a felt puppet labeled “independent civil society” and then applauded the puppet’s testimony.

The cleanup was a masterclass in Brussels damage control. The European Court of Auditors probed and found EU funding of NGOs “too opaque” — €7.4 billion sloshed to NGOs from 2021–23 with no reliable central tracking, 30 organizations hoovering up 40 percent of a decade’s funds, a state-controlled institute misclassified as an “NGO” with a board stacked entirely with government officials. The auditors’ remedy? The Commission graciously agreed to some reforms — scheduled for 2028 and 2029. A parliamentary censure motion failed by one vote. The EEB, which takes a tenth of its budget from LIFE, declared the whole affair a “scandal that wasn’t.” The beneficiaries of the funding pronounced the funding clean. Case closed.

But keep your eye on what the puppet was actually selling, because the invoice just arrived, and it arrived at 44°C.

This month, as the third heatwave since May cooked the continent, France’s EDF took reactors at Golfech, Bugey, and Chooz fully offline, roughly 3.65 GW, about 6 percent of the country’s nuclear fleet, with several more running at reduced output elsewhere in the fleet. Earlier in the same heatwave, curtailments across a wider set of eight reactors had reached 6.4 GW at one point, about 14 percent of French demand.

Not because the reactors couldn’t run. EDF says plainly there’s no safety issue. They were shut down by environmental discharge limits: the thermal-pollution rules governing how warm the cooling water returned to the Rhône and Garonne may be. The rules the green lobby spent decades perfecting. Paris had to issue an emergency exemption for Bugey “to ensure the security of the power grid,” which is a government’s way of admitting its environmental law and its electricity supply have become mutually exclusive.

And the rest of the grid Europe built to green-lobby specifications? Germany suffered a heat-driven blackout. The UK activated a supply alert and paid up to £1,379 per megawatt-hour — a ransom, not a price — to keep the lights on. Italian analysts project Q3 power prices up 36 percent year-over-year. Tens of thousands of French homes lost power while roughly 20 percent of European homes have air conditioning, versus 90 percent in America, because for thirty years the same subsidized chorus told Europeans that cooling was decadence and baseload was sin.

And right on cue, the heat has a courtroom application. Strasbourg is sitting on Müllner v. Austria — the ECtHR’s designated follow-up to the Swiss KlimaSeniorinnen case, granted rare priority status, in which an Austrian MS patient argues the summer temperatures aggravating his condition are a human-rights violation by his government. Expect the sympathetic profiles to multiply with every degree on the thermometer. What those profiles will leave out is the org chart.

Start pulling the thread. The plaintiff’s lawyer, Michaela Krömer, runs the case arm-in-arm with Fridays for Future (Greta Thunberg’s youth movement) whose Austrian arm hosts the case on its own website, crowdfunded the filing, and markets it under the #FightForYourHumanRight banner.

The “third party interveners” who filed with the court include GLAN, the strategic-litigation shop that took $175,000 from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations in 2022–23, and CAN Europe, the flagship of the European Climate Foundation flotilla — the Hewlett-, Bloomberg-, and Rockefeller-fed funding hub we’ve already mapped in these pages. FFF’s case site solemnly assures readers that such interventions “do not take sides.” CAN Europe’s own website says it intervened to support the plaintiff’s claims. Pick one.

And the punchline: CAN Europe heads a thirteen-NGO consortium running an EU LIFE project — yes, that LIFE — whose stated objectives include “supporting and dialoguing with decision-makers” on EU climate targets. So Brussels is funding the coalition backing a lawsuit designed to force deeper emissions cuts on an EU member state, through the very program whose grants the Commission’s own budget chief admitted “inappropriately” obliged NGOs to lobby lawmakers. American billionaire foundations supply one hand; the European taxpayer supplies the other; both hands work the same puppet.

So run the loop one more time. Brussels paid the greens. The greens lobbied Brussels. Brussels enacted the greens’ agenda and called it the people’s will. The agenda produced a grid that fails precisely when Europeans need it most — and rules that switch off carbon-free nuclear power in a heat emergency. And when the heat arrives, the same network sues the government for the heat — with Brussels helping fund the plaintiffs’ cheering section. Now the same chorus explains that the fix is to do everything faster.

