Climate activists are as keen to follow the money as they are to follow the science. And we don’t mean it in a good way. When it comes to money, they’re quick to claim we deniers are crooked liars backed by “Big Oil”, our pockets stuffed with greasy petrodollars, even though as it turns out the big environmental foundations are rolling in hundreds of millions of dollars, to say nothing of what governments spend. But if you ask them to follow the money from Beijing to Western climate activists, they suddenly lose all interest. As Michael Doran and Brenda Shaffer recently wrote in Tablet magazine, “China’s Net Zero Advantage/ Beijing is pursuing a climate strategy that weakens the West while strengthening its own competitive position”. And it involves precisely the kind of shady complex financing with sinister overtones that hard-boiled skeptical journalists would love to explore… if we had any such left in the modern world.
Even when the activists notice, they don’t, as with a Bloomberg Green item that says:
“A deluge of solar panels and batteries from China has transformed Pakistan’s electricity sector, bringing huge benefits for consumers. Yet, there have been losers too: the nation’s already indebted energy industry, and a previous generation of China-backed and operated coal-fired power plants. It’s a scenario that offers a glimpse into the complex future for the global energy transition – a transformation that China’s officials and exporters remain determined to lead.”
Almost nothing in that passage is true except that China helped build and run a bunch of coal plants. But even it is portrayed as China’s determination to lead with solar.
As Doran and Shaffer say:
“For years, a large, influential, and well-funded Western network has campaigned to restrict the production and use of fossil fuels. Many of the same campaigning organizations also oppose nuclear power, the largest source of emissions-free electricity in the United States. Climate advocates seek to persuade the American government to surrender its energy advantage voluntarily. Beijing agrees. Over the past two decades, therefore, an alliance in all but name has taken shape. On one side stands the Chinese party-state. On the other stands a Western climate community much broader than its activist core: environmental organizations and the philanthropies that finance them, research institutes and international agencies, journalists who cover the transition to renewable energy, officials drawn from the movement’s own ranks, and the investors, asset managers, and financial institutions whose returns depend on the policies the movement secures.”
And again, if it were oil companies and skeptics there’d be a howl you could hear on the moon. Instead, eerie silence.
Now at CDN we do not believe in conspiracy theories. Humans are not clever enough to carry off gigantic conspiracies and through history what we actually find is that misplaced zealotry rather than cunning plots are far and away the worst danger except perhaps sheer stupidity. As we say, the problem with Hitler wasn’t that he was pretending to be a Nazi and the problem with Lenin wasn’t that he was pretending to be a Communist. Or Mao.
Or Xi Jinping. And of course the Chinese Politburo’s plan to take over the world is not a secret. They actually boast about it. And as always, our “statespersons” react with some variant of “Oh those wacky tyrants” when, for instance, Hitler publishes Mein Kampf or Khrushchev bellows “We will bury you” or Hamas pledges to annihilate Israel so the Canadian government gives them money. Or consider the Babylon Bee headline “Click Here To See The List Of Celebrities Who Have Condemned Iran For Sentencing Women To Public Beatings For Uncovering Their Faces”. The Iranian regime doesn’t have to lie about it; Malcolm Muggeridge’s “Great Liberal Death Wish” is alive, well and doing their work for them.
Of course tyrants aren’t above telling tactical fibs. Remember the outburst of “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” in the late 2010s, when Beijing decided it would be smart to drop the honeyed words and abuse Western governments and citizens in the kind of language we imagine is more common in “re-education” sessions, only to find that it caused us to stare in baffled horror? So yes, they dialed back the rhetoric, and useful idiots like Canada’s Mark Carney responded by declaring them a “strategic partner”. And they make some effort, generally unconvincing, to hide their sinister financial activities, while Western MSM make no effort to uncover them.
If you want a headline like “A Markham Mailbox and a Spoofed Construction Firm: How a B.C. Coal Terminal Traced an Alleged $6.2 Million Fraud Into an Apparent Chinese Money Laundering Network Spanning Canada’s Biggest Banks”, you need to go to upstart online publications. Though if you want fatuous denial, the government is ready and willing with, say, “Statement by the Minister of Finance welcoming the Financial Action Task Force Mutual Evaluation Report, showing Canada’s strong progress in combatting financial crime”.
Once again useful idiots not clever conspirators are at work. As Doran and Shaffer note:
“The Net Zero community is not uniform. Its radical wing seeks to end capitalism and usher in a new socialist experiment. Its wealthiest participants intend to profit from the transition to wind and solar. What binds them is not a pact or a chain of command but a convergence of interests. Many, if not most, of them would deny that the alliance with China exists at all.”
