EXCLUSIVE: NC Gov Roy Cooper’s Top Climate Advisers’ Salaries Were Bankrolled by Environmentalist Nonprofit as They Imposed Left-Wing Climate Policies on State
Thomas Catenacci
Washington Free Beacon
October 19, 2026
Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper’s (D.) top climate advisers were paid for by a progressive nonprofit—the United Nations Foundation—in an initiative designed to enact left-wing climate policies at the state level, thus bypassing President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw America from the Paris Climate Accords, according to documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The advisers oversaw Cooper’s policies prioritizing offshore wind projects, “decarbonizing” the state’s electric grid, implementing electric car mandates, and making the state’s buildings less dependent on natural gas.
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The Free Beacon obtained a trove of internal state documents showing that, beginning in 2020, Cooper’s office submitted several applications for UNF grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund salary, benefits, and travel for its top climate policy staff. The UNF—a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, founded by Ted Turner, that draws upon its more than $210 million endowment to directly support U.N. social and environmental activities—ultimately approved those requests and, between 2020 and 2024, awarded grants worth $1.7 million to the state, according to funding agreements and tax filings. That’s more than any other state received under the initiative.
The advisers funded by the UNF grants were official North Carolina state employees.
The grants are part of the U.S. Climate Alliance initiative, which is housed at the UNF for what it says are “legal and fiduciary purposes” and was founded by a coalition of Democratic governors in June 2017 after Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Accords. At the time, the founders, then-Govs. Jerry Brown (Calif.), Jay Inslee (Wash.), and Andrew Cuomo (N.Y.), said the alliance would uphold the accords’ aggressive climate objectives via state-level policy. Cooper entered North Carolina into the initiative three months later, though his office never publicly disclosed that the UNF would be paying for his staff. Cooper’s office privately requested that other states involved in the alliance not make “too big a deal” of the participation of North Carolina, whose voters are far more conservative than those in California, Washington, and New York.
The documents provide a window into how Cooper pursued some of the nation’s most extreme climate policies, modeled his environmental agenda after California’s, and did it all with the direct assistance of an outside progressive organization funded by liberal billionaire environmentalists like Turner, who died in May, and Bill Gates.
They also offer behind-the-scenes insight into the views of Cooper, who is again portraying himself as a moderate as he seeks a Senate seat. During this campaign, he has shied away from his climate record (his campaign website is devoid of any mention of climate change) and has instead broadly emphasized the importance of making energy more affordable, something critics say his climate policies failed to do.
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For Cooper, receiving outside funding to pursue left-wing climate initiatives was useful, as the legislature has made a practice of going through budgets with a scalpel and excising funding for staff and groups that pursued liberal policies on the taxpayer’s dime.
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Several months later, Cooper’s office submitted an application for funding under the nascent program, which the UNF quickly approved. According to the agreement reviewed by the Free Beacon, the grant was worth $292,677 and funded the two-year salary of a new senior climate policy adviser who would be Cooper’s highest-ranking staffer overseeing climate policy.
The application stated that the adviser would oversee implementation of Cooper’s plans to push electric vehicles, develop a “strategic plan for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector,” and enter the state into new multi-state agreements on EVs. It added that they would be tasked with developing new actions to curb emissions from sources not yet regulated, like home appliances; representing the state and Cooper at climate conferences; and leading North Carolina’s “efforts to advance offshore wind.”
And the application added that a broad goal of the funding would be to ensure North Carolina’s climate policy has a “ripple effect throughout the country.”
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One year later, Cooper’s office solicited another grant, this time worth $264,765 for the two-year salary of a second adviser who would serve as the first UNF-funded adviser’s top deputy. The UNF again approved the request and provided the funding in April 2021.
In addition to assisting the senior adviser and allowing them to focus more on crafting new climate goals and executive orders, according to the application, the new staffer would “focus primarily on climate issues related to the transportation sectоr, government fleet conversion to zero-emission vehicles, building and energy efficiency, and industrial emissions.”
As the point person on electric vehicle adoption, the new adviser would oversee a plan mandating the state government’s fleet of vehicles be converted to electric and help evaluate whether North Carolina should enter the so-called Transportation Climate Initiative, a multi-state program led by Massachusetts to force emissions reductions and a transition to EVs. The new adviser would be tasked also with coordinating “climate justice” policies to make sure “environmental equity” was prioritized.
According to the records, the UNF and Cooper’s office continued to renew the two agreements—and added a $315,980 grant for a third climate adviser in the state’s Department of Transportation and a $144,949 grant for a fourth climate adviser in its Department of Commerce—through the end of his term in 2024.
In one of the office’s final applications to renew funding under the initiative, it argued the positions would help “institutionalize Governor Cooper’s climate legacy.”
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The UNF-funded advisers, meanwhile, were evidently successful in pushing many of the policies outlined in the state documents. They were less successful, though, in shielding those policies from the legislature, which routinely overturned Cooper’s most extreme policies with its veto-proof GOP majority.
Cooper’s crowning climate achievement was 2021 legislation directing regulators to take “all reasonable steps to achieve” to slash carbon emissions from the state’s electric power sector by 70 percent by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The bill’s 2030 mandate, however, was axed by a bill passed last year after the state’s utilities commission determined it was “no longer reasonable or executable,” the Associated Press reported.
Similarly, in 2021, the Cooper administration moved to enter North Carolina into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multi-state program forcing utility companies to pay states for greenhouse gas emissions they are responsible for, something supporters say will drive emissions down over time, but critics say functions like a carbon tax and makes energy less affordable. The UNF-funded advisers were tasked with overseeing the process for joining the initiative. But in 2023, a veto-proof majority in the state’s legislature passed a bill prohibiting the state from participating in such a program.
The Transportation Climate Initiative, the other multi-state emissions program the UNF-funded advisers sought to thrust North Carolina into, dissolved after several states withdrew from it over concerns about how it would drive gas prices higher.
In 2022, Cooper signed an executive order calling for half of all new car sales to be electric by 2030, a plan that closely mirrored California’s EV mandate. Months later, he ordered his administration to adopt California’s “clean truck” rules, forcing manufacturers to sell a progressively larger amount of electric trucks over time. That same order directed state agencies to transition their vehicle fleets to electric.
The North Carolina legislature eventually overturned the clean truck regulations and blocked agencies from prioritizing costlier electric vehicles.
Cooper further sought to prioritize offshore wind development and rewrite the state’s building code to make it more energy-efficient and climate-friendly. Last year, the state’s largest utility company backed out of its offshore wind plans after an independent review determined they were not cost-effective, and the developer behind the largest offshore wind farm proposed in the state agreed to forfeit its federal lease in April. In 2024, the legislature blocked Cooper’s building code rewrite.
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