If people isolated themselves in an imaginary world dominated by Big Change …

- where foundations fund scientists to publish dubious studies on nanoplastic detections …
- with media groups surviving on these same philanthropist donations amplifying anti-chemical fear campaigns …
- where Bloomberg-based phantom “projects” are lobbying policymakers to move beyond plastics …
- while well-financed strategic litigation fiscal sponsors are paying law firms to sue plastics manufacturers …
- and billionaires are producing films to raise doubts on the safety of polymer-based products …

it would be possible to believe we are in the process of transitioning toward a post-plastics world.

But in the real world, not funded by billionaire-driven foundations but rather by consumers seeking practical, sustainable solutions, innovative plastic products continue to be developed, improving lives and the environment. Researchers in market-driven sectors are continuously turning to plastics as the more sustainable, innovative alternative to traditional materials like glass, steel, paper and wood.

For other industries, the strategy lesson is clear: If you are under a relentless onslaught of well-funded campaign attacks, the best response is to continue innovating and introducing products that are irreplaceable.

It is time to pause our attention to the activist nonsense and their well-funded anti-plastic transition campaigns, in order to celebrate some of the truly fantastic plastic solutions that are saving lives, improving the environment and positively transforming daily activities. Here are three case studies of how plastics are changing our lives for the better.

Defensive Bullet Drones

I recently had a conversation with a Ukrainian military expert (I think most Ukrainians are now military experts) about the capacity of the Bullet Interceptor drones. As the Americans foolishly used up almost all of their $4 million Patriot missiles trying to take down $10,000 Iranian drones, the Ukrainians developed the $1000 interceptors to fairly successfully take out Russian Shahed drones at speeds of up to 300km/h. My question to him was why the Russians have not been able to take out the Ukrainian Bullet drone factories.

The expert’s response was simple:

“Because they are produced everywhere. The Bullet drone is mostly made out of plastic with very few parts. Thousands of Ukrainian Babas and Gidos have a number of 3D printers in their living rooms. They get an email with plans for the parts they need to print for the day and, the next morning, these parts are packaged and delivered to assembly points in other living rooms.”

Thousands of these defensive drones are produced every day, saving countless lives by taking out Russian drones and missiles aimed at civilian homes (while Donald Trump is trying to sell the Ukrainian coalition expensive, factory-produced weapons he cannot sufficiently manufacture or afford for his own military).

While this is evidently a “single-use plastic”, each 3D-printed drone has a value far exceeding its cost. Plastics’ versatility never ceases to surprise me.

Polymer Money

With a second home in Manila, I am witnessing the gradual rollout of plastic bills replacing paper money. I can’t help but smile every time I hold a crisp polymer Philippine bill in my hand: smooth, clean, water-resistant and practically indestructible (and it’s also perfect at removing tinga). Australia, Canada and the UK have transitioned to polypropylene-based currencies, the European Central Bank is considering it, while the US, … well, they are still resisting converting their one dollar bill to a coin.

With a wide range of colors and security watermarks, these plastic bills are much more difficult to counterfeit and more secure (and faster) to feed into machines. And unlike between 80-90% of paper bills in circulation, they don’t easily retain cocaine residue (for those living in the EU political quarter of Brussels, this innovation for the euro can’t come soon enough).

The best part is that polymer-based money is far more sustainable than paper bills. According to the International Monetary Fund, plastic currencies last three to five times longer than paper/cotton/linen based bills, cost less to produce and have a “32 percent reduction in global warming potential”. And as money is not commonly thrown out into the environment, collection rates are high so recycling the polymer at its end of service is far more sustainable than incinerating paper currencies.

This sustainability advantage is not surprising. Plastic alternatives have consistently been more sustainable than the alternatives they replaced. See a Firebreak review of a study showing that 15 out of 16 plastic applications were found to release fewer greenhouse gas emissions than the products they replaced. There is good reason why innovative plastic alternatives are introduced (and why these other industries resort to dirty tricks to try to defend their less sustainable products).

When activists tell you that fossil-fuel-based plastics contribute to climate change, just smile and wish them well as they return to their isolated and imaginary Big Change world.

Plastic Food Pouches

Waiting for my first grandchild, I look back three decades to when I had to pack glass containers for a day out with my young children and I marvel at how the world has changed since then. In the 80s and 90s, there were frequent reports of glass shards in Gerber Baby Food containers to terrify young parents, not to mention the weight and the waste of those glass pots. We didn’t know better back then.

Today, I look at how toddlers can hold these plastic, squeezable food pouches in their hands and feed themselves: the autonomy, the safety, the preservation quality, the attractiveness and the ease of transportation and recycling. Why on earth would any parent want to go back to those dangerous, expensive glass pots from which they would have to spoon-feed their toddlers? This is not just a convenience or additional consumer choice, it is a liberation for tired parents and an early opportunity for autonomy for children.

Despite the pathetic Greenpeace attempts to scare parents with bad research, I know what Gido David is going to pack in his trips to the park with his future grandchildren.

All the Money in the World

Big Change foundations are spending hundreds of millions of (paper) dollars to:

• fund retired research mercenaries like Philip Landrigan to propagate scientific doubt,

• have film companies produce lobbumentaries like the Plastic Detox,

• get law firms to pay off Attorneys General like California’s Rob Bonta

• have strategic litigation NGOs serve as front-plaintiffs to sue plastics producers and

• continue to finance phantom NGOs like Beyond Plastics,

Meanwhile, the plastics industry is continuing to innovate and introduce products that are becoming indispensable parts of our lives.

It is becoming much harder for environmental activists to go plastic-free. But on the bright side, they are being more ecological each time they choose plastic. It may take time for reason and reality to defeat their hardened fundamentalist dogma … but there will be more than enough time as the industry continues to innovate.

With “all the money in the world” being thrown at this ban plastics campaign, policymakers will still have to think twice about putting any more restrictions on this truly innovative industry. Maybe they will just continue to look away, maybe send another high-level delegation to the next UNEP Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution conference to express their concern, sign some non-binding commitment, and then carry on ensuring that consumers have access to the products and services they need and want.

• The US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary released a report on the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project at the end of last month.

• The report focused on how a group of climate attribution activists conspired to push their political dogma into training programs intended to indoctrinate judges ruling on climate litigation cases.

• The House Committee revealed evidence on how the activist campaign targeted left-leaning judges in regions with frequent weather-related damages.

• The NGO presented a biased and highly contested position (of weather events being caused by climate change due solely to fossil fuel emissions) as fact.

• CJP-linked academics worked with litigators involved in climate lawsuits with no conflict of interest standards.

• The emails released in the report reveal how interconnected the climate activists were, seeking strategic partnerships and coordinated actions, adding further evidence of a choreographed cabal managed by their foundation funders.

• The Committee on the Judiciary charged the groups involved with trying to “rig the game” and take control of the US judicial system.

The last section of this series on climate attribution science looked at how five organizations, linked by the foundations funding them, had essentially formed into a cabal, working together to control the public narrative, break the rules and go against any sense of fair play to ensure they can win climate lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry. They are not paying off the judges (that’s what the law firms do at election time) but rather these groups were getting into their heads and telling the judges what to think, where opposing views are merely disinformation and why energy companies need to pay for climate change.

Using words like “cabal” might be considered conspiracy-theory laden until the evidence presented by the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary is considered. The committee was so fed up with the how these activists were corrupting the US judiciary that they recently released a report entitled: “How Radical Environmental Special Interests Manipulate the Federal Judiciary”. The Congressional report weaved their commentary around email evidence showing how the attribution science organizations have been secretly coordinating their activism in strategic partnerships … like a cabal.

While the House Committee on the Judiciary ostensibly looked at how the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) has been targeting judges for training courses via its Climate Judiciary Project (CJP), the emails shed light into how ELI was part of a wider strategy, not just organized by a coordinated group of activist law professors, but by the consultants and fund managers of the foundations pulling the strings from the shadows to advance their climate lawfare campaign.

The email evidence released in the House report showed strategic partnerships forming between ELI and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, with ties to Sher Edling and Climate Central (and how individuals from these groups used their network to influence the NASEM and the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence).

About ELI and CJP

The Environmental Law Institute is not a school, but an NGO. It states its mission “is to foster innovative, just, and practical law and policy solutions to enable leaders across borders and sectors to make environmental, economic, and social progress”. They modestly take credit for “shaping the fields of environmental law, policy, and management” but their main focus seems to be on climate litigation. Funding for the NGO’s $8.8 million annual budget is provided by the usual climate-oriented foundations (Packard, Hewlett, Grantham, Walton, Pew, Sloan, regranters like ClimateWorks, New Ventures Fund and a very large number of law firms).