They’ll tell you the auditors found no wrongdoing. Sure — the rules allowed it. That’s the scandal. It was never about the environment. It was about controlling the narrative, and billing you twice: once for the lobbying, once for the electricity.

What could possibly go wrong? Open a window. It’s 44 degrees out.

During the American heat dome or Europe’s summer swelter and the hottest June days on record, we no longer have to endure the media hyperbole or the activist misanthropy, blaming man (industry, capitalism, consumers…) for the planetary destruction. Now we are sometimes reminded, in a deadpan tone, that these warm days are in keeping with climate models, but it is often greeted with a reaction similar to when my doctor tells me my excess weight gain is related to my eating habits.

After two decades of well-choreographed campaigns and narrative control that merged all environmental health issues into a centralized campaign against consumption, trade, capitalism and industry, with billions in foundation funding flowing in to enrich the activist movements, within a year, the tap was literally turned off. Everything just stopped. Why?

• The activist groups did not run out of money (foundation donations often stretch from three to five years).

• They did not run out of issues (none of the policies they demanded was actually delivered).

• These forever campaigners simply ran out of legitimacy.

The elections of 2024-25 across Europe and North America delivered a blow to the environmental left with economic, social and border issues taking priority in the political shift to the right. Over the last two years, policies, procedures and funding have migrated towards more economic, industrial and jobs development and away from the intangible feel-good fluff that the activists had pushed to the center of the policy arena. Buzzwords like simplification, deregulation, rationalization quickly replaced the environmental totems of circularity, decarbonization and degrowth. The electorate’s clear message was received in the policy halls of Brussels, Berlin and Washington.

Turning the Crisis Inward

The NGOs reacted as they have always done, not by reflecting and seeking a good compromise, but by declaring an imminent crisis. But the fabricated crisis was no longer a catastrophic climate collapse or a mass ecological extinction, but rather the threat to their own existence. Ever polarizing, the activists ran a campaign claiming the far-right was on a mission to silence NGOs (and free speech). Maybe it was the perpetual polarizing and lack of reflection or compromise that had turned so many off of their issues. The Firebreak published an article how their portrayal of the good activist fighting the “bad guys” was not setting the right tone and was not even singing the right hymn to their choir.

More recently, the activists have resorted to triage to try to make it through the lean years. Two weeks ago, the smarmy Good Lobby published their recent sales pitch called: “An Advocacy Survival Guide for Civil Society” claiming that the nature of the game had changed. Correction: the audience decided to watch other more important games. Of course, Alberto has been getting too fat living high off the foundation funding hog as the hypocrite blindly attacks other forms of advocacy (lobbying) funding so maybe he should follow his own advice.

Last week, a group of 60 activist NGOs, including the ever-opportunistic Good Lobby, published an Open Letter to the European Commission. The letter was quite remarkable in that their demands for better regulation were what these same groups had been condemning only three years earlier. The NGOs were demanding to be allowed to engage in dialogue while it was not too long ago that they were gleefully kicking their industry enemies out of the European Parliament and Commission. They demanded transparency, but the NGOs are the ones who do not reveal the billionaires and other interest groups behind their foundation funding. They demanded impact assessments. Good, so does that mean Europe will revise regulations like the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive where the NGOs got their way by rejecting the need for any impact assessments?

The NGO activist groups do face a crisis situation, but the crisis is coming from within.

Looking to the Post-NGO World

This is not the first decline in NGO influence, and they will be back, probably stronger and even more vengeful. What is dangerous is for other stakeholders to consider the recent shifting sands as the end of the uncomfortable decades of activist interference and use it as a chance to go back to business as usual. Rather, this is an opportunity to reshape the post-NGO world to redefine how stakeholders engage in the policy process. Here are four key changes to ensure a rational policy process in future.

• Clarify the role of foundations. With the professionalization of philanthropy (consultants creating networks of fiscal sponsorships and dark donor-advised funds), foundations have become billionaire-led activist NGOs. These groups pose as campaign organizations but as they don’t legally exist, they don’t have to declare their funding or be held accountable. The rules need to change so these groups follow the same rules of transparency and accountability as every other stakeholder group.

