Beijing is pursuing a climate strategy that weakens the West while strengthening its own competitive position
by Michael Doran and Brenda Shaffer
September 16, 2026
In its competition with China, the United States holds a natural advantage: abundant oil and cheap natural gas. Reliable energy powers factories, data centers, transportation networks, and military operations. It lets the United States combine technological innovation with industrial scale, an advantage that China, dependent on imported oil and gas, cannot easily reproduce.
But China has found a partial answer: the Net Zero movement. 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.
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.
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.
Of China, they speak in an entirely different register. 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. Between the diplomat who built the climate regime and the envoy who bargained with the world’s largest emitter lies the settled disposition of the Net Zero movement: Contrary to all available emissions evidence, China is the morally serious party, and the West is the laggard. Why?
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. For example, Neville Roy Singham, an American technology entrepreneur, has reportedly been the subject of a federal grand jury inquiry in New York. Singham sold his consulting firm Thoughtworks in 2017 for $785 million, moved his operations to Shanghai, and began financing a global network of nonprofits and media outlets. In August 2023, The New York Times reported that Singham, working closely with the Chinese government’s media apparatus, financed the spread of its messaging worldwide through nonprofits and shell companies. Singham denied receiving funds or instructions from any government or party, including the Chinese Communist Party.
One recipient of his philanthropy has been Code Pink, the antiwar group cofounded by Jodie Evans, whom Singham married in 2017. In November 2025, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) asked the attorney general to investigate Code Pink under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
At the heart of the grand bargain is an agreement over Western and Chinese policies defined by simple arithmetic. China adds. The West subtracts.
Cotton’s letter noted that, before her marriage to Singham, Evans had demanded that Beijing stop repressing women’s human-rights defenders. After it, she discovered China to be a defender of the oppressed. Code Pink stopped criticizing Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs and instead took up its defense, launching, in 2020, a campaign under the slogan “China is not our enemy.” Entities linked to Singham, Cotton’s letter said, had supplied Code Pink with more than $1.4 million since 2017, roughly a quarter of its funding, a figure the letter drew from the Times investigation.
Code Pink also praises China on the climate question. But if Chinese money is shaping American energy policy, the organization under the most serious scrutiny is Energy Foundation China, a California charity that keeps a San Francisco address and a large office in Beijing. By its own account, its China office is registered with the Beijing public-security bureau and supervised by the National Development and Reform Commission, the ministry that writes and administers China’s five-year plans. That self-description, and a report by the national-security group State Armor, was enough to prompt a December 2025 letter from 26 state attorneys general, led by Montana’s Austin Knudsen, asking the Justice Department to investigate the foundation as an unregistered foreign agent. The attorneys general likewise relied on Energy Foundation China’s published statement that the Beijing office is “supervised by” the NDRC.
Energy Foundation China’s chief executive, Zou Ji, is a Chinese national. He previously served as deputy director general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, an NDRC agency, and was a member of the Chinese negotiating team in the years leading to the Paris Agreement. He also sits as a special adviser to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, the State Council advisory body chaired by a Chinese vice premier. Other senior staff have come out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Beijing Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau, and the National People’s Congress system. The foundation partners with Chinese ministries and state institutes.
By its own account, its principal business is moving Western philanthropic money into the Chinese policy system. Its major donors include the Hewlett Foundation, ClimateWorks Foundation, Climate Imperative, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and similar houses. Energy Foundation China grants that money onward to Chinese government research bodies and universities: the National Center for Climate Change Strategy, the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and others.
But it also makes grants in the other direction: to American universities and advocacy groups. Harvard University, the University of California, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the International Council on Clean Transportation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have all received money. Energy Foundation China says it accepts none from any government or political party. No published investigation has documented otherwise.
The grounds for suspicion, however, are obvious. An American charity, financed by American and European philanthropy, operates in Beijing under the industrial-planning ministry, is led in part by former Chinese officials, disburses Western money to Chinese government institutes, and then writes smaller checks to organizations that work on U.S. energy and climate policy.
It's good to hear that when a US candidate talks about climate change, more people vote for them. I'm in Canada though. Do you have similar data for Canada?