The Climate Judiciary Project claims it “is building and facilitating a network of judges and scientists advancing climate science education for the judiciary.” CJP was started by Paul Hanle in 2018 and employs five staff out of ELI. Hanle came to ELI from Climate Central, where he was the president and CEO, to set up this judicial training project. Climate Central was managing the World Weather Attribution organization (funded by Bezos Earth Fund) that was leading the campaign to link extreme weather events to climate change caused by fossil-fuel emissions. See an earlier section from the Firebreak climate attribution series on how Climate Central spends $21 million a year in foundation funding on climate communications messaging.

While CJP is a project managed by ELI, it also attempts to raise its own foundation funding. In 2020, it received a direct donation from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Hewlett, also funding ELI, is heavily involved in funding climate action projects (donating $241 million to climate actions in 2024) including funds to the strategic litigation NGO, EarthRights International. They are also one of the key foundations funding Sher Edling’s climate lawfare strategy, Climate Central and the Sabin Center (via ClimateWorks)..

A Blatant Corruption of the Judicial System

Bias and deception has been built into the CJP training program. The courses argue how certain claims made by climate attribution scientists were settled and widely accepted. It is important to note that ELI had not included sessions on skeptical positions or wider views on climate issues in their course modules. There was no balance of views or credible pedagogic value to these courses. They were designed to indoctrinate judges to the extremist climate activist dogma to advance the litigation strategy against the fossil fuel industry.

As the Congressional report observed: “in developing and presenting the curriculum available to judges, CJP partnered with presenters, attorneys, and climate advocates who are aligned with special interest plaintiffs in climate litigation.” CJP’s courses were meant to prepare judges to interpret data presented before them in a way that would favor the plaintiffs and advance the La Jolla lawfare strategy.

The House Committee document revealed how trial lawyers litigating ongoing cases against energy industries were involved in the CJP course materials (without transparently disclosing this to the judges). It is possible then for the lawyers trying the cases to be able to prepare information before a judge, knowing how that judge had been trained to understand the information in a favorable manner.

How is this not a blatant corruption of the judicial system?

Scientific and Judicial Integrity

This is not an investigation into the causes of climate change, but rather the integrity of the academic institutes and law professors who are trying to hammer a simplistic concept called climate attribution into a litigation-ready science. As the last part of this series argued, by ignoring scientific methods and research integrity standards, these activists are destroying trust in (climate) science.

The House Committee report noted that their investigation was about restoring the integrity of the judiciary. “By biasing judges that these issues are “settled” science, ELI and CJP stacks the deck against some litigants before they even enter the courtroom. The Committee and Subcommittee will continue to conduct oversight to inform legislative reforms to better protect the integrity of the judiciary and judicial proceedings.”

And integrity is seriously lacking in this climate litigation strategy. The Committee report described the damage ELI and CJP have done.

Let this quote just sink in for a moment. “By targeting judges, failing to safeguard against conflicts of interest, and promoting disputed science as fact, CJP’s activities amount to an improper ex parte influence on the federal judiciary.” From this conclusion, can the US federal government shut down ELI for corrupting the justice system?

Sadly, this is exactly what the foundations wanted them to do, so ELI and CJP will likely increase their funding in the coming years. The only thing the US government can do is no longer be a party to this madness. They need to change the law allowing the funding of such advocacy programs to be tax deductible. End the foundation tax haven abuse and demand full transparency on funding and university “institute” front groups.

But the legislators who could do this are also funded by many of the billionaires who founded these same foundations, so the entire system has been corrupted by loose money.

The damage has the potential to get far worse.

In 2019, the House Judiciary report identified 70 judges who were “educated” on climate issues to align with the interests of the climate lawfare litigators. By 2022, when the Sher Edling state and local litigation strategy was gaining speed, the CJP was intentionally targeting states where climate cases were being filed. In that year, they ran 400 judges through their propaganda machinery.

400 judges in one year … they indoctrinated more than a judge a day.

But it was not only prepping judges to react in a certain way, they also wanted to identify and prepare a selection of judges to become “judicial leaders in climate science” (see email below from CJP head, Paul Hanle). This program, started in 2022, would allow high-level judges to become climate influencers for other judges.

Activist law professors (funded by climate campaign foundations) telling judges what to think on climate litigation issues is a transgression that might someday get found out (perhaps by a House Judiciary Committee). Training judges, especially chief justices, to be judicial leaders in climate science, though, and having them tell other judges what to think on climate litigation, is so diabolically brilliant that I can only applaud these activists for their efficiency (albeit, lacking in any ethical principles). But from the perspective of scientific integrity, all of these academics must be sanctioned for their destruction of public trust in legitimate climate science.

A Rigged Process

The US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary summed up, in one paragraph, the interference of CJP on the judicial process:

Fair play is an important part of the justice process. While these climate activists may not agree, even the oil industry has the right to a fair trial. It seems stunning to think that a group of lawyers and law professors, who are teaching or training the next generation of legal experts, are demonstrating to these students that cheating to win, rigging the game, is an acceptable legal practice.

Mentors or menteurs?

The word “malpractice” should be used, but these professors and lawyers are too far gone down their rabbit hole of bias and anti-industry vindictiveness to even realize their transgressions.

Puppets on a String

Behind the curtain are the foundations pulling the strings and choreographing the La Jolla Playbook, litigating the fossil fuel industry out of existence and pricing fossil fuels out of the energy market (... making energy, transportation, heating and material/industrial products far more expensive for those without their wealth and affluence). This is a post-capitalist strategy put forward by many foundation consultants (whose wealth was created by capitalists and entrepreneurs). See an email revealed in the Congressional report and see if you can recognize a voice from the shadows.

The line “we have some interest from a funder” means that a foundation is telling the Executive Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Michael Burger (who is also employed by Sher Edling, the main foundation-funded law firm active in suing oil companies for damages from climate change), to form a strategic partnership with the Environmental Law Institute and the Climate Judiciary Project.

The problem is that there are at least 12 foundations donating to these climate attribution campaign groups that would like to rationalize their funding with several strategic partnerships. The philanthropy industry is not in the least bit transparent, and the work involved in managing and coordinating a cabal of organizations implementing their strategy is complicated and unruly, so I suspect the 12 foundations have moved to appoint a fiscal sponsor to manage their climate attribution campaign funding from a backroom.

This email indicates the obvious: activists like Michael Burger and Paul Hanle are mere puppets for the Big Change foundations controlling the climate litigation gameplan. Academics like Burger protect and covet their institution’s funding – he would never tell Hanle about his funding ... unless he was told to.

Five years later, Michael Burger again contacted Hanle (see email below) to ask if his group, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, could be involved in a course module. Someone informed Burger that CJP had developed a module to train judges on how to manage lawsuits against the siting of renewable energy facilities. This could be Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center, who heads the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative within Sabin, or maybe a foundation funding both campaigns.

Even more conflicted, Michael Gerrard serves on the CJP’s Advisory Committee so it would not be a stretch to conclude that the CJP judge training module on dealing with lawsuits against renewables was built on the advice of a Sabin Center director (if not a foundation fund manager).

It is interesting to note (not that conflicts of interest seem to matter to these people) that the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative was launched with Arnold & Porter, one of the world’s largest law firms and a leader in climate litigation. Having the academic veneer of an institution like Columbia Law School to hide behind is a useful partner for grooming plaintiffs for litigation fees.

Time was these academic institutions would have closed down such activist organizations for violations of research standards and ethical improprieties. Now, serving as fiscal sponsors taking in at least 10% of the captive foundation funding, universities like Columbia or NYU have learnt to stretch their necks to look the other way.

“I know a man who can be bought.”

Another curious thing that the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary report touched upon, only marginally, is how there seems to be a practice of lawyers suing the fossil fuel industry making donations to law professors involved with the CJP training modules.

Lawyers are donating to environmental law professors involved in training judges with the CJP who are then referring these lawyers to plaintiffs to represent them in climate litigation lawsuits, and then the lawyer turns around to hire an environmental law professor to act as a litigation consultant in preparing the case. What happens if the judge hearing the case had attended a CJP training program?

No conflicts of interest here, no, certainly not.

More investigation needs to be given to this situation. The emails above reveal how the Sabin Center works directly with climate litigation law firms. The Roger Worthington story suggests that those aligned with CJP are also working directly with law firms (it is certain from the testimonials that ELI is).

As the philanthropy industry is not in the least bit transparent, data on this corruption would be difficult to obtain. And given how the foundations funding these groups also provide dark, donor-advised funds, a lawyer can simply donate to a foundation earmarking the anonymized funds for the CJP or the Sabin Center for, well, “strategic partnerships”.

The Climate Attribution Cabal at Work

The close strategic partnership between ELI, CJP and the Sabin Center (whose executive director works for the climate litigation firm, Sher Edling) adds further evidence to the claim that there are at least five organizations working as a cabal to advance the climate attribution litigation strategy. The US House Committee on the Judiciary report added a case study at the end to show how these groups were working together to try to corrupt the Federal Judicial Center and NASEM by inserting their political ideology into the climate science chapter of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (see Part 3 of this series).