• Differentiate NGOs from activist lobby groups (APEs). The Firebreak has argued that most policy activist groups abuse their status as NGOs, pretending to be in the same league as humanitarian organizations or aid charities, claiming tax-free status while spending hundreds of millions on salaries, political donations and lobbying campaigns. They should be classified as Alternative Policy Enterprises (APEs), lobby groups whose millions in funding from special interests should not be tax deductible or classed differently from industry lobbyists. Meanwhile, those genuine NGOs trying to run food banks, shelters and development aid programs have to compete with these non-transparent lobbyists trying to impose their elitist dogma on society.

• Set stricter conditions for evidence in policy processes. For the last 20 years, NGO groups have done a good job discrediting industry research and excluding their evidence from the policy process. But the activist science they put forward is lower quality and designed to generate fear and doubt rather than facts and evidence. Since NGOs are no longer dictating the narrative at the present time, a clear, objective standard of scientific research and data should be established that would encompass the best available research and lab practices, regardless of its source.

• Consider environmental activist campaigns as marketing and PR activities rather than policy actions. The NGOs are communications organizations trying to shape the public narrative to enhance business opportunities (donations, funding, alternative products…). Their evidence is neither scientific nor economic but designed to persuade via the emotional triggers of fear and outrage. Some examples:
  - The anti-pesticide campaigns intend to push frightened consumers into buying organic food. Organic is nothing more than a high-priced marketing concept for the affluent elite to impose on struggling consumers.
  - The catastrophic climate agenda is woven into the promotion of renewables and promoting a post-capitalist neo-Marxist ideology.
  - The plastics fear campaigns (microplastics, waste, endocrine disruption…) work in tandem with alternative industries like copper, steel, glass and paper manufacturers.
  - The litigation industry is profiting nicely from the activist PR work in all of these fear business centers.

We need to consider the activist APEs campaigns and lobbying, not as policy engagement, but as marketing and PR for other interest groups.

The big problem for the environmental NGOs is that their marketing campaigns continue as usual, but not many people are buying them. It is time to change the business model.

My wife starts her day every morning with a long conversation with another man that she trusts more than me. His name is Claude.

As AI agents integrate themselves into more of our daily decisions, eventually driving our cars, cleaning our houses and preparing our meals, our societal institutions will need to get public buy-in (perhaps via a consultation, ballot or citizen’s assembly) for this major technological shift. But what would a participatory engagement on the future of AI look like? … Maybe we should ask Claude.

The public consultation or stakeholder dialogue approach was meant to improve public trust in institutional and regulatory decisions by engaging with the public, empowering them and seeking their buy-in for important decisions affecting their lives. A key element of trust is agency, that I (believe I) have control over decisions or actions that affect me. In the first two decades of this century, we saw a plethora of public consultations, townhall meetings, citizen assemblies, state ballots and referendums.

But today the public engagement process is broken: manipulated by stakeholders, ignored by policymakers and deemed worthless by a large part of the population. Many of the attempts by the activist left to conduct consultations to advance their transition strategies knowing that most people will not bother, giving their small but motivated movements a disproportionate voice in the outcome. Some examples:

• France held a series of citizen assemblies called Citizens' Convention on Climate (Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat) in 2019-2020. But after much fanfare and support at the highest level, the French government had to quietly walk away from the citizen assemblies’ 500 page report with 149 recommendations including banning 5G, large vehicles and suburban shopping centers.

• The EU Conference on the Future of Europe was launched in 2021 with grand statements from leaders of the European Parliament, Council and Commission as they started public consultations across the European Union. After wasting so much time and money by mid 2022, the EU quietly abandoned this engagement process.

• The most recent EU Consultation on tobacco and nicotine products has been shown to be a farce. Hundreds of thousands of ex-smokers who were able to finally quit with the help of e-cigarettes quite rightly shared their views in past consultations on why vaping should be promoted in the EU. This overwhelmingly outcome in favor of a policy that would force the EU to break with the WHO-Bloomberg diktats against tobacco harm reduction solutions meant that the European Union had to ignore the outcome of their consultation. This year, they tried to write an anti-harm reduction bias into the survey questions, making it nearly impossible to express a pro-vaping, anti-smoking view.

• The UK Brexit vote was conducted as a means for the UK Conservatives to purge itself from its anti-Europe faction. After a tumultuous time, the British people purged themselves of the Conservative Party. No one in government actually expected the UK to vote to leave the EU and this shocking result was enough to deter any other government from doing something so reckless as to ask the public what they think about complex policies.

