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The climate charity issue: How to donate like it's for real

Climate Solutions  //   I S S U E  # 6 3   //   G I F T S

By Mike Coren

For many of us, giving is not a habit. It certainly wasn’t for me. I wasn’t greedy. I didn’t own that much stuff, especially compared to many Americans. Big cars and houses drag me down. But I wasn’t giving regularly. I decided that needed to change. I had more money (relatively speaking) than any other time in my life. If not now, when was I going to start?

So I started automating my philanthropy. Every month, $75 is deducted from my paycheck. It goes into a separate charity account: I give it to anyone or any group I feel can use it best. From this pot, I schedule monthly donations to groups or hand it out to someone in need. From big well-known non-profits to causes close to my heart—such as the tiny Nantu wildlife reserve in Sulawesi, Indonesia, one of the last redoubts for the babirusa, a rare tusked pig (check out that cute face). 

It gives me way more joy than most of my $75 purchases. Whatever’s remaining or topped up—$574.44 in 2021—is doled out by the end of the year.

So the giving season is upon us once again. You too may have some charity to hand out this December as well. About one-third of charitable giving happens this month. While the ultra-wealthy get most of the attention, the majority of charitable dollars come from the bottom 99% of all donors, far outpacing corporations, foundations, and billionaires.

Even the pandemic didn’t dent this generosity. In 2020, the US public gave a record $471 billion to nonprofits. That’s about 2.3% of US gross domestic product in all—a rate that has been consistent since 1980. 

The same generosity, however, doesn’t hold for the climate. Less than 2% of charitable dollars go to environmental nonprofits. Groups dedicated solely to climate change receive even less: just 0.4% of all charitable dollars, according to a CarbonSwitch, which analyzed about 65,000 environmental nonprofit tax returns (see their analysis below). Instead, most tax-deductible donations end up in two places: churches and universities.

Why does climate go begging?

One reason, I suspect, is the emotional appeal of our local church, food bank, or alma mater (and their well-oiled fundraising machines). Another, however, is that people don’t know where to give.

As someone who covers climate change every day, I’d be hard-pressed to name the three groups I’m sure can effectively deploy your cash. Luckily, a few teams of economists have stepped in to crunch the numbers about where you get the most bang for your buck.

Effective altruists try to do this by evaluating non-profits on three criteria: Is their work important? Are their aims achievable? Is their work underfunded or neglected by others? 

Anyone who has studied economics (or purchased television advertising) knows that proving a dollar did what it was supposed to do is really tough. In philanthropy, piecing together the cause and effect of your donation is as much art as science. And this approach risks excluding some non-profits doing great, if less measurable, work. After all, Hothouse brings you evidence-based solutions like these (you can donate here if you feel so inclined) but we’re not yet on any national lists (ok, well at least one). Still, the approach is a powerful tool to identify a few climate nonprofits moving the needle.

This week, I interviewed two researchers who spent weeks and months pouring over reams of data to identify the most effective groups to give your dollars this holiday. Their recommendations are below. 

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For climate philanthropy, the more boring, the better 

Everyone agreed on one thing: We need to fund more boring stuff. Planting trees and banning plastic straws feels right. But achieving net-zero emissions means getting laws into the federal registrar (70,392 pages and counting). 

Daniel Stein, an economist who runs Giving Green, an evidence-based donor guide, says climate philanthropy can have the greatest impact, dollar for dollar, in the halls of national legislatures and the White House. “The main things you have to do to fight climate change are not sexy,” he said. “It’s coal plant regulation, electric vehicle subsidies, figuring out clean concrete. Systematic stuff.” 

Also praising the virtue of tedium is Michael Thomas, the founder of CarbonSwitch, the rare people, he says, who likes to look at IRS tax filings.

“The groups creating a huge amount of impact aren’t getting a lot of money,” he says. “We need to be funding the boring work, we need to get the tedious details right—fund groups that give donors the highest leverage for their money.”

And who’s doing that well? Stein and Thomas both arrived at similar conclusions in their reports: Small, nimble organizations that punch above their weight advancing strategic policies. [See the full findings by both Giving Green and CarbonSwitch.] 

When it comes to giving, that means funding people lobbying Congress as it crafts multi-trillion-dollar spending bills. Or reframing the narrative to change public perceptions (and the political calculus) about what’s possible on climate today. 

