Thomas Catenacci of the Washington Free Beacon reports a dubious target for left-wing spending.
The New Venture Fund (NVF), a behemoth left-wing dark money charity, wired $2.3 million last year to the law firm that dozens of Democratic prosecutors have contracted to spearhead high-stakes climate litigation against oil companies, according to its latest tax filings. At the same time, it bankrolled a group that advises judges on how to handle those cases.
The NVF’s support for the San Francisco-based Sher Edling isn’t new—in fact, it has funneled nearly $11 million to the firm through a nondescript fund it has fiscally sponsored since 2021. In its latest tax filings, however, the NVF also reported donating $1.3 million to the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), a D.C.-based legal nonprofit that trains judges on how to handle the very type of litigation Sher Edling is pursuing on behalf of Democratic states and cities.
It’s the first time the NVF has contributed to the ELI and it signals the latest escalation in the fund’s efforts to target the oil industry through the judicial system. It also raises ethics questions about whether the fund is attempting to stack the deck by funding both the lawyers leading the cases—which are aimed at bankrupting America’s largest oil companies—and trainings that could sway judges to side with those lawyers.
Since its founding in 2016, Sher Edling has received more than $16 million from the NVF-sponsored fund and has simultaneously taken up lawsuits against the oil industry on behalf of at least nine Democrat-run states and more than a dozen Democrat-run cities, which are collectively home to a quarter of the U.S. population.
The lawsuits accuse oil companies of causing global warming, deceiving the public about the harms of fossil fuels, and, therefore, bearing responsibility for damages stemming from extreme weather events.