• State ballots on social issues like legalizing cannabis attract a niche population supported by powerful money and influence. Other issues like demanding a minimum wage or childcare allocations do not enjoy such privileged access to public consultations.

The bottom line is that governments and regulators are no longer using engagement processes to help mold the policy process, or if they are, they are quietly ignoring the outcomes. If these consultations are not helping foster public trust, then the process is pointless, costly and raising expectations the policymakers will only disappoint.

How did Engagement Fall from Grace?

There is not one single reason why public consultations are now perceived as useless or merely symbolic.

1. The political decline of the “Green-Socialist-Anti-capitalist left” in the last electoral cycles has led to a shift in issue focus, away from “consultable” public programs like climate, migration and social support toward technical strategies on deregulation, access to energy and economic development.

2. The public engagement tools were used as weapons to legitimize activist transition campaigns (energy transition, food transition, economic transition…). As the fear campaigns pushed the apocalyptic scenarios too far, the public backlash made such a strategy unviable.

3. The rising social media tribal trust deficit means that I trust those like me (familiarity) more than those outside of my echo chambers. Algorithms have channelled individuals into groups of like-minded thinkers, rendering any consultation process obsolete. If one’s tribe rejects the outcome of a public consultation, then there is no trust benefit from public buy-in (agency).

4. AI technologies are already playing a role in public engagement tools. The ongoing EU tobacco and nicotine consultation is showing evidence of AI-assisted contributions. An article in The Firebreak ridiculed an NGO for conducting a consultation structured and moderated by an AI bot.

5. People are more concerned with efficiency than participatory engagement. If a technology works and I perceive benefits from it, then there is no point engaging the public. This may explain why there have never been any large-level public consultations on the Internet, mobile phones or social media.

With these points in mind, will our governments resort to engaging the public for policy advice on AI regulations? Will concerned citizens be able to direct the future of AI policies or is the field considered “not fit for public consultation”?

The AI Public Engagement Vacuum

Given the societal pressures the emerging AI technology is causing, if ever there was a need to engage with the public on the future direction of artificial intelligence, the time is now.

• Large populations are losing their jobs as this technology continues to encroach on different professions.

• As AI data centers suck energy off the grid and push prices up, certain populations are paying a higher price for less access to energy.

• The land-use and water issues have not been given serious considerations.

• These data centers create a lot of noise in local communities (expect the anti-5G and EMF campaigners to take ownership here).

• Deepfakes and disinformation have a serious affect on the general population.

• And with the rapid rise of billionaires (and one trillionaire), will the wealth disparity and the rise of the have-not majority lead to social discord?

If there were any issue today that demanded public buy-in and societal engagement, it wouldn’t be climate change or agrotechnology, it would have to be the future of AI. But this will never happen.

For regulators to pretend legitimacy via public consultations, there would have to be an alternative (however unrealistic) should the public reject the technology. A survey or ballot where the public might reject plastics, pesticides, GMOs, ultra-processed foods, nuclear energy or fossil fuels implies that there is an interest group pushing an alternative. Such polls are advanced by Big Change activist groups to advance their transition theology.

But where the benefits are so evident or the risk of falling behind without the technology so great (as in the emerging AI applications), no regulator would dare risk seriously asking the public what they wanted. Imagine any government tying its hands with a public consultation and then forced to block any AI development. That is about as likely as building data centers in space.

I asked AI (ChatGPT and Copilot) if a public consultation on the future of AI was a good idea. These agents gave me the standard LLM answer (that democracy and engagement are important) but they do not really know me well. So my wife asked Claude the same question, and got an honest answer adapted to her personality.

As Claude noted, the European Commission is presently consulting citizens, academia, industry, and public administrations on the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act and a unified EU cloud policy, but it has already been established that the Commission never listens to their consultations. Claude rightly called it “theater”.

Having a binding public engagement on the future of AI would be like letting the precautionistas force a consultation to ban mobile technology in the early 2000s after the Stewart Report suggested possible health risks from cellphone use. Rather, the emerging mobile technology was perceived as developing solutions with increasing promises of greater benefits. And there is the lesson for industry.

