Lobbying Magicians Bankrolling A Climate News Sensation
Part Three of the Press Payola Series: How the European Climate Foundation Managed a Climate Asset
Imagine a world where teenagers were organizing marches and demonstrations around the globe, making speeches on the world stages, producing films, meeting a line-up of adoring world leaders, giving countless press interviews with the right journalists, filing lawsuits in courts around the world and listing demands on complex climate regulations. If you think all they would need is an Instagram account to do all of this, seamlessly and effectively, you would be as naïve as the media that sheepishly came at their beck and call. And if you think, out of the millions of messages sent to Greta Thunberg, that she took the time to read and reply just to you, then you are capable of believing the stupidest fictions.
The world of issue management, campaign communications and media relations is arduous, costly and time consuming. Activists, lobbyists, PR professionals and communications consultants invest heavily in campaigns, events, spinning news, cultivating influencers, building followings and generating impact, and most of the time, after many months of planning and organizing, they could at best hope for a few lines in the media. Teenagers like Greta didn’t know more than these professionals about running a climate campaign – they were, rather, groomed by the experts in what is perhaps the most incredibly stealth activist stunt ever.
But if your question from this then is: “Who did little Greta use to get her message out?” you are still sadly missing the point. The question rather, is: “Who used little Greta to get their message out?” And since such flawlessly executed climate campaigns don’t come cheap, to answer that, we need to follow the money.
The Mediatic Grooming of Greta Thunberg
Before investigating the significant media manipulation, it is important to understand the timeline of Greta’s early rise to influence.
The story that Greta and her family like to tell is that she was terribly upset that no one was acting to stop climate change, so she started a school strike and on her first day, in August, 2018, the head of a Swedish think tank (and climate NGO) just happened to be walking by and had a chat with her. What a stroke of luck … if only.
In May, 2018, an activist by the name of Bo Thoren, the leader of a group called Fossil Free Dalsland, started an environmental writing contest in Swedish schools to look for some fresh youth voices for the climate campaign. He wanted to emulate the Parkland School students whose walkouts were effectively protesting gun violence after the shooting in their Florida school. Greta won second place for her essay. When Thoren tried to organize the writing contest participants into holding a school strike, the students weren’t interested. Only Greta agreed.
A week before Greta’s first school strike in front of the Swedish Parliament, Thoren sent out a mass mailing promoting the toned-down event to his media contacts. Only a media entrepreneur, Ingmar Rentzhog, took an interest. Trained by Al Gore, Rentzhog set up We Don’t Have Time in 2017 to use social media to hold leaders accountable for climate change. The site calls itself the “world’s largest media platform for climate action”.
On the day of Greta’s first school strike, Rentzhog visited her and posted a picture on this social media platform. That same afternoon, Greta’s story was in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper and this started her rise to fame. Twelve days later, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper ‘ran an opinion piece on the need to force the greening of the global economy by “bottom-up” action against national governments, including “broad social mobilisation . . . reminiscent of what takes place in communities threatened by war”. Source These were not Greta’s words at that time yet, but those of her handlers.
Around the same time, Greta’s mother was releasing a book on climate change. Curiously she had met Rentzhog at a climate conference in May, 2018 so there is a lot still unknown on the role Greta’s parents played in moving her forward with the climate activists.
There is also an important business interest behind the grooming of Greta. Rentzhog is also the CEO of a think tank called Global Utmaning (Global Challenge) which has support from Swedish green energy investment groups. In the autumn of 2018, many of the board members of the Global Challenge, along with Rentzhog’s ‘We Don’t Have Time’ and the Club of Rome, published the Climate Emergency Plan from which much of Greta’s early talking points came from.
This little-known story of the grooming of Greta by PR spinmeisters was first broken in December 2018 by Rebecca Weidmo Uvell and was only amplified in August 2019 by The Times when Greta was sailing to America. Greta replied to Uvell’s investigation, confirming much of it with her own spin, but she did not address the emails. See also an article on the interest groups involved, but otherwise, the main media groups are reporting Greta’s story of a chance meeting as fact.
These analyses, though, missed the most important part of the story: What happened when the big boys took over in January, 2019 just as Greta’s star was starting to rise?
