The Trump administration has canceled a couple of anti-convenient-energy grants to the Rocky Mountain Institute, which has an office in China.
One grant, for $5.3 million, was to fund a project retrofitting a building with “green energy” technology.
Another, for $1.5 million, was to fund inquiry into the “viability of electric vehicle carshare programs. The research, according to the Department of Energy, would assess business models in the United States for resilience and ‘equity,’ ”—“equity” here being the modern code word for race-consciousness and adherence to racial and other favored-group quotas at the expense of merit, talent, and qualifications (“Trump Cancels Biden Grants to China-Tied Think Tank Behind War on Gas Stoves,” The Washington Free Beacon, April 2, 2025).
These retrieved funds are a drop in the bucket, just several millions of what the Beacon reports are $22 billion in “climate grants” awarded by the Biden administration that the Environmental Protection Agency has now canceled. But a drop here and a drop there and pretty soon you do have a bucket, and then, if you keep going, tubs and oceans.
Gas-stove ban
The Rocky Mountain Institute led the charge for “heavy restrictions” on gas stoves, i.e., an almost-ban that would have amounted if not immediately then soon to a full ban on sale of gas stoves, if not also police raids to extract gas stoves from homes.
The loss of the federal grants won’t disable RMI, which according to tax filings gets plenty of funding from other nonprofits.
Although the RMI funding and the rest of Biden energy policy sought to inflict the kind of undermining of Americans and the U.S. that the Chinese Communist Party likes to see, such agendas do not by themselves mean that an organization is CCP-affiliated as opposed to only pro-tyranny. But the Rocky Mountain Institute does have a “number of ties to the Chinese government,” the Beacon reports.
The group’s only office outside the United States is located in Beijing. It is also a member of the China Clean Transportation Partnership—a Chinese nonprofit whose founding members include China’s National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Transport—and its board member Wei Ding previously served as chairman of the China International Capital Corporation, a partially state-owned investment bank.
The group’s ties to China ultimately led to a number of congressional investigations.
No comments
In early 2023, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, as a ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, penned a letter to the CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute wanting to know, among other things, “whether RMI has ever received any funding from any entity or individual associated with the Chinese government. Please answer with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ before providing any further response.” No reply is reported.
Around the same time, Cruz wrote to the secretary of energy at the time, Jennifer Granholm, “with deep concerns regarding the Department of Energy’s recent activities involving the Rocky Mountain Institute, an organization with considerable documented ties to the Chinese government.” No reply is reported.
A little later, Cruz wrote to the country’s attorney general at the time, Merrick Garland, about the committee investigation “into environmental nonprofits’ collusion with the Biden administration to drive radical environmental policy that negatively impacts the American people and the country’s economy. The extensive ties many of these organizations have to foreign governments and U.S. adversaries is publicly documented and raises concerns that these groups are attempting to skirt compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act. We are writing to request that the Department of Justice clarify the legal status of these organizations.” No reply is reported.
Also see:
The Washington Free Beacon: “Meet the Green Energy Group Behind the Study That’s Driving Calls To Ban Gas Stoves”
“Rocky Mountain Institute partnered with China to implement ‘economy-wide transformation’ away from oil and gas.”