What Can we Learn from This?

For the last two decades, the public consultation strategy has taken aim at certain industries and products under fire from activist transition campaigns. What AI and mobile phone technologies teach us is that an industry needs to present its technology as indispensable while continuously improving the product. If an industry can do this, if the public can see the benefits, there would be no threat from activists attacking products through a transition campaign that forces a public consultation.

• Fossil fuels or nuclear energy are seen as necessary for the increased energy demand from the coming build-up of AI-driven data centers.

• GM and new genomic plant breeding technologies are deemed essential for protecting global food security given the threats to modern agriculture.

• We need better plastics to protect food from contamination and spoilage.

• We need to promote tobacco harm reduction products as the only effective measures to finally attain smoke-free status.

While the activist transition campaigns can no longer rely on the public engagement and consultation tools to force the strategies through, public engagement remains a legitimacy tool in most governance arsenals. It is up to industry to communicate the widespread benefits and indispensability of their technologies to ensure long-term market stewardship.

Professor Curry was leaving on a high-point, citing a number of recent victories (many thanks to her indefatigable work) that suggested to her the site was no longer necessary:

“There have been some decisive battles in the past two years, notably President Trump’s election, the DOE Climate Report, and widespread acknowledgement that RCP8.5 is an implausible emissions scenario. As a result, many news agencies have dropped or substantially reduced their climate desk, we don’t hear about climate change so much in the media (particularly as related to extreme weather events). Also, we can’t underestimate the impact of substantially reduced funding for climate-related NGOs, with USAID and other funds drying up.”

That being said, I could not help but feel sad about the end of an era built around a site where science, not consensus or position, was respected. Judith has been an icon of scientific courage, and she used her site to encourage scientific debate and promote others doing good work in the climate field. She served as a role model to so many in the field of science communications and science and policy (including myself).

In standing up to Big Climate, with its big money and big egos, Judith Curry also took her fair share of verbal and reputational abuse. In 2019, I posted one of her clear-eyed responses to the Extinction Rebellion fear campaigns on social media and was surprised to get more than 40, mostly negative, attacks on Curry’s person.

But unlike the Mud-Pit Michael Manns of the world, she deflected the slurs with grace, wit and humor. In academic pissing contests, Judith reminded us that science was always about the facts and data (rather than networks and titles). She never let her own authority and achievements distract us from that. At a time when the term “skeptic” was considered an insult, Judith’s steadfast strength reminded us that integrity has a greater resilience than emotional activism or ad hominem attacks.

Many of us may have forgotten what a pioneer site Climate Etc. had been in the field of climate science communications. Started in 2010, in the wake of the ClimateGate leaked emails from the University of East Anglia, Judith Curry’s first post said:

“My engagement in the blogosphere over the past several years have convinced me that the blogosphere has untapped potential for educating the public and for enabling large-scale collective intelligence to address the scientific and policy challenges associated with climate change.
The climate blogosphere is a vibrant environment but the signal is often hidden by the noise.”

The threads and comments section were indeed vibrant, and I often turned to Climate Etc. as a best practice case study in my communications lectures. The site was a vital source for ideas for my own work (I set up The Risk-Monger in 2010 as well, at a time when activist NGOs and special interests ruled the Internet). I used to reserve time on Sunday evenings for Judith’s weekly summary of “things that caught my eye”, notably her science policy and science communications sections.

The cost of keeping the site active through all of the technical issues was too high ($16,000 in the last four years) so Judith decided to wrap it up. As many of the climate research issues have become “boring” with the models and politicking, she is looking forward to a more “peaceful life with family and friends” in a new house, a new dog and a new garden … as well as a new Substack page (one can always hope).

At a time when the world had gone mad, with activists gluing themselves to buses, teenage savants growling at compliant world leaders and the mainstream media reporting the imminent Climageddon with each weather report, the community Judith Curry had built around her Climate Etc. site were the keepers of the flame, protecting the true objective of science while resisting the personal attacks from the billionaire-funded Climate Industrial Complex. That Judith could close her site with the flame of open scientific discourse on climate issues burning brightly, gives us hope for the other well-funded, wide-networked Big Change campaigns we are still struggling under.

Thank you Judith for inspiring us and reminding us of the true value of science and the cost of defending it.