← Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
How to Make Your Climate Giving Count, According to an Expert
00:56:59
Rob preps for Giving Tuesday with Giving Green’s Dan Stein.
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- [00:01]
Robinson Meyer
You are listening to Shift Key Heat Maps weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, we are talking with an expert on climate philanthropy about Giving Tuesday and the tumultuous year it has been in climate policy. So what approaches still work in 2025? How has the Trump era changed his thinking and which nonprofits does he think are most worth your time and money? It's all coming up on Shift Key after this. America's future depends on reliable power provided where and when it's needed. It depends, in other words, on long duration energy storage. Hydrostor's advanced compressed air energy storage technology is helping build the grid of tomorrow with secure, reliable power and thousands of American jobs. With bipartisan support and a flexible supply chain, long duration energy storage is the missing puzzle piece to scale energy independence. Learn more about Hydrostor's Willow Rock Project and the future of energy storage at Hydrostor ca. Electricity demand is growing faster than ever, creating an unprecedented opportunity to meet load growth with customer owned distributed energy resources. Uplight is a clean energy technology company that unlocks grid capacity by activating customers and their devices to generate SHIFT and save energy. The Uplight Demand Stack integrates energy efficiency rates and virtual power plant programs into a cohesive portfolio to meet surging demand while improving grid resilience, accelerating decarbonization and reducing costs for energy providers and customers. Learn how Uplight can help your utility harness existing customer assets to meet the moment@uplight.com Heatmap. Hi, I'm Robinson Meyer, the founding Executive editor of Heat Map News, and you are listening to Shift Key Heat Maps weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, we're having a conversation about climate philanthropy in this unparalleled moment. There have been big ripples in the world of climate giving over the past few months. Not only the Trump administration's war on clean energy, but Bill Gates, his declaration in a high profile and highly covered memo that the climate movement should make a quote, strategic pivot, unquote, to fighting poverty. Of course, Giving Tuesday is coming up as well, when millions of Americans will donate to climate causes. Perhaps you'll be among them and are trying to figure out the most effective or best places to give in the Trump era. Today we are talking to someone working and thinking about all of those issues. Daniel Stein is the founder and Executive.
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Jesse Jenkins
Director of Giving Green.
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Robinson Meyer
It's a philanthropic advisor that helps people and companies donate to the most high impact climate nonprofits since it was founded a few years ago. Giving Green has influenced or advised more than $37 million in donations. And Dan comes to Climate World from the world of development economics. So he was previously chief economist at.
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Jesse Jenkins
ID Insight and worked at the World bank.
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Robinson Meyer
And he holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics. Dan, welcome to Shift Key.
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Daniel Stein
Thanks, Rob. Happy to be here.
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Robinson Meyer
I'm so glad we're having this conversation because I feel like we have at this point what has become an annual conversation, basically always, literally this week, and I'm like, tell me what's going on with Giving Green. And then we have an amazing conversation and then I write it up and then we're like, we gotta talk more. And then invariably we talk exactly 12 months later.
- [03:54]
Daniel Stein
I don't know if that's true. I feel like I managed to stalk you at various events and at least say hi.
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Jesse Jenkins
That is true.
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Robinson Meyer
That's true. We've met in person in the past year, which I think is actually a new development. Can you, before we get into anything.
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Jesse Jenkins
Before you get into the recommendations this year, can you give us an intro into just what is Giving Green?
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Daniel Stein
Yeah, so Giving Green is a nonprofit that we started to try and solve a specific problem, which is that people want to do something about climate and just don't know what to do. And it's part of our thesis is that giving donations to really impactful climate organizations are some of the most powerful things that individuals can do to fight the climate crisis. And so Giving Green is a platform designed to make climate giving really easy. So we do research to try and identify the most impactful strategies to slow warming. And we provide specific recommendations of places that people can donate to that we think are just doing amazing job and can really take your dollar very far. And we also do regranting ourselves so we have a fund and people can give to us and then we can allocate it to places that we think are doing really amazing work.
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Jesse Jenkins
I think of it as almost like a kind of a givewell for climate change, where that says, okay, what? Where can your money go the furthest in saving lives? Giving Green is like, where can your money go the furthest in fighting climate change? Is that fair?
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Daniel Stein
That's totally fair. They're definitely the inspiration for Giving Green. And actually in a previous life, I was working for an organization that was doing some consulting for GiveWell. We were working together closely and I just thought they had a really amazing model and just thought that there was a lot of demand for this type of thing in the Climate space. And so that's where Giving Green came from, I think.
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Jesse Jenkins
Let's just get right into the meat of things. Which climate groups do you recommend folks give to this year?
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Daniel Stein
Excellent. So there's two layers of this. Basically Giving Green has two main products. And one is our short list of top nonprofits, which is what I want to get into in this part of the conversation. But the other one, like I mentioned, is we have a regranting fund and we where we give to a much wider set of organizations. So I think what I would say is I'm going to talk about our five, quote unquote top nonprofits this year. And the key to those is these are organizations that we think have a little bit of an established track record, we think are doing super important work. We very deeply vetted them and we think they can absorb a lot of extra money, especially unrestricted. So you could just write them a check, no problem. So I just did want to mention that we also have 24 other organizations that we granted to as part of our fund that are doing amazing work that many of them we think are eligible for follow on grants. And so if there are donors looking for more options, there's a much longer list, all on our website. But to answer your questions and also.
