It will surprise no-one to learn that there is a trail of money which leads from climate protesters and their pranks in Britain back to the self-satisfied celebs of Hollywood. It will come as a greater – and possibly happier – revelation that this particular source of money appears to be drying up fast. If you want to know who was paying for Insulate Britain to block motorways during September 2021 and March 2022 you need look no further than the website of the Climate Emergency Fund, a charitable organisation based in West Hollywood and run by a bunch of film directors and actors including Adam McKay – who made the film Don’t Look Up – actor Jeremy Strong and funded by Abigail Disney. It claims that it provided 93 per cent of the $175,000 spent by Insulate Britain during its six-month existence.
The organisation boasts of providing enlightened individuals with a ‘safe, legal and tax-deductible’ way of donating to a global network of disruptive protest groups
The organisation boasts of providing enlightened individuals with a ‘safe, legal and tax-deductible’ way of donating to a global network of disruptive protest groups. Indeed, in 2022 it made the decision only to fund groups which are involved in non-violent disruptive protest, claiming that its money goes further that way. It continues to fund stunts in Britain: one of its grantees is an organisation called the A22 network which in turn funds Just Stop Oil. A photograph of a Just Stop Oil protester dousing himself and a snooker table with orange powder at the World Championships in Sheffield adorns its latest annual report. How nice to know that Hollywood folk are earning themselves tax relief on their donations to cause disruption in foreign countries. That is not so good for America’s poor as it means there is less money from Hollywood to be ploughed into US social programmes. But then who cares about that when you have a planet to save? The Climate Emergency Fund repeats the unscientific nonsense that ‘our window to prevent catastrophic runaway heating has nearly closed, and if emergency decarbonisation does not begin in earnest in the next five years the Earth will be locked into an unliveable future.’
But it does sound as if there may be some good news on the horizon. The Fund’s annual report reveals that the donations it receives collapsed by nearly a quarter last year, from $6 million in 2022 to $4.7 million in 2023. That means there is less money to pay the legal bills racked up by the Barnabys and Cressidas of the climate protest world: the fund was forced to drop the grants it was able to offer from $5 million in 2022 to $3.5 million in 2023. Like many charities, a sizeable slice seems to disappear in administration and fundraising costs.
The question is, though, should authorities in Britain merely wait for the funding to wither as Hollywood liberals lose interest and shift their focus onto other bleeding heart causes – or should they take a little more direct action of their own? The Climate Emergency Fund seems content with lawyerly advice which prevents its donors from prosecution. But then again Britain’s Serious Crime Act 2007 prohibits ‘encouraging or assisting offences believing one or more will be committed’. It would seem at least a moot point that donating to an organisation which is openly committed to disruptive protest – much of it, as we have seen from recent cases, illegal – is an offence under the act.
The Climate Emergency Fund doesn’t like private jets – it claims credit for having them banned from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport from 2025. But it is hard to believe that there aren’t some private jet enthusiasts among its 5,800 funders. Perhaps next time one of them lands in Britain for a film launch police might like to meet it on the tarmac. It took years of diplomatic effort to try to stem IRA funding from the US – something the authorities there only finally began to take seriously after 9/11. Given that many of the Climate Emergency Fund’s donors have chosen to advertise their names in the organisation’s annual report it seems that we could be a little proactive when it comes to the funding of illegal protests.