Few of these organizations make the news. But, researchers say, all have proved to be formidable in the climate fight, dispatching climate and policy experts to the trenches to get their ideas into the law books. With a brief window opening in the US under the Biden Administration to pass sweeping climate policy, time is short, here are some of the organizations having the most impact in 2021. 

Rewiring America: The positive climate story about electrifying everything  

Rewiring America plans to electrify 121 million households—and then everything else. Its virtual offices are stacked with inventors (Saul Griffith), engineers, entrepreneurs, and policy wonks pushing policies to get buildings and vehicles off fossil fuels, and onto clean electrons. Rewiring America helped put the nation’s first national electrification bill on the floor of Congress. More importantly, they’re rewriting the message around climate action. “It’s a great example of a group telling a different story,” says Thomas. “The story of environmentalism and climate action has been all about sacrifice. It turns out it’s really hard to get people to sacrifice money or the things they love. Rewriting America’s campaign about electrifying everything is about ways that save people money and create massive amounts of jobs. That’s really important as we try to reach larger and larger audiences—and voter bases—in the climate community.” [In my own interviews with Congressional staffers, it’s true: almost every climate bill is framed as a jobs bill.] 

You can make a donation here. 

Carbon180: Policy to get the CO2 out 

When I interviewed the team at Carbon180 last year, their call to remove carbon from the atmosphere—pulling greenhouse gasses out of the sky—was a lonely one. Today, the co-founders have the ears of policymakers around the world. Giana Amador and Noah Deich spun out their non-profit from the University of California, Berkeley to advocate for tech innovation and policy. Their key insight was simple: make it easier for companies to invest in carbon removal. By helping pass a tax credit for removing carbon, they created an instant business case for investing in mitigation. “If you tell investors, I want to save the world, but I have this technology risk, policy risk, and this market risk,” says Carbon180’s Deich, “the number of investors who say I’ll invest in that is vanishingly small.”  

Thomas says the group has become an influential counterwright to industry in Washington DC making carbon removal part of national policy. “Carbon180 means the fossil fuel companies are not the only ones writing policies on climate removal,” says Thomas. “That’s really important.”

You can make a donation here.

Clean Air Task Force: Leave no climate technology behind 

After a bill is passed, there’s something that political scientist Leah Stokes of the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls the “fog of enactment.” It’s up to government agencies to turn legislative language into effective regulation. Once a bill is passed, its implementation dictates its impact. Ensuring arcane rulemaking delivers the climate benefit is one of the things Clean Air Task Force (CATF) does well.

CATF now has a strong record of winning tough policy battles, spotlighting neglected technologies, and scoring national bi-partisan policy wins, from the Energy Act of 2020 to improving the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. If you’ve heard a lot about methane today, you can thank CATF for starting to sound the alarm five years ago. CATF’s Global Methane Pledge, taken up by US president Joe Biden, was signed by 105 countries at COP26 in Glasgow this fall. “Clean Air Task Force focuses on policy to move the needle on neglected technologies that aren’t getting attention from government or industry,” says Stein. “They’ve got an exciting bunch of wins under their belt.”

You can make a donation here

Evergreen Collaborative: Climate campaign staffers take Capitol Hill

When then-presidential candidate Jay Inslee ended his campaign in 2020, his climate team was just getting started. The team behind the Washington state governor’s campaign formed the nucleus of a new group, the Evergreen Collaborative, and immediately dove into implementing Inslee’s climate platform at the federal level.

Once Democrats re-took the House and Senate, Evergreen has proven to be among the most influential voices shaping the Build Back Better bill’s climate provisions. Evergreen was “out in front of the pack on how to take all these climate policies and priorities and make them passable,” says Stein. “They seem to punch above their weight…as one of the most effective insider policy organizations currently working to influence US federal policy.”  You can give to the Evergreen Collaborative’s policy work as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (tax-deductible) or its political activism via an associated sister organization Evergreen Action (501(c)(4). 

You can make a donation here. 

Growing the grassroots: When time is money 

For those who’d like to give of their time—even as little as one hour per week—grassroots organizations need your help. One of those is Climate Changemakers, a 100% volunteer-built organization launched in 2020. Each week, Changemakers connects you with a (virtual) team for “simple, productive political action with no prep required.” Their work elects climate-friendly candidates and holds those leaders accountable once they’re in office. You’d be amazed at how much leverage a few persistent constituents can have over state and local elected officials.

Join or donate here.

Thank you for reading the final installment of the Gift issue! We’ll see you again in 2022.

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Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Mike Coren and Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read.