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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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A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”