China’s Net Zero Advantage
Beijing is pursuing a climate strategy that weakens the West while strengthening its own competitive position
by Michael Doran and Brenda Shaffer
September 16, 2026
In its competition with China, the United States holds a natural advantage: abundant oil and cheap natural gas. Reliable energy powers factories, data centers, transportation networks, and military operations. It lets the United States combine technological innovation with industrial scale, an advantage that China, dependent on imported oil and gas, cannot easily reproduce.
But China has found a partial answer: the Net Zero movement. 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.
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.
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.
Of China, they speak in an entirely different register. 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. Between the diplomat who built the climate regime and the envoy who bargained with the world’s largest emitter lies the settled disposition of the Net Zero movement: Contrary to all available emissions evidence, China is the morally serious party, and the West is the laggard. Why?
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. For example, Neville Roy Singham, an American technology entrepreneur, has reportedly been the subject of a federal grand jury inquiry in New York. Singham sold his consulting firm Thoughtworks in 2017 for $785 million, moved his operations to Shanghai, and began financing a global network of nonprofits and media outlets. In August 2023, The New York Times reported that Singham, working closely with the Chinese government’s media apparatus, financed the spread of its messaging worldwide through nonprofits and shell companies. Singham denied receiving funds or instructions from any government or party, including the Chinese Communist Party.
One recipient of his philanthropy has been Code Pink, the antiwar group cofounded by Jodie Evans, whom Singham married in 2017. In November 2025, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) asked the attorney general to investigate Code Pink under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
At the heart of the grand bargain is an agreement over Western and Chinese policies defined by simple arithmetic. China adds. The West subtracts.
Cotton’s letter noted that, before her marriage to Singham, Evans had demanded that Beijing stop repressing women’s human-rights defenders. After it, she discovered China to be a defender of the oppressed. Code Pink stopped criticizing Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs and instead took up its defense, launching, in 2020, a campaign under the slogan “China is not our enemy.” Entities linked to Singham, Cotton’s letter said, had supplied Code Pink with more than $1.4 million since 2017, roughly a quarter of its funding, a figure the letter drew from the Times investigation.
Code Pink also praises China on the climate question. But if Chinese money is shaping American energy policy, the organization under the most serious scrutiny is Energy Foundation China, a California charity that keeps a San Francisco address and a large office in Beijing. By its own account, its China office is registered with the Beijing public-security bureau and supervised by the National Development and Reform Commission, the ministry that writes and administers China’s five-year plans. That self-description, and a report by the national-security group State Armor, was enough to prompt a December 2025 letter from 26 state attorneys general, led by Montana’s Austin Knudsen, asking the Justice Department to investigate the foundation as an unregistered foreign agent. The attorneys general likewise relied on Energy Foundation China’s published statement that the Beijing office is “supervised by” the NDRC.
Energy Foundation China’s chief executive, Zou Ji, is a Chinese national. He previously served as deputy director general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, an NDRC agency, and was a member of the Chinese negotiating team in the years leading to the Paris Agreement. He also sits as a special adviser to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, the State Council advisory body chaired by a Chinese vice premier. Other senior staff have come out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Beijing Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau, and the National People’s Congress system. The foundation partners with Chinese ministries and state institutes.
By its own account, its principal business is moving Western philanthropic money into the Chinese policy system. Its major donors include the Hewlett Foundation, ClimateWorks Foundation, Climate Imperative, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and similar houses. Energy Foundation China grants that money onward to Chinese government research bodies and universities: the National Center for Climate Change Strategy, the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and others.
But it also makes grants in the other direction: to American universities and advocacy groups. Harvard University, the University of California, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the International Council on Clean Transportation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have all received money. Energy Foundation China says it accepts none from any government or political party. No published investigation has documented otherwise.
The grounds for suspicion, however, are obvious. An American charity, financed by American and European philanthropy, operates in Beijing under the industrial-planning ministry, is led in part by former Chinese officials, disburses Western money to Chinese government institutes, and then writes smaller checks to organizations that work on U.S. energy and climate policy.
It's good to hear that when a US candidate talks about climate change, more people vote for them. I'm in Canada though. Do you have similar data for Canada?
Yes my colleagues have also run the survey in Canada and it holds there too.