61: Green recovery
I am wiped out at the end of a long week, but one of the things I’ve been focusing on that I thought I could talk about here today was this panel that I moderated yesterday for the UNFCCC secretariat, which is the administrative body that oversees climate treaties. This year they are hosting a bunch of virtual Climate Dialogues, which are just wrapping up today, and I was invited to moderate one about climate philanthropy and green recovery. You can see the full list of dialogues here and some have links to recordings if you’re interested.
In COVID times, moderating a panel means putting on the top half of a suit, moving my desk into the living room to get away from the dogs, and running a video conference call that is being watched live by many people. So kind of a strange experience, but all in all I think it went OK.
The event is perhaps a bit dry for casual viewing, but you can watch a recording of the whole thing posted on YouTube if you would like to a) hear some very smart panelists talk about climate change philanthropy and green recovery from COVID-19, b) see how I’m getting better but still not great at cutting my own hair, or c) hear me say “um” 1 million times.
I find hosting these events, as opposed to being a panelist, to be a little tricky because you have to balance your own opinions and interests with what the hosts and participants and audience will be most interested in, and also try to give all of the panelists enough time to get their perspectives in. But aside from the fact that Bloomberg got some extra attention at the beginning because he’s a big donor to the UNFCC I was pretty much able to control the flow of the event, which friends and loved ones will attest is something I am a big fan of.
Doing these panels can also be rewarding in that you get to talk to people you might not otherwise, and I thought all of the panelists yesterday were great, even folks from foundations I don’t always see eye to eye with. You can also get some ideas in front of a particular audience, in this case a lot of government and nonprofit people. So for this panel, I wanted to try to spotlight climate justice in the discussion, and to bring up some criticisms of philanthropy that might not otherwise make it into the conversation.
I put my opening comments below, but if you do want to watch I recommend you skip right past the very beginning where I screwed up and we all sat awkwardly in silence for a minute, and check out these highlights:
22:35 - My intro
40:28 - unique roles for philanthropy in green recovery
1:06:11 - climate justice
1:11:14 - funding women and indigenous leadership
1:24:17 - philanthropy’s lack of accountability
1:31:40 - power imbalances and participatory philanthropy
1:38:05 - feel good lightning round finish
Opening remarks:
Private foundations and donors have always played a role in funding work on climate mitigation and resilience. But right now, we’re seeing a couple of converging forces that present the sector with the potential to have a much larger impact.
For one, we’re seeing more foundations and wealthy donors embrace climate change as one of their major priorities. Since the 1990s, a core group of foundations have been very engaged in topics like climate policy, climate diplomacy, and expanding renewables. But the issue has drawn a pretty small percentage of overall philanthropic giving in the past.
That’s been changing in the past five years or so. So around 2015, climate funding hovered at less than 2% of philanthropic dollars, but in the past five years, foundation support has doubled to $1.6 billion in grantmaking in 2019. When you include individual donors, that number is somewhere between $5 billion and $9 billion annually.
That number is sure to rise, as many new funders are coming to the table. The Open Society Foundations recently launched its first official climate change program. Emerging donors like Jeff Bezos are committing billions in new funding to the issue, which has drawn both excitement and also quite a bit of skepticism. In addition, philanthropy is becoming a larger force in countries like China and India.
The second big factor at play is COVID-19, which has shaken the philanthropic sector along with the rest of the world. While the pandemic has to some extent drawn attention away from the climate crisis, it’s also fueled the demand to transition to a more equitable and sustainable world, as trillions of dollars from multiple sectors are headed toward future recovery efforts.
Climate advocates are calling for a “green recovery” that would unlock funding for things like solar power, wind power, energy efficiency, community resilience, and multimodal transportation in cities. At least one major private funder, the Rockefeller Foundation has made green recovery one of its top priorities going forward, committing $1 billion over the next three years to the cause.
So there’s some sense of hope that with a green recovery, transformative change could be possible in coming years, and philanthropy can offer significant resources toward that effort.
As we consider the future of climate change philanthropy, I think it’s important to keep in mind the sector’s potential pitfalls as well as its potential benefits.