Everybody who plays the game wants to win, that is normal. But only liars and cheats would find a way to change the rules of the game, to rig it in their favor.

• And this is exactly what ELI / CJP are doing in trying to indoctrinate judges to accept their political activism on climate attribution as scientific fact.

• And this is exactly what the Sabin Center is doing in trying to get their programs built into CJP training modules.

• And this is exactly what the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center was doing when they paid for their staff to prosecute energy companies under the guise of State Attorneys General.

When these activists secretly work together with others in Climate Central, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Sher Edling and certain scientists in NASEM to rig the game, it is a cabal.

But who is running the cabal?

How many of these strategic partnerships are being directed by the foundation fund managers? Who is pulling the strings, choreographing the cabal to implement the La Jolla climate litigation strategy? I mentioned there could be any of 12 climate-campaign oriented foundations pulling the puppets’ strings from behind the curtains, funding and managing these climate attribution litigation strategies.

Lobbying 101: Follow the money to the end of another sorry chapter in the destruction of climate science integrity. It is to the shadows that the last part of this exposé now turns.

Willy Sutton, why do you rob banks?
“Because that’s where the money is.”

Naomi Oreskes, why did you create a climate litigation company?
“I’ve been advised by counsel not to answer that question.”

In April, 2025, Naomi Oreskes set up a single-person litigation advisory company called Grenville Science Consulting (Limited Liability Company, New York State Dos ID: 7587207). She declares that her business “provides consulting services, including expert witness testimony, to law firms”. With the rise in climate lawfare cases, following from her La Jolla Playbook strategy, the time was ripe for Oreskes to cash in.

And good for Naomi; she deserves a nice payout. She has worked hard her whole life and has campaigned relentlessly ... against special interest funding of research. It is such hypocrisy that makes this story so rich. Her discrediting of private-funded research, her campaigns to tobacconize the energy, chemical and food industries, her unsubstantiated accusations and her efforts to retract papers whose conclusions go against her political interests have been so legendary that she has become one of the most hated academics in America.

Now that Oreskes has become a corporate consultant, while using her work to publish papers, I hope she appreciates how others can put her under the same scrutiny (and with the same degree of empathy).

Naomi’s foray into the business world has been anything but polished. Her website, 18 months on, is merely a wallpaper. Her main page promoting her special skillsets, on the Climate Reality Project, is not accessible to mere mortals like myself. There are only a few titbits about Grenville Consulting in article acknowledgements, so I had to resort to AI to gather enough information about Oreskes’ venture into the consulting world.

And Naomi knows a thing or two about using AI to replace actual research.

A Grenville Consulting Performance Review

While Naomi does not have to publish her financial accounts for the first two years of operations (watch this space next April), we can see the results from her first consulting contract, and it was not pretty.

Oreskes served as an expert witness / litigation consultant testifying for the plaintiff in Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. v. Shell Oil Company, et al. The firm that hired her, Conservation Law Foundation, is a strategic litigation non-profit receiving $12 million in annual support from foundations like the Rockefeller, Park, Barr, Grantham… The lawfare NGO alleges that Shell failed to adequately prepare its New Haven fuel storage terminal for extreme weather and the foreseeable impacts of climate change. This is just one more chapter in the relentless climate lawfare onslaught, a strategy orchestrated by Oreskes in La Jolla in 2012 to overwhelm and bankrupt the fossil fuel industry.

But something unusual happened in this case that made it come up in my litigation newsfeed. It was discovered in cross-examination that special expert Oreskes had used AI to prepare her review of the case. So the defense asked the witness to reveal the AI prompts that she had used to come to the conclusions in her review. Using AI in this manner was a violation of the court’s Standing Protective Order.

It then emerged that Oreskes had not even prepared the review herself but rather, the work was done by her research assistant and as they could not produce the AI prompts, that part of the case is at an impasse. As Grenville Science Consulting is a single-person LLC., we can only assume this assistant was a Harvard-paid intern.

For this anti-capitalist activist, campaigning against greed and unethical behavior in the corporate world, Naomi seems to be a natural at manipulation and exploitation.

At a $600-700 hourly wage, litigation consulting contracts that involve preparing briefs, depositions and court appearances can easily clear six figures so I have to wonder whether the plaintiff got its money’s worth.

And I really hope Professor Oreskes didn’t fail this poor Harvard intern. On the question of research integrity, I suppose Harvard doesn’t conduct ethics investigations on its pool of prima donna professors.

Pot, Kettle, Grenville

Naomi Oreskes has been very outspoken against researchers who take industry funding but somehow she thinks that the litigation industry is not an industry. I suspect Naomi is oblivious to the hypocritical chasm between her word and her deed. Almost a year after she set up Grenville Science Consulting, she published yet another paper criticizing private sector funding of research.

She has set up an operation to retract any papers that had industry involvement, including the Williams et al paper on glyphosate. It is curious that she only went after scholars and papers supporting industries she did not like, namely energy and pesticides companies. What if Oreskes had read The Firebreak and discovered the amount of special interest funding secretly coming from the US litigation industry to produce research and papers that would be beneficial to ... the US litigation industry? If she had looked at our exposé of the Heartland Health Research Alliance, she would have found at least a dozen papers that would need to be retracted.

Why do I doubt that she would have the objectivity to even entertain such a thought? I suppose it is just an integrity thing.

—

Why then is this outspoken critic of private funding of research taking money from the litigation industry, and why did she create a company to bank the profits?

• Given the smoke and mirrors of Grenville Science Consulting, one reason could be to hide the revenue she is accruing from working as a litigation consultant. She got a lot of grief from critics, including yours truly, when she was forced to disclose under oath that she had been directly receiving consulting fees from three law firms, including the notorious Sher Edling. A financial pass-through company would cleanse Naomi’s direct association with lucrative litigation invoices.

• Perhaps Harvard demanded that she separate her consulting work from her academic research. Academics pocketing lucrative litigation consulting fees have never benefited their university’s reputations, especially when their testimonies or court briefs get torn apart in cross examination.

• Oreskes created Grenville Science Consulting a month before testifying as a litigation consultant in the case of Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. v. Shell Oil Co., et al. The law firm for the plaintiff may have demanded that consulting fees be paid to an external company rather than to a professor (although they could still splash her title around).

• Maybe Oreskes is transitioning to a post-academic retirement life where padding her pension becomes an important strategy. I’m sure she has had a lot of advice from her activist science friends shilling for Predatorts. Maybe she should have lunch with Chuck Benbrook or Philip Landrigan.

One thing is certain. Oreskes did not create her company to reinforce her argument why researchers and scientists should not take industry funding, as that is clearly what this hypocrite is doing. She needs to come clean and apologize to all of the researchers and academics whose reputations she has viciously destroyed over her entire bilious career.

Or maybe I should devote the next five years getting all of her papers retracted for undeclared conflicts of interest. (I can also hire a student intern to use AI to do the work for me.) I may be a mean person … but not as mean as Naomi is.

The recent criticism of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) is not an issue of climate skepticism or denial. There is no denial of facts that the planet is warming and what may be the consequences. As much as activists want to paint the crisis along the lines of a right-wing v left-wing political conflict, this emerging scandal is a result of unethical academic behavior by a small group of highly-paid climate attribution interest groups.

The recent activist campaigns on climate attribution implicating NASEM demonstrate levels of greed, corruption and abuse of research never seen before in any scientific community (and far worse than the University of East Anglia Climategate scandal from almost two decades ago). The NASEM scandal not only involves academic deception, but it is also poisoned by big money from foundations and litigation industry opportunism. The misuse of academic positions to appeal to these interest groups has led to a breakdown in public trust that will have a profoundly negative effect on the reputation of science.

The NASEM scandal started when the National Academies published the climate science chapter in their 2025 update of the NASEM / Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, and a report last July on climate attribution science entitled: Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and their Impacts. Was this an attempt to legitimize a bastard child of the climate science community or was this the future direction of climate science (the anti-capitalist goal that many social academics like Naomi Oreskes have made a life-long ambition to see fulfilled)?

In any case, what is needed is science-led litigation. What the National Academies have delivered is litigation-led science. The scandal has caused a crisis in public trust.

To put this in context, the litigation industry, supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in foundation funding for strategic litigation NGOs and specially created climate lawfare firms, has been pushing to firm up court-friendly evidence ahead of the deluge of climate justice lawsuits they expect after the US Supreme Court decision on Suncor v Boulder County (heard yesterday). NASEM is being used to play a key role in the production of this litigation-friendly evidence.

What is increasingly becoming clear is that there is a small group of academics (mostly law professors and social scientists) moving freely between foundation fund managers, state attorneys general offices, judges, law firms and science policy institutions. Their strategy is to legitimize a climate attribution science that they can then use to generate evidence in suing oil companies for damages from extreme weather events they have been trying to link to climate change.

