A Hollywood-financed fund backed by celebrities such as Jeremy Strong and Chelsea Handler has quietly emerged as the primary financial engine behind Climate Defiance, a radical protest outfit known for illegal disruptions and incendiary rhetoric against Americas energy industry.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, tax filings show the Los Angelesbased Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) supplied $250,000 to Climate Defiances political action committee and another $243,292 to its charitable arm in 2024. Those contributions amounted to more than half of the combined grant revenue for the two entities and represented the entirety of the income for the Climate Defiance Foundation, underscoring how heavily the group relies on a single, ideologically driven donor network.
The documents offer the clearest picture yet of the financial structure sustaining Climate Defiance, which launched in 2023 with the stated mission of pressuring public officials to wage an aggressive war on fossil fuels. The organization portrays climate change as an existential crisis that threatens every fiber of every being in every corner of the world, a sweeping claim that has helped it secure tax-exempt status from the IRS as of July 2025.
In less than three years, Climate Defiance has positioned itself as one of the most extreme protest organizations in the country, routinely interrupting public events, speeches, and even sporting contests to demand an immediate transition away from conventional energy. Its activists accuse oil executives and profossil fuel policymakers of mass murder, and one member gained viral notoriety after confronting former West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, calling him a sick fuck and hideous fiend over his support for a major natural gas pipeline.
The groups most prominent stunt came during the Congressional Baseball Game in July 2024, when eight activists were arrested after storming the field in Washington, D.C., to demand an end to fossil fuel use. After the arrests, the organization doubled down, declaring, Make no mistake: Its the Members of Congress who should be locked up, a statement that typifies its contempt for elected officials who resist its agenda.
Despite its pattern of disruption and harassment, Climate Defiance managed to secure access at the highest levels of the Biden administration. The group repeatedly targeted thenenergy secretary Jennifer Granholm and thentransportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, yet still obtained a private meeting in late 2023 with White House clean energy adviser John Podesta, during which activists pressed him to block proposed natural gas export terminals.
Within weeks of that meeting, in late January 2024, then-president Joe Biden moved to halt those export projects, a decision the White House publicly celebrated with reference to Climate Defiances backing. The episode highlighted the influence that a small but loud cadre of far-left activists, bankrolled by wealthy donors, can exert over Democratic energy policy, even when their demands threaten American energy security and consumer costs.
Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist massacre in Israel, Climate Defiance has also expanded its activism beyond climate issues into aggressive anti-Israel agitation. The group has framed Israeli military operations as morally intolerable, proclaiming, There is no climate movement without moral clarity. And there is no future on a dying planet where we normalize the mass killing of children, after it disrupted an event featuring liberal commentator Van Jones, whom it accused of supporting genocide.
The Climate Emergency Fund, which underwrites this activism, was created in 2019 and has become a favored vehicle for Hollywood and left-wing elites eager to bankroll disruptive climate campaigns. Its donor list reads like a whos who of progressive entertainment and philanthropic circles: actors Strong, Handler, and Thomas Middleditch; Walt Disney heiress and filmmaker Abigail Disney; director Adam McKay; producers Shannon OLeary Joy and Geralyn Dreyfous; Getty Oil heiress Aileen Getty; and Rory Kennedy, daughter of former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy.
Several of these benefactors do more than write checks; they help steer the funds strategy from inside the organization. Strong, McKay, Joy, and Kennedy all sit on CEFs board of directors, giving Hollywood figures direct oversight of the money pipeline that sustains Climate Defiance and similar groups pushing for rapid decarbonization and sweeping regulatory interventions.
CEFs own filings reveal a robust flow of cash from the broader progressive donor ecosystem into its coffers. In 2024 alone, the fund received $1.4 million from McKays foundation, $250,000 from the left-wing Rockefeller Family Fund, $15,000 from Aileen Gettys foundation, $10,000 from singer and actress Barbra Streisands foundation, and $4,000 from actress Jane Fondas foundation, illustrating how legacy wealth and celebrity activism converge to fuel radical climate politics.
CEF executive director Margaret Klein Salamon defended the funds strategy and its beneficiaries in a statement to the Free Beacon. We are in a climate emergency, she said, alleging that Fossil fuel corporations have lied to the public and corrupted our democracy so they can continue enriching themselves as the planet becomes dangerously hot.
Salamon portrayed Climate Defiances controversial tactics as both noble and constitutionally protected. The brave activists at Climate Defiance are committed to nonviolently telling the truth, raising the alarm, and holding fossil fuel executives and fossil-fueled politicians accountable, she continued, adding, They are exercising their constitutionally protected right to protest in order to protect all of us and our common home. We are proud to support them.
Energy advocates on the right see something very different: a professionalized protest industry sustained by wealthy ideologues who face none of the economic consequences of the policies they promote. Daniel Turner, executive director of the energy advocacy group Power the Future, argued that this funding model is indispensable to the radical climate movements survival.
The climate left would not exist without deep-pocketed radical billionaires who finance their activism, Turner told the Free Beacon, warning that these donors enable campaigns that undermine affordable energy and American jobs. He urged a policy response from the next Republican administration, saying, The Trump administration would do the American people an enormous favor by ending the nonprofit loophole which allows bored radicals from punishing our society with their green communist stupidity.
Climate Defiance declined to respond to questions about its Hollywood-backed funding stream or its coordination with Democratic officials. As the group continues to escalate its tacticsfrom storming baseball fields to denouncing Israel and vilifying U.S. energy producersits reliance on tax-advantaged donations from liberal elites is likely to intensify scrutiny from conservatives who see these nonprofits as a vehicle for importing fringe activism into mainstream policy.
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