Larry Kramer spent 11 years at the helm of the largest legacy climate funder in the U.S., the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where he helped launch many of the field’s biggest collaborations.
The list includes partnerships on hydrochlorofluorocarbons ($53 million raised at launch), implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation ($230 million across two efforts when announced) and methane ($328 million to start).
He knows a thing or two about marshaling big money from major donors for significant climate action, so I called him to ask his opinion of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, which counts at least 13 billionaires among its donors, and last week announced this year’s five winners.
“I don’t think of it as a major prize or event or anything like that,” he said, later adding: “It’s so much attention for something that seems so relatively unimportant, and all these weird people weirdly attaching themselves to it.”
Kramer, who is now the president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics, nevertheless emphasized that such competitions are “certainly not harmful.”
Yet if the average person has heard of any environmental prize competition, it is most likely Earthshot. Thanks to its royal backing, the contest and its self-styling as a “moonshot” is covered widely — and almost always uncritically — including by top-flight outlets like the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Guardian and CBS News.
It helps that Earthshot has a lot of “name firepower,” as Kramer put it. Past A-list celebrities involved with the prize include Cate Blanchett, Ed Sheeran, Yao Ming, David Beckham and, until settling her tax fraud case, Shakira. At Earthshot’s recently concluded 2024 award ceremony in Cape Town, the wattage on the green carpet was somewhat dimmer, featuring model Heidi Klum, former South African rugby player Tendai Mtawarira and Robert Irwin, best known as the son of famed conservationist Steve Irwin.
Earthshot also sucks up a lot of funder money. It is one of the top 20 green grantees of U.K.-based foundations, thanks to a single foundation’s 5-million-pound award to Earthshot, according to the most recent study by Environmental Funders Network. The competition also received $9.5 million from four U.S. funders between 2020 and 2021, according to Candid. Today, it lists 19 total backers.
Last month, I made the case that Earthshot is fundamentally a publicity campaign. Despite a lineup of backers that features the heir to the British throne, four centibillionaires and (at least) eight other billionaire backers, it gives less per backer than any other major environmental prize, as I laid out in a follow-up piece. Following that, my goal was (and is) to hear directly from leaders who are not involved with Earthshot — and present their opinions, not mine.
Kramer — who felt my op-ed was an “overreaction” — was one of roughly two dozen current and former environmental grantmakers, philanthropic practice experts and environmental advocates I contacted about Earthshot over the past month-plus, including many of the field’s largest funders, top consultants and oft-quoted experts. Multiple messages to Earthshot and its staff were not returned, including an email summarizing the critiques in this story.
What do these leaders and experts think about the competition that calls itself “the most prestigious global environment prize in history?”
Many do not think about it at all, if their replies to my inquiries are any measure. Multiple said they knew little if anything about Earthshot. Others did not respond at all. That may reflect disinclination to comment or hectic schedules amid the U.S. election and U.N. climate conference. But even Kramer said he was only passingly familiar with the competition until my inquiry, and several of the half-dozen I ultimately heard from expressed similar sentiments.
Here’s what people who have spent decades, even whole careers, trying to do effective environmental philanthropy think about Earthshot’s approach and the attention it receives.
‘We need a lot more funding’
Liz Yee is the executive vice president of programs at the Rockefeller Foundation, overseeing its global programs, regional offices and learning and impact team. She previously spent four years at 100 Resilient Cities. She said her familiarity with Earthshot was limited, but appreciates that it supports much-needed innovation.
“What resonates with me is that it is an opportunity to elevate and invest in really promising ideas and technologies that can do incredible things to help speed up deployment,” she said. “Emerging technology is estimated to be able to deliver 40% of the emissions reductions that we need to be able to reach net zero by 2050 — and so I think their willingness and focus on supporting that is an important piece of the puzzle.”
As with Yee, Earthshot was not on the radar of Kat Rosqueta, the founding executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy. But when she looked more closely, she recognized one of Earthshot’s 2024 finalists, Build up Nepal, which was featured in a center toolkit this year.
“They have surfaced work that our independent analysis found to be worthy of highlighting,” she said, later noting that another 2024 finalist, d.light, won a Wharton School award more than a decade ago, for which her center serves as a partner.
Earthshot is “not capitalized” commensurate with its framing as a moonshot, Rosqueta said, but she sees other potential benefits, as with any prize competition: Earthshot could help attract new funders, identify new grantees, create new funder collaborations and raise public awareness.
Despite those potential upsides, Rosqueta, whose center works with big-donor philanthropy’s top prize platform Lever for Change, also sees prize fatigue in the field. The multitude of differing requirements and sometimes opaque processes can add up to a major burden on nonprofits.
“I have had dozens of conversations with applicants who bemoan the effort required to submit, and who will question, each time they submit, whether or not it’s worth it,” she said.
Given that most of Earthshot’s backers have the ability to give much more than the prize awards, she assumes that it constitutes a “side investment” for those funders with a long history of giving in the climate space. For those without such a history, she suspects the reason is a lack of “knowledge and confidence.”
“Just because you have a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean that you know the best way to deploy it to have impact,” she said. “And so some of this has to be understood as ‘where are they on that philanthropic journey?’”
For Helen Mountford, president and CEO of ClimateWorks Foundation, competitions like Audacious Project, Goldman Prize and Earthshot can play a critical role in “igniting the public imagination, spotlighting climate solutions and mobilizing support for innovators.”