This is a story of how money, politics, corruption and deception can destroy trust in science and perhaps bring down a major American scientific institution founded in the 1860s.

Part 3 will look at how this small group of foundation-funded academics has been working to corrupt climate science for the benefit of the forces launching a climate lawfare onslaught upon the energy industry. This section will focus on the groups behind the NASEM reports (setting up the next chapter on the Institute trying to train federal judges). The Firebreak also looked into the recent infiltration of activists into the state attorneys general offices to act as special prosecutors.

This relatively small group of activist academics that have led this charge could be called the “Climate Attribution Cabal”.

The Climate Attribution Cabal

There seems to be the same five organizations working together to advance their political litigation agenda under the pretense of climate attribution science. All of them are generously funded by large, climate-oriented foundations, closely tied to law firms, strategic litigation NGOs, attorneys general or judges (that they are trying to bias). (Note: the term “climate cabal” has been used elsewhere to refer to factions working to speed up or delay climate regulations, but never to a private clique of academics.)

Some of the leaders of this climate litigation campaign faction include:

• The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law (with funding from the Rockefeller Family Fund among others with Columbia University serving as its fiscal sponsor) is tied to Sher Edling and their unlimited funding from seven large foundations to conduct climate lawfare.

• Climate Central ($21 million last year from foundations like the Schmidt Family Foundation and others) runs the World Weather Attribution organization (funded by the Bezos Earth Fund and others).

• NYU Law School took $5.6 from Michael Bloomberg to set up a phantom organization, the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, that appointed and paid the salaries of Special Assistant Attorneys General in eleven (Democrat-led) states to prosecute oil companies.

• The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Science Hub for Climate Litigation has the objective of advancing climate accountability. This cofounder of the La Jolla Playbook is funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund, Grantham Foundation, ClimateWorks…

• The Environmental Law Institute, funded by Hewlett, MacArthur and Walton Family Foundations, set up the Climate Judiciary Project to “educate” judges likely to hear climate lawfare cases about the links between extreme weather events and fossil fuel emissions that contributed to climate change. More on this in the next Firebreak chapter.

These are the principal groups forming a cabal that has controlled the climate lawfare process: influencing the state attorneys general from the inside, running the law firms, brainwashing the judges and convincing the frightened public that any climate justice served on Big Oil will save the planet (while they can continue driving their cars and heating their homes at no extra cost).

And together, this Climate Attribution Cabal directed NASEM to deliver a litigation-friendly science on climate change, climate attribution and climate justice lawfare.

There are actually two NASEM scandals (involving the same cabal special interest groups).

NASEM Climate Attribution Scandal 1.0

NASEM, together with the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), rushed through an update of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence in 2025. This manual is meant to provide the best scientific research to guide the courts on technical evidence required in many lawsuits. The latest update, for the first time, included a chapter on climate science for the judiciary (ie, climate attribution). The climate chapter was quickly retracted following complaints from 27 state attorneys general who charged it with poor methodology and a bias to influence climate-related litigation.

In an article from last March, Roger Pielke Jr got into the details of the how the climate chapter in the NASEM-FJC Reference Manual was removed from the latest update. The two authors of the chapter, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton, are both affiliated with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Pielke showed how the section on climate attribution had a 41–48% of overlap with a 2020 article published by the head of the Sabin Center, Michael Burger. Pielke concluded that Burger had ghost-written the chapter on climate attribution science.

This should come as no surprise. In a recently released email, the principal editor of the NASEM / Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Joe Cecil, invited Michael Burger to write the chapter on climate science, asking him to base it on his 2020 article on climate attribution (and offered to pay him $8000 for his quick turnaround that would be rushed through peer review, all within three months). See the email below.

As a recent Firebreak article showed, Burger is also employed by Sher Edling (as well as the Sabin Center) but these conflicts of interest were not acknowledged when he contributed to the NASEM climate attribution report (claiming only an affiliation with Columbia University). Sher Edling, the foundation-funded law firm filing climate nuisance lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry, would clearly benefit from having their man on the inside, writing national science policy documents for the courts to base their decisions.

It is curious to note, from a recent disclosure of controversial emails between the cabal members, that NASEM knew of Burger’s conflict of interest, and rather than acknowledge it, they decided (less than a month before the April 3 peer review deadline when we can only assume the chapter had been completed) to remove Burger’s name from the climate chapter in the Reference Manual.

See a truly despicable affront to research integrity in the email below.

Pielke was right then on his original suspicion back in March that Burger had written the climate chapter in the Reference Manual, but for the wrong reason. He suspected fraud within Sabin (plagiarism and ghostwriting) while the real reason was an intended cover-up of conflicts of interest at NASEM - at the research institution level.

I fear we will need to conduct an ethics review to determine which of these scientific misconducts is more detrimental to research integrity. In any case, NASEM needs to fire several of their more gung-ho activist scientists. Maybe the foundations should close down the Sabin Center they are funding as well (in the same way Bloomberg made the State Impact Center vanish into the night when things got “inconvenient”).

Even more curious, Burger submitted an amicus brief on behalf of Sher Edling for the US Supreme Court case on Suncor v Boulder County. This amicus brief relies heavily on Burger’s contributions to the NASEM report. The case before SCOTUS is not about the reliability of climate attribution science, but whether such cases fall under the remit of county or state courts or only federal courts.

Suncor v Boulder County is a crucial case for the La Jolla Tobacconization Playbook. If a county like Boulder can be allowed to sue oil companies for damages from climate change, then the foundation-funded litigation machine will file cases in every county court in the US. There are over 20,000 counties and cities in the US. The strategy here is not to win on the science, but to overwhelm the fossil fuel industry with relentless lawfare, suing them out of existence. Like other La Jolla inspired mass tort lawsuits (glyphosate, talc …), it is expected that oil company shareholders (fund managers) and board members will pressure the management to settle as the share prices tank.

In 2012, the report published after the Climate Accountability conference in La Jolla, CA recognized that the law firms would need to develop a strong climate attribution science (linking extreme weather events to climate change and then to the fossil fuel industry), and from that, academics set out to establish a robust new field in climate science (designed for the litigation industry). The second NASEM report on Climate Attribution Science marks the high point of this political strategy.

NASEM Climate Attribution Scandal 2.0

The second scandal involves the NASEM report: “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and their Impacts” published on July 16, curiously just 11 days before the cut-off date for the Boulder merits brief for the Supreme Court case, Suncor v Boulder County. While it is clear that this field of climate attribution science is promoted by climate lawfare special interests who would promote selections of the document, what did NASEM pretend that the report would cover?

The Terms of Reference

The NASEM report on climate attribution was called within the context of updating the state of the science following from a previous study in 2016 (Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change). A decade ago, there were many weaknesses in attribution science (data gaps, methodology, reliability of certain types of weather events…). The terms or reference (TOR) of the 2026 NASEM was quite simple: In the last decade of research, has the attribution science field (methodology, capacity, data, scope…) since improved to enable linking extreme weather events to climate change (and what are future research needs)?

The TOR was minimal because the field is limited. The first sentence defines the climate attribution science accordingly: “Event attribution seeks to tease out the influence of human-caused climate change on specific weather and climate events.” To “tease out” an influence is a rather interesting choice of words. If you tease something out, it implies that you are aware of the limitations and try to avoid ambitious declarations or conclusion given the wide degree of variables.

The NASEM TOR was therefore not ambitious and much of the report reflects that caution. It was not charged with providing evidence for the US Supreme Court, or any other courts, to consider. Nor was it asked to determine whether climate change exists or whether humans influence climate. The TOR did not require a focus only on fossil-fuel based greenhouse gases or appropriating blame for the cause of climate change.

While their mandate was quite clear, the NASEM was once again taken over by activist scientists who saw political opportunity in pushing the TOR towards political and litigation opportunism. For coverage on some of the special interests that have pushed their way into this NASEM process, see an earlier Firebreak article that showed the influence of the litigation industry, climate comms organizations, lobbying groups and media outlets committed to amplifying climate fear campaigns. But the most curious special interest involved in this NASEM report is the lead foundations funding its production.

Special Interest Funding

The NASEM report on Climate Attribution Science is not a government funded research endeavor. The lead funder listed on the NASEM front page is the Bezos Earth Fund. At the same time, the Bezos Earth Fund is a key funder of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) organization leading the campaign to link all extreme weather events to climate change.

In December 2022, the Bezos Earth Fund awarded $10 million to their “Advancing and Communicating the Science of Extreme Weather Attribution” initiative. This included organizations such as Climate Central, Imperial College, and Yale University. The Bezos site added “and others” who received funding, although there is no mention of how much money was given to NASEM to produce a report that would reflect their $10 million investment in climate attribution science. NASEM did not declare the amount this foundation provided for the research and production of this report.

