A multimillionaire Democratic donor’s guilty plea raises broader questions about corruption in environmentalist schemes like carbon-offset trading.
A major pillar of the Democrats’ donor ecosystem just pleaded guilty to $248 million in green fraud.
Multimillionaire environmentalist Joe Sanberg co-founded the $2.3 billion “financial and sustainability services company” Aspiration Partners and donated tens of millions to progressive Democratic causes, candidates, and the party itself. He pleaded guilty to a massive green fraud after being indicted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and now faces up to 20 years in prison, but has not yet been sentenced.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti of the DOJ’s Criminal Division said that Sanberg “used his position at Aspiration to deceive investors and lenders for his own benefit, causing his victims over $248 million in losses.”
Sanberg told Forbes in 2023 that he’d invested over $100 million into Aspiration. This highlights a major trend of environmentalists using eco-companies like Aspiration to enact their agenda, often at taxpayer expense via indirect subsidies for “green” business. This is a convenient workaround to the fact that it has been unclear, at best, that direct federal spending to combat global warming has worked. With such spending harder to justify, environmentalists have used companies like Aspiration as an alternative means of enacting their agenda and personally enriching themselves.
This isn’t a case of some low-level official. Sanberg served on the four-member board of the Sierra Club and reportedly considered a Democratic presidential run in the 2020 cycle. He co-founded Aspiration with former Arizona Democratic Party Chairman and Assistant Attorney General Andrei Cherny, who was the director of speechwriting for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Kerry was a big fan of carbon offsets while serving as the U.S. climate envoy.
Sanberg was a huge deal on the progressive left. He received glowing profiles from outlets such as The Atlantic, which praised his support for “Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, increasing corporate regulation, and investing in food stamps and Medicaid.” Aspiration was financially backed by famous actors Robert Downey Jr. and Leonardo DiCaprio, though it is unclear whether they were personally defrauded.
Between 2020 and 2025, Sanberg used his position as a board member of Aspiration Partners Inc. to defraud investors and banks out of $248 million via an environmental, social, governance (ESG) scam, which the company claimed to be a leader in. The company’s ESG focus was central to its brand, attracting vast amounts of venture capital. This involved manufactured financials based on fake customers to artificially drive up the company’s value by giving the impression the company was rapidly growing. Sanberg also faces separate civil Securities and Exchange Commission charges for this process. He raised $300 million from investors under false pretenses.
In 2021, Aspiration earned a $1 billion valuation and a coveted spot on the prestigious Forbes annual financial technology 50 list. This was a huge company and Sanberg was a huge deal.
But it was all built on a lie.
Resembling a modern-day form of indulgences, Sanberg’s scheme at Aspiration involved pressuring other companies to pay tens of thousands of dollars that he would supposedly pass along to other entities to plant trees in Africa. The ostensible goal was offsetting carbon dioxide emissions. Sanberg then used the nominal revenue from this activity to obtain huge loans, triggering $248 million in losses for his victims. “The defendant didn’t just bend the truth, he built a business on a lie to boost the company’s value and line his own pockets,” Eric Shen of the United States Postal Inspection Service Criminal Investigations Group said of Sanberg’s scheme.
To make the indulgence comparison more biting, in a non-Aspiration case, the Vatican itself received carbon-offset certificates that claimed millions of trees had been planted in Hungary to absorb carbon. Those trees were never planted. This is extremely common. Even left-wing outlets like The Guardian have concluded that up to 90 percent of nominal offsets made by the world’s largest carbon-offset certification system existed only on paper. Major U.S. companies, like Microsoft and Amazon, continue to spend billions each year on carbon offsets regardless.
Sanberg was profiting from a similar carbon offset scheme integrated into Aspiration’s business model by offering a feature where customers could round debit card transactions to the nearest dollar to fund carbon offset projects. He used the lucre generated to donate huge sums of money to progressive causes and candidates, especially in California. He personally poured $11 million into the 2024 California Proposition 32, which would have raised the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour. It was narrowly defeated at the polls, during a time period overlapping with the fraud.
A search of FEC data shows that Sanberg has made $632,422 in individual contributions to Democrats or Democratic-aligned candidates since 2002. That includes $100,780 to various Biden-Harris campaign organizations, $19,200 to Ruben Gallego, $5,400 to Kamala Harris’s Senate campaign, $4,800 to Chuck Schumer, $2,700 to Sherrod Brown, and $100,000 to the far left Rebellion PAC, founded by the YouTuber and failed political candidate Cenk Uygur. Sanberg also donated to numerous other Democrats.
As I’ve been saying for almost a decade now, these kinds of carbon-offsetting schemes often go up in smoke. Science-Based Targets initiative, a United Nations–backed nonprofit, has found that carbon offsets rarely accomplish anything. Virtually all offsets do not actually remove carbon from the atmosphere, according to a secret draft reviewed by Reuters.
Sanberg’s scheme turned out to be a fraud. Others have managed to profit in this dubious green economy without running afoul of the law. As I noted last year in National Review, “eco-mania has pressured major corporations into buying billions in offsets in what is essentially a shakedown . . . with the only winner being rich and well-connected environmentalists who profit from the carbon-offset-industry racket.” Former Democratic Vice President Al Gore and David Blood, the former chief of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, made nearly $218 million in profits from a carbon-trading company, Generation Investment Management, which they co-founded.
Carbon trading is big business. Its profits often seem to find their way into Democrats’ hands. This latest scandal should bring more scrutiny to the carbon trading industry.