China is building coal plants. The United States is training judges to shut down the companies that produce American energy. And the nonprofit doing the training spent thirty years working with organizations supervised by the Chinese Communist Party.

This is not a coincidence theory. It's a paper trail.

A 39-page report released last week by State Armor, a national security research group, documents three decades of collaboration between the Environmental Law Institute and CCP-affiliated entities — including Tianjin University, which the Commerce Department has since placed on its national security Entity List. In 2018 alone, ELI trained 265 Chinese environmental NGO workers, judges, prosecutors, and attorneys from 26 Chinese provinces at that same university.

That same year, ELI launched its Climate Judiciary Project — a domestic program that has now trained more than 2,000 American judges on climate science and law. The project specifically targeted jurisdictions where climate lawsuits against energy companies were already underway. The curriculum teaches courts to link individual emissions sources to specific weather events — the kind of legal theory that turns judges into environmental regulators Congress never voted to create.

So while China adds more than 50 coal plants to its grid every year, a Washington D.C. nonprofit with thirty years of CCP-adjacent partnerships is shaping how American judges think about the legal liability of American energy producers.

State Armor CEO Michael Lucci called it what it is: "A one-way vector that attacks American energy security while advancing China's geopolitical interests. This puts U.S. national security at risk."

ELI's China partners weren't fringe actors. They included the Policy Research Center for Environment and Economy — a think tank directly affiliated with China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment — and the China International Business Dialogue on Environmental Governance. These are not independent academic exchanges. They are organizations that answer to the Chinese government.

Senator Ted Cruz connected the financial picture at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing last June. He described what he called a "systematic campaign against American energy" backed by the Chinese Communist Party, and pointed to $12 million that Energy Foundation China allegedly funneled to groups actively filing climate lawsuits against domestic energy producers.

Lucci sent a letter to leaders of five congressional committees asking the obvious question: should a nonprofit with three decades of CCP-supervised partnerships be the organization shaping American judicial education on energy law? He's asked Congress to examine ELI's funding, curriculum, expert-selection process, and governance — and to cross-reference which judges attended ELI programs against whether they later handled climate or China-related cases. Representative John Moolenaar of Michigan, who chairs the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the CCP, received the letter.

ELI's spokesman said the organization's China work was "no different than our typical work in the United States" and insisted they were "sharing evidence-based best practices on environmental regulation, not advancing the interests of the Chinese government." He added that the Climate Judiciary Project "has not conducted any programming in China."

That's true. But it's not the point.

Nobody is claiming ELI flew American judges to Beijing. The concern is simpler and more uncomfortable: an organization that spent thirty years embedded with CCP-supervised entities is now the organization deciding what American judges learn about the legal theories used to shut down American energy production. Whether that connection was intentional is almost beside the point. The effect is the same either way.

China's coal program didn't need ELI's help. China built those plants regardless. What China needed was for American courts to make American energy more expensive, more legally precarious, and more politically risky — while Beijing kept the lights on.

ELI says its China work ended in 2024.

The Climate Judiciary Project is still training judges today.