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Jesse Jenkins
Is the way to access that longer list, just give to your kind of all purpose fund and then you guys will like regrant it accordingly.
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Daniel Stein
That is one way to do it. People can give to the fund and then we make our decisions on where they would go, which is like could be those the 29 organizations that we granted you this year as well as an expanding list. But the other thing is people can just look at the long list of grantees and say, hey, this organization looks good. Why don't I grant to them? Or they can drop us an email and talk it through. They can say like, hey, I'm really interested in industrial decarbonization. Can you tell me more about your grantees in that area and then maybe find the ones that fit them?
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Jesse Jenkins
Concierge, philanthropic advisory. I love this.
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Daniel Stein
Except it's free. That's the best part.
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Robinson Meyer
Yes, exactly.
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Daniel Stein
So to get to your question, so the top nonprofits, we have five this year that we really want to spotlight. The first one is. And this by first one I mean this is just alphabetical order. We think they're all amazing. The first one is the Clean Air Task Force. They've been a grantee and a top recommendation for us for many years. What we really like about them is that they work on policy primarily in the US but now more and more around the world, essentially to try to bring new super important technologies to market and try to have governments get the right policies in place to get super important decarbonization technologies that can't quite stand up on their own and get them to market. And specifically there are, there are a couple verticals of Clean Air Task Force work that we looked into deeply that we're super excited about. One is heavy transport, which is aviation and maritime shipping. One is geothermal energy. Especially thinking about really the next generation of geothermal energy, which is digging really deep and finding really hot rocks and a lot of heat down there that can hopefully be super efficient and be deployed in many places. And then last is really thinking about energy markets and how to properly compensate and incentivize putting clean, firm power on the grid. So Clean Air Task Force, we love them. The second one is future clean Tech architects that are organization that is kind of similar in that they are trying to do a lot of techno economic analysis and policy recommendations to bring new technology to the market. But they are really European focused and work a lot with the EU and European country governments to try and get the right policies in place. And the things that they're working on that we're especially excited about are their work on aviation, thinking about the pathways to decrease aviation emissions and then decarbonizing heavy industries, so steel, concrete, et cetera. The third one is the Good Food Institute. So these guys focus specifically on emissions from livestock and livestock, depending on how you measure it, maybe 10 or 15% of all emissions and we don't really have a pathway to reduce them. The Good Food Institute's looking at alternative proteins. How can we essentially create meat without animals and therefore without the emissions? Next one is Opportunity Green. They're a UK based organization really focused on transportation, specifically aviation and shipping, also doing a little bit of work in industry. So super excited about them. And the final one is Project Inner Space. They're back to geothermal energy, which is what we were talking about before, which is just, we think is a really exciting bet on how we can increase the amount of clean, firm power on the grid. Innerspace is working to do mapping and connect investors to companies and working on policy reports on various states and countries. Really just trying to catalyze this new industry and help it take off where hopefully it can go from something like 1% of power generation to maybe something like 15 or 20%.
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Jesse Jenkins
And I should say that before we go on that not only are all these groups linked to on Giving Green's website, which we'll link to in the show notes. But in fact, we'll just stick links to these five groups in the show notes as well. So in case you were furiously rewinding and scribbling down what Dan said, you can find it all in the show notes.
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Robinson Meyer
One thing that unites these groups is like, they're quite.
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Jesse Jenkins
Many of them are quite technologically focused and they're focused on changing markets or changing policies in ways that bring the next set of decarbonization technologies to market. What drove that focus and what drove it now?
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Daniel Stein
Yeah, I mean, there's really a path that we have taken as an organization of thinking about where are the major levers and how can you really be sure that your money is being used effectively? I do think that one place that that type of analysis can take you is looking at things that can be measured really closely. Like if we conserve one hectare of forest and we're really sure we do it, how much does that decrease emissions? The issue is that when you zoom back and you think about the broad problem that we have in climate, we have to fundamentally change the way that people produce food and energy. And that is driven by thousands and thousands of individual actors responding to incentives. So we fundamentally don't think that we can make this massive change unless you change the rules of the game. You change basically the policies, which is rules. You change technology, which is how people are creating and deploying energy, and you change the markets, which sets the prices. So we've come to this through our research process, but I think it's really inspired by asking this question of what are the major victories that we've had in the climate challenge over the past few decades? It's very easy to point to all the things that are not working. But I think that there are two incredible victories that act as an inspiration for us. And one is it's basically the price of solar panels and the price of batteries. So both of them have decreased by 98% since roughly 1990. And like, it's just astonishing and totally unpredicted. And so then what do you see? You see industry is completely transformed by these technologies, both being invented and then us learning to mass produce them at low cost. So we have the boom in solar energy from solar panels being so cheap and exported everywhere from China. And just we see batteries most obviously impacting utility storage and cars, but also just infiltrating tons of different appliances. And once it's done, once that technology is created, it just takes over industries and doesn't really need support anymore. So I think the goal is to try to think about where basically if you can solve the problem with technology, and I don't think you can solve every problem with technology, but if you can do it, then you have a self perpetuating solution that can completely solve whole industries on their own. And I think that is we really draw our inspiration from, from those victories.
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Jesse Jenkins
So we were talking about GiveWell earlier and GiveWell like as a. Do a number of different kind of nonprofits in that category or regranters in that category are able to look very quantitatively at which interventions save the most lives and ultimately have quite like an econometric based approach.
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Robinson Meyer
Is that something? And I think when we first talked.