And in their mind it doesn’t. Just a convergence of interests. But when your interests converge with enemies of Western civilization, you might want to give a bit more thought to their moral and even mental soundness than activists typically do. But they don’t:
“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. The organizations working to avert climate change aim their strongest instruments – divestment, litigation, regulatory pressure, public shaming – at Western energy and industry, and at the governments that decline to restrict them.”
We ourselves have noted the weird tendency of climate activists to lionize China despite its obvious carbon sins. For instance “Minister Dabrusin advances Canada–China cooperation on climate, clean growth, and the environment”, a sadly typical Canadian government press release that babbles:
“For more than 30 years, Canada and China have worked together on the environment. This week, Canada’s Minister of the Environment, Climate Change and Nature, the Honourable Julie Dabrusin, led Canada’s delegation to the Annual General Meeting of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), which took place in Beijing, China, from September 27 to 29, 2026…. No country can tackle climate change or protect nature alone. Global environmental challenges require global solutions. As the world’s second largest economy, a major source of global emissions, and one of the most biodiverse countries, sustained engagement with China is essential to advancing progress on climate change, pollution, and biodiversity. During Prime Minister Carney’s January 2026 visit to China, Canada and China forged a new strategic partnership and committed to deepening cooperation on climate and the environment, including through the CCICED, bilateral memorandums of understanding, and other multilateral frameworks.”
And we also recall the strange silence of the environmental movement waaaay back in the Cold War as to the Soviet Union’s being essentially a toxic waste dump spanning 11 time zones.
Such idiocy mercifully tends to backfire. Indeed the Chernobyl reactor meltdown was a devastating PR setback to the walking corpse the USSR had then become not least because they’d spent decades financing anti-nuclear movements in the West, including those blurring the line between nuclear power and nuclear bombs. But the Soviets, for instance, destroyed the Aral Sea in fairly plain view and Greenpeace didn’t care. Which recalls a broader comment about the East Bloc in The Economist shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, in their June 30, 1990 edition:
“a common presumption in the West lay in ruins – that East Germany had forged an identity for itself and that its people would certainly want to preserve the better parts of their system in any opening toward the West. When the lid was lifted, the pot was found to be scorched and empty.”
Why didn’t we know? There were voices trying to make it plain, including this memorable passage from Tom Clancy’s 1984 Hunt for Red October about the naval base at Polyarny:
“The water was coated with the bilge oil of numberless ships, filth that would not evaporate in the low temperatures and that left a black ring on the rocky walls of the fjord as though from the bath of a slovenly giant. An altogether apt simile, Ramius thought. The Soviet giant cared little for the dirt it left on the face of the earth, he grumbled to himself.”
But such warnings were pushed to the margins because in polite society it was cool to be anti-anti-Communist and hopelessly rustic to be anti-Communist. As with the reputable economists who said things like John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1984 hallucinatory:
“Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”
Or Justin Trudeau’s facile 2013 response on being asked which nation he admired most:
“There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.”
Which was, be it noted, with specific reference to their alleged pivot to environmentalism, as he immediately continued “and say ‘we need to go green fastest…we need to start investing in solar” one of many things that made “Little Potato” an idiot useful to them and harmful to us as they went all-in on coal and his climate policies strangled our economy. But it didn’t derail his surge to power because it reflected the views of an astounding number of people in the West, especially influential people. As Doran and Shaffer also write:
“The respect accorded to Beijing by Christiana Figueres, who ran the U.N. climate secretariat and midwifed the Paris Agreement, is instructive. In November 2025 she said that in three decades of climate diplomacy, the Chinese had ‘always under-promised and over-delivered,’ a habit she attributed to integrity and humility. John Kerry, then the United States climate envoy and the movement’s most senior American official, put the matter more starkly. At the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021, on the day Washington announced a cooperation agreement with Beijing, Kerry was asked about the forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, where most of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon is produced. The subject, he said, was ‘not my lane.’ His job was to move the climate agenda forward. Figueres credits Beijing with integrity. Kerry declines to look at what Beijing does. Neither is an outlier.”
They rightly insist that it is a puzzle requiring a solution. And they add:
“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.”
Which they then cite including the grotesque detail that after the founder of Code Pink married an American technology entrepreneur who had moved his operations to Shanghai, that outfit pivoted from criticizing China’s gender policy to praising it, and their Uyghur repression as well.
