The universities we proudly attend recently received historic donations to step up the fight against climate change—a $1.1 billion gift from John Doerr for a climate school at Stanford University, and a $200 million gift from the Salata family for a climate institute at Harvard University.
As students, we appreciate the new opportunities these gifts will provide. However, as young people deeply concerned about climate change, we fear they’re a mistake.
The chief problem is this: however noble and well-intentioned, these donations are unlikely to drive progress on anywhere near the time scale the climate crisis demands. New schools and institutes take months to plan, years to build and develop, and often decades to yield transformative societal impacts. Meanwhile, as the recent wave of extreme heat makes clear, we are rapidly running out of time to avert climate catastrophe.
These donations are a “20th-century solution to a 21st-century problem,” one news report remarked. “Endowing university chairs and naming a building are nice gestures, but it’s not clear how those efforts will help rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are dangerously warming the planet.”
Stanford and Harvard are not alone. Columbia University is courting major donations to underwrite its new Columbia Climate School, Yale University has launched the Planetary Solutions Project with an initial $100 million gift, and Princeton University secured a “transformative gift” to expand its environmental institute. There is an emerging arms race in academia for ever more expansive—and expensive—climate schools and institutes.
While these donations are useful, this money would be much more effectively spent to directly accelerate government action—the only force powerful enough to turn the tide on climate change.
Consider the Inflation Reduction Act, which authorizes at least $369 billion in clean energy tax credits and other incentives. It is, by far, the largest and most consequential step the U.S. has ever taken to address climate change. No other initiative—no community recycling effort, no corporate climate pledge, nor any state or local policy—holds a candle to the sheer power and effectiveness of action by the federal government.
We need much more of it. Overall emissions continue to rise, while they ought to be falling precipitously. While universities produce valuable climate-related research, today the greatest limiting factor is not our understanding of climate solutions, but rather our ability to implement them.
To ensure our lawmakers meet the moment, environmental leaders should direct significantly more resources to climate advocacy and political organizing. This includes greater engagement of minority communities as well as constituencies across the political spectrum.
We’re not referring to feisty youth activism—although there is a place for that too—but instead to the tools of modern political mobilizing (lobbyists, SuperPACs, grassroots and grasstops organizing, digital ad campaigns, political donations, and the like) that can apply serious political pressure and compel lawmakers to act.
This is the playbook that corporate America has largely mastered to advance its interests in Congress, often in opposition to climate action. Meanwhile, the environmental movement brings three-point plans to a gunfight.
“Climate advocacy is one of the most neglected causes in all of philanthropy,” a 2022 analysis concluded. Just 0.4 percent of U.S. donations, it found, go to climate organizations working directly to prevent greenhouse gas emissions through policy and other systems change.
Consider the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion pledge by business mogul Jeff Bezos to support environmental philanthropy. While a historic gift with enormous potential, very little, if any, of the funds appear to be going to support direct advocacy. Or consider the Waverley Street Foundation, a $3.5 billion climate pledge by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs. While also very generous, all of the funds have already been cordoned off for 501(c)3 giving, as opposed to the more political—and greatly needed—501(c)4 giving. This will significantly constrain the real world impact of these resources.
Yes, political advocacy is sometimes messy and the results are often uncertain. And yes, it comes with little of the fanfare associated with other initiatives, like endowing a new school, but it is an essential accelerant of government action.
“Climate funders have long had trouble with risk-taking. That’s particularly problematic, given the fact that they’re taking on what’s likely to be humanity’s paramount challenge for the next century, if not centuries,” noted Inside Philanthropy. “Even as legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act underscores the centrality of policy and even political engagement, many funders remain unwilling to ruffle feathers in a field where urgency is of the essence.”
As students with long lives ahead of us, we understand viscerally what’s at stake due to climate change. That’s why we feel a responsibility to call out strategic misfires—including by the best of allies—to ensure we are positioned for success on the most consequential issue of our time.
Our planetary future will be won or lost in the political and legislative arena. We can’t just dance around the edges of this arena. We have to enter it.
Fortunately, the environmental movement has a growing war chest at its disposal. We have the resources needed to win. But this will only happen if we use them wisely.
Conrad Sproul is a law student at Stanford University. He is the ’22-’23 editor-in-chief of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal.
Lucy Nathwani is a sophomore at Harvard College. She is a member of the Harvard Undergraduate Clean Energy Group.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.
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