It’s been a tumultuous year for climate politics — and for climate nonprofits. The longtime activist group 350.org suspended its operations in the U.S. (at least temporarily), and Bill Gates, the world’s No. 1 climate funder, declared that the decarbonization movement should make a “strategic pivot” to poverty reduction. How should someone who wants to help the global climate navigate this moment?
Our guest has recommendations. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Dan Stein, the founder and executive director of Giving Green. Giving Green is a nonprofit that researches the most high-impact climate groups and helps people and companies donate to them. Stein talked about the top five climate groups Giving Green recommends this year, effective altruism and the future of climate philanthropy, and whether Bill Gates is right that climate activism has focused too much on emissions targets.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Dan Stein: You can think of this set of solutions that’s very easily measurable, and to a first order approximation call that the carbon offset market. And so if you’re very obsessed about measurements and accountability, you’re playing in the offset market — which is okay, but I just think people can do better, right? Like, we need to change systems. We need to change laws. And you can’t do that with a carbon offset. So we sometimes advise companies, as well, and that’s what I tell them. I’m like, if you put yourself in this box of having to measure the amount of tons that you are reducing to solve your net zero goal, well then you’re extremely restrained in terms of the upside impact you can have.
Robinson Meyer: It seems like you’ve followed an arc that is not unrecognizable from other parts of life. Like, I think of what’s happened with effective altruism, which is kind of where GiveWell initially came out of — this idea that everyone could be saving more lives if they were way more thoughtful and exact and precise, and scrutinized their methods much better in picking which groups to give to. And that obviously has had some big successes, among them GiveWell, which is quite impressive, I think, in some ways, and has saved a lot of lives and changed how people think about development. But ultimately you do run into politics, at the end of it.
I even think in economics more broadly, there’s incredible attention given to small policy changes that can produce more or less growth and more or less equality or inequality. But then when you talk about these big picture questions like why do certain countries become rich, or why does development happen in some places and not others? Once you move past the basic geographic constraints, then as far as I can tell, the current economic answer is like, well, some places had histories that developed good institutions and some places didn’t. And if you have good institutions, you have economic growth.
And it feels like we’re hitting the institution question of climate tech, or of decarbonization. Like, yeah, your dollars could go a little farther on some sorts of carbon offsets than others. But if you really care about decarbonization, you’re actually back at this big set of very mushy questions at the intersection of society and technology and policy and politics.
Stein: Definitely. And I mean, not to get us too derailed — you know, I’m an economist, Rob. But anyway —
Meyer: That’s why I’ve intentionally driven this car into a ditch.
Stein: Development economics has also gone through waves of this. If you think of the 70s and 80s, like, early versions of the World Bank were all about institutions and getting the rules of the game, right? And then free markets will solve everything. And then you kind of get a reaction to that in the 90s and 2000s of more microdevelopment.
And now I actually think maybe the pendulum is swinging the other way, going more towards growth. Now you even see it for someone like GiveWell. They’re now making a ton of grants not just to these super measurable direct intervention orgs, but to more meta orgs that are trying to increase the total amount of aid or the quality of aid or health systems or whatever. It’s really hard to avoid these questions of policy and technology and markets if you’re trying to solve big problems.
Mentioned:
Giving Green’s top climate nonprofits for 2025:
Clean Air Task Force
Future Cleantech Architects
Good Food Institute
Opportunity Green
Project InnerSpace
The Giving Green regranting fund
Bill Gates’ memo on “three tough truths about climate”
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Uplight is a clean energy technology company that helps energy providers unlock grid capacity by activating energy customers and their connected devices to generate, shift, and save energy. The Uplight Demand Stack — which integrates energy efficiency, electrification, rates, and flexibility programs — improves grid resilience, reduces costs, and accelerates decarbonization for energy providers and their customers. Learn more at uplight.com/heatmap.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
