Green grifters are destroying the environment

OPINION:

The environmental industrial complex is a behemoth collection of interest groups that relentlessly rakes in money. Ostensibly, its purpose is to save the planet.

In reality, the interest groups spend billions of dollars enriching themselves while damaging the environment they claim to protect. It’s a grift machine as brazen as it is harmful.

John Stossel recently released a video laying out the financial corruption at the heart of major environmental groups. For example, the World Wildlife Fund pulls in more than $200 million annually but spends its money on a massive 250,000-square-foot headquarters that, as it bragged, boasts a “stunning eight-story, skylit atrium.”

Greenpeace’s American branch most recently reported in its tax filings that it made more than $40 million in revenue, 99.8% of which came from donations. Yet Greenpeace personnel spent nearly $15 million of those donated funds (37% of its revenue) on wages and benefits for themselves and another nearly $8 million (20% of its revenue) on fundraising and advertising.

The Natural Resources Defense Council reportedly makes more than $190 million annually, about $180 million of which comes from donations, while spending an eye-popping $118 million (more than 61% of its earnings) on salaries and benefits.

I could go on and on.

Basic math would indicate that these organizations exist to pay for themselves. Perhaps that would be warranted if the people working for left-wing green groups spent their days saving endangered species, cleaning up waterways or preserving natural habitats. Maybe some individuals at these organizations still do that. Yet by and large, the environmental industrial complex exists to file lawsuits. As the Natural Resources Defense Council once bragged, during President Trump’s first term, its attorneys sued the Trump administration an average of once every 10 days for four years straight.

If you are hoping to build a pipeline, power plant, housing development or manufacturing facility, you had better buckle up because green lawyers will drag you to court until you give up or run out of money to keep up the fight.

This unrelenting obstruction is bad enough for every homebuyer or utility purchaser in America, but the real rub is that when green groups block development, they are actually harming the environment.

This is most obvious when it comes to climate change. Every left-wing environmental organization declares that climate change is an existential threat and that we must take drastic action to reduce carbon emissions. If we don’t, the Arctic will melt, the seas will rise and natural disasters will wreak havoc on Earth.

Of course, climate change is a problem, even if it’s not as catastrophic as the alarmists say, but one can wonder whether they really believe their own rhetoric. If climate change really is an existential threat to humanity, one would expect green groups to do whatever most effectively drives down emissions.

Yet left-wing environmental groups and their army of attorneys are the biggest impediments to clean energy projects that would cut carbon infinitely more than green activists’ preferred strategies, such as crackpot protest and defacing art.

An alliance of green groups blocked an offshore wind development even in the hard-left region of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The Natural Resources Defense Council vocally celebrated its work to drive a stake into the heart of the Calico solar projects in the California desert. Just a couple of months ago, Friends of the Earth sued to put an end to California’s last remaining nuclear power plant in Diablo Canyon.

In almost every single state in the nation, green groups are not only standing against oil and gas projects; they are also shooting themselves in the proverbial foot by litigating renewable and carbon-free energy facilities to death.

Worse, they aren’t just stopping projects that reduce emissions; they are also increasing emissions by driving economic activity abroad. U.S. production is twice as clean as the global average, so when we don’t build here, that demand goes somewhere dirtier. One of the best ways to cut global emissions is to wield the double-edged sword of American energy: reshoring high-tech energy and manufacturing that is cleaner than what it replaces while avoiding offshoring to global polluters.

The truth is, these groups don’t want to reduce climate change or protect the environment, regardless of what their propaganda says. They want to enrich themselves and stop development, no matter what. That’s what they are good at, and that’s what they do.

Green grifters can talk ad nauseam about their care for the future, but talk is cheap. The best environmental groups don’t obstruct the future; they help build it.

• Chris Johnson is president and co-founder of the American Energy Leadership Institute, a conservative energy policy research and advocacy organization working to ensure America leads and dominates the 21st century.