Thomas Catenacci writes for the Washington Free Beacon about dubious climate policies under North Carolina’s former governor.
Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper’s (D.) top climate advisers were paid for by a progressive nonprofit—the United Nations Foundation—in an initiative designed to enact left-wing climate policies at the state level, thus bypassing President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw America from the Paris Climate Accords, according to documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The advisers oversaw Cooper’s policies prioritizing offshore wind projects, “decarbonizing” the state’s electric grid, implementing electric car mandates, and making the state’s buildings less dependent on natural gas.
Cooper’s progressive environmental policies were deeply divisive in North Carolina, which leans conservative, but the state legislature’s Republican supermajority ultimately blocked much of the Cooper administration’s efforts. Cooper is now running for Senate, and polls show him with a strong lead over the Republican contender, Michael Whatley.
The Free Beacon obtained a trove of internal state documents showing that, beginning in 2020, Cooper’s office submitted several applications for UNF grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund salary, benefits, and travel for its top climate policy staff. The UNF—a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, founded by Ted Turner, that draws upon its more than $210 million endowment to directly support U.N. social and environmental activities—ultimately approved those requests and, between 2020 and 2024, awarded grants worth $1.7 million to the state, according to funding agreements and tax filings. That’s more than any other state received under the initiative.
The advisers funded by the UNF grants were official North Carolina state employees.
The grants are part of the U.S. Climate Alliance initiative, which is housed at the UNF for what it says are “legal and fiduciary purposes” and was founded by a coalition of Democratic governors in June 2017 after Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Accords. At the time, the founders, then-Govs. Jerry Brown (Calif.), Jay Inslee (Wash.), and Andrew Cuomo (N.Y.), said the alliance would uphold the accords’ aggressive climate objectives via state-level policy.
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