Leading Climate Lawfare Firm Accepts Millions in Donations from Left-Wing Dark Money Groups
December 21. 2025
A leading firm behind the nationwide lawfare campaign targeting fossil fuel companies accepted millions in donations from left-wing dark money groups last year, ensuring a steady source of revenue independent of the success of the activist lawsuits the firm pursues on behalf of municipalities across the country.
Based in San Francisco, Sher Edling has filed more than two dozen climate cases on behalf of liberal states and cities, such as Minnesota, Hawaii, Baltimore, and New York.
Sher Edling labels these “climate damage and deception” cases, claiming the lawsuits “hold fossil fuel industry defendants accountable for their decades-long campaigns of deception about the science of climate change and the role their products play in causing it, as well as their failure to take steps to avoid the harm they knew would arise from the use of their products or even to warn anyone about it.”
Recent 990 forms filed by Sher Edling and obtained by National Review reveal that the firm has accepted nearly $20 million since 2017 from dark money groups such as the Tides Foundation and the New Venture Fund.
In 2024 alone, Sher Edling received $314,000 from the Tides Foundation, a progressive grant-making organization, which has in turn received millions from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Tides has historically donated millions to left-of-center — even radical — groups, including Black Feminist Future, Planned Parenthood affiliates, and the Council on American Islamic Relations, a group recently designated as a terrorist organization by Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Further, the New Venture Fund, another committed donor to Sher Edling, gave the firm almost $2.5 million in 2024. The group focuses on creating “an equitable world,” according to the New Venture Fund website. One project the group funds, for example, is the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, which “works to empower women, youth, and indigenous peoples on the front lines of climate change to create and share their own solutions for resilience.”
The New Venture Fund has long backed Sher Edling, donating almost $11 million dollars to the firm since 2021, according to the 990s obtained by NR.
Since its founding in 2016, Sher Edling has filed at least 25 of these lawsuits, none of which have yet been resolved in their favor.
“Our work arises out of our conviction that the courts provide an even playing field essential to taking on the biggest polluters,” the Sher Edling website reads. “They should not be allowed to make everyone else pay for the damage caused by their pollution.”
Sher Edling did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Sher Edling has been in the spotlight for its role in climate litigation for years now. In 2023, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Representative James Comer (R., Ky.) sent a letter to the law firm, demanding information on the firm’s climate lawsuits.
“It appears that Sher Edling is not really working on these lawsuits on a contingency basis, but rather the lawsuits are being funded, tax-free, by wealthy liberals via dark money pass-through funds,” the letter reads. “And as these groups showered Sher Edling with millions of dollars, your law firm advanced numerous climate change lawsuits. It therefore appears that dark money — a purported concern of many who support radical climate legislation — is fueling your firm’s litigious effort to achieve a left-wing goal lacking majority support in Congress: the eradication of fossil fuels.”
Founded in 2016, Sher Edling took on climate lawsuits that, if won, would force energy companies to shell out funds to local governments.
In 2020, Sher Edling began representing Maui, Hawaii, in a suit against massive energy companies like ExxonMobil, Shell Oil Company, and Sunoco. The complaint alleges that energy companies have long been aware of climate change but “have nevertheless engaged in a coordinated, multifront effort to conceal and deny their own knowledge of those threats.”
“The County seeks to ensure that the parties who have profited from externalizing the consequences and costs of dealing with global warming and its physical, environmental, social, and economic consequences, bear the costs of those impacts on the County, rather than the County, taxpayers, residents, or broader segments of the public,” the complaint reads.
These cases, and others filed by firms similar to Sher Edling, act as an indirect carbon tax on energy companies, as explained by David Bookbinder in a Federalist Society webinar titled “Can State Courts Set Global Climate Policy,” reported on by National Review in October.
Bookbinder, director of law & policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, worked for years on the legal team that brought a climate lawfare case against major energy companies on behalf of Boulder, Colo., claiming the companies concealed damages their businesses inflicted on the county.
Because Congress is unwilling to pass a carbon tax, as Bookbinder explained in the webinar, activist law firms have stepped in to inflict harm on energy companies through litigation, imposing liability that will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for energy.
“There are a variety of cities and states that don’t agree with the federal government, and they would like to see the energy companies taxed,” John Yoo, Heller professor of law at the University of California and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute, told National Review in October. “Some of them probably like to see them go out of business. Since they can’t persuade through the normal political process of elections and legislation like the rest of the country, they’re using this back door, trying to bankrupt these companies by suing them on made-up claims that these companies somehow deceived people who are buying energy and gas and oil, about climate change.”
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