A charity set up by Cherie Blair has received more than £3.6 million from U.S. fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil, DeSmog can reveal.

The eponymous Cherie Blair Foundation for Women was founded in 2008 – providing training and resources, including mobile apps, for “women entrepreneurs” in low-income countries to start small businesses, according to its website.

The group has received at least $4.8 million (around £3.6 million) from ExxonMobil’s charitable arm, the ExxonMobil Foundation, since 2015.

The majority of this ($2.8 million, around £2.1 million) was received between 2020 and the ExxonMobil Foundation’s most recent filing in 2024.

The oil and gas giant provided roughly a-fifth of the Cherie Blair Foundation’s total income from 2020 to 2024, according to an analysis of the latter’s accounts.

Blair is a barrister and the wife of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who last month called for the UK to abandon its climate targets and ramp-up North Sea fossil fuel exploration. There is no suggestion that Exxon funded the Cherie Blair Foundation to influence Tony Blair’s work, nor that his views have been swayed by the money provided.

The ExxonMobil Foundation is the primary philanthropic arm of ExxonMobil, the largest U.S.-based oil and gas company.

Internal company reports have revealed that Exxon knew in the 1980s that unrestrained carbon emissions have the potential to cause “great irreversible harm to our planet,” and that it predicted the exact amount of global warming the world is now experiencing. However, instead of warning the public, Exxon internally decided to publicly “emphasize the uncertainty” of climate science.

The Cherie Blair Foundation said that it is “focused on supporting women entrepreneurs in low- and middle-income countries.”

It added: “We receive funding from a range of donors to deliver programmes aligned with our mission. One of these donors is the ExxonMobil Foundation, with whom we have worked since 2015. This support has enabled us to expand access to business skills training for women entrepreneurs in Nigeria and Guyana.”

Africa is disproportionately vulnerable to climate change, with eight of the 10 countries most at risk globally located in central, west, and southern Africa.

The ExxonMobil Foundation’s available tax returns show that it gave the Cherie Blair Foundation $1 million in 2015 and 2016, $600,000 in 2024, 2023, and 2022, and $500,000 in 2021 and 2020. 

Exxon’s tax returns for 2017 to 2019 do not list any donation recipients, although the Cherie Blair Foundation’s annual accounts for those years still list Exxon as a donor.

The ExxonMobil Foundation is also listed on the Cherie Blair Foundation’s “donors and partners” list for 2011 to 2014, but details of any money provided are not available in the charity’s reports or the ExxonMobil Foundation’s tax returns.

Cherie Blair is still involved in the foundation, having given an interview to The Standard about its work in March.

The foundation added: “We are not connected to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change or to Tony Blair’s personal or professional activities, and we operate independently in our governance, strategy and operations. Information relating to funding received is publicly available in our annual report and accounts.”

ExxonMobil was approached for comment.

Tony Blair and Net Zero

In a major intervention in May, Tony Blair called on the Labour government to “use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources” and sideline the UK’s net zero emissions targets. 

He also said new oil and gas was essential to power the data centres needed for the mass deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), which Blair has championed.

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has caused an energy crisis and a spike in the price of oil. Labour has argued the UK needs to deploy clean energy at a faster pace, while the Conservatives and Reform have been calling for the UK’s ban on new North Sea exploration licences to be lifted.

The Cherie Blair Foundation’s ExxonMobil donations are the latest example of fossil fuel interests backing Blair family initiatives.

TBI has been paid to advise the governments of several authoritarian petrostates, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Azerbaijan, all of which are heavily reliant on oil and gas exports.

The institute has also championed the deployment of artificial intelligence by the government and in the economy, and has supported the use of gas to power AI data centres.

TBI received $130 million (around £96.5 million) between 2021 and 2023 from billionaire tech entrepreneur Larry Ellison, founder of data software company Oracle and an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump. In total, Ellison has donated or pledged at least £257 million to TBI.

“Neither Tony nor Cherie Blair can be taken seriously when it comes to climate change, energy policy or human rights when their organisations have taken so much money from oil companies and oil dictators,” a spokesperson for the Green Party said.

In a 5,000-word essay published on the TBI website in May, Blair listed “the net-zero acceleration and phasing out of the British oil and gas industry” among Labour’s 2024 manifesto commitments which he considers a mistake.

He wrote that Labour should “remove those parts of the net-zero agenda which prioritise clean energy over cheaper energy”.

Blair, who was prime minister from 1997 to 2007, concluded: “We must prioritise cheaper energy and electrification over net zero and use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources. This is essential for our competitiveness and for taking advantage of AI.”

Renewable energy from wind and solar power are consistently the cheapest form of energy. High energy bills are caused by the price of oil and gas, while new North Sea exploration will do little to cut energy bills.

Data centres are currently using six percent of electricity in the UK and U.S., according to a report earlier this month by the International Data Center Authority, an industry body. The average data centre uses enough energy to power roughly 5,000 UK homes, and between 11 million and 19 million litres of water per day, the same as a town of between 30,000 and 50,000 people.

Up to 100 data centres in the UK are reportedly looking to use gas power to meet this demand, threatening emissions reduction targets. The Labour government has yet to state whether it will prevent gas-powered data centres from being built in the UK.

Last month, the government admitted that it had under-estimated the potential carbon emissions of data centres by a factor of more than 100.

Last year, Keir Starmer’s administration – which has close ties to Blair and TBI – signed a ‘Tech Prosperity Deal’ with the U.S. government through which big tech companies pledged to heavily invest in AI development in the UK. While Trump paused the deal in December, it’s unclear to what extent these investments are also on pause.