To repeat, it’s not a conspiracy and not a plot. It’s an ethos. Including the weird Greta-Thunberg-themed convergence of climate and antisemitism:
“This pattern is too broad to dismiss as incidental. The World’s Youth for Climate Justice calls Palestine ‘part and parcel’ of the climate struggle.”
Again we say that ideas matter and have consequences. Not only for actions, but also for other ideas; there is a ghastly coherence to the radical view of the world including how it handles evidence, emphasizing some things and dismissing others. And of course the virtues of the open society create at least superficially weaknesses that the brittle tyrannies lack:
“At home, the Net Zero establishment commands an arsenal available only in an open society: lobbying, protest, litigation, shareholder resolutions, disclosure requirements, freedom-of-information requests, legislative pressure, hostile journalism, and public shaming. In China, the party-state will not tolerate these instruments and tactics. No autonomous environmental movement is free to organize against government policy. The courts, press, civic organizations, and corporate sector all remain subordinate to the Communist Party. The Net Zero establishment therefore enters China disarmed. Its only path forward is to develop a relationship with the state, and it comes to that task as a supplicant, kowtowing and bearing gifts. More than just a practical convenience, access becomes professional capital. The person who can meet Chinese ministers, sit on an official advisory council, or interpret Beijing’s plans to Western donors and governments acquires status, funding, and intellectual authority.”
But of course Western politicians, including Mark Carney, manage somehow to exclude from their minds the knowledge that China works that way because it is a Communist tyranny. Once again the useful idiots do the tyrants’ work for them. And why? Because of how they think, their dubious attachment to their own tradition, the enormous self-esteem that opens them to the subtle flattery of being treated as wise and important, the lifestyles and the acclaim including from journalists with similar flaws.
The result is dangerous as well as brazen:
“At the heart of the grand bargain is an agreement over Western and Chinese policies defined by simple arithmetic. China adds. The West subtracts. Beijing adds wind, solar, hydroelectricity, and nuclear power to its energy supplies without retiring coal, oil, or natural gas. It expands manufacturing capacity and uses the state to secure supply chains and capture export markets for manufactured goods related to wind and solar energy industries and electric vehicles while still expanding fossil fuel use. In 2024 alone, China began construction on 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plants, the highest level in a decade, accounting for 93% of all new coal construction on earth. The Net Zero movement accepts China’s behavior while selling an entirely different prescription at home: close mines; seal wells; shut down pipelines, refineries, and power plants; deny capital to disfavored industries; and compel the adoption of approved replacements, which, by the way, are manufactured in China.”
If it were a plot, they’d try to hide parts of it. But it’s not. And unfortunately it would be a great deal less dangerous if it were a conspiracy, susceptible of being unmasked and demolished in the process.
Instead it’s a mindset. A mindset shared in Beijing, the various offices of the Green Money Machine, a great many ministries in democracies, a great many universities and also, alas, the media who ought to be investigating it instead of facilitating it.
You keep misunderstanding what a conspiracy is. Similar to how you reflect on climate change being a statistical blah blah blah, you should reflect on what a conspiracy is: a group of people trying to get some personal gain at the cost of others. Simple example: your favorite club has 3 people on the board, 2 of them don't like the third and start scheming to damage his reputation, prove he's incompetent, etc, until he's voted out. You can't pretend that this situation doesn't happen. This happens all the time as soon as bureaucracy and committees are involved. The 2 people are the conspiracy, yet they get the members of the club to vote their third man out. Those are the useful idiots. They don't know what they're doing, yet they will repeat gossip about the third man being incompetent, unwittingly becoming part of the conspiracy.
Your mention of useful idiots implies that there are people making use of those idiots. THAT is the conspiracy. And the world is complex, so there are multiple strings attached to each puppet, pulling often in the same direction, sometimes in opposite ones. That doesn't mean that you should ignore the fact that useful idiots are being used to execute the plans of some conspirator.
China's plans are public, yet most people don't know about them. There is a cover-up going on there. China being public about the plans may just be a strategic move to take the wind out of the sails of people warning about them. The plans do still exist and are being executed, a huge part of it will be in the shadows.
Conspiracies are real and exist on every level of human interaction. Pretending they don't exist is naive and frankly unscientific as many of the past have been revealed and proven. That doesn't mean that every conspiracy theory is correct. It means that you shouldn't excuse destructive behaviour as incompetence until you have actively disproven conspiracy.