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If you want to donate to fight climate change, what’s the best way to spend your money?
For the past five years, Giving Green has been trying to find out. Each year, the nonprofit recommends a set of nonprofits that are trying to solve the climate problem effectively and efficiently, and get the world closer to decarbonization.
Giving Green, in other words, is somewhat like the climate-specific version of Givewell, an uber-utilitarian group that identifies which global charities maximize the number of lives saved per dollar spent. But it’s much more difficult— or at least much less clear — to identify which nonprofits might best fight climate change than it is which nonprofits might save the most lives through targeted interventions.
Climate change is a globe-spanning sociotechnical problem, a political quandary baked into humanity’s largest-scale engineering systems. Even when a government or technology has seemingly pushed the world forward, it can be unclear why the improvement happened, or whether, in the long run, it will make a meaningful difference. The Paris Agreement, after all, has been around for nearly a decade, the European Union’s cap-and-trade scheme for nearly two. Yet academics, experts, and politicians can (and do) disagree about whether either policy has ultimately helped — and even why they happened in the first place.
To resolve this problem, Giving Green reviews the historical record to identify philanthropic strategies that seem like they have a good shot of leading to emissions reductions. This year, it has focused on eight, including next-generation geothermal, decarbonizing aviation and marine shipping, advancing nuclear energy, and speeding the energy transition in low- and middle-income countries. Then it looks for groups that are working on those problems in time-proven ways.
I spoke with Daniel Stein, Giving Green’s director, earlier this week. Our interview has been edited and condensed for readability.
What is Giving Green’s goal with these recommendations?
The main goal — the problem we are trying to solve — is that we believe that there are lots of people who want to do something about climate, and there’s a lot of money that’s paralyzed by indecision and sits on the sidelines. So we provide a comprehensively researched guide with a systematic approach to try and determine where the high leverage points are in climate philanthropy — and by high-leverage, I’m thinking most greenhouse gas reductions per dollar.
We focus in on what we call philanthropic strategies, specific things that people could be doing. Then we find organizations working on those strategies that are doing a great job and promote them.
Can you tell me about a few of the organizations that you have chosen?
We have some that we’ve recommended for a few years, such as Clean Air Task Force. Last year, one of our big pushes was geothermal energy, and so we’ve recommended Project Innerspace, who are a big advocate for geothermal and work a lot with both private industry and the government.
Another big area of focus for us over the past few years has been heavy industry. The case for philanthropic support for heavy industry is really, really clear. Depending on what estimate you use, heavy industry accounts for roughly a quarter of carbon emissions, but something like less than 5% of philanthropic spending. There’s very little policy teeth almost anywhere in the world on industry, and basically nothing in the U.S., but there are pathways to solving it. We kind of know how to make green steel and green aluminum, and at least have ideas on concrete and plastic. There’s a lot nonprofits can do to pave the way forward in terms of: What does policy look like? How do we get from where we are today — where we kind of know the technology but no one’s using it — to a place where there’s actually supply and demand in the future? So our top recommendations for that is an organization called Industrious Labs in the U.S. and an organization called Future Cleantech Architects in Europe.
Over the past five years, I feel like I’ve seen your mission evolve and your strategies evolve. At the beginning, you recommended giving to a mix of high-end research and policy-development groups, and then also to more grassroots, movement-type groups. But over time, your set of recommendations have become much more focused on groups that are like CATF, that are providing nonpartisan, highly expert information and analysis.
I think that’s right, but it is not necessarily that we have just changed our mind on what works. I think different moments in time call for different approaches. And in those heady years leading up to the Inflation Reduction Act — where there was hope for a Democratic trifecta, and then it happened — there was a major opportunity for a left-driven, all-of-government push on climate. That was what we thought these grassroots groups were in a good position to push forward.
I think when you look back, you see groups like Sunrise having a really powerful influence. Obviously people disagree on what forces got the IRA to happen. But I really do think that you can draw a direct line from this progressive advocacy to the Democrats believing that they had to do something about climate to please their base.
But our view is that that moment has passed. Especially post-IRA, this opportunity for a more progressive-led legislative process has ended. Even if the Democrats were still in control, I think you weren’t going to get big bills like the IRA. We moved to a point where we need to focus on the wonky details of implementing these bills and then passing more technical, focused policy in the future. Our view is that in the U.S., the big opportunities have shifted to what we would call the “insider” groups. But I think that could change again, and it could change based on geography.
Are there any big climate strategies nobody is working on right now — where you identified a place where money could be spent, but you couldn’t find a nonprofit focused on it?
