This is a very interesting, and very tech centric appraisal of the climate change NGO sector. I'd like to call out early on that the author uses two funds explicitly created by and for wealthy...
This is a very interesting, and very tech centric appraisal of the climate change NGO sector. I'd like to call out early on that the author uses two funds explicitly created by and for wealthy folks in the technology sector. While "data and evidence driven initiatives" is very popular at the moment, I always like to take a pause and remember who has the capacity to provide data and how they get to interpret it often create skewed results. Check out a few articleson thephenomenon.
Another issue with the tech-centric groups is that there is an assumption that we can engineer our way out of this problem. And while there will definitely be some invention and engineering needed, I feel like these groups do what engineers usually do and blow their contributions out of proportion. If you think we're just going to suck the atmosphere free of CO2, then you haven't been paying attention to the scale of what is currently happening. That said, more efficient and cheaper renewables, increased efficiency in commercial processes, and streamline supply chains are definitely engineering problems that will greatly support reducing emissions.
To the traditional models not working. I totally agree that locking up the lions share of funding in groups that are already well supported suppresses fresh innovation and established conservation regimes like indigenous practices. But to say they don't measure the success is kind of bogus. All of these groups have to report out to donors and all of these groups have monitoring, evaluation, and learning budgets that make up about 10% of their total project budgets. They are also coming up with some really novel methods of address carbon capture like restructured debt for conservation. They do have a big impact and they make working in climate change mitigation financially viable. But, like all big institutions they are largely self proving (like the article says, they rarely cop to faults but that's often for fear of articles like this one would add it as another reason not to fund them) and slow to adopt some of the more processing novel techniques.
What is largely untouched is the potential benefit of traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous groups. There is a new push towards paying indigenous groups to steward their traditional lands. This runs in the face of mineral and oil exploration so it's rarely supported as a viable "scalable" option. When a model is anti-capitalist it doesn't receive the same support as our modern "fixes" do. Anti-capitalist practices are a sure fire way to reduce emissions and elevating traditional practices can improve conservation/natural carbon capture abilities.
After writing all this out I think my biggest critique of the article is that it is pointedly capitalistic. It leans on development and creation rather then conservation and maintenance as the most needed and valuable solutions to our climate crisis. The author reads like someone going coming to terms with the climate crisis from a very comfy armchair and doesn't want to get up. The non-profits listed are not the most effective, they are just the ones that make you feel like we can stop climate change without having to lose any personal comforts.
I don't know much about climate change charities; I've just begun reading about them. An issue with many charities is that the big donors get more information than the general public. Charities...
I don't know much about climate change charities; I've just begun reading about them.
An issue with many charities is that the big donors get more information than the general public. Charities are often very focused on the grant application process and convincing big donors that they're doing what the donor wants. (They will also change their plans to appeal to these donors.) Some of the articles you link to are about international giving by governments, which is at an even larger scale than the big private donors.
One reaction to this was the approach taken by MacKenzie Scott, where she had her people evaluate charities without talking to them. A variety of organizations got grants without even applying. She's a big donor who doesn't want to influence charities in the ways that other big donors do.
Meanwhile the public usually gets slick marketing campaigns based on emotional appeals, because that's what's usually works for large-scale fundraising from small donors. I can't really blame them for doing what works, but choosing charities based on who has the best advertising doesn't appeal to me.
One of GiveWell's goals is to encourage transparency, so that ordinary donors who aren't into emotional appeals and prefer more scientific and financial information can get the sort of information that they want. They are influential enough that many charities will take them seriously, but the charities often don't have the sort of information that GiveWell wants, or aren't comfortable revealing it to the public.
Giving Green seems to be following GiveWell's lead, but I haven't read much about them yet and I don't know how influential they are or how much information they share.
I think it's generally true that people in the tech industry are more likely to be interested in evaluating charities this way than the average small donor, but I'm not sure what the alternatives are? Are you happy with how you choose where to give? Do you get the information you want to make a good decision?
I totally get what you mean and it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have worked at a number of non-profits, some good some not so good. In most cases they were chronically...