This is an evident conflict of interest. The Bezos Earth Fund has invested $10 million dollars in promoting research proving the link between extreme weather events and climate change (and linking them to the fossil fuel industry for litigation opportunities).

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took money from the Bezos Earth Fund to produce a report on climate attribution science, and it is hard to imagine that they were unaware of the foundation’s $10 million in special interest funding. In any scientific institution with integrity, this financial transaction should have been refused or it would have disqualified the entire report.

The second foundation funding this NASEM report was the Heising-Simons Foundation. Mark Heising is the chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund, a strategic litigation NGO and cofounder Liz Simons contributed to California Attorney General Rob Bonta shortly after he sued oil companies.

Beholden to the Cabal

As if the direct funding weren’t enough, the NASEM climate attribution report acknowledgements page reads like a Who’s Who from the Climate Attribution Cabal, with at least six members contributing to the report’s content.

The National Academies seem to have become beholden to a group of activist climate academics (mostly law professors) who will stop at nothing to advance their strategy of exacting climate justice through the litigation industry’s relentless climate lawfare campaign. Meanwhile these Cabal members can be seen at conferences and events like UN Climate COPs posing as climate scientists. They are anything but.

The next part of this investigation will look at another member of the Climate Attribution Cabal, the Environmental Law Institute, that has been targeting judges for training courses via its Climate Judiciary Project where they teach judges how to identify the right evidence on climate attribution to use in court decisions. Last week, the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary released a report entitled: “How Radical Environmental Special Interests Manipulate the Federal Judiciary”. While it focused on ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project, its release of emails provides an enlightening investigation into the close ties and coordination within the Climate Attribution Cabal.

When the heat was closing in, and a number of investigations and lawsuits loomed, this Bloomberg operation did what any other criminal organization would do, they scattered into the dead of night. At the end of last month, the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center literally disappeared. They left a message on their website saying site was no longer updated and since they did not officially exist as an organization (a common Bloomberg tactic), there was no paper trail.

A Shifting Mandate Challenging Ethics and Law?

The State Energy & Environmental Impact Center claimed it would provide “expertise to interested attorneys general on specific administrative, judicial or legislative matters involving clean energy, climate change and environmental interests”. This involved helping attorneys general to employ NYU Law Fellows to serve as Special Assistant Attorneys General (SAAGs).

But this mandate evolved into the State Impact Center appointing their own people as SAAGs and paying them directly from Bloomberg funds. The mandate further evolved when special assistants put into the State AG offices started concentrating on prosecuting energy providers. These State Impact Center SAAGs were appointed in the District of Columbia, Delaware, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin AG offices (all Democrat run AGs suggesting this was a politically targeted campaign).

What we find here is less than innocent. Michael Bloomberg made a donation to NYU to act as the fiscal sponsor to the State Impact Center that then paid his people to operate within the AG offices in 11 states to influence the agenda and implement his climate lawfare strategy. This raises many questions:

• Should billionaires be allowed to buy influence within state judicial systems?

• Did the funding compromise state AG independence by allowing privately funded prosecutors to carry out work on behalf of the state.

• Were the lawsuits carried out by these Bloomberg appointees in the interest of the public or of some activist campaign agenda?

• Was the sudden, quiet closure of the State Impact Center an attempt to avoid the House investigation into their practices?

• What happens to all of the SAAGs on Michael’s payroll still carrying out his marching orders in the eleven state AG offices?

• Can Michael Bloomberg or NYU be held liable for damages caused by their fiscal sponsor project?

In any foundation-led campaign operation, executed with military precision, sometimes efficiency runs faster than moral integrity. Rather than just supporting the State AGs, the most efficient manner was to let the Big Boys with the deep foundation pockets move in and take control of the operations. Of course, having privately funded special interest groups running State AG prosecutions was not allowed, neither ethically nor legally, so a certain level of subterfuge was required. But it was apparently not hidden enough. Following a Free Beacon exposé, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened an investigation into the State Impact Center’s use of funds and the State AGs’ prosecutions.

The Firebreak showed how individuals acting as Special Assistant Attorneys General could come in and manipulate the justice system to advance their special interests. Michigan, for example, appointed Sher Edling as their SAAG to launch a climate lawfare suit against fossil fuel companies in the name of the State AG, Dana Nessel. See an excerpt below from the Michigan AG’s SAAG contract. Michigan was not one of the states involved in the State Impact Center scandal because, I suppose, Dana’s office was already bought and paid for by the tort law firm created and funded by a group of foundations, including Bloomberg Philanthropies.

In another case, Wisconsin dairy farmers are suing the state AG, Josh Kaul, for giving a “privately-funded attorney ... the authority to impose fines and pursue criminal charges against our farmer members” while not being accountable to the state AG. The SAAG is a legal fellow paid by the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center. See the case here.

Commodore Mike

I often wondered why Michael Bloomberg almost always chooses to create his own advocacy groups via fiscal sponsors like universities rather than funding existing organizations. I had assumed it was about control. Bloomberg’s generals would issue the orders from central command for the foot soldiers to carry out. We saw how complex this command structure got with his flotilla of tobacco control operations, spreading funding between organizations as each supposedly independent body was coordinated into a massive campaign to carry out Bloomberg’s whim of banning tobacco harm reduction products.

The Firebreak has investigated many of these Bloomberg babies, criticizing how their existence only via fiscal sponsors (often universities like Bennington College or University of Bath) is designed to evade transparency and accountability issues. Groups that look like and function like NGOs or institutes, but are simply (very large, long-term) projects give a certain control and flexibility that appeals to impact-oriented professionalized philanthropy consultants. And if such projects find themselves in a situation where they may be forced to be accountable or transparent, then like the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, it can be dissolved in the middle of the night and no one would ever speak of it again. Control, flexibility, invisibility.

The ability for the State Impact Center to simply vanish with the wave of a billionaire funder’s hand is a further argument for why the US should ban the use of fiscal sponsors to run “projects” to avoid having campaign groups registering as legal entities. There needs to be accountability. Would Bloomberg Philanthropies be held liable for any laws that may have been broken? Or does accountability rest with NYU?

Since the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center doesn’t exist, and their website was easily closed, no one seems particularly concerned about what happened. They will probably resurface as another fiscally sponsored project once Bloomberg Philanthropies fixes that disclosure failure that exposed their involvement.

Ethical Rules do Apply to Philanthropists

This is not an ethical way to run an organization, creating dark bodies for political activism that are in no way accountable for their actions. In all fairness, I have to admit admiring how cheeky Bloomberg’s generals have become, assuming they can just move in and take over the state judicial systems. When you spend your days sitting on a mountain of money, you quickly assume everyone can be bought (especially lawyers). And if things get messy, just shut it down and say nothing more about it.

As wickedly efficient as this all sounds, shouldn’t Michael Bloomberg, at some level, be considering such abuse of influence as morally questionable.

It should not be forgotten that Michael Bloomberg is not a philanthropist. He is a politician and a business entrepreneur. He runs his foundations, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bloomberg Family Foundation, as extensions of his political activism: to lobby for policy change and to control the agenda. He will continue to pump money into a campaign, however flawed, until he gets his way. And if any of his groups gets caught doing something illegal or unethical, he just shuts it down and tries another tactic.

This is the first time in history that a billionaire has decided to use his wealth for political influence on such a global scale without getting directly involved in political movements (like, for example, George Soros). He is, for example, essentially running a WHO program on tobacco control and has shown other billionaires that it can be done for a mere $2 billion. He has spent hundreds of millions relentlessly trying to obstruct fossil fuel companies via activist campaigns, strategic litigation or media attacks. The $5.6 million spent to set up the State Impact Center was just a small bet on his climate lawfare roulette wheel. They got caught, so he just shut it down. Maybe he’ll be luckier next time.

How would a genuine philanthropist spend $2 billion? If Bloomberg had made charitable donations instead of shelling out on highly-paid lobbyists, he could have made significant inroads in addressing the mental health and homeless crises in US cities ... or curbed poverty and malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, he runs a complex network of organizations campaigning against public access to affordable energy or raising doubts on vaping or nicotine pouches as effective tobacco harm reduction tools. And for that he can tout the titles of WHO Global Health Ambassador or UN Special Envoy for Climate Action.

Michael Bloomberg is no philanthropist, and his unethical strategies do not merit special UN titles. He should be held liable for the costs of the misdeeds of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. Lacking transparency, accountability and ethical principles, Bloomberg’s win-at-all-costs to control policy and public behavior merits a new title: “philoligarch”. An article on that new billionaire species is in production.

