New Venture Fund, a hub of the Left’s dark money network, bankrolls both sides of climate lawfare: the lawyers who file lawsuits against energy companies and a nonprofit training judges to view such cases favorably. The fund, however, claims these projects are “unrelated.”
In its 2024 tax filing, New Venture Fund reported sending $2.3 million to Sher Edling, L.L.P., a law firm that represents Democratic prosecutors when they file climate litigation against tax filings. The fund also gave $1.25 million to the Environmental Law Institute, a nonprofit that trains judges how to approach their work to “make environmental, economic, and social progress.”
“New Venture Fund works with numerous projects and institutional funders to advance their missions on a variety of issues, including education, health care, and the environment,” a spokesperson for the nonprofit told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “Our grants to Sher Edling and the Environmental Law Institute were made on behalf of two separate fiscally sponsored projects. These grants are unrelated and have no connection to each other.”
New Venture Fund does direct money from donors to fiscally sponsored projects, a model that critics say allows donors to cloak which projects their funding supports. Even so, Sher Edling has represented lawsuits that arise before judges who have worked with the Environmental Law Institute.
As The Washington Free Beacon previously reported, Sher Edling has taken up lawsuits against the oil industry on behalf of at least nine Democrat-run states and more than a dozen Democrat-run cities. The lawsuits accuse oil companies of causing climate change and deceiving the public about the alleged harms of burning fossil fuels.
Sher Edling represented the city and county of Honolulu in a 2020 lawsuit seeking to force Sunoco, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevon, BP, and others to compensate them for coastal erosion, tropical storms, and flooding. Hawaii Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald allowed the case to proceed in late 2023. In December 2022, Recktenwald spoke at an Environmental Law Institute event on “Hurricanes in a Changing Climate and Related Litigation.”
ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project aims “to provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation,” according to its website. Since its creation in 2018, the project estimates that it has hosted more than 50 events and trained more than 2,000 judges.
“The Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project isn’t education; it’s a backdoor lobbying effort targeting judges with materials crafted by climate activists and litigation insiders,” Jason Isaac, founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute, previously told The Daily Signal. He called it a “scheme to rig the courts against American energy.”
ELI says it does not advise judges how they should rule on any issue.
“The Climate Judiciary Project does not participate in litigation, support or coordinate with any parties related to any litigation, or advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case,” ELI Communications Director Nick Collins told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday.
The Environmental Protection Agency canceled two grants to the Environmental Law Institute, which had sought to integrate “environmental justice in restoration and protection programs” and build “capacity to incorporate climate change in compensatory mitigation projects.”
“Since day one, the Trump EPA has been crystal clear that the Biden-Harris administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment,” an agency spokesperson told The Daily Signal.
The ELI defended its relationship with the Biden EPA.
“Through every administration, the Environmental Law Institute has worked closely with the EPA to ensure Americans have access to clean air and water,” the spokesperson told The Daily Signal. “To do its work ELI receives support from a wide range of sources, including energy companies, private philanthropy, and individual donors, but no funder dictates our work. Nor does shared philanthropic support create partiality or a conflict of interest, and the assertion that they do is false and ridiculous.”
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, who led a group of state litigators in urging the EPA to defund ELI, condemned the Climate Judiciary Project’s efforts as “lawfare.”
“This is the Left not being able to get their agenda passed through the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate, so what do they do? They shift their tactics and they run to their buddies on the judiciary,” Knudsen previously told The Daily Signal.