I totally get what you mean and it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have worked at a number of non-profits, some good some not so good. In most cases they were chronically underfunded and as such ended up straying off mission to fulfill some potential donors demands. I think you hit the nail on the head with much of your assessment.
To be completely honest I think philanthropy and charitable giving are scams. There are incentives for the wealthy to shelter their income and dictate the use of those funds. Most of us don't make or spend enough for either of those to be true for the common person. In my opinion we need a progressive tax to support programs like these. Many of the jobs that non-profits do could be better achieved by well supported government programs. We wouldn't need so many mental health charities if we had a well funded medicare for all. We wouldn't need a climate tech non-profits if we spent more on our EPA or forest service. But, we don't have that system so I do still give to a few charities that align with my ethos.
My selection process comes down to personal experience and the experience of folks I think highly of. Generally it's organizations that I have personally worked for or with, volunteered with, had friends involved with, or have come across their outputs in the wild. I think working in the non-profit space gave me the opportunity not everyone has to rub shoulders with a great number of other charitable groups. It let me ID the worst offenders (Green Peace I'm looking at you) and appreciate the one's who are moving in the right direction. Those decisions aren't static either. I was volunteering and donating to The Nature Conservancy as I really liked their initiative to restore the kelp forests of California and reintroduce the endangered sun star that nearly went extinct during the 2016 "warm blob" event. The field teams were awesome and participating in kelp surveys gave me a first hand look at what they were accomplishing. I still believe in that project, but overall it feels like they are often selling out to corporate interests. When I learned their acting CEO was Sally Jewell, who's entire family fortune is based on fossil fuels, I decided to redirect those funds elsewhere but continued volunteering on the kelp project. Wikipedia is another group I have frequently donated to. I get to see the product of their work so it's easier to vet. The last thing for me is if I ever come across a group that has employees with clipboards on the street I will not donate to that organization again. It's weird but it's a deal breaker.
I think I'm an anomaly as I work in climate tech, I've worked at non-profits for the majority of my career, and I have a large network of people who get to peek behind those slick marketing campaigns. My advice is spend some physical time with the organizations you're excited about and see what it feels like.
For companies I would suggest, check out creative financing or coordination groups like Blue Forest Conservation or The California Institute of Biodiversity. They usually work with a number of really cool non-profits and are non-profits themselves.
This is a very interesting, and very tech centric appraisal of the climate change NGO sector. I'd like to call out early on that the author uses two funds explicitly created by and for wealthy folks in the technology sector. While "data and evidence driven initiatives" is very popular at the moment, I always like to take a pause and remember who has the capacity to provide data and how they get to interpret it often create skewed results. Check out a few articles on the phenomenon.
Another issue with the tech-centric groups is that there is an assumption that we can engineer our way out of this problem. And while there will definitely be some invention and engineering needed, I feel like these groups do what engineers usually do and blow their contributions out of proportion. If you think we're just going to suck the atmosphere free of CO2, then you haven't been paying attention to the scale of what is currently happening. That said, more efficient and cheaper renewables, increased efficiency in commercial processes, and streamline supply chains are definitely engineering problems that will greatly support reducing emissions.
To the traditional models not working. I totally agree that locking up the lions share of funding in groups that are already well supported suppresses fresh innovation and established conservation regimes like indigenous practices. But to say they don't measure the success is kind of bogus. All of these groups have to report out to donors and all of these groups have monitoring, evaluation, and learning budgets that make up about 10% of their total project budgets. They are also coming up with some really novel methods of address carbon capture like restructured debt for conservation. They do have a big impact and they make working in climate change mitigation financially viable. But, like all big institutions they are largely self proving (like the article says, they rarely cop to faults but that's often for fear of articles like this one would add it as another reason not to fund them) and slow to adopt some of the more processing novel techniques.
What is largely untouched is the potential benefit of traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous groups. There is a new push towards paying indigenous groups to steward their traditional lands. This runs in the face of mineral and oil exploration so it's rarely supported as a viable "scalable" option. When a model is anti-capitalist it doesn't receive the same support as our modern "fixes" do. Anti-capitalist practices are a sure fire way to reduce emissions and elevating traditional practices can improve conservation/natural carbon capture abilities.