One of our high-level strategies is solar radiation management. That was something that was new for us this year. And within that, we would look at very specific substrategies. Should we be funding research? Should we be funding governance? And within those little sub-elements, we occasionally found stuff where we were like, wow, we really wish there was a group working on this, but we didn’t find anything.
But one of the nice things about having a [grant-making] fund this year, for the first time ever, is that we could help get things started that didn’t exist before. We’re super excited about industry, and so much industry is happening in developing countries. But when you ask, Who is focused on reducing steel emissions in Indonesia?, there were very few organizations. We made a grant to an organization called Climate Catalyst — they were already working on steel in India, and we helped them expand into emissions reduction in Indonesia.
I think some people might see your list and go, Wow, these are a bunch of high-end research and elite advocacy organizations, but what’s actually going to solve the climate crisis is local organizing. How would you reply to that?
I think that’s a reasonable point. We are open to all of these things, and we have considered them, and I think there is a time and place for grassroots approaches and activism. But looking at the historical research and our own research, I believe that the approaches that work on this are ones where the activism is tied to clear policy demands — that are good policies, that can have big, systematic decreases in emissions and seem to have some sort of feasible pathway to success.
What I’ve seen in a lot of grassroots movements in recent years are things like throwing soup at paintings, or blocking streets, which have not had this direct policy connection, and we are pretty skeptical of those approaches. But if grassroots approaches came on our radar that have a super viable theory of change to altering policy, we are very open.
This is the fifth year you’ve put out recommendations like this, right? What have you learned or changed your mind about during that time?
One of the things that’s really crystallized in our mind is that we really think the big levers are in systems. And that can mean a lot of things, but to us, it really means three things — it means policy, technology, and markets.
To solve the climate crisis, you need to change the rules of the game, such that everyday actors — people making decisions, businesses — everybody changes their behavior because some technology got cheaper, or some policy changed. We really use that to focus ourselves to think about, What are the big changes that need to happen, and how do we work backward to the actions that get us there?
So I think that might be why you see some of these more insider, techno-analysis-driven approaches. Because when you step back and you think, alright, we need this market to change in this way, or we need this technology to develop that doesn’t currently exist, and you think about how you get there, a lot of times you need advocacy to change policy, and you need research to make that policy change possible.
This year, Giving Green has recommended six top groups fighting climate change. They are:
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The storm currently battering Jamaica is the third Category 5 to form in the Atlantic Ocean this year, matching the previous record.
As Hurricane Melissa cuts its slow, deadly path across Jamaica on its way to Cuba, meteorologists have been left to marvel and puzzle over its “rapid intensification” — from around 70 miles per hour winds on Sunday to 185 on Tuesday, from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in just a few days, from Category 2 occurring in less than 24 hours.
The storm is “one of the most powerful hurricane landfalls on record in the Atlantic basin,” the National Weather Service said Tuesday afternoon. Though the NWS expected “continued weakening” as the storm crossed Jamaica, “Melissa is expected to reach southeastern Cuba as an extremely dangerous major hurricane, and it will still be a strong hurricane when it moves across the southeastern Bahamas.”
So how did the storm get so strong, so fast? One reason may be the exceptionally warm Caribbean and Atlantic.
“The part of the Atlantic where Hurricane Melissa is churning is like a boiler that has been left on for too long. The ocean waters are around 30 degrees Celsius, 2 to 3 degrees above normal, and the warmth runs deep,” University of Redding research scientist Akshay Deoras said in a public statement. (Those exceedingly warm temperatures are “up to 700 times more likely due to human-caused climate change,” the climate communication group Climate Central said in a press release.)
Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded in 2024 that “tropical cyclone intensities globally are projected to increase” due to anthropogenic climate change, and that “rapid intensification is also projected to increase.”
NOAA also noted that research suggested “an observed increase in the probability of rapid intensification” for tropical cyclones from 1982 to 2017 The review was still circumspect, however, labeling “increased intensities” and “rapid intensification” as “examples of possible emerging human influences.”
What is well known is that hurricanes require warm water to form — at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA. “As long as the base of this weather system remains over warm water and its top is not sheared apart by high-altitude winds, it will strengthen and grow.”
A 2023 paper by hurricane researcher Andra Garner argued that between 1971 and 2020, rates of intensification of Atlantic tropical storms “have already changed as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the planet and oceans,” and specifically that the number of these storms that intensify from Category 1 or weaker “into a major hurricane” — as Melissa did so quickly — “has more than doubled in the modern era relative to the historical era.”