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Jesse Jenkins
About giving green, that was an idea that loomed large in your thinking. Does that still drive how you think about giving green? And is there research that can go into validating these five nonprofits or whoever you're recommending at the moment?
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Robinson Meyer
Or is climate change like a much.
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Jesse Jenkins
Harder problem than just saving lives? Because you're never going to be able to measure discrete interventions in the energy system in the same way. It's kind of a big socio political technical system that's much harder to intervene in.
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Daniel Stein
Yeah, and that's a good question. It's funny, it's like we've been talking about this for so many years. Rob, you can probably check your notes and see the evolution we've had on this. I mean when we first conceived.
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Robinson Meyer
The good news is that I don't.
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Jesse Jenkins
Do that good a job of taking, of keeping my notes together in one place.
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Robinson Meyer
So either I'd have to Google for.
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Jesse Jenkins
Old stories I wrote or I'm just going off my mind.
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Daniel Stein
Don't bother. Okay, so in a perfect world, and I think when we started this, we thought we would have a big spreadsheet with all of the evidence amassed and a whole bunch of different options and a line on the spreadsheet with dollars per ton of CO2 on the bottom and then we pick the ones that look the best, lowest dollar per ton. But we became convinced over time that the set of solutions where you can do a good job of that, which is like cook stoves or maybe destroying super pollutants, you have very much money in, tons out, were potentially not as effective as these big system solutions like changing policy and changing technology. So we have spreadsheets on activist organizations that are trying to change laws and on organizations trying to push forward the development of alternative proteins or carbon capture. But we have to be honest with ourselves that those types of calculations are a rough estimate at best because you need to be assessing these ideas like, well, we think that green steel is poised to come to the market at only 10% higher cost than regular steel by 2024. But if we were to put a bunch of money into advocacy groups, we could push that up by five years. You can build that into a model that has a lot and lot of difficult assumptions. And we do, if you look at our reports, you can click in and we've built these models and we try to shoot for solutions where we think we can get roughly a dollar per ton from these modeled approaches. But it's become a smaller part of our overall decision process because we have to be humble and just say like, look, these models are a little bit of a stretch and we have to combine them with more qualitative approaches and theory based approaches. And so our core process now uses some modeling, but also uses a lot of heuristics. So we have this heuristic that we call the scale feasibility and funding need approach that we use to try to identify parts of the solution space that we think are potentially super cost effective. And we do a lot of qualitative work, talking to experts, reading papers, trying to piece together different parts of data to help us come to this conclusion.
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Jesse Jenkins
As you've changed your methodology, how have the recommendations changed over time?
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Daniel Stein
So the very first recommendation that we put out, which I still love and so don't take this as a denigration, is this organization called Burn that does cook stoves. And they, what was great about them is they were super measurable. They'd done a randomized control trial with some academics that found essentially that if you were to give cook stoves, and this is to people in Kenya, that you give them these more efficient cook stoves, it decreases the amount of wood that they use. And over the life of the cook stove they emit less carbon at roughly $5 per ton, which is pretty good. But the key was they, you know, you could go and give 100 people cook stoves and not 100 people another cook stoves randomly and compare their usage of the stove over time and back out emissions. There were super good data, two really good papers on this. And so, you know, we had to focus on the types of solutions where you could get this really good data. Once we sort of broke from that box, if you will, we were free to look at other things like what if we tried to accelerate the pace of the alternative protein market? What if we tried to get what if we funded organizations that were trying to get the IRA passed. I think you, you allow for potential outcomes that are way bigger, even if you have a lot more uncertainty about whether you're going to get there.
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Jesse Jenkins
In other words, it seems like the world of directly observable interventions into cook stoves. Or am I right to remember that there was a. You recommended at one point kind of giving to a group that was destroying refrigerants.
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Daniel Stein
Yeah, right.
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Jesse Jenkins
That's important. The number of tons involved is big. And yet it is actually developing energy technologies and kind of making them useful to the global economy at one time that drives the overall pace and scale of decarbonization. And you can kind of prune at the edges with maybe more or less use, efficient use of your dollars on like cook stoves or refrigerants or carbon removal. But ultimately it's like only do we have the technologies. Question mark, yes or no, that determines the whole decarbonization picture.
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Daniel Stein
I think that's a big part of it. Yes. Yeah, that's a way to put it succinctly. I just don't think I would like completely go like 100% into the techno optimist camp. I do think that there are going to be certain subsets of the decarbonization challenge that are not solvable by technology. But I think it's such a big leverage that that's the biggest one we can pull is philanthropists.
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Robinson Meyer
To be clear, when I say, when I lay out that case, I'm not.
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Jesse Jenkins
An optimist about it.
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Robinson Meyer
In fact, it doesn't make me entirely.
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Daniel Stein
Feel, you know, you can think of this set of solutions that's very easily, easily measurable, and to first order approximation, call that the carbon offset market.
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Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, right.
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Daniel Stein
And then, and so if you really thought that, if you were like, if you're very obsessed about measurements and accountability, you're plaguing the offset market, which is okay, but I just think people can do better, right? Like we need to change systems, we need to change laws, and you can't do that with a carbon offset. So we sometimes advise companies as well, and that's what I tell them. I'm like, if you put yourself in this box of having to measure the amount of tons that you are reducing to solve your net zero goal, well, then you're extremely restrained in terms of the upside impact you can have.