The Firebreak has been covering the rise of strategic litigation, where foundations have been providing tort law firms like Sher Edling and NGOs like EarthRights International with hundreds of millions of dollars to file a continuous stream of climate nuisance lawsuits against oil companies for alleged damages from extreme weather events caused by climate change. As Part 1 of this series on the backstory of climate attribution science noted, this gameplan was mapped out at a conference in La Jolla in 2012 with the goal of exhausting the oil industry with relentless litigation waves much like the tobacco industry was. In 2012, the architects (law firms, NGOs, academics and foundations) recognized that attribution (of a weather event to climate and then to the oil companies) was the challenge for climate accountability. By 2014, climate attribution was created as a scientific field for just this task.

Central to the La Jolla Playbook’s claims for damages was the need for a tool to determine the damages from extreme weather events and link it to climate change. In quite an astonishing expression of bias, in light of the upcoming Supreme Court hearing, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) rushed forward a report on climate attribution. What is this new scientific field and what role does it actually play in the La Jolla lawfare strategy?

Novum Organum

The Wiki definition of climate attribution is the: “science of identifying and quantifying the role that human-caused climate change plays in the frequency, intensity, duration, and impacts of individual extreme weather events.” The scientists would take a weather event and be able to determine how much of it was caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and which sources in particular are to blame (ie, held liable). It is quite remarkable that they seem to be able to do that with (what they refer to as) a fair degree of certainty.

Climate attribution science advocates like to claim their discipline began with a paper published in 2004 but the first real commitment to studying this effect did not begin until it was considered in a chapter in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report a decade later. In that same year, 2014, scientists associated with the NGO, Climate Central, established the World Weather Attribution (WWA) organization with funding from the Grantham Foundation, the European Climate Foundation and the Bezos Earth Foundation (see the Postscript below on Climate Central). They essentially gather and propagate media reports of weather events into a large database and a series of “rapid studies”. By rapid, the WWA mean they need to get the climate link into the news “while the rain is still falling”. This appears to be a new scientific methodology – designed to meet media deadlines (and perhaps an AI peer review).

Take a recent example. On the basis of a WWA report published three weeks after the catastrophic flood, the Nepal government has requested $20 million in compensation from the UN climate Loss and Damage Fund. This led Roger Pielke Jr to take a closer look at the WWA model. He replicated 96 WWA reports and found that you could feed practically any event or trend into their model and be able to link it to climate change. Pielke does not consider such research as providing a service to climate science.

The weather data is then fed into their two-world models to look for statistical significance.

The two-world model (one of 1.3°C warming and a hypothetical world without climate change “caused by the burning of fossil fuels”) is rather neo-Malthusian. If there had been no industrialization, humanity would not have developed the technologies to have supported a global population of more than a billion people. But this non-existent planetary model is at the heart of climate attribution science upon which they justify their conclusions.

The problem here, and this is not the first time, is when climate scientists are looking for trends (“statistical significance”), they will likely cut corners to prove their hypotheses. The WWA goes so far as to admit their built-in bias:

“However, a lack of statistical significance shouldn’t be interpreted as evidence that climate change did not influence the event, especially when there are physical reasons to expect that it should.”

In other words, even if the data fails to link the weather event to climate change, the climate scientists can still find other ways to justify their desired conclusion (that every weather event is influenced by climate change).

Reading passages like that makes it clear why the remains of the climate consensus community still censor any skeptics.

The perfect world model was designed for other objectives (ie, litigation) so those involved are impervious to any scrutiny or criticism. There is however one design flaw in the model which highlights how amateur the entire process is. The benchmark model depicts a cooler world as not being influenced “by the burning of fossil fuels”. This means the model will ignore greenhouse gases produced by agriculture, forestry and other land use (about 25%). I suppose their perfect world model would have no industry so we can ignore a further 20% of emissions. They are only looking at fossil fuel emissions … point!

The model also does not make any distinction between fossil fuels like the difference in emissions of natural gas compared to coal. Under the recent European Union taxonomy, natural gas is defined as a sustainable source of energy. I suppose for the Willy Suttons in the climate attribution world, there is no money in suing the coal industry. The zero-warming model is designed to hold the oil industry liable for all of the damages from what they determine to be climate-linked weather events (and their climate attribution science is determined to prove that).

Inadequate Risk Management

The first step in any legitimate risk management process is to draw up a series of scenarios to be assessed for exposures, mitigation measures and decisions. In any such exercise, I have always preferred to draw up five scenarios: two extreme situations (a very serious hazard and no hazard at all) and three scaled situations. Any company would perform this exercise not only to spot market opportunities but also to preserve business continuity.

It seems certain that in the 1990s, ExxonMobil drew up a series of scenarios in an internal document, with one potential situation being that fossil fuels cause climate change. This type of research, obtained in a subpoena and leaked by the New York Attorney General, was taken out of context to support the “Exxon Knew” campaign to create the public outrage needed for the La Jolla climate lawfare strategy to succeed.

Hindsight is wonderful but in the 1990s, the discussions were far from clear (a decade earlier, researchers were pointing to a coming Ice Age) so this causal relationship between fossil fuels and climate change was probably categorized as an extreme scenario. That the Exxon Knew activists lifted the document out of the scenario exercise suggests that they either had no clue how risk management works or they were liars. Probably both.

It is safe to say that the climate attribution scientists have no clue how risk management works. They only provide two scenarios to work from, the two extremes that most risk managers watch but downplay: a fictional nature claimed to be in balance, pre-industrial revolution, without significant anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; and a world of unbridled capitalist pollution, no mitigating innovations or regulatory controls on fossil fuel emissions. These two scenarios are designed to lead to the intended conclusion – that the fossil fuel scenario would lead to extreme weather events and the perfect world situation would not.

If these climate scientists were serious, they could have added three more models into their research:

1. a world where all of the oil companies moved toward renewable energy, electric cars and the decarbonization of industry in the 2010s;

2. an industrial model still relying on fossil fuels but focused on carbon capture and storage; and

3. a world where regulators banned fossil fuels in the 2010s, using natural gas as transitional fuel source.

But the reality is that these three reasonable models wouldn’t change the attribution results, although it might make it harder to sue certain companies and might leave governments liable (you can’t litigate a government out of existence).

Why would somewhat educated climate scientists take such a corrupted risk management approach? The most likely explanation is that their science is in service to the US litigation industry. A lawyer does not want to present a jury with five possible scenarios to consider – they need to frame it as a black or white, guilty or not guilty decision. I don’t want to conclude that parameters for the entire climate attribution science were defined by the litigation industry, but the only other reasonable explanation is that these scientists are not very smart.

Variables that Would Confuse a Jury

Even worse, the bipolar extremes are comparing apples with oranges. There are many variables that make this simplistic breakdown scientifically illegitimate:

• On an annual basis, greenhouse gas emissions from industry, fossil fuels, agriculture, and deforestation combined add roughly 30 to 50 billion tons of CO2 equivalents, making up only 4 to 5% of the total, while the earth naturally emits roughly 750 to 770 billion tons.

• These anthropogenic contributions do disrupt the carbon sink balance, but greenhouse gases are cumulative, meaning that emissions from 100 years ago are more influential than today’s. Humans are also making efforts to capture emissions and develop carbon sinks.

• The IPCC was only charged with monitoring human emissions so the impact of other influences outside of greenhouse gases (like the influence of solar storms on weather) are not considered.

• It is important to understand that Mother Nature is not a static beast holding still for the climate attribution scientists to do some clean math. Climate has always been changing due to natural events and there have been many warmer periods in history. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, for example, emitted approximately 42 to 50 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in less than a week.

• Since the third assessment report, the IPCC has made it clear that climate is not weather. Saying that climate change is causing an increased number of extreme weather events is based on postulation and, given the significant variables influencing weather patterns, not reliable or credible.

This does not even touch on other challenges like how US fossil fuel companies can be held liable for greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere that travel across continents (with 88% now originating from sources outside of the US). These variables would confuse a jury though, so simplicity is a virtue. Outside of the courthouse, it is very difficult to call climate attribution a science.

Activists Behind the Curtain

The most important influence on climate attribution science is not the data nor the US litigation industry, but rather the special interests of the activist groups who created this field as a tool to wield against the fossil fuel industry.

I often refer to the La Jolla Playbook as a campaign initiated by Naomi Oreskes. But she had her accomplices implementing her strategy, namely the activist group, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), who cohosted the 2012 conference in La Jolla with Oreskes’ small consultancy. Since that 2012 strategy event, UCS has been working to make the link between extreme weather, climate change and the fossil fuel industry strong enough to convince a jury.

Unlike the academics involved, the Union of Concerned Scientists doesn’t hide its objective of creating this field with the sole objective of suing the fossil fuel industry. It states:

“Attribution science is an established scientific discipline backed by decades of research. It has been recognized by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a critical tool for understanding the impacts of climate change. And it’s central to our efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role as the primary driver of human-induced climate change.”

