Leonardo DiCaprio’s non-profit basis awarded grants to a darkish cash group which, in flip, funneled cash to a legislation agency spearheading local weather nuisance lawsuits nationwide, in response to emails reviewed by Fox Information Digital.
Correspondence between Dan Emmett, a significant philanthropist, and Ann Carlson — a College of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) local weather professor — in 2017 revealed that the 2 labored with legislation agency Sher Edling to lift cash for its efforts to sue oil firms over alleged local weather change deception on behalf of state and native governments, in response to the emails obtained by watchdog group Authorities Accountability & Oversight (GAO) and shared with Fox Information Digital.
Of their emails, Emmett and Carlson focus on how Chuck Savitt, Sher Edling’s director of strategic consumer relationships, had sought Emmett’s assist and had already acquired assist from Terry Tamminen in his function because the Leonardo DiCaprio Basis’s CEO, a title he held between 2016 and 2019. When the emails have been exchanged, Carlson, who's now a senior Biden administration official, served as co-director of the UCLA Emmett Institute on Local weather Change & the Surroundings, the advisory board which Emmett nonetheless chairs.
“Chuck Savitt who's heading this new group behind the lawsuits has been searching for our assist,” Emmett wrote to Carlson on July 22, 2017. “Terry Tamminen in his new function with the DiCaprio Basis has been a key supporter.”
Emmett additionally forwarded a message Savitt despatched him three days earlier on July 19, 2022 asking for his assist, in response to the information. Savitt talked about in that electronic mail that Sher Edling’s first lawsuits have been filed with the assist of the Collective Motion Fund for Accountability, Resilience and Adaptation, a fund managed on the time by darkish cash group Sources Legacy Fund (RLF).
“Wished to let you understand that we filed the primary three lawsuits supported by the Collective Motion Fund on Monday,” Savitt had instructed Emmett. “These precedent setting circumstances name on 37 of the world’s main fossil gasoline firms to take accountability for the devastating injury sea degree rise – attributable to their greenhouse gasoline emissions – is having on coastal communities.”
Savitt additionally supplied to arrange a gathering between Emmett and Vic Sher, a associate at Sher Edling.
The e-mail correspondence passed off two months earlier than the Leonardo DiCaprio Basis publicly introduced it might contribute $20 million in grants to numerous local weather and conservation causes. The group’s announcement, which has since been deleted however stays archived, included a grant to the RLF “to assist precedent-setting authorized actions to carry main companies within the fossil gasoline trade liable,” intently mirroring Savitt’s language.
“These grantees are energetic on the bottom, defending our oceans, forests and endangered species for future generations – and tackling the pressing, existential challenges of local weather change,” DiCaprio stated on the time.
Tamminen added that the group believed it wanted “to do as a lot as we will now, earlier than it's too late.” The announcement didn’t point out Sher Edling.
In February 2018, months after the preliminary electronic mail trade, Emmett instructed Carlson that she may point out to different potential donors that he and the Leonardo DiCaprio Basis have been now “critical supporters” of Sher Edling’s ongoing litigation. The suggestion got here after Carlson requested whether or not she ought to ask New York philanthropist Andy Sabin to assist the trouble.
“You may inform him Terry’s group and I are each critical supporters, that you're an advisor, that the science is there, that it may do extra for the surroundings than absolutely anything happening if it succeeds,” Emmett stated within the electronic mail Carlson.
Along with the Leonardo DiCaprio Basis and the Emmett Basis, the MacArthur Basis, William and Flora Hewlett Basis, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and JPB Basis have contributed to the Collective Motion Fund since 2017.
Sher Edling’s web site states that the agency is particularly devoted to representing “states, cities, public companies, and companies in high-impact, high-value environmental circumstances.” Since its preliminary circumstances in July 2017 — filed on behalf of a metropolis and two counties in California — Sher Edling has sued main oil firms on behalf of Delaware, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York Metropolis, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Baltimore, Honolulu and a number of native governments throughout the nation, alleging the businesses have deceived the general public about local weather change.
A lot of the circumstances are ongoing with two, involving San Francisco and Oakland, Calfornia, on enchantment earlier than a federal panel.
“Clearly, the donors created — together with DiCaprio — a number of purported arms’ lengths,” Chris Horner, a lawyer who represented GAO within the case involving the emails, instructed Fox Information Digital in an interview.
“This mannequin used a few pass-throughs, by which DiCaprio and, it seems, Dan Emmett and others may run issues, together with DiCaprio’s basis and Sources Legacy Fund, and so they’re not seen as financing the assault,” Horner added.
Total, the RLF contributed greater than $5.2 million to Sher Edling between 2017 and 2020, in response to the group’s tax filings throughout that interval. The group doesn’t disclose its donors and declined to verify who it beforehand acquired cash from to fund Sher Edling’s litigation.
“From 2017 to 2020, Sher Edling acquired grants from RLF to pursue charitable actions to carry fossil gasoline firms accountable for the accuracy of data that they had disseminated to shoppers and the general public in regards to the function their merchandise performed in inflicting local weather change,” an RLF spokesperson Mark Kleinman instructed Fox Information Digital in an electronic mail.
“RLF receives assist from many funding entities, and its board of administrators and workers make all choices as to the place the funding goes,” the spokesperson continued.
Specialists have beforehand raised issues relating to the supply of Sher Edling’s funding for its local weather litigation.
Michael Krauss, a legislation professor emeritus at George Mason College, famous in a 2020 Forbes article the association through which Sher Edling receives a payout from localities it represents if its circumstances are profitable whereas, on the identical time, it receives funding from tax-exempt teams, thereby eradicating some danger concerned with taking up such circumstances.
“Can a non-profit funnel donations to a for-profit legislation agency that has already decided a distinct type of compensation?” Kraus wrote. “Might a legislation agency, which may very well be fabulously enriched on a contingent foundation, ethically settle for funding that's paid whether or not or not the consumer prevails?”
“If laws via litigation is dangerous, what to make of laws via litigation backed by taxpayers via charitable donations? We don’t have all of the solutions to those questions but,” he continued. “I believe we deserve them.”
Emmett, Tamminen, Sabin and the Earth Alliance, a company that subsumed the Leonardo DiCaprio Basis in 2019, didn’t reply to requests for remark.
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