The Geopolitics of Climate Continues

Hawaii, the United States’ military hub in the Indo-Pacific, is in the midst of unraveling a scandal at the confluence of philanthropic money, NGOs, and the state’s effort to build-out LNG infrastructure in partnership with the Tokyo-based company, JERA.

At the crux is the researcher Matthias Fripp whose work was upheld by advocates to block the LNG project. Through a series of investigative journalism, Stewart Yerton with Civil Beat, uncovers concerning issues of undisclosed COI related to Fripp.

Fripp’s employer is the think-tank Energy Innovation created and designed to advance the interests of its parent organization, John Doerr’s philanthropic foundation, Climate Imperative. The foundation, along with partners, backs gas bans.1

As Yerton reports, lots of people are upset and policymakers have taken notice, too. Hawaii Governor Josh Green is quoted as noting the double standard:

“If there’s a bias behind it [the research], it’s no better than if Big Oil funded a study to kill solar,” he said. “I’d be furious about that too. We can’t torpedo ideas and hide behind a veil of secrecy.”

In 2024, Climate Imperative gave nearly $30 million to Energy Foundation China (EF China), its largest grant that year. There is growing discourse around EF China’s relationship to the Beijing government, with concerns that climate philanthropies and Chinese state interests are aligned in reshaping US energy capabilities, centrally organizing acceptable political narrative, and harnessing scientific institutions to these ends.

Some of this has long been the subject of murmurs somewhere between tongue in cheek commentary and due diligence suspicion. But it is currently manifesting in ways that are difficult to ignore: movement of large sums of money, politicization of research institutions, real world geopolitical tensions, and dysfunctional domestic politics.

What Yerton has tapped into is more than one researcher’s nondisclosure. It is a coordinated philanthropically funded apparatus that has undermined domestic discourse and policymaking. It also increasingly looks like it functions as a political international aligned with interests adversarial to the United States.

From this standpoint, a philanthropically funded controversy over a US-Japan partnership to build LNG infrastructure in Hawaii carries real strategic significance.

You can read more about

• how all of this fits together with World Weather Attribution,

• the use of international infrastructure to fan the flames of grievance, and

• how it interacts with perceptions of United States’ credibility

in my essay at Civitas Outlook: