US Senate Investigation into Sher Edling
American lawmakers agree with the Firebreak: This law firm is toxic
A Memorandum dated October 7, 2024 from U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Accountability has looked into the activities of the climate nuisance law firm, Sher Edling. The full title of their document is: “Investigation into the Funding of Sher Edling, LLP’s Lawfare Against American Energy Companies and the Role of Former Nominee to Be NHTSA Administrator, Ann Carlson, in Those Efforts”
In the introduction, they state their findings:
“Through this investigation, the Committees obtained information confirming left-wing groups gave Sher Edling exorbitant sums of money to pursue lawsuits against the oil and gas industry and Carlson and her students at the University of California School of Law (UCLA Law) provided Sher Edling with legal assistance on these cases.”
My first reaction, when reading this, was: It’s about bloody time! The Firebreak has been publishing articles on the corrupt practices behind the Sher Edling climate lawfare strategy:
In September, 2023 we revealed how they kept Naomi Oreskes secretly on retainer;
in February, 2024, I focused on their lawfare game and the foundation funding behind them; and
how the law firm is merely the product of fiscal sponsor consultants creating campaigns via bundling foundations into discrete targeted funding operations (May, 2024).
Sher Edling was created by foundation fiscal sponsors to pursue climate nuisance lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, mostly on behalf of local or state governments, for damages allegedly caused by climate change. The law firm has filed more than 20 climate liability cases with little chance of ever getting them heard in court. The goal, instead, is to try to threaten the long-term existence of these industries, inflict reputational damage and continue to obtain internal documents via discovery. Now a law firm that never gets their cases heard in courts doesn’t obtain fees to pay the rent. Sher Edling is wholly financed by discrete foundation funding (almost $14 million so far).
What the Senate Committees Missed
The Senate Committee researchers were using many of my expressions in the memorandum but they should have invited me to come testify as they seem to have overlooked many of the important features of the complicated web these activists have created to allow the foundations and interest groups to operate below any regulatory radar. The researchers were asking general questions about who was funding Sher Edling and how much. The fact that Sher Edling was actively resisting providing such information or claiming it was “sensitive” should have set off alarm bells to dig deeper than just the numbers. There is an entire system of climate activist bottom feeders behind this operation hoping to remain comfortably in the shadows.
But still, as superficial as the Senate Committees’ research was, they are recognizing a serious problem and have broken the ground to try to rebuild the damage these groups have caused. Let’s examine their document before digging deeper. Their report states the situation as they see it.
“In effect, American taxpayers are bearing the cost of Sher Edling’s litigation. Wealthy liberals, like George Soros, make tax-deductible donations to foundations like the Resources Legacy Fund, New Venture Fund, and the Tides Foundation (or otherwise make tax-deductible donations to other nonprofit organizations that, in turn, give money to these foundations). The foundations then direct that money to Sher Edling to pursue climate change policies through the courts. If these individuals had donated to political candidates or advocacy organizations to enact climate change legislation, however, they would not be able to deduct those donations. Although not illegal, this structure allows the green mafia to achieve its political goals while lowering its tax bill.”
Calling these cabals a “green mafia” is too kind. Sher Edling is more like a front group for a network of special interests bent on controlling the climate narrative and keeping it politically expedient. The numbers they posted from their research, almost $14 million, is shocking at first, but likely only a fraction of the money passing through these mechanisms. See the table below that Sher Edling provided the Senate investigation.
What the Senate Committees failed to examine is how the two main donors, Resources Legacy Foundation and the New Venture Fund, are not actually foundations. They are fiscal sponsors. This means, for example, that some consultant or activist with an idea (eg, let’s create a law firm just to file pointless climate nuisance suits) would then organize a group of fund managers in certain foundations to work together to fund the idea (either through existing funds or from special interest groups cleansed through dark donor-advised funds that many of the large foundations offer).
Should Sher Edling ever get a case heard in court and earn their fees, the foundations funding them could not benefit in the settlement (they are grant givers, not litigation finance companies). It is not clear that fiscal sponsors have similar restrictions.
The first question the Senate researchers should have asked is: Why would donors use these two shell organizations? Why didn't groups like Rockefeller Brothers Fund or the MacArthur Foundation just donate directly to Sher Edling?
Well, probably because the idea of a foundation claiming to be committed to making the world better and helping those in need did not want their boards to scrutinize throwing millions of dollars at tort lawyers with private jets. In fact they knew this project was so stinky that they even created a shadow fund, the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience, and Adaptation, to add a further structural layer to mask their support. So with the help of expensive foundation consultants, their donations smell much better now and no one would notice the foundations behind two layers of shell organizations. At least the Senate Committees did not (or did not want to find out).
The second thing the Senate researchers should have noticed is that the Resource Legacy Foundation (note, not a real foundation) stopped their funding in 2020 and was replaced in 2021 with funding by New Venture Fund. Was it a coincidence? Of course not. In the image above, the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience, and Adaptation management was taken over by a new fiscal sponsor, the New Venture Fund. These two organizations merely manage the administration for the foundations (and for a hefty fee). But the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience, and Adaptation is also merely a shell organization – it does not even have a website. These are all just dark tools to hide where the money is going … to Sher Edling and their activist games.