“Hurricane Melissa has been astonishing to watch — even as someone who studies how these storms are impacted by a warming climate, and as someone who knows that this kind of dangerous storm is likely to become more common as we warm the planet,” Garner told me by email. She likened the warm ocean waters to “an extra shot of caffeine in your morning coffee — it’s not only enough to get the storm going, it’s an extra boost that can really super-charge the storm.”
This year has been an outlier for the Atlantic with three Category 5 storms, University of Miami senior research associate Brian McNoldy wrote on his blog. “For only the second time in recorded history, an Atlantic season has produced three Category 5 hurricanes,” with wind speeds reaching and exceeding 157 miles per hour, he wrote. “The previous year was 2005. This puts 2025 in an elite class of hurricane seasons. It also means that nearly 7% of all known Category 5 hurricanes have occurred just in this year.” One of those Category 5 storms in 2005 was Hurricane Katrina.
Jamaican emergency response officials said that thousands of people were already in shelters amidst storm surge, flooding, power outages, and landslides. Even as the center of the storm passed over Jamaica Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service warned that “damaging winds, catastrophic flash flooding and life-threatening storm surge continues in Jamaica.”
With Trump turning the might of the federal government against the decarbonization economy, these investors are getting ready to consolidate — and, hopefully, profit.
Since Trump’s inauguration, investors have been quick to remind me that some of the world’s strongest, most resilient companies have emerged from periods of uncertainty, taking shape and cementing their market position amid profound economic upheaval.
On the one hand, this can sound like folks grasping at optimism during a time when Washington is taking a hammer to both clean energy policies and valuable sources of government funding. But on the other hand — well, it’s true. Google emerged from the dot-com crash with its market lead solidified, Airbnb launched amid the global financial crisis, and Sunrun rose to dominance after the first clean tech bubble burst.
The circumstances may change, but behind all of these against-the-odds successes are investors who saw opportunity where others saw risk. In the climate tech landscape of 2025, well-capitalized investors are eyeing some of the more mature sectors being battered by federal policy or market uncertainty — think solar, wind, biogas, and electric transportation — rather than the fresh-faced startups pursuing more cutting edge tech.
“History does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes,” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, told me. He was working as the chief commercial officer at the solar company Suntech Power when the first climate tech bubble collapsed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, venture capital and project financing dried up instantly, as banks and investors faced heavy losses from their exposure to risky assets. This time around, “there’s plenty of capital at all stages of venture,” as well as infrastructure investing, he said. That means firms can afford to swoop in to finance or acquire undervalued startups and established companies alike.
“I think you’re gonna see a lot of projects in development change hands,” Beebe told me.
Investors don’t generally publicize when the companies or projects that they’re backing become “distressed assets,” i.e. are in financial trouble, nor do they broadcast when their explicit goal is to turn said projects around. But that’s often what opportunistic investing entails.
“As investors in the energy and infrastructure space — which is inherently in transition — we take it as a very important point of our strategy to be opportunistic,” Giulia Siccardo, a managing director at Quinbrook, told me. (Prior to joining the investment firm, Siccardo was director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing & Energy Supply Chains under President Biden.)
Quinbrook sees opportunities in biogas and renewable natural gas, a sector that once enjoyed “very cushioned margins” thanks to investor interest in corporate sustainability, Siccardo told me, but which has lately gone into a “rapid decline.” But she’s also looking at solar and storage, where developers are rushing to build projects before tax credits expire, as well as grid and transmission infrastructure, given the dire need for upgrades and buildout as load growth increases.
As of now, the only investment Quinbrook has explicitly described as opportunistic is its acquisition of a biomethane facility in Junction City, Oregon. When it opened in 2013, the facility used food waste — which otherwise would have emitted methane in a landfill — to produce renewable biogas for clean electricity generation. But after Shell acquired the plant, it switched to converting cow manure and agricultural residue into renewable natural gas for heavy-duty transportation fuels, a process that it’s operated commercially since 2021. Siccardo declined to provide information about the plant’s performance at the time of Quinbrook’s acquisition, though presumably, it has yet to reach its total production capacity of 730,000 million British thermal units per year — enough to supply about 12,000 U.S. households.
The extension of the clean fuel production tax credit, plus the potential for hyperscalers to purchase RNG credits, are still driving demand, however. And that’s increased Siccardo’s confidence in pursuing investments and acquisitions in the space. “That’s a market that, from a policy standpoint, has actually been pretty stable — and you might even say favored — by the One Big Beautiful Bill relative to other technologies,” she explained.