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Jesse Jenkins
It seems like you've followed an arc that is not unrecognizable from other parts of life. I think of what's happened with effective altruism which is kind of where GiveWell initially came out of this idea that everyone could be saving more lives if they were way more thoughtful and way more exact and precise and scrutinize their methods much better in kind of picking which groups to give to. And that obviously has had some big successes among them. Give well, which is quite impressive I think in some ways and has saved a lot of lives and changed how people think about development. But ultimately you do run into politics at the end of it. I even think in economics more broadly there's this, there's incredible attention given to small policy changes that can produce more or less growth and more or less equality or inequality. But then when you talk about these big picture questions like why do certain countries become rich? Or why does development happen in some places and not others? Once you move past the basic geographic constraints, then as far as I can tell, the current economic answer is like, well, some places had histories that developed good institutions and some places didn't.
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Robinson Meyer
And if you have good institutions, you have economic growth. And it feels like we're hitting the institution question of climate tech and that like or of decarbonization and that, you know, your dollars could go a little.
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Jesse Jenkins
Farther on some sorts of carbon offsets than others. But if you really care about decarbonization, you're actually back at this big set of very mushy questions at the intersection of society and technology and policy and politics.
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Daniel Stein
Definitely. And I mean not to get as too derailed, you know, I'm an economist, Rob.
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Jesse Jenkins
But anyway, that's why I, that's why.
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Robinson Meyer
I, that's why I've intentionally driven this car into a ditch.
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Daniel Stein
I mean also, yeah, like development economics has also gone through waves of this. If you think of the 70s and 80s, like early versions of the World bank were all about institutions and getting the rules of the game right. And then free markets will solve everything. And then you kind of get a reaction to that in the 90s and 2000s of more micro development. And now I actually think maybe the, maybe the pendulum is swinging in the other way, like going more towards growth. Now you even see it for someone like GiveWell, they're now making a ton of grants not just to these super measurable direct intervention orgs, but to more meta orgs that are trying to increase the total amount of aid or the quality of aid or health systems or whatever. It's just, it's really hard to avoid these questions of policy and technology and markets if you're trying to solve big problems.
- [24:25]
Robinson Meyer
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Jesse Jenkins
One thing I noticed in how your recommendations have changed over time is that there was the era where you were recommending these carbon opposite groups. There was an era where you were recommending Sunrise and I think. And the Sunrise Movement and I think for. Or the Sunrise Movement Education Fund, which is their 501C3.
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Daniel Stein
Thank you for not getting me in trouble with the irs. I appreciate it.
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Jesse Jenkins
Of course it's, you know, more important now than ever now. Your recommendations are more like Clean Air Task Force, Good Food Institute, Project Inner Space. They're much more technologically focused, I think. Clean Air Task Force, super interesting group. Know a lot of people there. They have always been the most focused on technology development and deployment among the kind of big green groups to the point of being quite solicitous of say, nuclear energy because they feel like it's the fastest route to clean air.
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Robinson Meyer
And it seems like when I look.
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Jesse Jenkins
At that broad arc, there's been an arc from more agonistic approaches to politics, supporting groups that are addressing this as a primarily social problem, and then to moving groups that are addressing this as kind of more of a technological or economic or market based problem. Has that been a factor in your thinking?
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Daniel Stein
Sort of. I mean, I think we're, we are pretty open to different levers to cause change. We supported Sunrise early in their life.
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Robinson Meyer
Yeah, it was early.
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Jesse Jenkins
It was pre ira. It was, well, pre IRA because we.
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Daniel Stein
Thought that they had a super compelling theory of change and had shown some really good execution. They had a super clear theory of change. We're going to mobilize the youth, we're going to Win power. And then once we win power, we're going to pass a major climate bill. And there could be a lot of arguments about how much causality was there and how much influence they had, but their theory of change happened and I would argue that they played a role in it. So I would still, we would still be open to, we still are open to funding movement groups that have a super clear that like, that are really building power, have a super clear theory of change and are working to effectuate changes that we think are super important. I think what I've, if I've changed my mind on anything, it's that those groups, really, really impactful activist groups, I think are rare and potentially hard to identify in the early days. So show me another early sunrise with a really clear pathway to impact. And we're super open to supporting something like that, either in the US or in other countries. We've always got our mind open. I do think that where, if you take a little bit of a longer view, Sunrays managed to really have their moment, or the Democrats had their moment and pass a big bill in the longer view, maybe we've come to the conclusion that those opportunities are going to be few and far between and we can't bank on them. We've got to try and have solutions that can keep making progress or not backsliding too much when there are different political structures which have made us be a little more keen of these more centrist, behind the scenes groups that can still get stuff done in different, like with different political circumstances.
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Jesse Jenkins
How has watching the Trump administration over the past eight or nine months tear up a lot of, but not all, but a lot of the policy put in place during the Biden administration and just generally kind of wage war on clean energy and decarbonization technology more broadly, like, changed your thinking here?
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Daniel Stein
Well, it's felt pretty terrible and.
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Robinson Meyer
I.
