Potentially, fifty years from now people may look back and marvel at how easily (and cheaply) China could wind up the Western liberals, and how they got away with it. We may wonder how it was not obvious that the world was caught in a covert Cold War. We don’t have all the receipts to say that now, and may never get them, but we have the method, the motive and the opportunity.

As I keep saying there are so many advantages to China it would be crazy if it weren’t manipulating the West to sabotage our own success. But Peter Doran and Brenda Shaffer have taken that further and written a very classy feature in Tablet.

They followed the money as far as they could, but many of the dollars vanish in a swamp of collected philanthropic funds which earnestly profess their angst and indignation against Western carbon emitters, but somehow cheer on China even though it accounts for 93% of all new coal constructions on Earth. A funny coincidence…

Propaganda

And so it is that China somehow ends up being in bed with Western lefties who say they hate carbon emissions but admire China. Then these Western institutions, PhD’s, and NGO’s tell the world how wonderful and advanced China is in renewables. This third party endorsement is also handy as a much more convincing than a press release from the CCP.  In effect, donating to a Green fund in the West would be one way of laundering propaganda, wouldn’t it?

We know China already sends some money to Western charities to ‘help’ us clean up our environment. (It’s so sweet of a developing nation to care about rich world pollution, don’t you think?). But the end result of that donation could easily be viewed as an economic investment that damages the West and boosts Chinese trade.

The sums of money that can be traced back to China are in the hundreds of thousands or low million per individual. But if a foreign entity was sending many millions of dollars to influence an adversary’s policies, they wouldn’t want to advertise that would they?

We know China sends money to universities and NGOs, through Energy Foundation China, and former CCP members were involved. To bluntly lay the hostility on the table — we have found secret communication devices in some Chinese electronic goods, we know the CCP lied about Covid, spread it to the world on planes from Wuhan, while stopping it at home, and we know of at least two suspicious biolabs in the US stocked with things labeled ‘Ebola’. We know China is cutting submarine cables around Taiwan and in the Baltic sea, and possibly off Perth, Western Australia.

We would have to be pretty stupid to not even ask the question, just how much of the Climate obsession in the West is driven by China? China has already been caught funding eco-lawfare suits in the USA to sabotage American energy dominance.

China’s Net Zero advantage

The following excerpts from the article China’s Net Zero Advantage are in italics.

By Peter Doran and Brenda Shaffer, Tablet 

In its competition with China, the United States holds a natural advantage: abundant oil and cheap natural gas. Reliable energy powers factories, data centers, transportation networks, and military operations. It lets the United States combine technological innovation with industrial scale, an advantage that China, dependent on imported oil and gas, cannot easily reproduce.

But China has found a partial answer: the Net Zero movement.

Over the past two decades, therefore, an alliance in all but name has taken shape.

On the surface, it looks like a relationship of strange bedfellows. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the largest producer and consumer of coal. Its power system still runs mainly on coal, and it burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. By the climate movement’s own stated goal, the reduction of emissions, China should be its principal target. It is not.

Guess who was behind Code Pink?

Several well-publicized cases suggest that one reason China appears to be above Net Zero criticism is that Beijing is playing a major role in funding the climate movement. For example, Neville Roy Singham, an American technology entrepreneur, has reportedly been the subject of a federal grand jury inquiry in New York. Singham sold his consulting firm Thoughtworks in 2017 for $785 million, moved his operations to Shanghai, and began financing a global network of nonprofits and media outlets. In August 2023, The New York Times reported that Singham, working closely with the Chinese government’s media apparatus, financed the spread of its messaging worldwide through nonprofits and shell companies. Singham denied receiving funds or instructions from any government or party, including the Chinese Communist Party.

One recipient of his philanthropy has been Code Pink, the antiwar group cofounded by Jodie Evans, whom Singham married in 2017.

“China is not the enemy”

According to Sen. Tom Cotton, $1.4 million moved from groups associated with Singham and found it’s way to Code Pink. Whereupon Code Pink stopped criticizing the Uighur treatment in China, and stopped worrying about the fate of human rights workers in China. A few years later they started saying things like “China is not the enemy”.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union cultivated Western peace and antinuclear movements that constrained Western governments and left Soviet power untouched. It also sponsored the campaign that produced the U.N. resolution equating Zionism with racism—a line crafted in Moscow and carried at the United Nations by Soviet and Arab clients, then taken up by parts of the Western left. Beijing is the heir to this tradition, working now from inside the world economy rather than from outside it.

The costs fall almost entirely on America and its allies.

British and European industrial electricity is among the most expensive in the world. When the price of power rises, manufacturing contracts, plants close, and the jobs and the tax base move. China keeps adding supply and selling electricity to its factories at prices the West cannot match. Climate policy, as practiced, is a transfer of industrial advantage to China.

The replacement systems are Chinese. China dominates every stage of solar and wind manufacturing, battery cells and their materials, and the processing of critical minerals—and, increasingly, electric vehicles themselves. A transition mandated by Western governments therefore transfers consumer demand to Chinese factories and hands control of supply to Chinese planners. With the outbreak of the Ukraine war, Europe learned from Russian gas the cost of a single choke point. Renewable-energy supply chains have more of them.

For some reason China wants to help Americans breathe the cleanest air?

Energy Foundation China has written checks, for example, to the Rocky Mountain Institute, which in 2022 published the gas-stove asthma paper that Consumer Product Safety commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm helped turn into a national fight over gas in the home. Destroying the much-deserved reputation of natural gas, which is abundant in the United States, as a low-polluting source of cheap energy has obvious national-security advantages for China.

Scrutiny

There’s no document that shows the China instigated this research, but the conflict of interest “deserves some scrutiny” as they say.

They also present vulnerabilities pipelines never did. According to the International Energy Agency, China accounted for about 80% of global manufacturing capacity for solar and battery inverters in 2025. These devices convert solar or battery output into grid power. Western operators have found undocumented communications hardware in some Chinese-made equipment. Chinese military writing treats an adversary’s energy system as an early target. The easiest way to stop a fighter-bomber is not to shoot it down. It is to deny it electricity before it takes off.

Friendly agencies in the West help to launder CCP propaganda:

Beijing cannot manufacture Western credibility. A Chinese state outlet can call China a climate leader indefinitely without moving a single Western legislature, because the audience knows who is speaking. The same claim advanced by an American foundation president, a European research institute, or an international agency carries the authority of institutions trusted precisely because they are not Chinese. The arrangement solves the propagandist’s problem. It separates the message from the messenger.

There is a lot more detail to the story at Tablet magazine. China didn’t start the Climate Change movement, and we know the big Bankers, the renewables industry, and those who want Big Government have a trillion reasons to push the Climate Change barrow. But it’s easy to imagine how China could have been pulled into the slip-stream and taken advantage of it. The question today is how much influence does China have now?