Solar, meanwhile, is still cheap and quick to deploy, with or without the tax credits, Siccardo told me. “If you strip away all subsidies, and are just looking at, what is the technology that’s delivering the lowest cost electron, and which technology has the least supply chain bottlenecks right now in North America —- that drives you to solar and storage,” she said.
Another leading infrastructure investment firm, Generate Capital, is also looking to cash in on the moment. After replacing its CEO and enacting company-wide layoffs, Generate’s head of external affairs, Jonah Goldman, told me that “managers who understand the [climate] space and who can take advantage of the opportunities that are underpriced in this tougher market environment are set up to succeed.”
The firm also sees major opportunities when it comes to good old solar and storage projects. In an open letter, Generate’s new CEO, David Crane, wrote that “for the first time in nearly four decades, the U.S. has an insatiable need for more power: as much as we can produce, as soon as we can, wherever and however we can produce it.”
Crane sees it as the duty of Generate and other investors to use mergers and acquisitions as a tool to help clean tech scale and mature. “If companies across our subsectors were publicly traded, the market itself would act as a centripetal force towards industry consolidation,” he wrote. But because many clean energy companies are privately funded, Crane said “it is up to us, the providers of that private capital, to force industry improvement, through consolidation and otherwise.”
Helping solar companies accelerate their construction timelines to lock in tax credit eligibility has actually become an opportunistic market of its own, Chris Creed, a managing partner at Galvanize Climate Solutions and co-head of its credit division, told me. “Helping those companies that need to start or complete their projects within a predetermined time frame because of changes in the tax credit framework became an investable opportunity for us,” Creed told me. “We have a number of deals in our near term pipeline that basically came about as a result of that.”
Given that some solar companies are bound to fare better than others, he agreed that mergers and acquisitions were likely — among competitors as well as involving companies working in different stages of a supply chain. “It wouldn’t shock me if you saw some horizontal consolidation or some vertical integration,” Creed told me.
Consolidation can only go so far, though. So while investors seem to agree that solar, storage, and even the administration’s nemesis — wind — are positioned for a long and fruitful future, when it comes to more emergent technologies, not all will survive the headwinds. Beebe thinks there’s been “irrational exuberance” around both green hydrogen and direct air capture, for example, and that seasoned investors will give those spaces a pass.
Electric mobility — e.g. EVs, electric planes, and even electrified shipping — and grid scalability — which includes upgrades to make the grid more efficient, flexible, and optimized — are two sectors that Beebe is betting will survive the turmoil.
But for all investors that have the capability to do so, for now, “the easy bet is just to move your money outside the U.S.” Beebe told me.
We might be starting to see just that. Quinbrook also invests in the U.K. and Australia, and just announced its first Canadian investment last week. It acquired an ownership stake in Elemental Clean Fuels, an energy developer making renewable fuels such as RNG, low-carbon methanol, and — yes — clean hydrogen.
Last week, Generate announced that it had closed $43 million in funding from the Canadian company Fiera Infrastructure Private Debt for its North American portfolio of anaerobic digestion projects, which produce renewable natural gas — Generate’s first cross-currency, cross-border deal.
Creed still has confidence in the U.S. market, however, telling me he’s “very bullish on American innovation.” He certainly acknowledges that it’s a tough time out there for any investor deciding where to park their money, but thinks that ultimately, “that volatility should manifest itself as excess returns to investors who are able to figure out their investment strategy and deploy in this environment.”
Exactly what firms will manage this remains an open question, and the opportunities may be short-lived — but it’s a race that plenty of investors are getting in on.
“I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate.”
Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s most important funders of climate-related causes, has a new message: Lighten up on the “doomsday.”
In a new memo, called “Three tough truths about climate,” Gates calls for a “strategic pivot.” Climate-concerned philanthropy should focus on global health and poverty, he says, which will still cause more human suffering than global warming.
“I’m not saying we should ignore temperature-related deaths because diseases are a bigger problem,” he writes. “What I am saying is that we should deal with disease and extreme weather in proportion to the suffering they cause, and that we should go after the underlying conditions that leave people vulnerable to them. While we need to limit the number of extremely hot and cold days, we also need to make sure that fewer people live in poverty and poor health so that extreme weather isn’t such a threat to them.”
This new focus didn’t come with a change in funding priorities — but that’s partly because some big shake-ups have already happened. In February, Heatmap reported that Breakthrough Energy, Gates’ climate-focused funding group, had slashed its grant-making budget. Gates later closed Breakthrough’s policy and advocacy office altogether.