The NGO has even set up a Science Hub for Climate Litigation that connects scientists with the litigation industry, prepares court-ready documents and provides law firms with expert witnesses capable of persuading juries. In the war of good v evil, it is clear who is fighting the good fight: “We make science accessible to communities affected by climate change so they can hold bad actors accountable.” When the Union of Concerned Scientists pretends to own the concept of climate attribution science, it is very clear what their objectives are, and it is a moral imperative.

NGOs are more committed to winning campaigns and moving their ideology forward than scientific rigor (even if they use the word “scientist” in their NGO’s name), so it shouldn’t be surprising that they define climate attribution science to meet their objectives. But what about the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) that recently published a report on climate attribution science? Are there other interests at play here? That is the subject of the third and final part of this series.

——-

To deal with these challenges, many NGOs are turning to large philanthropic foundations for financial support. My message to the NGOs is: “Don’t !!! It will not end well for your organizations.”

The best example of this challenge to NGO autonomy is from the Firebreak’s translation of Florence Autret’s investigation that showed how almost every Brussels-based NGO campaigning on climate issues received large donations from the European Climate Foundation (ECF), with a 2023 budget of €275 million (funded largely by US tech billionaires). They were expected to fall in line within the ECF flotilla of NGOs and support their net-zero campaign. I do not believe the NGO community has given much thought to the implications of this strategy, the loss of autonomy and the compromises they had to make.

Here are 12 reasons why NGOs need to rethink working so closely with their billionaire bedfellows.

1. Foundations are not transparent: Many foundations have donor-advised funds where individuals or companies can donate anonymously to the fund earmarking a particular project or NGO. The intention is to make it impossible to track the special interest sources behind these funds. Some organizations that use the word ‘foundation’ are nothing more than donor-advised program managers acting as pass-throughs (minus their commission fees). It has to be assumed that any NGO taking funding from a foundation using dark donor-advised funds has a special interest group involved in the campaign. The NGO cannot pretend to be transparent by simply declaring the foundation as “funder”.

2. Fiscal sponsors are direct competition: Foundations often set up fiscally sponsored “projects” as an alternative to supporting existing NGO campaigns. It gives the fund managers (ie, activist consultants) more control over the organization and strategy. Take the example of Beyond Plastics. There were many NGOs campaigning against plastics, but Michael Bloomberg decided to donate large sums to Bennington College to start up Beyond Plastics (in line with his Beyond Coal and Beyond Petrochemicals “project” strategy). Hundreds of millions go into these fiscal sponsors rather than supporting existing NGO campaigns. It is assumed that the Rockefeller Foundation’s donations to this little liberal arts college in Vermont with 797 students is also earmarked for Beyond Plastics.

3. Fiscally sponsored “projects” distort public perception: The public sees an organization like Beyond Plastics, their campaigns, websites, networks and publications, and think that it is a legitimate NGO. After more than a decade of campaigning, Beyond Plastics still does not exist as a legal entity, does not produce any transparent financial records and remains a “project” of little Bennington College. Even the US Congress was fooled by this trojan horse when allowing the Beyond Plastics founder, Judith Enck, to testify at a Congressional hearing on behalf of this phantom NGO.

4. Fiscal sponsors are not accountable or transparent: Another phantom NGO is the Agroecology Fund. It does not exist as a non-profit 501(c)(3) or any other legal constitution, but merely as a project managed by the Global Greengrants Fund. Like other fiscal sponsor projects, they do not file IRS Form 990 declarations, so no one can know how much they receive, how much they regrant and to whom (although it can be assumed a large chunk of it went to the UN’s FAO agroecology program). They definitely fund NGOs. The Firebreak did a study on foundation donations to the Agroecology Fund, and estimated over $100 million in the first year under the Global Greengrants management. Worse, as the Agroecology Fund does not legally exist, if one of their reports makes a false or libelous statement about conventional agriculture practices, there is no one to be held accountable. Do NGOs want to take money from groups that don’t exist in any legal or accountable form?

5. Billionaire philanthropists peddle political influence: In the 2026 US midterm elections, George Soros is the largest political donor among a long list of philanthropists. It is not unusual for billionaires like Michael Bloomberg to use their wealth to seek the highest office. They then use their foundations as extensions of their political dogma, donating to groups that will help carry out their ideological objectives (and often to extend the philanthropist’s persona). While it is their money to be spent as they wish, NGOs receiving politically-motivated donations risk having their issue or campaign clouded in the dogma and politics of an ambitious public personality. Even the WHO, dependent on Bloomberg’s $1.6 billion in tobacco control funding, has lost their political independence.

6. Global foundations carry baggage: NGOs like to think that philanthropic donations are more fragrant than the stench of industry funding, but the public is becoming less naïve and some relationships could cause irreversible reputational harm. The strategic litigation NGO, Earthjustice, lost all credibility when they took money to litigate fossil fuel installations from a Chinese foundation promoting renewables. When people think of the Ramazzini Institute, they can’t help but remember Factor GMO when they took Russian money to attack GMOs. But the most hypocritical case has to be Corporate Europe Observatory. This anti-industry, anti-trade, anti-capitalism NGO campaigning on EU issues has almost half of its funding coming from dark donor-advised foundations based in the US. Such undeclared conflicts of interest from foreign entities to influence EU policy should ban the NGO from engaging with EU institutions. NGOs should not leave their reputations open to such vulnerabilities.

7. Media exploitation: Professionalized philanthropies choreograph their funding across a wide mix of NGOs, media groups, lobbyists, law firms and influencers. When you are pumping 100s of millions into a campaign, you can make it rain. Meanwhile large media groups were struggling with a financial drought until the philanthropists came to the rescue. Some media groups like The Guardian receive millions from foundations (and try as they might, this money doesn’t come without strings attached). The Firebreak revealed how foundations were funding media organizations to report on actions taken by NGOs they were controlling.
   - Are NGO campaign managers happy to be a cog in a complex process, restricted to a bit role with certain parameters?
   - Are they happy that the journalists are only reporting on their campaign because they are paid to do so by central command?
   - Are they willing to do the coms work for tort law firms getting rich with foundation support?

8. Impact over Process: As the Effective Altruism cult (remember them?) argued, philanthropy should achieve the highest impact and return on investment. NGOs, by contrast, often invest decades in a policy process, hoping to make incremental progress while slowly influencing changes in human behavior. A foundation fund manager with $100 million to spend on a campaign and an algorithmic chart, has no patience for such gardening techniques, preferring to unleash a coordinated onslaught on an industry or company. They might throw a million at an NGO to maintain their policy game as a flanking exercise (and to keep influence over them), but the NGO will not be taken seriously.

9. Michael Bloomberg’s poodles: I feel sorry for the directors of the dozens of NGOs created by activists within Bloomberg Philanthropies like: Vital Strategies, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the Framework Convention Alliance... Every morning they get up and wait for the day’s marching orders from central command, which sister groups will be involved in the next project, the funds they need to redistribute and the position they will have to propagate. They are paid far too much to quit ($25,000 per month for the top ten directors in each of Bloomberg’s NGOs), but it must be horrible to have to implement strategies without any input. And what if Michael wakes up tomorrow with a new idea, say, on raising doubt on vaccines? NGOs have to be careful about getting pulled into a foundation’s ecosystem – easy money can lead to hard choices and lost autonomy.

10. Superiority complex: When foundation-funded campaign budgets expand into eight or nine figures, and offices and salaries augment accordingly, it is easy to forget of the vulgar but passionate activists campaigning from the strip malls. The Firebreak was contacted, for example, by Oceana, funded by the Packard foundation, to remove any reference from our article about the group’s involvement with Greenpeace on a salmon aquaculture protest. Oceana and Packard were OK with all of the other criticisms we made about their campaign, but that association, however factual, really got to the handlers upstairs. The reality is that these foundation consultants and fund managers don’t really like working with NGOs or being associated with them. Any cooperation with NGOs will be short-term and one-sided.

11. Charitable front groups: Many foundations are merely fronts for larger investment funds, taking advantage of tax-free status while growing wealth for the family’s interest. The Firebreak has shown how some foundations, like Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative have enormous investment divisions or how the founder of Yahoo!, David Filo’s Skylight Foundation, turn a healthy annual rate of return on their hundreds of millions in stock holdings. This foundation capitalism and illegitimate exploitation of tax loopholes represent the type of opportunism most NGOs have been speaking out against.

12. Unstable long-term security: If your NGO received $10 million from three foundations this year, it is likely you widened your program budget but no longer bothered investing in traditional fundraising or government grant applications. But what if next year, the foundations consultants no longer find your issues or performance sufficiently “impactful”. Also, as the consultants managing the funds network among themselves, the three foundations may decide to set up a fiscal sponsor to manage a new (competing) project to run a similar campaign. They might poach your best staff before you have a chance to restructure.

The one thing NGOs have as an asset is trust. They are invited to the table in public dialogues as representatives of civil society on the basis of this trust. If NGOs are seen as just another well-financed interest group beholden to a dark network of billionaire funders, they will not only lose their seat at the table, they will lose the support of civil society and their own staff. Foundation funding may be an easy cocktail to consume, but its poison lingers.