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Daniel Stein
Do think that it felt personally like a personal gut punch that, you know, maybe we're one step removed as a funder, but we felt we were working really hard to make certain things happen that then got rolled back. But I don't know if it has necessarily changed fundamentally because, like, ultimately I'm very much hopeful that if you look at the end, if you take the Trump administration and the Biden administration as one big block and you see what's accomplished from the beginning to end of that, I think it will be forward progress, even if it's three steps forward, two steps back or whatever. I do think that it's interesting, I don't know how many people will have listened to this podcast that also listened to me on Volts with Dave Roberts? And he pushed really hard on this where he said, if you're actually trying to. If you're actually trying to do the most effective thing for climate, it should be get Democrats elected and win and push forward climate bills. It's like essentially the sunrise movement. And I really don't agree with that. I think that if you frame climate as an issue of one side of the aisle and only make progress in these magical windows where that side has power, that that's ultimately going to be a losing strategy. That's just going to be a yo, yo back and forth as we're sort of seeing right now. I do think that the climate movement has to think about creating policies that are a little bit more evergreen, a little bit more bipartisan. Probably can't be totally bipartisan, but at least are forged out of some sort of compromise and some sort of belief of at least in the US of people on different sides of the aisle to make them a little bit more durable.
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Jesse Jenkins
Do you think there's opportunities for climate progress during the current administration?
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Daniel Stein
I do. I think they are smaller. And so one of the research products that we released just this month, actually, we call our Unleashing Clean Energy in the US Report. But essentially, I always say the unofficial subtitle is what the Hell Can Climate Philanthropists do in this world of Trump? And there's. We've basically focused on. Basically, I think the answer is you just can't make progress in a lot of different areas. But we've tried to focus on a few things where we think we could make progress from a philanthropy perspective. And there's basically two pillars to this. One is clean, firm power. There's one thing that climate activists and Republicans can seem to agree on now is we need more power. There are certain types of clean power that seem coded as good on different sides, like nuclear and geothermal. And so there's some. There's momentum and that's a place where we can work together, right? Can we get the incentives and the pricing right on utilities such that clean, firm power can be financed and correctly compensated? Can the Department of Energy provide support to burgeoning industries like nuclear and geothermal? That's something we can all agree on and maybe work together on. And that I don't think is going to be that the current administration is going to throw a roadblock on. What are you laughing about?
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Robinson Meyer
I'm laughing that I sometimes say, no, no, no, I'm laughing is that sometimes I think, like, if the Trump administration.
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Jesse Jenkins
Were to provide direct public support to a wave of nuclear plants across the country, like a fleet of new nuclear plants that we added new reactors to, some to a dozen or 20 or two dozen existing generators across the country where there's already transmission capacity, where the local community is already quite happy to receive generation. Not to say that I've done like a feas a year, just like that is sometimes you get the sense that's the scale that they're thinking about. And then we were to say, have a massive recession that, like, God forbid, to be clear, but like some economists say, it's happening and electricity use were to plateau a little bit, but all those projects were still happening, and we still had federal support, and we maintained that federal support, the Trump administration would do incredible things for emissions. Now, it would be in a bad outcome, but like, Trump wants to go fund a dozen new reactors, that this is. We're talking massive reductions. And it becomes much easier to kind of then add renewables to the grid because we'll have this 247 clean, firm electricity just sitting there all the time. Not that I think there's obviously a lot of political questions between now and then, including that in this world, somehow they have to, like, get all these things built without destroying the credibility of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is. Would itself be bad. Quite tricky. Yeah. But it's this weird world where on the one hand, they're not only wrecking the American electric vehicle industry, but, like, wrecking the very regulatory tools that could be used not only to help EVs in the future, but, like, to indeed fight any kind of air pollution from cars or trucks. But at the same time, they want to do stuff on nuclear and they want to do stuff on geothermal. And it's a confusing mix because their attitude is so punitive in so many other categories of energy or climate policy making.
- [34:25]
Daniel Stein
And so that's part of it is like, let's do the stuff we can do when we can do it. And the other thing is, like, the. This administration is less technocratic than previous administrations. Right. So I actually think that even if the Department of Energy wanted to do something big on nuclear geothermal, they might struggle a little bit compared to, say, the Biden administration that was way more staffed up and had all these energy wonks and whatever. So how's it going to get done if there is the vague desire to get something done, but not the capacity to get something done? That is the space for civil society and philanthropy to Enter like we as like the broader. We can come up with a plan that is presented to government now, to both sides of the aisle and can potentially fall on really open ears. And that's part of like this clean, firm power strategy. Like what do you do? How do you get the energy markets right? What subsidies need to get there? Like, like presenting lots of ideas on how to operationalize this work.
- [35:30]
Jesse Jenkins
Given that we've also already recognized that there's no interventions in these systems without intervening at the full level of the technological and the social and economic, that you have to accelerate technology pathways. Is there also an argument though that the role of climate people during this administration is to just point out all the things they're doing wrong and to argue against their evisceration of climate regulation and to say if you care about the environment, then the Trump administration is doing nothing for you here?
- [36:04]
Daniel Stein
I think there's a role for that, but I don't think that's the only role. Maybe that pays some long term dividends in terms of convincing voters they're like 12 pro climate Trump voters out there, you might swing their vote. But like, I don't really know. I'd rather try to work to get something done.
- [36:23]
Robinson Meyer
Okay, and so what is the profile of that person?
- [36:27]
Daniel Stein
I'm sure it exists. We live in a complicated tapestry.
- [36:30]
Jesse Jenkins
I love voters. I know, I know. They're incredible.
- [36:34]
Daniel Stein
So the other thing I mentioned that there's two pillars of this strategy. The first is clean, firm power and the other one is decreasing deployment barriers. So sort of a abundance permitting reform type thing though. I think it's federal permitting, it's local siting, it's transmission. This is another thing that people on both sides of the aisle care about. And as you. There's very active debates at the federal level over this right now. And is this something that civil society can play a role in and trying to chart a path forward that works for people? I think everyone agrees that we need more transmission, that we need energy projects to be cited without tons and tons of red tape and delay. And I think that there is a way forward here, like maybe even a more unique of an opportunity under a Republican administration to decrease regulatory barriers that really matter.