For one, it must be noted that along with rising economic inequality, we’re seeing more intense concerns over the influence of private wealth on society. Common critiques of philanthropy include a lack of accountability, a tendency toward incrementalism and market-based solutions, and a tendency to exert control over agendas and strategies.That being said, the sector has several strengths: including the power to convene diverse parties, the freedom to operate independently of political pressures, and the potential to support a wide range of approaches and ideas.
All of this raises some important questions for our conversation today, and next our panelists will introduce themselves and share a little about their work.
Links
I don’t really feel like doing links this week. Coronavirus in the US is extremely bad and getting worse.
I endorse
We’re getting back into therapy-via-scented-candle season, so I will recommend this cute couple’s business based in Bisbee, Arizona, which we first came across while we were in Bisbee, but continue to order from periodically. It’s called Bisbee Soap and Sundry and I’ve mentioned them briefly before. Their top offering is creosote-scented products, which are incredible, but really it’s all great, I have a bunch of their candles and soaps.
Reading
I recently set aside the nihilism and scifi epics to read a couple climate books that have been on my list. One that I mentioned previously is The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac.
Figueres is the former executive secretary of the UNFCCC (her father is José Figueres Ferrer, the three-time president of Costa Rica known for, among other things, abolishing the country’s army), and she had this kind of famous moment where she took over after the failed Copenhagen treaty, and admitted to the press that she didn’t think a global climate agreement would be possible, “not in my lifetime.” But then she was instrumental in salvaging climate negotiations and shepherding the 2015 agreement. Rivett-Carnac was Figueres’ senior advisor at the UNFCCC and lived as a Buddhist monk for two years, which actually comes through in the book.
I have to admit that I didn’t have super high expectations, because like a lot of people I have conflicting opinions about the Paris Agreement and UN climate negotiations overall, and thought it might be overly sunny about both. While it is optimistic as an overall theme, the book surprised me for being as radical as it is. There are a lot of strong anti-growth/GDP, anti-consumption, and anti-colonialist messages in this book, as well as a call for mass civil disobedience. It does stop short of fully attacking capitalism as an economic model, which I guess is not super surprising.
The best part is definitely the first half of the book, which is probably one of the most concise and clear summaries I’ve read of the climate crisis and what needs to happen to avoid its most catastrophic consequences. It feels very real and concrete, and doesn’t pull any punches. There’s also quite a bit of philosophy and just raw emotion in there, which I find it interesting how books on climate change are becoming less about the science and trying to convince people of the concept, and more on how we are supposed to live with our shifting relationship with the world.
For people who are super savvy on climate, or for those looking for a more explicitly lefty perspective, this book might not quite satisfy. But I’m always looking for that one climate book that most people could pick up and find to be clear, compelling and useful, and this may be the closest thing to it that I’ve read yet. Recommend!
Watching
Oh boy. So many things. Watching so many things. I will highlight two, which includes that I finished my Sopranos rewatch over Thanksgiving weekend. I know everyone has been really eager to know how I would rank the seasons upon rewatch, so the definitive order from best to worst is: 2, 1, 6, 5, 4, 3.
The other thing is that we are finally watching The Mandalorian, which I really am enjoying. I didn’t quite realize it until a couple episodes in but it is basically Lone Wolf and Cub and Sam Peckinpah movies in space, and the Mandalorian is a ronin. But you know we’re all just here for the baby.
Listening
Well I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving, the savoriest, and the second-most problematic of all US holidays, but one that I think can still be a nice shared experience and a moment for reflection and learning.
One extremely 2020 moment in our household is that Jamie (I never do borat voice anymore, sad) and I decided to watch that new Taylor Swift movie about folklore during our Thanksgiving dinner. We have a complicated relationship with Taylor Swift, because don’t we all, but do like a lot of her music including folklore, and that movie is extremely emotional. During this one song, we both started to spontaneously cry and then started laughing because we were both crying because of this Taylor Swift movie, but really because of the sort of culmination of all this, and then crying some more.
All of which is to say that it has been a tough year.
Um, that’s it.
Tate