Vivian Krause;

Over the past five years, I have gone though more than 100,000 pages of U.S. tax returns and traced more than 2,000 grants from U.S. foundations to environmental and First Nations groups in Canada. Most of my research is based on U.S. tax returns because the Internal Revenue Service requires greater disclosure than the Canadian Revenue Agency.
While the volunteer activists on the front lines of the Tar Sands Campaign are every bit as Canadian as I am, their big funders are not. According to U.S. tax returns and other documents, the Tar Sands Campaign is co-funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Sea Change Foundation, the Marisla Foundation and at least a dozen other foundations – most of which are based in California. These are the big green elephants that have fueled efforts to thwart the development of Canadian oil and gas for more than a decade.
By my analysis, more than a dozen U.S. foundations have granted at least US$75 million between 2009 and 2013 for initiatives that stymie the Canadian energy sector. This does not include grants for general or unspecified purposes nor for large-scale conservation initiatives that aim to put huge blocks of land off-limits to natural resource development.
So, what’s the motivation of the funders? One of the few documents that provide insights into the funding of the climate movement is a strategy paper, Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming. According to Design to Win, the overarching goal of voter and consumer education campaigns is to create a policy context for a massive shift in investment capital and a billion-dollar market for renewable energy. Without a negative foil of bad press about fossil fuels, it would be much harder to justify the billions of dollars that government has invested in solar and wind.