The European Union is paying NGOs millions of dollars to conduct what amounts to soft economic warfare against its own member states

This Sunday’s bombshell report in the Welt am Sonntag

Somewhere in the bowels of the Brussels Eurocracy – specifically, in the guts of the EU Commission, which is the executive authority of the European Union – there is a computer where one may view secret documents.

One can neither search nor print the files called up on this computer, and windows stay open for only thirty minutes at a time. Thereafter they close automatically and one must load the files again. Reporters for the Welt am Sonntag, who have seen this bizarre terminal, speculate that secrecy is only one purpose, and that another is to make the reading experience difficult even for those who enjoy authorisation.

Why the Eurocrats would want to make using this computer an obnoxious experience becomes easier to understand when you learn more about the crazy stuff stored on its hard drive.

The documents hidden there attest to the unsavoury tactics that the Commission has deployed to promote its so-called Green Deal – a range of policy initiatives designed to make the Continent “climate neutral” by 2050. If they are ever fully realised, these policies will spell the unilateral deindustrialisation of Europe, and the Commission is determined to force them through over the heads of dissenting voices in the EU and where necessary even behind the backs of member states.

On our supersecret terminal is a truly insane contract concluded in 2022 between the EU Commission and a non-governmental organisation known as ClientEarth. In this instrument, the Commission agreed to pay ClientEarth €350,000 in exchange for specific activism in Germany. This included the things you’d expect; for example, the NGO pledged to cooperate with the environmentaloid scene and to help stage civic protests and climate camps. But ClientEarth also sold the more nefarious service of waging lawfare against coal-fired German power-plants, and this in the immediate aftermath of the German energy crisis. The Commission specifically wanted ClientEarth to “increase the financial and legal risk of the ownership and operation of [coal-fired] power plants,” by targeting their emissions and water use permits in court. They were to carry out their work without the knowledge of the German government, effectively weaponising our own courts against us.

The ClientEarth agreement was but one of many such contracts concluded between the EU Commission and various NGOs for similar purposes. Altogether, the Commission dispensed over €15 million in taxpayer funds in 2022, all of it for activist and lobbying activities in 2023. That may not sound like a lot, but we must remember, first, that NGOs are by and large an extremely cheap way to influence public discourse; and, second, that Welt am Sonntag has had access only to contracts concluded in this one year. These general tactics are thought to go back to 2017 at least and they are presumed to be ongoing.

In addition to secret interference in the domestic politics of member states, the EU Commission uses NGOs for internal influence – for example, to promote its Green agenda to legislators in the European Parliament and even to undermine other initiatives in the EU Commission itself.

Another 2022 contract described by Welt am Sonntag relates to a €700,000 deal with the “international network of grassroots environmental organisations” known as Friends of the Earth. The EU paid this NGO to lobby against the EU’s own longstanding efforts to secure a free trade agreement with the South American trade bloc known as Mercosur. While EU member states like Germany have pushed hard for free trade with Mercosur, and while the Directorate-General of Trade within the EU Commission has worked for a long time to hammer out the details, the Directorate-General of the Environment across the hall hopes to torpedo the whole thing. Thus they paid Friends of the Earth to do everything possible to “stop” the Mercosur agreement “in its present form,” among other things by drawing attention to its allegedly “harmful consequences for human rights and the environment.” Friends of the Earth were paid to conduct “at least three meetings with representatives of the European parliament” and “two meetings with representatives of the EU Commission,” specifically with the Directorate-General of Trade to persuade them to scuttle their own project.

They report other contracts too – with Bankwatch, the European Environmental Bureau and the Health and Environment Alliance. The latter were paid €700,000 to lobby against the herbicide glyphosate, inter alia by posting between 50 and 80 Tweets against the chemical and meeting with four to six members of the European parliament. You may not be a fan of industrial agriculture and many of you will have reservations about the harmful effects of industrial chemicals, but that doesn’t matter. The Commission just has no business lobbying other branches of the EU to support its environmental agenda.

As a whole, these activities are remarkable for seeming to show an EU Commission that has ceased to function as merely the executive branch of the EU. Particularly the climatist elements of the Commission have begun to acquire autonomous features, as they pursue what can only be described as economic warfare on EU member states, without the knowledge and often against the wishes of the EU itself.