"Who Funds You?"💳👁️| C40 Cities

Turning the spotlight on the funding of "left wing" and "independent" organisations, as opposed to Tufton Street

With London running so smoothly, perhaps it’s no surprise that Sadiq Khan has had time for an impressive second job.

Oh, you didn’t know? (Or maybe you did - in which case, please pretend you didn’t for the sake of a rhetorical device).

Khan is co-chair of C40, “a global network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis.”

That network that every voter definitely knows about…

I thought it might be interesting to spell out the details of C40 on my new Substack section Who Funds You? (putting the spotlight on "left wing" and "independent" outfits, as opposed to Tufton Street).

How it all began…

Once upon a time, in 2005, when Ken Livingstone was the Mayor of London, he “convened representatives from 18 megacities to forge an agreement on cooperatively reducing climate pollution and created the ‘C20’”.

Here’s a longer history of between then and now.

Fast forward to 2023 and the project has gone from megacity to mega-megacity.

Nowadays Khan and Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the Mayor of Freetown, serve as Co-Chairs of the now-titled C40.

Shirley Rodriguez, formerly London’s Deputy Mayor Environment, also sits on C40’s Board Directors.

You may remember Rodriguez from the time she tried to pressure Imperial College London into fudging some results to make help public realise how incredible ULEZ is. She is clearly a beacon of sound governance.

Activities

Together, the nearly 100 mayors of C40 want to collectively cut emissions in half by 2030, through a series of measures such as “Facilitating access to finance for investment in green jobs and projects that improve resilience in cities.” They also want “inclusive climate action”, whatever that means.

Who’s paying for all this?

Quite a lot of organisations, actually - as well as taxpayers (not just from Britain, I should add). Here’s a list of funders from C40’s Annual Report 2023.

Mayor Funders (whose funding exceeds $1 million)

Funders (*whose funding is below $1 million)

And C40’s Global Partners (partners also contribute financial funding to C40, it seems)

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and Scottish Government are also listed as major funders on C40’s website *although not included in the 2023 report I mention; perhaps they are funders from an earlier time.

Here’s more info about FCDO’s work (for the year ended 31 December 2022):

Londoners have coughed up separately for C40. Here’s a link to Tony Devenish of City Hall Conservatives asking (in 2023) how much the GLA provides to C40 Cities, and being told:

“In total £24k of funds have been provided to C40 to carry out specific research work for London including calculating the number of green jobs in London, reviewing London’s Climate Action Plan and measures to help develop relevant skill-sets in the environmental workforce in London. No payments have been made since 2019.”

All in all, the sums C40 receives are huge (image from its 2023 report):

What’s the problem?

Well, it just isn’t very democratic, is it - taxpayers having their money mixed together with various organisations’ - to “influence the global agenda”.

C40’s objectives look more like a manifesto than anything else, including talk of a “Global Green New Deal”.

The sort of thing that, I dunno, the public might want to vote on - not have decided for them by a huge international body they never consented to, funded by FedEx, Fondation L'Oréal and Google, among other organisations.

Khan acolytes

To all this, I can imagine Khan fanboys and fangirls saying that, by voting for Khan for a third term, the public gave their support to the C40 project.

But I suspect most people don’t even know it exists.

Nor are they having it flagged - at the time of writing it is not in Khan’s X bios where (I am 99% certain) it once was.

In the lead up to the general election it’s interesting that The Labour Party have tried to tempt the electorate with a “Green Prosperity Plan”.

Conservatives, of course, flagged Net Zero in their 2019 manifesto.

But what’s the point in wooing voters when an unelected elite has already decided we are part of a “Global Green New Deal”?

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