But she emphasized that “no single initiative, organization or sector can do enough alone” in the face of the overwhelming threat of climate change and the dramatic shifts needed. (ClimateWorks was not invited to participate in Earthshot, she said.)
“We need a big tent of diverse actors, solutions and a lot more funding to move at the speed and scale that the climate crisis demands,” she said in a statement. “Competitions and prizes that act as springboards to broader, more impactful climate action are an important part of the solution toolkit and need to be further scaled.”
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‘How much are each of them giving? Fifty bucks?’
While few active grantmakers said they knew enough about Earthshot to comment, I did hear from two recently retired leaders, who together have more than 40 years of environmental philanthropy experience.
One of those was Walt Reid, who earlier this year left his role leading the environment program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a position he had held since 2006.
Unlike Kramer, Reid is bullish on prizes. Packard did a deep dive into various models while he was there, creating a 35-page report on climate prize concepts and launching a competition, Climate Breakthrough, one of the major environmental prizes. Reid said he was not familiar with Earthshot’s awardees, but he glanced at the list while we were on the phone.
“They’re not the sort of ones that, like, when you go to climate funder meetings, everybody’s talking about,” he said. “If these are awesome things, the recognition this gives could be a huge boost.” In particular, he said the well-known backers of Earthshot offer validation and prestige to winners and finalists.
Yet he said Earthshot’s aspiration to fund “moonshots” “doesn’t fit” with its achievement award level of funding. I.e., instead of giving out multimillion-dollar awards like an XPrize, Earthshot funding is about the same as that given by the Nobel Prize or MacArthur Fellows award, which recognize accomplishments but are not designed to drive new discoveries.
Kramer, in a different form, shared a similar sentiment about his experience with prizes. “Usually, the ones that are meaningful are going to be much bigger,” he said, citing tech billionaire Tom Siebel’s $20 million prize for net-zero home designs. “They’re going to be much, much more ambitious in terms of what they’re really looking for.”
Hewlett was not, to Kramer’s knowledge, asked to back Earthshot during his tenure, nor would he have, given his general doubts about prizes. Reid also could not recall Packard being invited to participate in Earthshot.
Reid said that while he was unfamiliar with Earthshot’s selection process, he was concerned that the competition may be falling into a traditional philanthropic trap.
“It’s like, ‘we, the donor, know the best idea and so we’re going to pick that’ — and most of the evidence is that’s not where breakthroughs come from,” he said. “Breakthroughs come from things where there’s something that is more systematically creating the conditions for innovation, which is often ideas like DARPA; find outstanding people and then let them decide what the model is going to be. So it’s not really the right model.”
In Earthshot’s case, finalists are selected by the organization itself, with input from experts, and winners are chosen by its prize council, whose 14 members include Prince William, actress Cate Blanchett, fashion designer Stella McCartney, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, Queen Rania of Jordan, and about a half-dozen well-known environmental activists.
Like Kramer and Reid, Virginia Clarke knew Earthshot existed, but that was about it. Clarke spent more than two decades at the helm of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders, growing it from five funders to more than 100 foundations and other organizations, as well as helping seed other grantmaker networks like Funders for Regenerative Agriculture. She retired last year.
After she came across my op-ed, she went through the prize’s website, annual report and funders. Her conclusion? “It’s absurd.”
“I didn’t know they were getting pathetic amounts of money out the door,” she said. “Even their lowest-tier backers could get that money out the door.”
“If, in fact, you think that the situation is so urgent and you have 10 years to solve it — kind of want to throw everything that you got plus at it,” she added. “Not like, a million here, a million there, and ‘Oh, we bring you together, and we throw a really damn nice party.’”
Clarke was particularly struck by the section in Earthshot’s 2024 Impact Report on its organizational footprint. According to Earthshot’s calculations, 47% of its footprint is guest travel, more than staff, trustee, partner and finalist travel combined. The report notes that Earthshot is in the process of offsetting all historical emissions by buying carbon offsets from Earthshot Prize Finalists.
“I don’t know of any other prize that is so little money with so many people providing funds,” she said. “How much are each of them giving? Fifty bucks?”
‘Look at all the other things you could be doing’
Earthshot’s backers run the gamut. Mike Bloomberg and Bill Gates are climate heavyweights. Philanthropies like Paul G. Allen Family Foundation or the Rob Walton Foundation are closer to middleweights.
But most of the backers are not known to be major climate funders, even four years after the prize launched. (Given that several backers have extremely minimal public philanthropic records, there’s also the possibility they support Earthshot publicly while conducting the rest of their climate philanthropy in secret.)
Kramer’s concern is that almost all billionaires, even those who have signed the Giving Pledge, are watching their fortunes rise as the world cooks. He knows what he’s talking about, having helped launch what is now Climate Lead, the space’s most successful effort to bring billionaires and multimillionaires to the cause.
But if there’s a villain in the Earthshot story, he thinks it is the media — specifically reporters “who pay more attention to celebrity than substance” — not the competition or its donors.
“I don’t think [Earthshot] becomes the excuse for all those other people if they’re not doing anything. So it’s more the question, why aren’t you doing something?” he said. “If this signals that they do care about climate, then why aren’t they doing more?”
So what is Kramer’s takeaway message for billionaires whose climate portfolios are focused on Earthshot — and any other Forbes list members who have yet to support climate action? “It’s not, ‘don’t support this,’ but ‘look at all the other things you could be doing.’”
