Leonardo DiCaprio funneled grants through dark money group to fund climate nuisance lawsuits, emails show
DiCaprio's foundation awarded grants to the Resources Legacy Fund, a dark money group, which then donated to a private law firm suing oil companies over climate change
Correspondence between Dan Emmett, a major
philanthropist, and Ann Carlson — a University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) climate professor — in 2017 revealed that the two worked with law firm
Sher Edling to raise money for its efforts to sue oil companies over alleged
climate change deception on behalf of state and local governments, according to
the emails obtained by watchdog group Government Accountability & Oversight
(GAO) and shared with Fox News Digital.
In their emails, Emmett and Carlson
discuss how Chuck Savitt, Sher Edling's director of strategic client
relationships, had sought Emmett's support and had already received support
from Terry Tamminen in his role as the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation's CEO, a
title he held between 2016 and 2019. When the emails were exchanged, Carlson,
who is now a senior Biden administration official, served as co-director of the
UCLA Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment, the advisory
board which Emmett still chairs.
"Chuck
Savitt who is heading this new organization behind the lawsuits has been
seeking our support," Emmett wrote to Carlson on July 22, 2017.
"Terry Tamminen in his new role with the DiCaprio Foundation has been a
key supporter."
Emmett also forwarded a message Savitt
sent him three days earlier on July 19, 2022 asking for his support, according
to the records. Savitt mentioned in that email that Sher Edling's first
lawsuits were filed with the support of the Collective Action Fund for
Accountability, Resilience and Adaptation, a fund managed at the time by dark money
group Resources Legacy Fund (RLF).
"Wanted to let you know that we filed
the first three lawsuits supported by the Collective Action Fund on
Monday," Savitt had told Emmett. "These precedent setting cases call
on 37 of the world's leading fossil fuel companies to take responsibility for
the devastating damage sea level rise - caused by their greenhouse gas
emissions - is having on coastal communities."
Savitt also offered to set up a meeting
between Emmett and Vic Sher, a partner at Sher Edling.
The email correspondence took place two
months before the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation publicly announced it would
contribute $20 million in grants to various climate and conservation causes.
The group's announcement, which has since been deleted but remains archived,
included a grant to the RLF "to support precedent-setting legal actions to
hold major corporations in the fossil fuel industry liable," closely
mirroring Savitt's language.
"These
grantees are active on the ground, protecting our oceans, forests and
endangered species for future generations – and tackling the urgent,
existential challenges of climate change," DiCaprio said at the time.
Tamminen added that the organization
believed it needed "to do as much as we can now, before it is too
late." The announcement didn't mention Sher Edling.
In February 2018, months after the initial
email exchange, Emmett told Carlson that she could mention to other prospective
donors that he and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation were now "serious
supporters" of Sher Edling's ongoing litigation. The suggestion came after
Carlson asked whether she should ask New York philanthropist Andy Sabin to
support the effort.
"You can tell him Terry's
organization and I are both serious supporters, that you are an advisor, that
the science is there, that it could do more for the environment than just about
anything going on if it succeeds," Emmett said in the email Carlson.
In addition to the Leonardo DiCaprio
Foundation and the Emmett Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and JPB Foundation have
contributed to the Collective Action Fund since 2017.
Sher Edling's website states that the firm
is specifically dedicated to representing "states, cities, public
agencies, and businesses in high-impact, high-value environmental cases."
Since its initial cases in July 2017 — filed on behalf of a city and two
counties in California — Sher Edling has sued major oil companies on behalf of
Delaware, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York City, Washington D.C., San
Francisco, Baltimore, Honolulu and several local governments across the
country, alleging the companies have deceived the public about climate change.
Most of the cases are ongoing with two,
involving San Francisco and Oakland, Calfornia, on appeal before a federal
panel.
"Obviously, the donors created —
including DiCaprio — several purported arms' lengths," Chris Horner, a
lawyer who represented GAO in the case involving the emails, told Fox News
Digital in an interview.
"This model used a couple of
pass-throughs, by which DiCaprio and, it appears, Dan Emmett and others could
run things, including DiCaprio's foundation and Resources Legacy Fund, and
they're not seen as financing the assault," Horner added.
Overall, the RLF contributed more than
$5.2 million to Sher Edling between 2017 and 2020, according to the group's tax
filings during that period. The organization doesn't disclose its donors and
declined to confirm who it previously received money from to fund Sher Edling's
litigation.
"From 2017 to 2020, Sher Edling
received grants from RLF to pursue charitable activities to hold fossil fuel
companies accountable for the accuracy of information they had disseminated to
consumers and the public about the role their products played in causing
climate change," an RLF spokesperson Mark Kleinman told Fox News Digital
in an email.
"RLF receives support from many
funding entities, and its board of directors and staff make all decisions as to
where the funding goes," the spokesperson continued.
Sher Edling declined to comment.
Experts have previously raised concerns
regarding the source of Sher Edling's funding for its climate litigation.
Michael Krauss, a law professor emeritus
at George Mason University, noted in a 2020 Forbes article the arrangement in
which Sher Edling receives a payout from localities it represents if its cases
are successful while, at the same time, it receives funding from tax-exempt
groups, thereby removing some risk involved with taking on such cases.
"Can a non-profit funnel donations to
a for-profit law firm that has already determined a different form of
compensation?" Kraus wrote. "May a law firm, which could be
fabulously enriched on a contingent basis, ethically accept funding that is
paid whether or not the client prevails?"
"If legislation through litigation is
bad, what to make of legislation through litigation subsidized by taxpayers
through charitable donations? We don’t have all the answers to these questions
yet," he continued. "I think we deserve them."
Emmett, Tamminen, Sabin and the Earth
Alliance, an organization that subsumed the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in
2019, didn't respond to requests for comment.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer at
Fox News Digital
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