- [37:28]
Robinson Meyer
This episode of ShiftKey is brought to you by Uplight Power. Demand is growing at unprecedented rates, creating a critical moment to meet load growth with customer owned distributed energy resources to ensure a reliable, affordable and sustainable energy future. Uplite is a clean energy technology company that unlocks grid capacity by activating customers and their connected devices to generate shift and save energy. Uplight combines personalized customer experiences with an AI driven flexible load management platform that harnesses customer ders at scale to maximize program value. Uplight integrates energy efficiency, time varying rates and virtual power plant programs into a single cohesive portfolio. These solutions help meet surging demand while improving grid resilience, accelerating decarbonization, and reducing costs for energy providers and their customers. Uplight serves over 80 energy providers, including eight of the 10 largest North American utilities. Learn how Uplight solutions can help your utility meet the moment with existing customer assets@uplight.com heatmap that's uplight.com heatmap or look in the show Notes.
- [38:42]
Jesse Jenkins
As a development economist, as a climate philanthropic RE adviser, what did you think about the Bill Gates memo?
- [38:50]
Daniel Stein
You know, I thought that the Bill Gates memo was covered a little bit unfairly. Like I read the New York Times piece on the Bill Gates memo and I thought, what is Bill Gates doing? He's gone off the deep end. But then I read the Bill Gates memo and I thought it was like reasonably balanced. He's making the point that ultimately it's human lives that we care about. And that is the reason, at least for someone like me, why I get in a climate is the ultimate thing you care about is affecting human lives. And then he made the point that there's a lot of work to be done to help humans right now. There's a lot of work to be done to help humans adapt to climate and we need to think about all of these things together. And also one thing that he said that was buried in there, he said, look, what we need to do is really focus our mitigation resources where they really matter and where there's the most impact to be using them smarter. And I said, well, that's what I do. I agree with you. I don't think there was a lot on the surface to really fundamentally disagree with. I do think it was just like a, like the framing was a little bit curious. It seemed like a very public shift in his narrative from mitigation to adaptation, where I was kind of like, what is behind it? Like why is the. Why the need to make this big splash?
- [40:12]
Robinson Meyer
But it's interesting I should intervene here.
- [40:13]
Jesse Jenkins
And say that I should have asked a better question, which is I should have said Bill Gates had this memo in October where he titled Three Tough Truths about Climate. I'll say, by the way, there's only two tough truths in this memo. There's only two. It's called three tough truths. It's like the 10 commandments. There's actually an argument over which are the 10. But because there's eight to 12 commandments in there and then where the numbers go, as you know, God never says so he does call for a quote, strategic pivot, unquote. And he says, I'm not saying we should ignore temperature related deaths because diseases are a bigger problem. What I am saying is that we should deal with disease and extreme weather in proportion to the suffering they cause and that we should go after the underlying conditions that leave people vulnerable to them. While we need to limit the number of extremely hot and cold days, we also need to make sure that fewer people live in poverty and poor health health so that extreme weather isn't such a threat to them.
- [41:05]
Daniel Stein
You know, I fundamentally don't disagree that we should, that, that this is a, that there's a trade off and we should be allocating money towards the thing that most benefits society. I don't think, I think, I wouldn't agree that we are like imbalanced in the wrong way and that too much money is going into climate change mitigation. Like, I definitely don't agree with that. I think that climate is likely to have pretty bad impacts on people and that mitigation is still a super important lever. From my perspective on this mitigation versus adaptation approach to philanthropy, the thing that has always really attracted me to the mitigation approach is that on the adaptation side, basically everyone is aligned in that. You have national governments, you have philanthropists, you have individuals. Everybody would like the individuals to be healthier, to have better livelihoods, to be able to be more resilient to changes. And so there's just like a lot of momentum pushing in that way. Whereas the mitigation problem is fundamentally different and difficult in that it's a free rider problem, whereas the incentives of individuals and even potentially governments are not aligned with the incentives of, of the world. So I guess I just sort of feel like there is a bigger problem for strategic philanthropy to play in the mitigation problem because so many other people don't want to work on it.
- [42:37]
Jesse Jenkins
Well, also, I mean, this is always what I've thought about from a climate journalist perspective on adaptation is that adaptation is hard to cover, not because it's unimportant. There's always fewer stories about adaptation than there are about mitigation. Mitigation is the big climate story. Adaptation isn't. And that's partially because like the environmental community and the climate goal setting kind of leadership community has probably always emphasized mitigation. As compared to adaptation. Partially out of a belief that if you talk about adaptation it like normalizes climate change and then people won't mitigate as hard.
- [43:10]
Robinson Meyer
But it's also, it seems to me.
- [43:12]
Jesse Jenkins
Because adaptation is always a local story. Like if we do something in New York to, to adapt to sea level rise, it's interesting because it's in New York and lots of journalists live in New York so it kind of gets covered in the national news. But like, it's not like, doesn't help people in New Jersey or Connecticut or Maine or Quebec like adapt to climate change any better. It's just that adaptation, with the exception of, I guess, some forms of geoengineering, which some people think we should consider as types of adaptation, like adaptation is always going to be a local story and we just don't cover local infrastructure projects through the same national or international lens that we cover mitigation because it matters. The CO2 that New York or Charleston, South Carolina or New Orleans emits affects everyone. And the adaptation that New York or Charleston or New Orleans do only really affects New York, Charleston or New Orleans.
