Antifracking Money Trail Leads to Russian Oil Industry

Envirokooks accuse opponents of the global warming hoax of being paid by the nefarious energy companies that enable our standard of living. If only. Meanwhile…

A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.

In addition to those roles, Hoskins is a director at a company called Klein Ltd. No one knows where that firm’s money comes from. …

The only publicly available documentation of any business conducted by Klein Ltd. were two Internal Revenue Service filings by the California-based Sea Change Foundation, which showed that Klein had contributed $23 million to the group in 2010 and 2011.

Shell games with dummy companies like Klein Ltd. are necessary to keep people from realizing where the money is coming from as it is channeled into the coffers of left-wing activist groups.

The Sierra Club, the Natural Resource Defense Council, Food and Water Watch, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Center for American Progress were among the recipients of Sea Change’s $100 million in grants in 2010 and 2011. …

The Sierra Club, which received nearly $8.5 million from Sea Change in 2010 and 2011, launched its “Beyond Natural Gas” campaign the following year. The effort has become one of the largest and best-funded environmentalist campaigns combating fracking and the extraction of natural gas in general.

Russians have employed this same devious strategy in Europe:

“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, formerly NATO’s secretary general, said last year.

Similarly reliant on high energy prices that are threatened by US production, Arabs play this game too. For example, a propaganda movie by the execrable Matt Damon attacking American oil and natural gas producers (Promised Land) was partially financed by the United Arab Emirates.

Don’t be too hard on the Russians and Arabs for trying to keep their profits up by keeping our production down. Even their greed is a cleaner motivation than the leftist politics of Damon and the Sierra Club.

On a tip from Artfldgr. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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