No one should have been surprised that Sher Edling did not want to share their contracts or internal information with the US lawmakers.
Attacking the Party Machinery
The Senate investigation focused more on the political bias, that the foundations were left-wing groups also donating to anti-Israeli groups and supporting violent protests. While such funding may be unpleasant, it is not illegal and there are also right-wing foundations giving funds to groups that may not be representative of the political mainstream. As fiscal sponsors, they give to whomever the paymasters tell them to donate to.
What is more important is how these foundations, with billions flooding in through their dark, donor-advised funds, are acting outside of the democratic process, with no transparency and no regard for laws or regulatory process.
When people described the Democratic Party Machine that was keeping Joe Biden in position as the party’s nominee after the presidential debate revealed his incapacitation, they were not referring to a group of advisors circled around Lady MacBeth at some cauldron in the deep, dark recesses of Delaware scheming some plot to keep their feeble leader in power. The machinery that was running the show were the hundreds of foundations using fiscal sponsor mechanisms to fund NGOs, the media, scientists, lobbyists, law firms and activist influencers to control the narrative and preserve their interests. The network pushing the climate agenda got so deep into the mechanics of power as to fund programs to train judges and journalists to advance their objectives. These are the “powerful elites” that the American voters rejected this week.
I agree with the Senate investigation that these funding tools should not be tax deductible, but would add: it should also not be legal (regardless of the political colors).
The Senate researchers also questioned whether third-party litigation funding should be more transparent. They are referring to litigation finance firms (a dark shadow banking network for the tort law industry). This is indeed a problem, that I have written about at length, but not an issue facing Sher Edling. Their climate lawfare strategy was so activist-driven that no reasonable litigation finance manager would ever dare risking capital on these sure losers.
Treating the Symptom, but not the Disease
But Sher Edling is the symptom, not the disease. The joint Senate Committees have to go deeper and look into how the foundations (the force behind the political machinery) are creating and using dark, non-transparent tools like fiscal sponsors or donor-advised funds to run their special interest campaigns. Sher Edling is but one example. I have written volumes on how tort law firms are coordinating and funding NGOs, scientists and judges to ease their opportunities. Sher Edling reveals only the tip of the iceberg of how foundations and tort law firms are working together and, as both operate under veils of secrecy, we don’t know the depths of their coordination.
We won’t get into the details of the political fights over Ann Carlson, who was nominated to be the NHTSA administrator. She failed to disclose her previous work for Sher Edling and her appointment was never approved. But this part of the Senate investigation seemed to be little more than a political witch-hunt into a spent, unethical force. Carlson is gone and quickly forgotten (sentenced to some long, slow death in an academic position). More interesting is how Sher Edling has kept Naomi Oreskes on a similar secretive legal services retainer (only revealed under oath in her deposition on the Michael Mann climate lawsuit). Oreskes is the architect of the La Jolla Tobacconization Playbook.
La Jolla was a conference Oreskes hosted in 2012, with lawyers, activist NGOs and scientists to try to eliminate the fossil fuel industry in the same way that Big Tobacco was taken down – not by regulations or public education, but by relentless lawsuits that would bankrupt the industry. The La Jolla Playbook has also been applied as an alternative regulatory tool (called adversarial regulation) to threaten the chemical, pesticide, plastics and food industries.
What the Senate Committees should be investigating is how these groups are using taxpayer money to finance actors and institutions designed to act outside of the democratic regulatory system. Sorry, but I recommend the two Senate Committees go back and do the investigation again, opening it up to include the groups pulling Sher Edling’s strings.
Who Cares
What mystifies me is how the media continues to look at stories like this, see that industry would benefit from any media exposure, and then “pass over it in silence”. This memorandum was published on October 7, 2024 (one month ago) and uploaded online on October 10. I saw this report two weeks ago but had too many rods in too many fires at the time. In any case, it was not like anyone would beat me to the news. I knew the media wouldn’t care.
The mainstream media did not cover this investigation or the news that climate campaigners are using millions in secret funds to clog the courts with frivolous lawsuits. No one in the media took notice that when the Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessel, called for expressions of interest from law firms to sue the oil industry on behalf of the state (covered here in the Firebreak), Sher Edling was her first choice. This Senate investigation was so largely ignored that no one in Nessel’s office was probably aware of it.
Who am I kidding? In research discovered since the article on Michigan’s climate lawfare, documents reveal that Nessel has been in contact with Vic Sher, Matt Edling and the Sher Edling team since at least 2019.
Didn’t anybody do their homework? Has the media become so lazy that it is left to lowly bloggers to reveal this malfeasance?
Perhaps the mainstream media saw it, but given they are also largely funded by these same foundations, they would not dare provoke their Sugar Daddies. Are these reporters now clearly part of the foundation political machine?
I suspect the media is so conditioned to go with the flow, to no longer dare confront the perceived anti-industry narrative or force their readers to think, that they could not imagine covering a story that could be seen as defending Big Oil. It is, after all, only industry and capitalism, and nobody in their right mind would write a story exposing the corruption behind the emerging foundation capitalism strategy.