Influential Energy Researcher Quietly Backed By Big Money Climate Group

Amid Gov. Josh Green’s push to bring liquefied natural gas to Hawaiʻi, one critic has risen to the forefront: a policy research leader who has repeatedly attacked Green’s arguments that LNG belongs in the state’s energy future.

On the surface, Matthias Fripp appears to have no agenda. His employer, Energy Innovation Policy & Solutions LLC, describes itself as a “non-partisan energy and climate policy think tank” providing “customized research and policy analysis to decision-makers to support policy design that enhances security and access to affordable energy.”

What Fripp didn’t disclose — in legislative testimony blasting a Hawai‘i State Energy Office report or in a paper published by the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization extolling the benefits of solar energy that was withdrawn Tuesday by its main author — are deep ties between his employer and the Climate Imperative Foundation, a powerful, well-funded environmental NGO that has given tens of millions of dollars to groups leading the fight against Green’s LNG proposal.

Fripp maintains the think tank is independent of the foundation, which he said is just one of its supporters. But public records reviewed by Civil Beat, including tax returns and job postings, expose extensive financial and operational connections.

That sets up a difficult reality for Oʻahu utility customers striving to support the best solutions: as Green and his own well-funded and powerful allies debate the island’s energy future with local environmental groups, few of the players are truly impartial. The situation also raises questions about the lack of disclosure requirements for advocates appearing before legislative bodies and contributing to the debate. 

Stealth advocacy is nothing new, although it more often involves industries such as Big Tobacco using research produced by seemingly independent third party experts paid to support policies that undermine public health. A recent paper by the Journal of the American Medical Association says the junk food industry is now following a similar playbook. 

Henry Curtis has been an environmental advocate for decades as executive director of Life of the Land, one of the state’s oldest environmental organizations. He noted that it’s often business and industry that use such tactics to buy influence behind the scenes, including by getting employees hired as staffers for influential government officials. But he said parties on both sides of issues engage in stealthy advocacy. 

“A lot of hidden funding flows through everything,” Curtis said. 

Disclosure and transparency are important for all sides, he said, including developers of green energy projects. 

“Should a wind or solar company identify who they’re paying off in the community to get support for their project?” he asked. “Life of the Land favors full disclosure.”

Green has received his share of criticism for supporting LNG, a natural gas that’s been super cooled to liquid form so it can be shipped across oceans and turned back into gas at its destination. Although generally cheaper and cleaner burning that the oil Hawaiʻi now uses to fuel power plants, critics say natural gas leaks can make it worse for the environment than burning oil and question whether Hawaiʻi should invest in new LNG infrastructure when the state plans to move away from fossil fuel by 2045.

In October, Green announced a strategic partnership for the state with Tokyo-based LNG giant JERA Co., Inc. The Hawaiʻi State Energy Office is also supporting JERA’s LNG bid in ways that have given some pause. Earlier this year, the office came under fire when it asked the Hawaiʻi Public Utilities Commission to upend a years-long process and delay approval of a Hawaiian Electric Co. Inc. power plant upgrade so JERA could have more time to submit a plan to the PUC.

Green’s chief energy officer Mark Glick says the administration has been open about its support for JERA and LNG. Opponents in the debate, he said, should be equally honest about affiliations.

“It’s OK for an expert to weigh in,” Glick said of Fripp, “but he should disclose that he’s not an unbiased party.”

Without that, Green characterized the recent UHERO report as compromised by hidden bias.

“If there’s a bias behind it, it’s no better than if Big Oil funded a study to kill solar,” he said. “I’d be furious about that too. We can’t torpedo ideas and hide behind a veil of secrecy.”

Numerous Ties To Green Group

The think tank Fripp works for, Energy Innovation, is a private LLC whose finances are largely private. But public records show it is closely intertwined with the Climate Imperative Foundation, which, according to its website, supports “rapid scaling of renewable energy” and “stopping the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure,” among other initiatives. 

For example, the Climate Imperative Foundation’s most recent available tax return shows the foundation’s president through December of 2024, Hal Harvey, was also the think tank’s sole owner. The foundation’s highest-paid employees were think tank staff, earning salaries as high as $405,000 annually in the case of then-vice president Sonia Aggarwal. 

In total, the foundation paid the think tank $23.3 million in 2024 for management services, including finance, grants administration, research and strategic communications.

Job postings for the think tank indicate other deep connections. A 2021 job description for an initiative director for the think tank, for example, says a core responsibility is to “Help identify top policy targets that fit the mission of the Climate Imperative Foundation.”

The foundation reported $271.7 million in revenue in 2024, including $268.1 million in grants, making it one of the nation’s largest environmental nonprofits. By contrast, the Sierra Club that year reported revenue of $169 million and Earthjustice $139.6 million, according to ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.

Where Climate Imperative’s money came from isn’t clear from the return, which does not disclose the identities of some major donors as allowed under IRS rules. However, considerable sums come from Silicon Valley. For instance, Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s family foundation alone poured just under $49 million into the foundation in 2024, the Brin foundation’s tax return says.

Also in 2024, the return shows, the Climate Imperative Foundation donated $23.1 million to the Sierra Club and $2.7 million to Earthjustice, both of which have amplified Fripp’s work in press releases and interviews opposing Green’s LNG proposal. 

Nick Conger, a spokesman for Climate Imperative, described the foundation in an email to Civil Beat as “a non-partisan public charity focused on winning policies that cut carbon pollution and accelerate clean, affordable energy as quickly as possible.” He said the group “supports a range of partners to provide analysis, education, and action on major policy decisions.”

