Eliminate federal limits on fossil fuel drilling on public lands. Stop federal investment in renewable energy. Greenlight new fossil fuel projects.
Those are just some of the measures laid out in Project 2025, the 900-plus-page policy blueprint created by the conservative Heritage Foundation — and it’s just one example of how taxpayer-subsidized philanthropic dollars are supporting groups spreading climate disinformation.
Heritage — which denies the scientific consensus on climate change — and 136 other groups received a total of $5.8 billion from donors between 2020 and 2022, with a minimum of $219 million going directly toward work on climate disinformation, according to an Institute for Policy Studies report published Tuesday.
“Fossil Fuel Philanthropy: How Taxpayer-Subsidized Charities Promote Climate Change Disinformation and Stall Urgent Action” offers a guide to the philanthropic dollars that help promote climate denial, deception and delay, including both the groups that cash such checks and the organizations that pass them out. For those looking for solutions, there are also tips on how we could change our tax system to stem the flow.
Individuals and corporate donors account for the bulk of such funding: $4.2 billion of the total. But those donations are private, so the report focuses on money flowing through donor-advised funds and private foundations, which contribute $942 million and $545 million, respectively, or only about a quarter of all support.
“The funds we are able to track through private foundations and donor-advised funds are just the tip of the influence iceberg when it comes to the charitable funding of climate disinformation,” write the report’s authors, Chuck Collins, Helen Flannery and Bella DeVaan. Collins and Flannery have published op-eds in IP.
Like Heritage, most recipients of such dollars work on multiple issues, and based on public information, it is impossible to know exactly how much of the $5.8 billion went to climate disinformation. But according to the authors’ analysis, $219 million went to groups focused on such work, and the real total could be “into the billions of dollars.”
The 48-page report highlights the key role that giving through donor-advised funds — which can be completely anonymous — plays in this ecosystem. A recent paper by Flannery and Brian Mittendorf of Ohio State found that donors, unsurprisingly, seem to prefer to give to politically engaged (and potentially controversial) charities through DAFs.
Project 2025 is one product of that stream of politics-adjacent 501(c)(3) giving — and has become an effective cudgel for Democrats to use against Republicans this election season. Yet political discussion of the plan sometimes fails to note that its recommendations run utterly counter to consensus science about how to maintain a habitable planet. To take one example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that even without any new development, pollution from existing coal, oil and gas projects is already enough to take the planet beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
Which philanthropies gave out climate disinformation dollars?
Three national donor-advised fund sponsors and a group of major conservative foundations were the top donors to climate disinformation groups between 2020 and 2022, the report found.
Of all DAF sponsors, the National Philanthropic Trust ($243 million), Schwab Charitable Trust ($213 million) and DonorsTrust ($181 million) channeled the most money to climate disinformation groups. In all, DAFs account for 16% of all such funding.
While DonorsTrust bills itself as a DAF for conservative and libertarian donors, NPT and Schwab do not. The “values-neutral” DAF sponsors are thus equally if not more culpable, in dollar terms, in aiding the flow of unaccountable, tax-deductible funding to climate disinformation.
Among foundations, first place went to the combined funding of three Scaife family outfits — the Sarah Scaife, Allegheny and Scaife Family foundations — which collectively gave $36 million. In second was the Searle Freedom Trust ($29 million), while third place went to Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation ($22 million).
Those philanthropies will be familiar to anyone who’s followed the funding for climate doubt. For instance, the same names were among the top five in a 2021 study, led by Robert Brulle, Brown University visiting professor, that examined top sources of funding for the climate counter-movement. Other greatest hits from this group? Campaigns to end affirmative action, ban abortion and ban books.
Other top foundation backers of climate disinformation included the Roger and Susan Stone Family Foundation ($21 million), Diana Davis Spencer Foundation ($18 million), the John William Pope Foundation ($15 million) and Charles Koch Foundation ($15 million). In total, foundations represented 9% of funding.
Which nonprofits received climate disinformation dollars?
A pair of nonprofits affiliated with megadonor Charles Koch and another linked with conservative legal activist Leonard Leo received more money than any other climate disinformation groups during the three-year period studied by the report.
The Seminar Network and Stand Together Foundation, both part of Koch’s Stand Together nonprofit network, took in more than $873 million, while The 85 Fund, closely associated with Leo, received another $318 million. Heritage Foundation came in fourth, with $236 million over that period.
Other top recipients were the billionaire donor favorite American Enterprise Institute ($173 million) and the Koch-funded free market policy think tank Mercatus Center ($171 million), as well as Turning Point USA ($174 million) and Prager University Foundation ($156 million).
What policies would address this situation?
The authors’ recommended remedy against billions of taxpayer-subsidized dollars flowing to climate misinformation? Sunlight. In other words, transparency is needed.
“The fossil fuel industry has been able to harness our charitable system for their disinformation campaigns, and to do it largely in secret, because of a lack of adequate regulation, a lack of oversight from watchdog organizations, and active campaigning by powerful funders to defeat charitable reform proposals,” the authors write.
Some of their suggestions are simple, such as requiring private foundations to identify grantees by Employer Identification Number, or EIN, and mandating 501(c)(4) organizations to disclose to the IRS all donors who contributed more than $10,000, already a requirement for private foundations.
They also recommend a series of donor-advised fund reforms that parallel the kinds of fairly innocuous proposals that the authors and other DAF reform advocates have previously floated, such as in the stalled ACE Act. They include prohibiting foundations from counting donations to DAFs toward their payout requirement, requiring DAFs to report on grants at the individual account level, and requiring DAFs to disclose names of donors who give more than $10,000 to each account.
To date, such proposals have been nonstarters in philanthropy — thanks in part to spirited resistance from certain quarters of the sector. But new attention to DAFs — and their growing size — could shift the debate. Until it does, it will be hard for anyone — whether researchers and journalists, or fellow funders and would-be grantees — to know exactly who is funding what.