What can NGOs do?

I understand that these are challenging times for NGOs with integrity. And it must be getting harder for these campaigners to swallow what they are being served. It is not a level playing field so they cannot realistically demand, in funding contract negotiations, that foundations become responsible public actors, be transparent and accountable. If they put forward such conditions, the activist consultants managing the foundation’s funds would just have more incentive to set up their own fiscal sponsors to suck more oxygen out of the room.

NGOs should do what they do best: campaign for change. They should create an NGO-Foundation Charter – a declaration - which draws red lines and imposes conditions on how NGOs should work with foundations and receive funding. This will guide internal NGO policy, protect public trust and allow smaller, more idealistic NGOs to still thrive in the public policy arena.

Equally important, the charter will also set a benchmark of standards for regulators to come in and introduce legislation to control and monitor philanthropic organizations. Political leaders won’t regulate foundations on their own (they are also bought and paid for by the billionaires), so they would need to be lobbied. I imagine many in industry would join in with the NGOs on this campaign (a first in my experience).

Or … NGOs can keep drinking from the poison philanthropy chalice, sacrificing their independence, supporters and public trust.

Here is a draft charter that the NGO community can start from:

Text version:

The NGO-Foundation Charter

NGOs will not work with foundations that do not adhere to the following conditions:

1. All foundations must be transparent on their donations

2. Donor-advised funds must no longer be anonymous

3. Fiscally sponsored “projects” are only allowed for one year

4. Fiscal sponsors must be held accountable for their actions

5. All charitable donations must be free of earmarks and conditions

6. Foundation-funded journalists must declare the donors and amounts

7. Investment houses with foundation fronts should not enjoy tax-exempt status

As long as there has been a profession known as environmentalism, there has been the objective of blaming mankind and human activity for the defilement of Mother Nature. By the late 1990s, as concern for polluted rivers, soils and skies did not move the needle enough for the activist community (laws and behaviors had evolved), campaigns shifted towards creating fear of planetary destruction due to climate change and biodiversity collapse.

This shift created more media sensation (and donations), but it also created challenges in the emerging field of environmental litigation. While soil or water pollution could be pinpointed to a particular emission source upon which a lawsuit could determine liability and damages (polluter pays), the litigation industry still required clear evidence of a particular malfeasance to prosecute lawsuits on the damages caused by climate change. This prompted the creation of an academic field known as climate attribution science to link proposed climate-related weather damages to polluters.

But it is not so easy to attribute liability for damages from a weather event like a flood or forest fire on one particular industrial emission source. The evidence for any jury decision needs to go beyond a reasonable doubt, so the climate attribution experts needed to get creative.

Prima Facie Nonsense

It seems absurd for a law firm to even think they could go into a courtroom and successfully argue that one oil company needs to pay damages for a particular weather event attributed to climate change that the company has directly contributed to. There are a wide number of factors that would cast doubt on such claims, namely:

1. Global greenhouse gases claimed to influence changes in climate move at atmospheric levels far beyond particular emission points

2. Other countries and regions (especially China and, soon, India) are emitting more greenhouse gases than the United States

3. Other industries (like electricity, textile and food production) emit more greenhouse gases than the oil industry

4. The lawsuits focus on damages from weather events but there are so many variables that affect storms and temperatures. There is a reason weather forecasts are often wrong

5. Since the early 2000s, after a series of cold winters, the IPCC has been rightly reminding the public that climate is not weather

6. The severity of damages from floods and fires are influenced more by poor planning, a failure in environmental management and human error or wrongdoing

When Boulder County, for example, wants to charge Suncor and ExxonMobil for the weather event damages due to climate change they allegedly caused, their lawyers have to go beyond these six reasonable doubts.

Any lawyer with common sense and a desire for a successful career would walk away from any “plaintiff” wishing to prosecute an oil company for damages from climate change. But the courts are clogging up with such lawsuits and one case, Suncor v Boulder County, has even reached the Supreme Court, to be heard next month. What gives?

Ambitious tort lawyers (Predatorts) can only keep their Gulfstreams in the air and pay off their litigation finance loan sharks if they can raise revenue streams via large payouts or out-of-court settlements. Persuading them to allocate valuable resources to dedicate years on climate lawfare cases that have a low likelihood of ever being heard in a courtroom requires a complete reimagination of the Predatort Playbook.

Enter the billionaire philanthropists (or rather their activist fund managers controlling the purse strings), to coordinate fiscal sponsors or strategic litigation NGOs to discretely underwrite all of the law firms needs, regardless of their success or quality of service.

La Jolla’s Missing Link

As my last article on adversarial regulation demonstrated, the US tendency to “litigate to lawmake” meant that any changes in industry behavior could only be obtained under the knife of relentless litigation. This was articulated in the summary document of the 2012 Climate Accountability conference held in La Jolla, California. This so-called La Jolla Playbook, the brainchild of Naomi Oreskes following her 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, argued that like the tobacco industry, Big Oil will not change their ways unless they are overwhelmed by an existential litigation onslaught.

The La Jolla tobacconization strategy had several fatal weaknesses (article on this to come), including the naïve assumption that lawyers were charitable creatures willing to contribute large resources towards saving the planet. In any case, the foundations were brought in to fill that little timesheet funding gap, but Naomi must realize this free money won’t last much longer.

More importantly, Oreskes, a lifelong ivory towerist with no experience in industry, sadly overlooked important differences in culture and product between the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. Naomi saw both industries as rich, powerful, causing harm and lying and that was enough for her to justify the conflation. But she was dead wrong on so many counts.

Western economies could continue to function if tobacco companies ceased to exist tomorrow, but not if we litigated out of existence the providers of the main feedstocks for transportation, energy, textiles, industrial production and home heating. This is not just another attack on a supposed health-harming industry - it was an attack on capitalism and our industrial foundation.

Worse, Oreskes failed to understand the level of attribution needed to litigate the oil industry. It is fairly easy to attribute liability if a smoker for 40 years develops lung cancer or COPD and the only challenge for a jury is to determine damages. And while economic damages from weather events may be easier to establish, the six factors noted above makes it impossible to attribute liability from global climate evolutions upon a single oil company.

The entire La Jolla Playbook would fall apart if the link between damages from alleged climate-related weather events and the fossil fuel industry were not established beyond a reasonable doubt. No problem, Naomi must have thought: “We could just fund some scientists to provide a link that could be sufficient for a jury to deliver its sentence.” And with this quick fix, the field of climate attribution science was born, to serve the litigation industry in its strategy to tobacconize the fossil fuel industry – a political-spawned scientific field. (Part 2 will look at how the climate scientists tried to deliver to this lawfare requirement.)

What Oreskes wanted was not an accountability or a just redistribution for the consequences of climate change. As a post-capitalist activist, she wanted to see the oil industry brought to its knees, and with it, the Western capitalist model. Her naïve assumptions were built on hatred and vengeance rather than logic and reason. With such fatal flaws, I have to wonder why people still bother to interview or give speaking slots to Professor Oreskes.

The Willy Sutton Strategy

If these activists funding the law firms litigating these countless lawfare cases had any integrity or commitment to their declared goals of protecting the environment, they would be going after the more likely guilty parties in their alleged climate accountability lawsuits. We need to ask why the strategic litigation activists aren’t suing:

• the Chinese companies and factories emitting far more CO2 than the US fossil fuel industry?

• the regulators who had been aware of the possible threats since the 1990s and chose to do next to nothing to protect the public?

• the other industries emitting more CO2 than the oil companies (power generators, the food chain, the textile industry…).

There is no doubt a political objective in targeting the fossil fuel industry. As a main driver of the industrial revolution and capitalism, nothing would make these anti-industry neo-Marxists happier than to eliminate what they believe to be the cause of all human evil. But this is mere ideology and dogma – success depends on something far greater.

In this case, it is important to follow the money. Big Oil has the deepest pockets, hence the target is on its back (rather than the coal industry, which is practically on its back … except in emerging economies in Asia and Africa). They have the most to lose so they’ll be the first to give in and pay up.

There is no point suing the regulators for decades of inaction – there is no money there. The Chinese won’t pay either and the other industries emitting more CO2 will quickly fold into bankruptcy trusts faster than you can say “asbestos”. As Big Oil has the money, they have the litigation problem. There is no ideology or integrity here, just greed mixed with vengeance. And winning. In order to win their billions in the courtroom, they actually created a scientific field known as climate attribution science.

Activists like Naomi Oreskes must be thinking like petty thieves – it’s all about the money. It reminds me of the bank robber, Willy Sutton. When asked in prison why he robbed banks, Willy replied: “Because that’s where the money is!”

So Naomi, why have you been going through so much trouble to sue Big Oil?

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

769KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

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.