Bailing Out Greenpeace: Lefty Donors Who Could Pay Up for Dakota Access Damages

Last month a North Dakota jury awarded $667 million in combined damages against Greenpeace International, the U.S.-based Greenpeace Fund, and it’s direct-action affiliate, Greenpeace USA. The award was won by Energy Transfer and in response to violent 2016 protests against the energy firm’s Dakota Access pipeline. The jury was convinced that Greenpeace had defamed Energy Transfer and given financial and other assistance to the evildoers. (Unsurprisingly, Greenpeace plans to appeal.)

The two American affiliates owe $535 million of the total, which equals 10 years of their combined annual revenue (minus healthy fund transfers between them, as explained below). Greenpeace plausibly says this damage award could close its doors. If Greenpeace’s wealthy donors truly share its principles, then maybe they should save it by paying Energy Transfer what is owed.

Doomberg provided this summary of the awful antics of Greenpeace’s pals:

The tactics used during the months-long siege set a new standard for violence and wanton criminality. According to court filings submitted by the company, the protesters pursued a campaign of “militant direct action,” regularly trespassing on ET’s private property, destroying construction equipment, and assaulting employees and contractors. Improvised explosive devices were deployed to attack police, hacked information was used to threaten officers and their families, and weapons were used to kill the livestock of local farmers and ranchers. At certain points, local authorities were overwhelmed, barely able to control the riots.

The Greenpeace Fund owes $131 million of the total for defaming Energy Transfer, and Greenpeace USA, liable also for the physical damages, is on the hook for $404 million.

The financial distinction between the two is frequently one of legality rather than reality.

In 2016, the year the Dakota Access disruptions began, nearly half of the tax-exempt Greenpeace Fund’s revenue was granted over to Greenpeace USA. Since 2015, Greenpeace Fund has transferred at least $66.6 million to the direct-action sibling, or 20.3 percent of Greenpeace USA’s total funding through 2023—the last year for which IRS filings are publicly available.

A lot of Greenpeace’s donors are not publicly known. At least 16 lefty foundations have been writing big checks to the Greenpeace Fund since 2015, and they have combined net assets of at least $50 billion. Here is the list, each with the cumulative donations to the Greenpeace Fund between 2015 and 2023:

• David and Lucile Packard Foundation ($10.7 million)
• Foundation for the Carolinas ($11 million)
• Cabin Road Foundation ($10 million)
• Schmidt Family Foundation ($4 million)
• William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ($5 million)
• Arcus Foundation ($4 million)
• The Goatie Foundation ($7 million)
• Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ($4 million)
• Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment ($4 million)
• Reiman Foundation ($1 million)
• Sustainable Markets Foundation ($919,000)
• Wallace Global Fund ($835,000)
• MacArthur Foundation ($800,000)
• ClimateWorks Foundation ($600,000)
• Panaphil Foundation ($600,000)
• Ford Foundation ($400,000)

As of 2023, the combined net asset value of the Hewlett, Packard, MacArthur, and Ford Foundations was $43.4 billion. These fortunes were all earned by the eponymous and now deceased business titans. Left-wing philanthropy bureaucrats have long since been spending the loot.

The Foundation for the Carolinas (FFTC) has been widely reported as the “dark money” donor platform used by billionaire Fred Stanback to fund a mix of radical climate groups, population control nonprofits, and abortion advocates. A 2018 Knoxville News report described Stanback as a “proponent of anti-humanist environmentalism . . . the belief that protecting the environment hinges on population control.”

Backstopping the claim that FFTC’s biggest grants to climate crazies are often traceable to the Stanback fortune was a 2019 Greenpeace Fund IRS filing naming Fred Stanback as an $8 million donor.

Here are the 2023 net asset values and sources of wealth for the other nine big Greenpeace Fund donors:

• Schmidt Family Foundation ($8 billion net assets in 2023) is the private foundation for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy.
• Rockefeller Philanthropy ($3 million) manages the giving for wealthy lefty donors, including some of the heirs to the John D. Rockefeller oil fortune.
• Grantham Foundation ($631 million) was founded by British investor and radical climate policy donor Jeremy Grantham.
• ClimateWorks ($2 million) is a pass-through funder for donors to radical climate alarmists.
• Cabin Road ($1 million) is the private foundation of former professional tennis player Anne Matta (formerly Anne Grousbeck.)
• Arcus Foundation ($6 million) is run by Jon Stryker, an heir to the multi-billion-dollar Stryker medical device fortune.
• Panaphil Foundation ($2 million) is somewhat of a mystery, as there isn’t a lot of open-source information on the source of the loot nor who is managing it.
• Reiman Foundation ($3 million) appears to be the private foundation for the family of the late Wisconsin publishing executive Roy Reiman.
• Sustainable Markets Foundation ($5 million) has been funded by many of the parties named above and is both a donor to anti-energy causes and a project manager of same.
• Wallace Global Fund ($8 million) is controlled by the family of former Vice President Henry Wallace. Wallace was deemed too much of a left-winger to remain on the reelection ticket with FDR in 1944.
• Goatie Foundation’s IRS filings since 2015 show nearly all funding coming from the Women’s Project Foundation and Louise Gund. She is an heir to a $3.5 billion fortune and a major donor to lefty climate groups and Democratic politicians. Women’s Project tax filings from the early 2000s reveal Gund as the only named trustee and donor.

All but two of these 16 tax-exempt foundation sources (Ford and MacArthur are the exceptions) continued to write checks to the Greenpeace Fund after 2018, well after the Dakota Access mischief and the filing of lawsuits over same was publicly known.

Perhaps these billionaire donors like to associate with such bad behavior?

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/bailing-out-greenpeace-lefty-donors-who-could-pay-up-for-dakota-access-damages/