The UK’s highest profile climate science denying group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), has quietly launched an American fundraising subsidiary.
As the GWPF’s latest accounts show, the think tank registered the American Friends of the GWPF in April 2015 so as to “enable supporters in the USA to enjoy tax relief on donations.”
This comes as donations to the GWPF dropped significantly last year from £377,979 ($547,219) in 2014 to £207,019 ($299,711) in 2015.
The group, headed by the former Thatcher Chancellor Lord Lawson, also seems to have lost at least one or two staff members over the past year.
The GWPF’s most recent Companies House filing shows that the average number of staff dropped from four to three, with membership fees down more than £3,500 ($5,067).
So with numbers and donations dropping in the UK, it seems the GWPF is looking across the Atlantic for a boost in funding.
The American Friends of the GWPF filed for registration as a 501 c3 non-profit corporation in Delaware on 15 April, 2015 and has a P.O. Box in Gillette, New Jersey. The non-profit was granted its charitable status in October 2015.
Company details also show that the subsidiary is represented by Los Angeles lawyer, Paul Tosetti, who has handled several mega-mergers of large pharmaceutical companies.
Tosetti is the president of the Catholic Charities of Los Angeles organisation, and graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1977.
Incidentally, Matt Ridley – member of the GWPF academic advisory board – began studying at Magdalen College in 1976.
The GWPF has long had strong ties to the Catholic community. Australian hedge fund manager and GWPF funder Michael Hintze was appointed to serve on the board of the Vatican Bank in 2014 and Australian Cardinal George Pell, who delivered the GWPF’s 2011 annual lecture, recently criticised Pope Francis’s stance on climate change.
The climate science denial group is also known for courting hedge fund managers, including the American stock broker David Herro who boasted of supporting the GWPF last year to the Financial Times.
Herro has also donated to the Heartland Institute and Cato Institute.
DeSmog UK contacted both the GWPF and Paul Tosetti for comment however neither responded in time for publication.
Photo: Ken Lund via Flickr
