With a blitz of executive orders over the past weeks, the Trump administration has left the Paris Agreement, abandoned electric vehicle goals, revoked policies addressing environmental justice and instituted an emergency state to expand oil and gas production. And that’s just a sampling of the new president’s environmental moves.
Some climate grantmakers have already responded, including billionaire donor Mike Bloomberg, who pledged to cover the United States’ Paris funding commitment last week, as he did in 2017. But on the whole, it remains to be seen how climate philanthropy will approach the second term of a man whose energy policy might be summed up in three words: “Drill, baby, drill.”
In a series of conversations before the presidential inauguration, I spoke to a range of leaders from nonprofits and regrantors across the sector to get a sense of the strategic shifts they both expect and hope to see from funders in the coming months and years.
While opinions vary, and uncertainty reins, some of the challenges and opportunities ahead are clear.
“Even though we will have a federal administration that has committed to taking us backwards, there is still a lot of progress to be made, particularly by states and the private sector,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action, a national climate nonprofit created by veterans of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Protecting the Biden administration’s historic climate investments is the No. 1 priority for the next six months, she said. “We are going to go to the mat to defend the Inflation Reduction Act.”
Tens of billions of dollars hang in the balance. Climate Program Portal estimated in October that $33 billion in IRA funding has yet to be awarded, while a Politico analysis last summer found that more than 70% of the funding from a suite of climate-related bills, including the IRA, has yet to be formally awarded, and thus could still be paused and reassigned. One of Trump’s early executive orders halted IRA disbursements, though the administration has since narrowed that order, and legal challenges remain.
As I’ve reported, environmental philanthropy has been significantly invested in guiding the rollout of Biden-era federal dollars for climate and infrastructure. While Congress still ostensibly holds the power of the purse, Trump’s early moves have cast a cloud of uncertainty over that arena.
The environmental movement also expects legal attacks on the organizations that have helped roll out those spending packages and on environmental activism generally, underlining the need for legal support, said Eva Hernandez, executive director of the movement infrastructure regrantor Mosaic.
While such immediate threats are legion, those I spoke with largely took a longer-term perspective, with many sharing a belief that how climate philanthropy addresses climate change is itself overdue for some fundamental changes. Here are some of those prescriptions.
“We can’t have a singular focus on greenhouse gas emissions”
After Trump’s first election in 2016, some saw international efforts as the most fruitful area for their grant dollars. If the same holds true today, Moffitt of Evergreen Action hopes that does not mean a drop in funding at home, particularly for groups helping states, regions and cities stand up to federal rollbacks.
“I hope that climate philanthropy will not turn away from the United States,” she said, noting that initial signs from funders had been positive. “The signals we send to the rest of the world are incredibly important.”
That said, she acknowledged the movement needs to reflect on lessons learned. Climate wasn’t a big deciding issue for most voters last November, and that in part reflects the climate movement’s failure to convince the American public that rising global temperatures are the paramount global challenge of our times. “We passed the biggest piece of climate policy the world has ever seen two years ago,” Moffitt said. “Then, in November, we lost the election.”
She believes states can help show how climate is a winning political issue. She pointed to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as proof that such an approach can win, even in a state like Michigan. One key, she believes, is for the movement to change how it frames the issue.
“We can’t have a singular focus on greenhouse gas emissions,” Moffitt said. She did not mention philanthropy, yet many grantmakers’ North Star on climate funding has long been reducing GHGs, an approach others have contested. “We need to have a focus on the benefits to the communities and the politics that will make those benefits durable,” she said.
“We need more plan Bs — and Cs and Ds”
Mark Muller, executive director of the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation, agrees that the movement, and particularly philanthropy, needs such a shift. Using GHG reductions as a target is “quite polarizing” and leads to thinking “more narrowly,” when a “more holistic” approach is needed, he said.
“Climate philanthropy as a whole has put all of its eggs in the basket of having progress with COP and a supportive administration,” he said. “We could really use a lot more big-picture thinking,” he added. “We need more plan Bs — and Cs and Ds.”
Within agriculture, according to Muller, that would mean more support for approaches that can yield transformative rather than merely incremental change, such as what’s known as mixed cropping systems, which involve growing two crops on the same patch of land, such as wheat with peas, or cotton with sunflower. Recent efforts by the Biden administration to develop carbon markets or quantify agricultural GHG emissions support tweaks to existing systems, but not systemic change, he said.
Dominated by scientists and engineers, climate philanthropy tends to prefer solutions backed by existing data, said Muller, who himself studied physics at university and earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering. He says that is understandable, but has limited the field’s options.
“If we’re just going to be able to do things that can create a nice graph, we’re going to miss these more transformative livestock and perennial cropping systems that can really make a big difference,” he said.
Building a “big-tent movement where there’s room for everyone”
Eva Hernandez, the incoming president of the environmental movement infrastructure intermediary Mosaic, sees two key big-picture areas of work for the movement.
One is creating the “connective tissue” within the country’s 30,000 registered environmental organizations and their staff and supporters, she said. “So that we’re all aligned on where we’re going, and recognize that there may be different approaches and strategies for how we get there, but there is room for that debate.”
The other piece is figuring out how to build a “big-tent movement where there’s room for everyone,” she said. “There’s this whole swathe of people who might not see themselves right now as part of an environmental community, as part of a climate community, but who very much are aligned in the values of ensuring we have clean air, clean water, healthy communities.”
For instance, Mosaic has a grantee that is supporting climate actions by veterans. The organization focuses on working with trusted community leaders with shared values who can speak across typical divides — and avoid jargon.
“When they first started talking about the IRA, we had people in the veteran community who thought we were talking about the Irish Republican Army,” she said.
“Philanthropists should be funding systems change”
Even with roadblocks and rollbacks of climate progress expected under the new administration, there are still many avenues for philanthropy to pursue, said Dan Stein, founder and executive director of Giving Green, an effective-altruism-inspired think tank known for its list of funding recommendations, and which recently launched a regranting fund.
He urged philanthropy to consider investments at the international, regional and local levels, as well as in work not directly related to government policy, such as supporting energy innovation in areas like geothermal and nuclear, which have more often had bipartisan support.
“Philanthropists should be funding systems change,” he said. “If some tech policy avenues are cut off, you can still focus on technology plays and markets.”
As nonprofits pivot their work to adjust to the new reality, Stein expects funders to shift dollars, at least on the margins, such as reducing or changing the focus of international diplomacy and regulatory work, and re-evaluating which grantees are most effective.
In an email after Trump’s initial flurry of executive orders, Stein said that amid the setbacks, it will be important to evaluate which pathways for climate progress remain open under the new administration, such as permitting reform or supporting nuclear power.
“The early executive orders have made clear Trump will have rolling back climate policy in his sights, but it’s still quite unclear what that will ultimately look like,” he wrote. “As the months go on, we’ll learn more about this, and hopefully there will even be some places of overlap between climate advocates and the Trump administration.”
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