- [44:18]
Daniel Stein
Yeah, I think that's true. Let me put another little spin about why I think adaptation is, is difficult. We get questions from our donors and also my staff. Why aren't you doing adaptation? Like what is the most impactful thing people can be doing for adaptation? I think it's a really hard problem, like for someone like us, if we were going to try to do a charity evaluator for adaptation. And I think the fundamental problem is that I really think the best tool for adaptation is economic growth. I just think that countries and people who are wealthier are going to be able to adapt. And that is a whole bag of worms. What do you do for economic growth? We're back to these long term institutions theories that you're talking about, Rob, or what the World bank does, or essentially what all countries are trying to do. They're trying to do growth. Is there something for me as a philanthropist that I can do that's different? I don't know. So then I think that there is a slice of things that is different from growth that is climate adaptation, like some examples like new seeds for agriculture that are heat resistance or like you said, like building a seawall in New York that's very specific to sea level rise. But then I see those as like these slices that are probably less impactful than growth. So I just think it's like a, it's a strange problem because I think so much of the important stuff is not like really climate related.
- [45:35]
Jesse Jenkins
Does this reveal something more more broadly about the challenge of working on climate politics in this particular moment? Where yes, there's all these energy technologies we need to make progress on and there's lots of policy levers we can pull to help on them. But at the end of the day we really do kind of care about growth. Because the number one thing that's going to decide how people feel the effects of the climate change, we can't really touch the climate change that's going to happen in the next 20 or 25 years. And what decides whether people are going to feel those effects are growth. And so we're actually in something much closer to like a Nordhausean world where we're just trading off against development versus climate mitigation than we maybe thought we were a decade ago?
- [46:26]
Daniel Stein
I don't know. I think that there are some places where there are potential trade offs. Like if you were in India right now and you said we're going to decarbonize by 2030, there would be some pretty stark and terrible trade offs. But like those things are not even on the table. Right? It's like that debate is almost uninteresting because it's like it's just not going to happen. Right? Like India is not going to sacrifice its growth for climate by any meaningful way. And basically no country is willing to do this. Except maybe we still have parts of.
- [46:54]
Jesse Jenkins
The climate conversation that kind of assume that this could happen.
- [46:57]
Daniel Stein
Like I think maybe, maybe rich countries are willing to make that trade off a little bit, specifically Europe. But I think poor countries are not willing to make that trade off. And I think that people who like assume that there is some sort of broad environmental lobby arguing for that. I think that's a straw man. Find me the person who thinks that India should have its economic growth in order to decrease emissions. I don't know who those people are. We certainly don't advocate for that. You need to figure out a pathway forward that probably involves lots of technology that allows poor countries to develop and keep their industry and keep generating more and more electricity while bending.
- [47:38]
Robinson Meyer
Let me give an example because I actually do think this is a more.
- [47:41]
Jesse Jenkins
Live debate in climate than we sometimes think is that in the early Biden administration the White House intervened to keep multilateral development institutions from financing fossil fuel development projects abroad. And this was done under this slogan that activists embraced across the climate movement that in a 1.5C world. And it's all driven by this IEA report about how the energy system could achieve 1.5C in a 1.5C world, we won't need large scale fossil fuel investment, we won't need any additional large scale fossil fuel investment and we have all the existing fossil fuel resources we need. And so therefore this kind of got reversed to people saying, okay, well if we want to hit 1.5 C then.
- [48:23]
Robinson Meyer
We shouldn't do any investment in fossil.
- [48:25]
Jesse Jenkins
Fuel infrastructure whatsoever because we don't need it.
- [48:30]
Robinson Meyer
And because if we do, then we.
- [48:32]
Jesse Jenkins
Won'T hit 1.5 C. And so there.
- [48:35]
Robinson Meyer
It was actually existing US policy like.
- [48:38]
Jesse Jenkins
Fairly recently to not finance, say a natural gas plant in sub Saharan Africa, because that was fossil fuel development and therefore it wasn't in line with our climate goals.
- [48:51]
Robinson Meyer
And to be clear, this made many.
- [48:53]
Jesse Jenkins
African countries, sub Saharan African countries very.
- [48:55]
Robinson Meyer
Angry and the Trump administration came in and pulled back those rules. But like, that is part of the.
- [49:01]
Jesse Jenkins
Discussion that we all have. Even if I agree that India is not going to sacrifice its growth for a 1.5 or 2 or 2.5 C world, I think there's basically no amount of warming that India is not willing to sacrifice for its own growth.
- [49:20]
Daniel Stein
Right.
- [49:20]
Jesse Jenkins
I think that's because growth is partially a mechanical process that like is outside of any one political leader's ability to suppress or encourage.
- [49:29]
Robinson Meyer
But when I think about the response.
- [49:31]
Jesse Jenkins
To the Gates memo shows how hard it is to say something nuanced about climate without people being like, oh wow, Bill Gates is giving up on climate change.
- [49:38]
Robinson Meyer
On the other hand, Bill Gates saying.
- [49:39]
Jesse Jenkins
Hey look, countries becoming rich is more important than countries having low emissions. That does actually like contradict major points of climate policy that the U.S. did implement in the past five years.