Despite eliminating those financial commitments, he still dwells on two of his longtime obsessions in the new memo: cutting the “green premium” for energy technologies, meaning the delta between the cost of carbon-emitting and clean energy technologies, and improving the measurement of how spending can do the most for human welfare. The same topics dominated his thinking when I last spoke to the billionaire at the 2023 United Nations climate conference in Dubai.
What seems to have shifted, instead, is the global political environment. The Trump administration and Elon Musk gutted the federal government’s spending on global public health causes, such as vaccines and malaria prevention. European countries have also cut back their global aid spending, although not as dramatically as the U.S.
Gates seemingly now feels called to their defense: “Vaccines are the undisputed champion of lives saved per dollar spent,” he writes, praising the vaccine alliance Gavi in particular. “Energy innovation is a good buy not because it saves lives now, but because it will provide cheap clean energy and eventually lower emissions, which will have large benefits for human welfare in the future.”
Last week, Gates shared his thinking about climate change at a roundtable with a handful of reporters. He was, as always, engaging. I’ve shared some of his new takes on climate policy below. His quotes have been edited for clarity.
The environment we’re in today, the policies for climate change are less accommodating. It’s hard to name a country where you’d say, Oh, the climate policies are more accommodating today than they have been in the past.
The thesis I had was that middle income countries — who were already, at that time, the majority of all emissions — would never pay a premium for greenness. And so you could say, well, maybe the rich countries should subsidize that. But you know, the amounts involved would get you up to, like, 4% of rich country budgets would have to be transferred to do that. And we’re at 1% and going down. And there are some other worthy things that that money goes for, other than subsidizing positive green premium type approaches. So the thesis in the book [How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, published in 2021] is we had to innovate our way to negative green premiums for the middle income countries.
Climate [change] is an evil thing in that it’s caused by rich countries and high middle-income countries and the primary burden [falls on poor countries]. When I looked into climate activists, I said, Well, this is incredible. They care about poor countries so much. That’s wonderful, that they feel guilty about it. But in fact, a lot of climate activists, they have such an extreme view of what’s going to happen in rich countries — their climate activism is not because they care about poor farmers and Africa, it’s because they have some purported view that, like, New York City, can’t deal with the flooding or the heat.
The other challenge we have in the climate movement is in order to have some degree of accountability, it was very focused on short-term goals and per-country reports. And the per-country reporting thing is, in a way, a good thing, because a country — certainly when it comes to deforestation or what it’s doing on its electric grid, there is sovereign accountability for what’s being done. But I mean, the way everybody makes steel is the same. The way everybody makes the cement, it’s the same. The way we make fertilizer, it’s all the same. And so there can’t be some wonderful surprise, where some country comes in and, you know, gives you this little number [for its Paris Agreement goals], and you go, Wow, good! You’re so tough, you’re so good, you’re so amazing. Because other than deforestation and your particular electric grid, these are all global things.
If you’re a rich country, the costs of adaptation are just one of many, many things that are not gigantic, huge percentages of GDP — you know, rebuilding L.A. so that it’s like the Getty Museum, in terms of there’s no brush that can catch on fire, there’s no roof that can catch on fire, adds about 10% cost to the rebuild. It’s not like, Oh my god, we can’t live in LA. There’s no apocalyptic story for rich countries. [Climate adaptation] is one of many things that you should pay attention to, like, Does your health system work? Does your education system work? Does your political system work? There are a variety of things that are also quite important.
The place where it gets really tough is in these poor countries. But you know, what is the greatest tool for climate adaptation? Getting rich — growing your economy is the biggest single thing, living in conditions where you don’t face big climate problems. So when you say to an African country, Hey, you have a natural gas deposit, and we’re going to try to block you from getting financing for using that natural gas deposit … It probably won’t work, because there’s a lot of money in the world. It’s not clear how you’d achieve that. And it’s also in terms of the warming effect of that natural gas, versus the improvement of the conditions of the people in that country — it’s not even a close thing.
People in the [climate] movement, we do have to say to ourselves, For the Europeans, how much were they willing to pay in order to support climate? — and did we overestimate in terms of forcing them to switch to electric cars, to buy electric heat pumps, to have their price of electricity be higher? Did we overestimate their willingness to pay with some of those policies? And you do have to be careful because if your climate policies are too aggressive, you will be unelected, and you’ll have a right-wing government that cares not a bit about climate. I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate. You worry they care so much about it that the people you talk to, you won’t be able to meet with them again, because they won’t be in power.