The European Climate Foundation Takes Over the Greta Brand
Greta and her family broke off cooperation with Rentzhog in January, 2019, just four months after she was “discovered”, because he had been using her image in a funding campaign for a We Don’t Have Time shares issue. Her new press agent, according to The Times article, was Daniel Donner from the European Climate Foundation (ECF). Given that this completely stealth consultancy, pretending to be a foundation and hiding behind non-profit regulatory privileges, is not at all transparent, this is where the story should have ended ... until now.
Greta was the perfect asset for the European Climate Foundation: a group with deep pockets, deeper networks in governments and media platforms and no accountability or need for transparency. Greta’s parents had always wanted to present her as an independent icon representing the voice of climate protest for a rising youth movement with no Greenpeace membership card or Extinction Rebellion stunt to box her in (and definitely not shilling as the face of some Swedish activist fundraising campaign).
The European Climate Foundation took over the Greta brand, acting quickly to utilize her rising stardom, connect her to world leaders while doing what they do best: hide their lobbying, funding and consultants completely in the shadows. All we know is what was reported in The Times, that the ECF’s Daniel Donner took over managing Greta in January, 2019. The ECF doesn’t even acknowledge that Daniel Donner exists or works for them. But Daniel does, on his LinkedIn page, so perhaps we should trust him with a bit of transparency.
The only other information we have of the ECF footprint is a Politico article, where the managing director of the newly separated ECF communications wing, Tom Brookes, joked: After all, someone’s gotta check Greta Thunberg’s email.
Have a Cigar, Girl, You’re Gonna Go Far
Greta’s rise could only have happened with the support of ECF’s media management, executed to perfection. Shortly after ECF started managing this new, hauntingly articulate asset, Greta got a speaking slot at the World Economic Forum conference in Davos in January, 2019 reading her prepared text. She concluded with the “I want you to panic like your house is on fire” soundbite, that drew more media attention than any speech from any world leader that year.
Nobody can just take a train to Switzerland and ask for the microphone at a conference exclusively for the rich, powerful elite, especially not a relatively unknown 15-year-old who was, at that time, not prepared for such a stage. But the European Climate Foundation has a rich, powerful leadership and is well connected to the WEF management, regularly organizing events and speakers at Davos, so that door was easily opened in the first month of Greta’s PR management contract.
Riding on the wave of media attention from the “house is on fire” one-liner (once again, this does not just happen unless your PR machine was high-octane, well-funded and well-connected), Greta then started a wave of speaking engagements and meetings with world leaders as her handlers were moving the teenager from capital to capital, feeding her factoids and tweets for her appearances at the European Parliament, the UN, the French, British and German parliaments... By March, 2019, school strikes were taking place in 135 countries… Business was good.
By the time Extinction Rebellion had shut down London, in April, 2019, Greta arrived in the British capital like the Messiah. She was transformed into the movement’s hero, tweeting slogans far too articulate and professionally crafted for a teenager working in a second language. Come August, one year after her first managed stunt, it was time for the ECF to put her on an eco-yacht and send the indefatigable teenager to the Americas (and be introduced to the powerful New York media).
In the Politico article, the ECF has only admitted to organizing the press conference and interviews at the launch of Greta’s cross-Atlantic yacht trip at Plymouth, and a round-table of newspaper editors (not journalists!) sitting down with Greta at the Natural History Museum in London just before the COP26 in Glasgow.
Let this sink in for a moment. Mere mortals in the lobbying world would aim at getting a journalist or two to report on a campaign. The spinmeisters at ECF got a roundtable of newspaper editors (the ones who give the marching orders) into the room to let Greta dictate talking points to them. Fine, the ECF controlled the narrative from the shadows and deceived the world, but you kind of can’t help but be in awe at their unmitigated power and influence.
The best part is that ECF was doing all of Greta’s brand management, media relations, press conferences and speaking arrangements for free. They are funded by billionaire philanthropists (who were all also lining up for photo-ops with their valuable new asset).
I am sure Greta thought this was normal given how gifted she thought she was, but it is a good example of how dark funding and foundations were hiding in the shadows, directing the news and defining the narrative within their privileged classes. Greta didn’t just show up at these events, they were designed for her, stage-managed down to the photo ops, rehearsed texts and sound bites. The ECF was pulling the strings of the Greta puppet from the shadows and no one even bothered to question whether the show taking place before them was in any way contrived. Anyone who dared criticize the circus was accused of having Greta issues or being a climate denier.
