The dark green lobby that nobody talks about
There is a highly influential lobbying group in Europe, founded and based in The Hague, which you have never heard of: the European Climate Foundation. With an annual budget of hundreds of millions of euros, funded by American billionaires, it successfully lobbies for climate neutrality in Europe. Yet the media remains deafeningly silent on this group.
Climate Intelligence (Clintel) is an independent foundation informing people about climate change and climate policies.
The European Climate Foundation: The Dark Green Lobby Shaping EU Climate Policy
Marcel Crok
Date: 13 July 2026
As director of the Clintel Foundation, I am bombarded weekly on social media with accusations about our funding. We are allegedly paid by the oil industry to spread disinformation about the climate. That narrative was skilfully peddled to the world shortly after Clintel was founded in 2019, by the investigative teams at Follow The Money and the TV programme Pointer, which also devoted two episodes to us, because, according to them, we were “so influential” despite our short history. Just Google “Follow The Money Clintel Guus Berkhout Shell” and this is the AI result:
An investigation by Follow the Money and Pointer has uncovered a financial ‘oil trail’ leading from the fossil fuel industry to Guus Berkhout’s climate-sceptic platform, Clintel. Berkhout received millions from dozens of oil companies, including Shell, for his Delphi Consortium, part of which was used to fund climate-sceptic work.
A “financial oil trail” – you have to hand it to the journalists at Pointer and FTM; they know how to use language effectively to conjure up the ‘right’ image. In their second broadcast in 2022, Pointer blithely claimed that Clintel is funded by the oil industry. I was fed up with Pointer’s lies and, on a shoestring budget, launched a lawsuit against Pointer, which was defended (using public funds) by two lawyers from the Zuidas business district in Amsterdam. The judge did, however, reprimand Pointer on this point, but Clintel still lost the case because the judge ruled that our proposed correction was inadequate. For many people, however, it makes no difference; ‘funded by the oil industry’ remains the easiest way to brush us aside.
European Climate Foundation
https://clintel.org/european-climate-foundation-lobby/