“Climate Imperative and Energy Innovation,” Conger wrote, “are separate entities with their own governance structures.”

Fripp said that Climate Imperative is just one of several Energy Innovation donors.

“Energy Innovation’s work is guided by research and not by any foundation, and Climate Imperative did not provide any input on my Hawai’i analysis.” he said in an email. “We share our research publicly, and decision-makers are free to come to their own conclusions about what to do with that research.”

New Math: $1.2 Billion Error?

LNG opponents accuse Green’s administration of similar bias. The most dramatic case involves a January 2025 report by the Hawaiʻi State Energy Office that found LNG merited analysis as a bridge fuel to replace oil while the state transitions to 100% renewables by 2045.

In testimony before the Hawaiʻi House Energy and Environmental Protection Committee, Fripp said he had found a significant errors in that report’s modeling that “artificially inflate the benefit of LNG by at least $1.2 billion.” 

Earthjustice quickly issued a press release with the heading: “Billion-Dollar Math Error Blows Up Green Administration’s Fossil Gas Import Plan.”

Fripp’s discovery was alarming. It raised questions not only about the report’s technical details, but broader ones about whether the energy office was swayed by a bias toward LNG. 

Since then, the energy office has admitted there were errors in the data it used in the report but says they didn’t amount to $1.2 billion and didn’t materially affect the overall finding that LNG merited a closer look.

Before his testimony, Fripp introduced himself as director of global policy research for Energy Innovation. He didn’t mention the think tank’s connections to the Climate Imperative Foundation. 

Rep. Nicole Lowen is chair of the Energy and Environmental Committee and presided over the informational briefing where Fripp disclosed his findings. Contacted by Civil Beat, Lowen declined to say whether she was aware of the ties between Fripp’s think tank and the environmental group when he testified, whether the information would have been relevant to how the committee weighed his testimony and whether the public should know about the ties. 

“The questions you sent in this email seem very loaded and intended to discredit Dr. Fripp,” Lowen wrote back in an email reply. “When you have genuine questions asked in good faith I would be happy to answer them.” 

“The bigger issue is Jera standing to profit off of local ratepayers while the administration repeatedly and knowingly makes inaccurate claims about savings and actively uses government resources to help one for-profit company,” Lowen said. 

UHERO Calls For Transparency

UHERO now says Fripp’s affiliations should have been disclosed in a recent paper evaluating solar energy versus electricity produced by power plants.

Titled “Hawaiʻi’s Electricity Future: Three Findings on Solar Reform, Enhanced Geothermal, and the JERA LNG Proposal,” the paper concluded that Oʻahu doesn’t need any additional power plants to keep the lights on — a major blow to JERA’s proposal.

The authors found that solar energy would be a better, less expensive option for ratepayers. In addition, the study found, the cost of solar could be driven down further if policymakers adopted regulatory and land-use changes to reduce the cost of developing solar farms.

On Tuesday, the report’s main author, UH economist Michael Roberts, took the unusual step of withdrawing the paper pending further review after Hawaiian Electric Co., Inc. found data errors in the report.

Although listed only as a contributor, Fripp played a significant role in the report, Roberts said in an email. 

“Matthias didn’t do any of the new modeling work or writing, but we corresponded throughout and generally used him as a sounding board, and he provided ample feedback on earlier drafts,” Roberts said. “We offered to make him a coauthor but were unable to do so due to restrictions in his current role at Energy Innovation.”

Fripp’s role was significant enough that the University of Hawaiʻi media team had listed him as a co-author with Roberts and doctoral student Ethan Hartley in an earlier online announcement about the paper. That announcement has been taken down from UH’s website but is still available through an Internet archive. 

After announcing the “Hawaii’s Electricity Future” report would be withdrawn, Roberts acknowledged in a statement on Wednesday that the report contained several errors, including data produced by an AI hallucination. Roberts, however, defended Fripp’s contributions to the report and said errors in the report had nothing to do with Fripp. 

“Matthias — formerly a tenured professor of electrical engineering at UH Mānoa and a UHERO Fellow — is among the sharpest, most scrupulous scholars I have worked with,” Roberts said. “The errors here are mine. Attacks on him are attacks on the wrong person, and I ask that they stop.”

Nonetheless, UHERO says Fripp’s affiliations should have been disclosed.

In an email, UHERO Executive Director Carl Bonham wrote, “An individual was acknowledged in the report for his contributions but is not listed as an author. After further review, we concluded that his contribution warrants including his affiliation in that acknowledgment.”

In addition, Bonham said, “We are making disclosure requirements explicit for all future publications.”

The whole matter has led UHERO to reassess its approach to releasing research. 

UHERO has become a major source of unbiased information about Hawaiʻi’s economy and critical issues, such as the state’s high cost of housing and healthcare. Although its quarterly forecasts are official UHERO reports, compiled with input from a variety of scholars, many policy briefs and other reports are the work of individual authors, published by UHERO.

In a statement to UHERO supporters issued Tuesday, Bonham stressed the need for UHERO researchers to remain independent and contribute to the public debate with transparency. 

“As a UH research organization, UHERO does not take official positions on policy or advocate for particular outcomes,” Bonham said. “Our researchers choose their own research questions and reach their own conclusions. That independence, paired with transparency, is fundamental to the trust placed in our work.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change and the environment is supported by The Healy Foundation, the Marisla Fund of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.