As 2017 wound to a close, Miles Goodrich sat in a dingy co-working space sifting through the Sunrise Movement’s options. He had sent out funding inquiries to dozens of foundations and was mostly coming up dry.
“We weren’t friends with the power brokers,” recalls Goodrich, deputy fundraising director for the environmental nonprofit.
That changed abruptly.
A year later the group scored a $300,000 grant from the JPB Foundation. Then, as the youth movement’s push for a green new deal began to take hold in the corridors of Congress, the grants came rolling in: money from the Bullitt, Ford, and Packard foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund followed.
After four years playing defense, as the Trump administration pulled out of international agreements and sought to throw the science behind global warming into question, climate-change leaders like Goodrich have a friend in the White House. President-Elect Joe Biden took a hard line on the fossil-fuel industry during the campaign and has pledged to rejoin the Paris climate accord on the first day of his presidency. In touting his proposed clean-energy revolution, he calls climate change the greatest challenge facing the country.
To reach a goal of zero net emissions by 2050, Biden has, among other things, called for large investments in research, stronger enforcement of environmental regulations, more stringent fuel standards for cars and trucks, and a requirement that publicly traded companies disclose greenhouse-gas emissions in their operations and supply chains. An infrastructure bill could be one early opportunity to advance pro-environmental policies with mass transit as an alternative to more roads and cars.
However, Biden also is a moderate with a long history of seeking compromise, and the impact of the pandemic on businesses could tempt the new administration to water down some of its climate efforts, says May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, an international climate nonprofit.
“There are still plenty of areas in his platform where he needs to be pushed,” Boeve says of Biden. “In this economic climate, there’s going to be tremendous pressure to just restore a bunch of industries to exactly where they were rather than using this as an opportunity to push them to decarbonize.”
Biden’s dedication to the cause is no reason for philanthropy to relax its efforts, Boeve and other climate leaders say, especially since the need to change course is so urgent.
“Winning slowly is the same thing as losing in that context,” says Melanie Allen, co-director of the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, which supports movement groups led by Indigenous women and other women of color in the southeastern United States. “It’s not going to happen by tinkering around the edges. It’s going to take big, bold investments.”
Hive recently received $43 million from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as part of his plan announced in February to dedicate $10 billion to address climate change. The gift, made through the Bezos Earth Fund, will more than double the Hive’s grant-making budget over the next two years.
The Bezos pledge suggests that philanthropy is getting more serious about climate change. According to the ClimateWorks Foundation, efforts to combat climate change totaled $1.6 billion in 2019. That total is nearly double the amount foundations put on the table four years earlier, but it still amounted to less than 2 percent of foundation giving.
ClimateWorks received $50 million from the Bezos Earth Fund, which it will use to research methods to reduce emissions from transportation and create market demand and public support for using cement and steel that doesn’t contribute to climate change, says Charlotte Pera, the grant maker’s president.
Finding Opportunities
After Trump was voted into office, many national foundations shifted gears away from pushing for changes in federal policy to focus on building movements, continuing a process that started after policy fixes like cap and trade, an attempt at a national emissions trading market that foundered in Congress during the Obama administration.
Some turned their attention to the states, according to Mary Skelton Roberts, co-director of the Barr Foundation’s climate program. Barr, which largely makes grants to Massachusetts organizations, supported the creation of groups like the Transportation and Climate Initiative of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, which looks to reduce emissions through regional agreements.
Skelton Roberts hopes national grant makers continue to work at the state level by supporting analyses of the health impact of changes in state emissions policies and helping to ensure that the economic benefits from climate-related policy changes at the state level are equitably distributed among people of different backgrounds in different geographic areas.
“They can fund the strategic communications that really enable people to connect the dots between a clean-energy economy, good jobs, public health, and better outcomes,” she says. “We do that locally. But amplifying that at the national level is a really good role that national funders can play.”
Jonathan Pershing, director of the environment program at the Hewlett Foundation, agrees that national grant makers shouldn’t dial back their climate-change efforts during a Biden administration. He suggested that renewable fuel policies and technologies targeting the agricultural economy could provide a lot of jobs and have a substantially positive impact on global warming. (The Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle.)
“American philanthropy has not invested all that much in how to persuade the middle of the country to play,” he says. “Where’s the farm investment? We could actually bring people together with a federal process that might give a pro-climate government some access to the states that are historically more oppositional.”
Global Agreements
Internationally, Pershing sees a need for a lot of climate investment throughout Africa. And the United States must work to reassert itself as a climate leader after re-entry into the Paris Agreement. Pershing says Hewlett will support planning for the next global climate meetings in Glasgow. The summit was scheduled for November but postponed for one year because of Covid-19.
During the Trump administration, the Packard Foundation supported legal challenges to Trump administration regulatory decisions and poured an additional $4 million into efforts to defend the integrity of science and pursue additional university research to make up for an anemic federal research budget, says Walt Reid, who directs the foundation’s environmental programs.
Much of the foundation’s environmental and climate work is international. Domestically, Reid doesn’t think there will be a lot of rapid progress on climate policy at the national level, particularly if the Senate remains in Republican hands following two runoff elections in January. The potential for gridlock suggests foundations would be wise to continue to invest at the state level and to continue to support movement groups, particularly those that represent marginalized populations, he says.
“The path to durable and stable climate solutions goes directly through justice and equity,” he says. It’s not about just getting 50 percent of people wanting to do something. “You actually need to be focused on who are the winners and who are the losers.”