But how much did managing the Greta brand and keeping her in the news actually cost?
The European Climate Foundation: A Dark, Bottomless Pit Widely Spread
The ECF is not, in any way, transparent, so no one knows how much they spent on managing teenagers like Greta Thunberg, or how much they have donated to NGOs that they then corralled onto their platforms. The Firebreak translated a French investigation into the European Climate Foundation that seemed to show them funding almost every NGO on any issue remotely related to climate change (often in the millions of euros). But they don’t reveal to the public what they do or how much money they give to their flotilla of NGOs.
All we know is that from their last two-page balance sheet, that funding (we can assume was coming from large American foundations) amounted to €275 million (for that single year). That is certainly enough to create and manage dozens of Gretas across every European country, manage the media, organize and fund their events. These teenagers just assume that their “handlers” are always going to be there to cover their lunch money and bus fare (plus doing some other stuff they really don’t understand).
But it gets more interesting…
The media arm of the European Climate Foundation, now called the Global Strategic Communications Council, was separated from the main organization between 2020 and 2022 and while it still serves the ECF and its sponsored groups and initiatives, it now acts as a separate entity.
The Global Strategic Communications Council or GSCC is even darker than its parent, the ECF, they have not submitted anything to the European Transparency Registry and they don’t provide information on their staff outside of the network directors (once again, the person acknowledged to be Greta’s PR manager must be a ghost). They claim on their website that they are managed now via the Meliore Foundation but list the ECF as a partner, as well as other funding foundations of the ECF like the Oak, Hewlett or Grantham Foundations. Old wine, new bottles.
How much are these foundations donating to the GSCC to manage the media, the messengers, the influencers and the events? Well … how much do they need? These magicians are defining the narrative and controlling the message on climate change so no budget is too large for such critical tasks. Probably why we are not allowed to know.
Kickass Lobbyists
When the communications division was started up, the ECF poached some of the leading lobbyists in the Brussels Bubble. These professionals don’t come cheap, know the importance of operating below the radar and doing whatever it takes to win. A successful lobbyist needs to be silently behind the story and never part of the story. There is no place for transparency at the GSCC or the ECF if they want to successfully implement their donors’ strategy.
Having billionaires paying them unlimited funds to keep pulling the rabbits (or Gretas) out of hats is an unbelievable cocktail for controlling the narrative and the news flow. Secretly paying off NGOs and media groups allows them to have willing (or rather, mildly extorted) partners to amplify their campaigns and influencers. The lobbyists in the European Climate Foundation and the Global Strategic Communications Council, running free and uninhibited, are the Jack Abramoffs of the activist and foundation worlds.
While the NGOs attack industry for the peanuts they transparently spend on lobbying, the ECF and the GSCC are operating in the shadows with incomprehensible volumes of cash they are dumping into the policy arena, to NGOs and the media to keep their climate narrative the central issue.
We have all been duped.
Even the transparency watchdog, Corporate Europe Observatory has taken large amounts of funding from the ECF for the last five years. This smells like the mafia paying off the police – pure payola – and nothing but silence from that band of pathetic hypocrites.
These Aren’t NGOs
Nobody actually knows what the GSCC is (except that they are largely invisible). The European Climate Foundation claims it is a foundation, but is actually a fiscal sponsor managing and regranting donations from large, mostly American, foundations. They have defined themselves as an NGO and thus only need to submit a small balance sheet annually to the Dutch authorities. As an NGO, they do not need to be transparent or play by the same rules as other stakeholders like industry.
It is hard to imagine a lobbying and communications campaign group with an annual budget of €275 million as an NGO, and with that classification, having no real reporting or transparency obligations. We have no idea at all how much the GSCC receives and spends, although they do the lion’s share of the climate communications and lobbying work.
Two recent Firebreak articles stressed the need to redefine such actors, not as NGOs but as Alternative Policy Enterprises (APEs), subjected to the same reporting, transparency and accounting obligations as other stakeholders. Shining a bit of light on these backroom rats is a good start. Once we know whom they are managing and promoting, with how much money, then the pronouncements of Swedish teenagers on the world stage may not come across as so impressive.