Don’t Set Your Money On Fire

So you want to get into climate philanthropy?

I get asked fairly regularly what prospective funders ought to prioritize, sometimes by the funders themselves, more often by people advising them. Many ask similar questions. Where are the gaps? What’s overlooked? What is the killer technology or strategy that will get us to net zero by 2050? How can I make a really big impact quickly? The answer I should probably give is that the obvious thing for them to do is to fund the Breakthrough Institute. And generally I find a way to suggest that. I do think we are an extremely good investment for anyone wishing to pursue a pragmatic and reality-based strategy to deal with climate change.

But I also feel some obligation to be honest about what is achievable and what is not, what is real in the worlds of climate tech, climate policy, and climate politics and what is vaporware. At the end of the day, there is no killer app that will fix climate change that no one else has thought of or invested in. There is a lot of good work being done by sensible people. But none of it will bend the emissions curve very quickly.

Whether you are a prospective grantee or a donor advisor, there is not a lot of benefit to being particularly honest about this. We all face perverse incentives to tell prospective funders what they want to hear. “Yes, you personally can tip the scales. Entrust your money to me, and we will make history together!”

Recently I got another similar query. And after responding, it occurred to me that I ought to publish my view on these questions. I don’t think that doing this is particularly good fundraising practice. But philanthropy in general and climate philanthropy most especially has been poisoned by hopium. The sector would be far healthier if we had more honest conversations about the wicked nature of the problem and the techno-economic and political constraints to solving it. So below is a lightly edited version of my response:

Hi ____

Gap analyses and the perpetual search for neglected strategies by funders getting into climate philanthropy is not terribly helpful and too often ends up prioritizing novelty over efficacy. In recent years this has led, for instance, to lots of money flowing to carbon removal, enteric methane, and regenerative agriculture, which are marginal at best and counterproductive at worst.

In contrast to the constant seeking out of novelty, there are actually only a handful of plausible pathways to deeply decarbonizing the global economy: firm low carbon generation (nuclear, geothermal, carbon capture and storage, hydro where feasible), electrification, non-bio synthetic fuels, and high productivity, intensive, technological agriculture. To varying degrees, there are significant efforts to make headway on all of these fronts. Some (nuclear, fuels, agriculture) remain underfunded. But in most cases, there are significant players and institutions already doing the work.

So the question or challenge I would put to any new funder coming into the space is how are you going to add value to these already extant efforts? Have some of those efforts been neglected? I guess so. But the problem is more that climate philanthropy has massively over indexed on a handful of strategies and technologies that can't work—energy systems predominantly, if not entirely, powered by variable renewable energy, carbon caps and regulations, global treaties, and civil rights style protest invoking a climate emergency and demanding immediate cessation of fossil fuel development and use.

New funders looking for new strategies usually understand, to some degree, that these efforts have failed and are not realistic approaches to the problem. But I would strongly encourage any new funders not to try to reinvent the wheel but instead to find partners who are already pursuing more promising pathways in some significant way and work collaboratively with them to scale up.

I would also caution against too much strategic philanthropy. Philanthropists end up treating their grantees like contractors or consultants whose specific work needs to fit into a grand strategy determined by the funder. Funders, and their advisors, ought to ask themselves why they are uniquely qualified to determine such a strategy versus, say, people actually doing the work, building institutions, etc. Those of us on the other side of these transactions, of course, always have our own biases (mostly that whatever it is that we are doing is the most important thing) that any funder needs to parse.

But the best way to parse those biases in my view is to take a more decentralized, portfolio approach. Bet on people and the institutions they are building, not a rationalized roadmap where they need to fit into some part of your grand strategy. Bet on different strategies and pathways to impact and success, bet on policy and political entrepreneurs, be more like a VC and less like a state planner in your philanthropic strategy. Experiment, try different things, see what works. Keep funding things that work. Stop funding things that don't.

Most importantly, if your benchmark for success is net-zero by 2050 or strategic impact in 2-3 years, you should just set your money on fire and heat your home with it. Not only will this not happen but prioritizing these outcomes in your strategic assessment of what to fund will assure that you have zero impact, invest huge money in technological or political vaporware, or worse, underwrite political strategies and policies that backfire.

The various temperature and emissions targets and timetables that supposedly necessitate action on these timescales are completely made up and arbitrary. There is no well established climate science telling us that 1.5 or 2C is catastrophic. To the contrary, if we are wildly successful over the course of this century, we will limit warming close to 2C. If we aren't, we'll end up between 2.5 and 3C. That is the envelope for policy and political success or failure.

There has been a widely accepted fiction that with sufficient political will, the world can decarbonize much faster than this. But the main drivers of climate change and decarbonization are long-term demographic, macro-economic, and technological trends. The good news is that these trends are all driving toward climate stabilization well below 3 degrees. The bad news is that while we have some ability to shape some of those trends, that ability is quite limited. The impact that philanthropy, advocacy, and activism can have on these trends will be at the margins. So approach the problem, and your philanthropy, with some humility.

You asked about regenerative agriculture, carbon removal, and deforestation. Regenerative agriculture is a scam. It's just old organic and agro-ecological wine in new bottles. By almost every metric that matters - land use, greenhouse gas emissions, input intensity - these agricultural methods have higher impacts than modern, large-scale, intensive systems. There is no plausible way that soil carbon sequestration can make up for the lower land use productivity.

Carbon removal is mostly a scam. It was invented because most climate mitigation models couldn't achieve 2 degree stabilization without it. It became popular some years later when the regenerative agriculture people grabbed onto it and claimed that they could do natural carbon removal through soil sequestration, including supposedly carbon negative rotationally grazed beef. Climate philanthropy rushed in. Within a few years, most analyses had concluded that most of the carbon removal tech either didn't work or was infeasible, most especially natural carbon removal. What remains is enhanced rock weathering and some big expensive machines. Neither is plausible as a solution to "overshoot" but these technologies could, with a lot of continuing innovation, be used to mitigate emissions in hard to abate sectors.

Deforestation is an important contributor to global emissions and biodiversity loss. But it is best understood as an agriculture problem, not a forestry problem. Global agriculture is the primary driver of deforestation. Where agriculture is intensifying, forest policies can succeed in limiting deforestation. Where agriculture is extensifying, forest policies will fail, often locally and always globally.

Bottom line, pick a select group of actors and institutions that are under-resourced, already have a track record, and are doing work in critical areas that offer a feasible pathway to long-term mitigation. Ask them to give you realistic benchmarks for success that they are willing to be evaluated on, invest for the long-term and be a reliable partner and collaborator.