After writing all this out I think my biggest critique of the article is that it is pointedly capitalistic. It leans on development and creation rather then conservation and maintenance as the most needed and valuable solutions to our climate crisis. The author reads like someone going coming to terms with the climate crisis from a very comfy armchair and doesn't want to get up. The non-profits listed are not the most effective, they are just the ones that make you feel like we can stop climate change without having to lose any personal comforts.
I don't know much about climate change charities; I've just begun reading about them.
An issue with many charities is that the big donors get more information than the general public. Charities are often very focused on the grant application process and convincing big donors that they're doing what the donor wants. (They will also change their plans to appeal to these donors.) Some of the articles you link to are about international giving by governments, which is at an even larger scale than the big private donors.
One reaction to this was the approach taken by MacKenzie Scott, where she had her people evaluate charities without talking to them. A variety of organizations got grants without even applying. She's a big donor who doesn't want to influence charities in the ways that other big donors do.
Meanwhile the public usually gets slick marketing campaigns based on emotional appeals, because that's what's usually works for large-scale fundraising from small donors. I can't really blame them for doing what works, but choosing charities based on who has the best advertising doesn't appeal to me.
One of GiveWell's goals is to encourage transparency, so that ordinary donors who aren't into emotional appeals and prefer more scientific and financial information can get the sort of information that they want. They are influential enough that many charities will take them seriously, but the charities often don't have the sort of information that GiveWell wants, or aren't comfortable revealing it to the public.
Giving Green seems to be following GiveWell's lead, but I haven't read much about them yet and I don't know how influential they are or how much information they share.
I think it's generally true that people in the tech industry are more likely to be interested in evaluating charities this way than the average small donor, but I'm not sure what the alternatives are? Are you happy with how you choose where to give? Do you get the information you want to make a good decision?
I totally get what you mean and it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have worked at a number of non-profits, some good some not so good. In most cases they were chronically underfunded and as such ended up straying off mission to fulfill some potential donors demands. I think you hit the nail on the head with much of your assessment.
To be completely honest I think philanthropy and charitable giving are scams. There are incentives for the wealthy to shelter their income and dictate the use of those funds. Most of us don't make or spend enough for either of those to be true for the common person. In my opinion we need a progressive tax to support programs like these. Many of the jobs that non-profits do could be better achieved by well supported government programs. We wouldn't need so many mental health charities if we had a well funded medicare for all. We wouldn't need a climate tech non-profits if we spent more on our EPA or forest service. But, we don't have that system so I do still give to a few charities that align with my ethos.
My selection process comes down to personal experience and the experience of folks I think highly of. Generally it's organizations that I have personally worked for or with, volunteered with, had friends involved with, or have come across their outputs in the wild. I think working in the non-profit space gave me the opportunity not everyone has to rub shoulders with a great number of other charitable groups. It let me ID the worst offenders (Green Peace I'm looking at you) and appreciate the one's who are moving in the right direction. Those decisions aren't static either. I was volunteering and donating to The Nature Conservancy as I really liked their initiative to restore the kelp forests of California and reintroduce the endangered sun star that nearly went extinct during the 2016 "warm blob" event. The field teams were awesome and participating in kelp surveys gave me a first hand look at what they were accomplishing. I still believe in that project, but overall it feels like they are often selling out to corporate interests. When I learned their acting CEO was Sally Jewell, who's entire family fortune is based on fossil fuels, I decided to redirect those funds elsewhere but continued volunteering on the kelp project. Wikipedia is another group I have frequently donated to. I get to see the product of their work so it's easier to vet. The last thing for me is if I ever come across a group that has employees with clipboards on the street I will not donate to that organization again. It's weird but it's a deal breaker.
I think I'm an anomaly as I work in climate tech, I've worked at non-profits for the majority of my career, and I have a large network of people who get to peek behind those slick marketing campaigns. My advice is spend some physical time with the organizations you're excited about and see what it feels like.
For companies I would suggest, check out creative financing or coordination groups like Blue Forest Conservation or The California Institute of Biodiversity. They usually work with a number of really cool non-profits and are non-profits themselves.