Millions of Taxpayer Dollars Have Subsidized Project 2025 and Climate Denial

After the hottest summer in recorded human history — along with Hurricanes Helene and Milton, flooding and wildfires — why isn’t there a greater push for action on climate change?

One reason is that big oil, gas and coal companies — and their allies in Congress — block the urgent action that’s required. They do this in part by denying basic climate science, and in many cases, they receive enormous, publicly subsidized tax benefits to do it. And in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, millions in charitable donations poured into policy development at the Heritage Foundation, producing the Project 2025 Blueprint for the incoming Trump administration.

It’s true. Wealthy donors and fossil fuel corporations regularly make “charitable” donations to nonprofit organizations that deny science, sow doubt about the urgency of climate change and run out the clock for timely action. When they deduct those contributions from their tax bill, they’re effectively being subsidized by you — the taxpayer.

Many of these donors have built their fortunes in the oil, coal and gas industries or in the industries that support them, like banking and insurance. They have a vested interest in ensuring the world’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels. These include the Koch family of private energy giant Koch Industries, and the Scaife family, heirs to the Mellon oil and banking fortune.

Here’s how it works, according to a new report I’ve co-authored for the Institute for Policy Studies and Climate Accountability Research Project: Through U.S. charitable giving tax laws, donors like the Kochs and Scaifes reduce their taxes when they give to qualified, tax-exempt nonprofit charities. The wealthier the donor, the greater the reduction in their tax bill. By one estimate, for every dollar a billionaire gives to charity, taxpayers chip in up to 74 cents in lost tax revenue.

From 2020 to 2022, U.S. nonprofits that deny basic climate science received $5.8 billion in tax-deductible donations.

Our report identified 137 nonprofit tax-exempt organizations that actively spread climate disinformation, working effectively to confound public opinion and delay urgent action on climate.

For example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) received $21 million in charitable contributions from 2020 to 2022. CEI boasts that it’s been “instrumental” in stalling climate action, both in blocking ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and in pressuring former (and now incoming) President Donald Trump to withdraw from the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement.

In 2013, Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, predicted that $500 million was given to organizations devoted to undermining the science of climate change. We estimate that figure has risen into the billions: Over three years, from 2020 to 2022, U.S. nonprofits that deny basic climate science received $5.8 billion in tax-deductible donations. Some $219 million went to groups that primarily work on climate disinformation.

The rest went to multi-issue organizations that include climate denial as part of their work — groups like The Heritage Foundation, which developed the extremist Project 2025 blueprint that would, among other things, roll back environmental regulations and cancel billions of dollars’ worth of investments in green jobs. Other recommendations from Project 2025 include the elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (OCAA).

Conservatively, we estimate that somewhere between $219 million and $1 billion flowed directly to climate disinformation, all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, during our study period between 2020 and 2022.

Even though these are effectively our tax dollars at work, we don’t know the precise figure. That’s because many donors give through vehicles called donor-advised funds (DAFs), which mask the identity of donors and their recipient organizations. Roughly 16 percent of all donations to climate disinformation groups come through DAFs. Many billions more may have come through private individual donations as well.

If we want to save the planet, we need transparency reforms to reveal this web of secret donations.

The fossil fuel industry has harnessed our charitable system for their self-serving, harmful disinformation campaigns — and they do it largely in secret. We know the oil, gas and coal industry has been funding disinformation for almost half a century, even as their own internal research documented the harms from carbon and methane emissions. So what can we do about it? One simple step is to improve transparency, so the public has more accurate information about where these taxpayer-subsidized donations are going.

Currently, DAF sponsoring organizations — like Schwab Charitable or Fidelity Charitable — are only required to disclose total grants to nonprofits from their sponsoring fund, not from each DAF account, so we don’t know the individual donor who gave the funds. Our report urges lawmakers to pass legislation to require grants from DAFs to be reported on an individual account basis.

We’re also calling to close another DAF loophole. Private charitable foundations, which are required by law to distribute 5 percent of their assets each year, are increasingly giving funds to DAFs and counting that toward their payout requirements. That loophole, which can conceal the actual grant recipients, should be closed.

U.S. taxpayers are likely subsidizing billions of dollars of donations to climate misinformation organizations. If we want to save the planet, we need transparency reforms to reveal this web of secret donations.