Green Activists With Ties to China Advised Obama State Department

The Natural Resources Defense Council held close ties to the Obama administration, providing advice on joining the Paris Agreement while simultaneously maintaining ties to China, according to attorneys and policy analysts who have reviewed email records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. While many of the emails are heavily redacted, they provide insight into how the NRDC, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, and its close associates in Beijing, sought to maneuver the United States into an international climate change accord that has all the "hallmarks of a treaty" without the "advice and consent" of the Senate, Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, explained in an interview. The United Nations' Paris Agreement, which took shape in December 2015, figures prominently in emails between Jake Schmidt, the NRDC’s director of international programs, and several State Department officials including Todd Stern, who was a special envoy for climate change at the time of his correspondence with Schmidt in 2014 and 2015...MORE