Full Disclosure for All, Including the “Selfless Defenders of the Environment” An update, October 2026

Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant, Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Full Disclosure for All, Including the “Selfless Defenders of the Environment”

An update from 2013, October 2026

Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant, Sheboygan, Wisconsin

I have been arguing for full disclosure since at least 2013. The rule is simple. Scientists, futurists, businesses, Wall Street desks, countries, universities, federal agencies, NGOs, forecasters, analysts, energy predictors, and environmental activists should have to disclose all material information. That means private funding, direct NGO funding, money passed from one NGO to another, federal and state grants, foreign money, individual studies and projects, university awards, and direct payments.

Judith Curry put the reason cleanly years ago. Material facts of this kind create a funding bias in a world that still claims to want humility and humanistic objectivity. Federal money, she noted, is many orders of magnitude larger than industrial money, and it can steer the questions that get asked, the findings that get published, and the consensus that gets spoken to power. We deserve the disclosures. The demand has not aged. The numbers have only gotten larger.

Climbing onto the climate gravy train

The popular picture, encouraged by the media, is still David against Goliath. Selfless defenders of the environment are cast against greedy multi-billion-dollar corporations and their lavishly funded stooges. Profits on one side. The Earth and future generations, on the other hand. Case closed, the camera says.

In 2007, NBC Nightly News breathlessly reported a Union of Concerned Scientists claim that ExxonMobil had given almost $16 million over seven years to “denier groups.” The figure that stuck was $15,837,873. To the mainstream press, that was the smoking gun.

Left unreported was a larger fact sitting in the New York Times archive. In 2002, ExxonMobil pledged $100 million to Stanford University for the Global Climate and Energy Project, which focuses on research into ways to meet growing energy needs without worsening global warming. The oil company gave more to one university climate program than the entire seven-year sum the networks treated as proof of a bought opposition. UCS’s own later tally put ExxonMobil grants to the groups it disliked at roughly $38 million from 1998 through 2019. The Stanford pledge alone was more than double that.

Al Gore, meanwhile, took Qatari oil money for Current TV. The outrage was selective. Sixteen million dollars over seven years was a scandal. A hundred million dollars to fight warming was a virtue. That double standard is the whole argument in miniature.

Who is David, who is Goliath

Put the old $16 million in a 2026 frame.

A Just the News review of 2021 tax filings found that fifteen large environmental groups campaigning against fossil fuels took in about $5 billion in gross receipts. The ten largest oil and gas industry groups took in $373 million. Eight large conservative and libertarian nonprofits that defend coal, oil, and gas took in $145 million. Combined, the industry groups and the skeptic nonprofits had $519 million.

The anti-fossil groups had nearly ten times that. For every dollar on the “Goliath” side of the cartoon, about $9.60 went to the groups cast as David.

The single-organization numbers are plainer still. The Nature Conservancy reported about $1.48 billion in revenue for fiscal 2024, with assets near $9.5 billion and government grants and contracts of about $165 million.

The Environmental Defense Fund has run in the several hundreds of millions. The Natural Resources Defense Council has spent on the order of $220 million to $250 million in recent filings. The Sierra Club has run near $169 million to $173 million. Earthjustice has spent on the order of $150 million. Rocky Mountain Institute and the World Resources Institute sit in the same neighborhood.

On the other side of the ledger, the Heartland Institute raised about $3.3 million in 2024, from roughly 2,700 donors, and took no government money at any level.

The CO2 Coalition reported about $4.5 million in revenue for 2024. The Competitive Enterprise Institute spent about $8.6 million in 2024, and only a fraction of that was energy work. Heartland’s entire year is a rounding error on the Nature Conservancy’s government line alone.

A single USDA grant in 2007, $20 million to study how farm odors contribute to warming, already exceeded everything ExxonMobil was accused of giving the skeptics. That comparison has not gotten kinder to the cartoon.

The public till

Private philanthropy is only half the story. The public till is the other half, and it does not fund the skeptics.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund put $27 billion into a financing network run largely through nonprofit intermediaries. EPA obligated that money in 2024. The Trump EPA later tried to claw back roughly $20 billion of it. An appeals court in August 2026 said the agency could not. Whatever one thinks of the lawsuits, the scale is the point. One federal program, aimed at a handful of nonprofit vehicles, dwarfs the combined annual budgets of every American organization the press still calls a “denier group.”

Globally, the Climate Policy Initiative reports that climate finance surpassed $2 trillion in 2024, with 2025 estimated at nearly $2.1 trillion. Multilateral development banks alone reported a record $163 billion in climate finance in 2025. ClimateWorks has put U.S. environmental movement spending on climate causes and advocacy at nearly $12.5 billion a year. The old line that the world was spending nearly $1 billion a day to prevent climate change is no longer a provocation. It is an understatement.

None of that money requires the recipient to disclose, in plain language, how much came from another NGO, how much came from a foreign foundation, how much came from a federal pass-through, or how much of a university lab’s work was shaped by the grant that paid for it. The Sixteen Thirty Fund and the rest of the pass-through world move hundreds of millions of dollars into advocacy, with the donor’s name often one or two layers back. Cross-NGO contributions are a feature, not a bug. Full disclosure would make them visible.

What disclosure should actually mean

The ask has not changed since 2013. It has only gotten more obvious.

Material disclosure should cover private funding, direct NGO funding, money moving between NGOs, federal and state grants, foreign funding, project-level awards, university grants, and direct payments.

It should apply to the scientist, the department, the journal, the agency, the foundation, and the activist group with equal force. A Form 990 is a start. It is not a substitute for saying who paid for the study, who paid the intermediary, and who paid the intermediary’s intermediary.

Oil-company money is not exempt from the rule. Neither is foundation money. Neither is a Department of Energy grant, an EPA cooperative agreement, or a university center whose letterhead says independent and whose budget says otherwise. ExxonMobil’s Stanford pledge belonged in the 2007 NBC story. The Nature Conservancy’s government line belongs in every story that still calls these groups shoestring defenders of the planet. Heartland’s zero in the government-grants box belongs there too.

Funding is not guilt. Silence about funding is the problem. A reader can weigh a paper, a model, a press release, or a Senate testimony only if the money is on the table. Curry’s point still holds. Biased funding can skew the questions, the citations, and the consensus. The skew can run from industry. It can also run from the agency whose mission the research is written to support. The second stream is larger. The press has spent twenty years on the first.

Energy Humanist Thinks

Energy is the foundation of health, work, and fairness. A policy built on undisclosed funds is one the public cannot audit. The Midwest habit is simpler than the grant language. Say who paid. Say how much. Say it for everyone, including the groups that call themselves selfless. Abundance, reliability, and low cost do not require a hidden till. They require adults who will show the books.

The 2007 smoking gun was $16 million over seven years. The 2026 books show billions on the other side of that gun, much of it public, much of it passed from one nonprofit to the next. Full disclosure was the right demand in 2013. It is the minimum demand now.