by Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris , America Outloud:
A dark money group was awarded grants from Leonardo DiCaprio’s non-profit foundation, funds that were then transferred to a law firm leading climate nuisance lawsuits across America against oil companies, according to emails examined by Fox News Digital.
The story is complicated, and so we have invited Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an expert on the issue, to be our guest on The Other Side of the Story on America Out Loud Talk Radio this weekend, Nov 5 and 6 at 11 am and 8 pm both days.
To whet your appetite for our show with Chris, we lay out the details of the case as follows:
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Correspondence in 2017 between philanthropist Dan Emmett and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) climate professor Ann Carlson demonstrated that they worked with law firm Sher Edling to raise funds for efforts to sue oil companies over alleged climate change deception. The legal action was launched on behalf of state and local governments, according to the emails acquired by Government Accountability & Oversight (GAO), a watchdog group.
Carlson, now a senior Biden administration official, served as co-director of UCLA’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment, the advisory board which Emmett still chairs.
The first lawsuits of Sher Edling were filed with the assistance of the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience, and Adaptation, which, at the time, was a fund managed by Resources Legacy Fund (RLF), a dark money group.
These precedent-setting cases demand that 37 of the world’s leading fossil fuel companies accept responsibility for the supposedly devastating damage sea level rise, allegedly caused by their greenhouse gas emissions, is having on coastal communities.
The email communication occurred two months before the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation announced publicly that it would allocate $20,000,000 in grants to various conservation and climate concerns. The group’s announcement is now deleted but may be seen in web archives. It included a grant to RLF “to support precedent-setting legal actions to hold major corporations in the fossil fuel industry liable.”
DiCaprio then said, “These grantees are active on the ground, protecting our oceans, forests, and endangered species for future generations – and tackling the urgent, existential challenges of climate change.”
There are groups other than the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and the Emmett Foundation that have contributed to the Collective Action Fund since 2017. They include Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, JPB Foundation, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The website of Sher Edling asserts that the organization is explicitly dedicated to representing “states, cities, public agencies, and businesses in high-impact, high-value environmental cases.” Since its first cases in July 2017, which were filed on behalf of two counties and a city in California, Sher Edling has sued major oil companies on behalf of Minnesota, Delaware, Rhode Island, New York City, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Honolulu, San Francisco and a number of local governments across America asserting that the companies have been deceiving the public about climate change.
Chris Horner, an attorney who represented GAO in the case involving the emails, explained to Fox News Digital, “Obviously, the donors created, including DiCaprio, several purported arms’ lengths.”
Horner continued, “This model used a couple of pass-throughs, by which DiCaprio and, it appears, Dan Emmett and others could run things, including DiCaprio’s foundation and Resources Legacy Fund, and they’re not seen as financing the assault.”
Mark Kleinman, a spokesperson from RLF, e-mailed Fox News Digital, “From 2017 to 2020, Sher Edling received grants from RLF to pursue charitable activities to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the accuracy of information they had disseminated to consumers and the public about the role their products played in causing climate change.”
Kleinman continued, “RLF receives support from many funding entities, and its board of directors and staff make all decisions as to where the funding goes.”
Concerns have been previously raised by various experts concerning the funding source Sher Edling received for its climate litigation.
In a 2020 Forbes article, George Mason University law professor emeritus Michael Krauss remarked about the situation in which Sher Edling accepts a payout, if its cases are successful, from jurisdictions it represents, while, simultaneously receiving funding from tax-exempt entities, and, in so doing, removes some of the risks that would otherwise ensue by taking on such cases.
Kraus wrote in Forbes, “Can non-profit funnel donations to a for-profit law firm that has already determined a different form of compensation? May a law firm, which could be fabulously enriched on a contingent basis, ethically accept funding that is paid whether or not the client prevails?”
Kraus concluded, “If legislation through litigation is bad, what to make of legislation through litigation subsidized by taxpayers through charitable donations? We don’t have all the answers to these questions yet. I think we deserve them.”
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