- [49:51]
Daniel Stein
Okay, that's a very fair point. And I think I would say it's a needle that's gotta be thread carefully. Like my belief is you really don't want to restrict growth in poor countries and you probably shouldn't draw any red lines in terms of fossil development. I mean, come on, the US is going to add a bazillion natural gans plants in the AI buildout. Are we then going to go tell Namibia that they can't have natural gas? I don't know. So this is actually something interesting, Rob, that we're working on. We've talked a little bit about giving Greens US focused work, but we actually have a really wide and growing international work both in Europe and Asia. And one of the reports we'll be releasing next year is an update of our low and middle income country strategy, which focuses on India and Indonesia. And this Is like the crucial part of it is it's based on electricity. It's based on huge and increasing demands for electricity that are being fed by coal in that part of the world. And so the crux of the question is not how do you stop the cold? Build out, build out. The crux of the question is how do you provide the electricity that is needed for India's rising middle class, rising industry at the lowest carbon, with the lowest carbon emissions possible? And so what are the structures that you need to get the incentives right to balance those demands?
- [51:19]
Jesse Jenkins
I was talking to an analyst today who said that AI buildout in the US is actually putting our grid closer to how the rest of the world, especially Southeast Asia, thinks about its grid, in that the sudden appearance of demand growth is creating growth like dynamics within various, you know, within the geothermal industry in the US or within the nuclear industry in the US which are much more common to how these companies would operate if they were in Southeast Asia. So given green, you have a synoptic and panoramic view of the sector, what do you think is coming next for climate action?
- [51:56]
Daniel Stein
I'm honestly quite concerned about polarization in climate and I'm nervous about a future where both in the US and Europe and in other countries, you have sort of a pro climate left and an anti climate right where both sides try to tear down everything. So I think that I'm actually really nervous about that. That's my pessimistic projection of the world. So I think that the optimist in me is looking towards figuring out a set of policies and principles that has a bit more universal buy in. I think that probably 10 years ago, this idea of energy innovation as the core part of the climate movement, I mean, that was the Republican climate platform. And now that is not even on the table. So I would be excited about a world where there's some core set of principles that we can all agree on and then still have a lot of disagreement at the edges. And I really think that technology is going to have to be the key thing no one hates. Well, that's not true. Luddites hate technology. Plenty of people hate technology.
- [53:13]
Jesse Jenkins
And the Trump administration seems to hit wind. Hate wind.
- [53:16]
Daniel Stein
Yes, right. I think that's the kind of thing that I think, like we, especially in the US is a place I know more about thinking about a set of actions that we can agree on, like faster deployment of many different types of technologies, energy abundance, and just hoping we can come to some sort of compromise and conclusion on that, such that we don't have drastic yo yos with every administration.
- [53:41]
Jesse Jenkins
It does seem to me like we're kind of all living. It's interesting that you describe the Sunrise Movements theory of change as you did, because that's something I've been thinking a lot about. It's something we're reporting and writing about here at umap in that I do think it made a promise. It made a pitch to voters, to Democratic leaders, that climate change was an issue that really motivated young people, that they cared a lot about it, that the key to gaining credibility with young people, especially in the Democratic establishment, was to have Democrats accept the reality of climate change, the urgency of climate change at the absolute highest level, and pass a big law about it and to elevate climate fighters. And that this would demonstrate to young voters that the party took it seriously and it took their concerns seriously. And of course, what happened is that the party, I would say, put climate change at the center of its legislative and regulatory agenda and the number of young people who voted for the Democratic Party went down between 2020 and 2024. Is the path to avoiding that polarized world to make climate central to how one party frames itself and fight that fight and heighten those differences? Or is it to say, actually climate needs to work a little bit more in the background and we should try to depolarize climate change and ultimately depolarizing it's going to be good for lowering emissions, even though you're not going to be having those big fights every day.
- [55:08]
Daniel Stein
I think it's depolarizing. And I don't quite know how we get there or if we can get there, but I think you can get certain constituents, certain constituencies within both parties to agree on certain points. Like you're probably not going to get the far right MAGA people or the libertarians in the Republican Party to get around for climate policy, but you might get workers who are interested in onshoring U.S. manufacturing of critical things. You might get certain businesses, you might get certain wings of the Republican Party on board, like youth as well, such that you can have at least parts of it be bipartisan. You saw this in the first Trump administration. You saw the energy act of 2020 pass kind of quietly with a bunch of stuff that the left and right was really happy about. That's what I want to get back to. I don't see the energy act of 2026 happening like, you know, a parallel of the 2021, but I would like to get back there.
- [56:10]
Jesse Jenkins
Well, with that, we'll have to leave it there. Dan Stein, thank you so much for joining us on Shift Key. This is great.
- [56:15]
Daniel Stein
Thanks so much Rob.
- [56:19]
Robinson Meyer
That will do it for us this week.
- [56:21]
Jesse Jenkins
You can find all of Dan and giving Green's recommendations in the show notes.
- [56:25]
Robinson Meyer
As always, you can follow me me on X or bluesky or LinkedIn by.
- [56:29]
Jesse Jenkins
Typing my name right into the search box.
- [56:31]
Robinson Meyer
If you enjoyed Shift Key, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. My co host Jesse Jenkins will be back next week. Shift Key, as always, is a production of heatmap News. Our editors are Gillian Goodman and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by.
- [56:46]
Jesse Jenkins
Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury. Our music is by Adam Cromwellow.
- [56:50]
Robinson Meyer
Thank you so much for listening and.
- [56:51]
Jesse Jenkins
See you next week.