[on-hold music] It's Quinn.
Maybe you're like me, and sometimes you just spiral out, not just because everything is a lot all of the time, but because some part of you actually wants to do something about it.
But, I mean, holy shit, where to start, right? Great news. We built an app for that. It's called What Can I Do? Even better news, it's free and it's fast. It takes just three clicks to start unfucking the world.
Visit whatcanido.earth to get started for free.
[on-hold music] Congress just
jammed the brakes on America's clean energy boom, however short-lived it may have been. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law after a lot of debate in the House and the Senate and in public.
It is gonna wipe out most of the wind and solar and EV tax credits. It's directing agencies to unwind renewable energy support, much less the mass electrification we need to do.
These are changes the industry warns could kill new projects and spike electricity costs for homeowners and renters and everyone.
So what can I do to keep climate progress moving when federal policy just banged right into reverse? More than you think. Truly. Look, every week, thousands of people ask us the most important question in the world.
What can I do? What is measurable? What is effective? Where do I have leverage?
So every week, I turn around and ask someone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about the very same question, someone who's answered it for themselves, who's working actively on the front lines of the future, from AI to food and water, medicine, Alzheimer's, you name it.
I find out why they're doing the work they're doing and what we, you and I, can do to support it, be inspired by it. I am your host, Quinn Emmett, and my guest today is Dr. Daniel Stein.
He is the founder of Giving Green. Dan's team pours over mountains of evidence to steer every donated dollar toward the highest impact climate solutions.
Exactly the kind of agile systemic work we'll need now that this brief shining window of federal support just got gunned. So please stick around to learn how your strategic giving can still bend the carbon curve. It can.
And how you can start actually multiplying your own impact today. For questions or feedback, as always, email us at questions@importantnotimportant.com. [on-hold music] Dan, welcome to the show, man.
Thank you for joining us from your bunker. [scoffs] Thanks, Quinn. Glad to be on the show. For sure. I will hope to not ruin that.
So I was explaining this to my 12-year-old this morning, what you do, because, you know, the name of the show now is the most important question, which is, what can I do?
And, you know, the equation has been around forever, and Elizabeth Johnson has a version of a Venn diagram, which is like, "What are you into, and what are you good at?"
And then I can point you towards 10,000 problems and opportunities. And clearly, you've gotta do something pretty specific. So I have a two-part question for you, and it's kinda the same question, but it's not.
First part is, why do you have to do this job? So of everyone in the world, like, why do you have to do this specific work? And number two is, why do you have to do this work?
So of all the ways you could put your skills to use and answer the call, why do you have to do this work? Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. Let's do it. Okay.
So, you know, from a very high level, the problem that we're trying to solve at Giving Green is that the world is burning. Climate change is this terrible, terrible existential
issue that we're all gonna face, and I think people don't quite know how they can contribute to the problem. Mm-hmm. And I think, you know, there's a lot of things people can do with individual actions or by
political action, but there's one thing that a lot of people, it's an easy thing they can do, which is donate money and try to contribute to causes that are working on these really big problems. Mm-hmm.
Because not everyone has time to, say, drop what they're doing. People have a life. They're busy. They have kids. They might not be able to drop everything and, I don't know, go,
you know, run out and invent the next electric motor.
So what we do is we provide a well-researched guide to help people figure out how to allocate their money towards things that really matter and are really making a difference. Okay.
But your question was, why am I the right person to do this? Mm-hmm.
And so my background is as an empirical economist, and so I got my PhD at London School of Economics, and I was working with farmers in India who were dealing with droughts and floods and trying to develop these insurance projects to help buffer poor farmers against the vagaries of the monsoon rainfall.
And then I went to work at the World Bank, not doing this insurance stuff anymore, but using the same tools, trying to figure out whether various products and services and World Bank programs were actually helping people that they were trying to help.
Mm-hmm.
So basically this tool-- I've been, like, been developing this toolkit of, like, trying to figure out whether things you do when you allocate money towards them actually work and what's the cost effectiveness of them.
Mm-hmm. First in agriculture and then doing a lot of climate energy and environment work, both at the World Bank and at IDinsight, the organization I moved to afterwards.
And in that work, I worked with a lot of donors, kind of big-time donors and smaller-time donors that had this mindset. It was like, "We wanna give money to solve this problem.
We wanna contribute to big solutions that we can't do on our own, so we wanna give money to contribute." But it's a minefield out there. Mm-hmm.
We all know that there's lots ofNonprofits sort of wasting money, or maybe not wasting money, but just working on problems that are not really the big problems Mm-hmm And especially in climate it's an extremely wide field.
Mm. Let's say that you decided you wanted to give money in climate. Well, you might say, "Well, what could we do? We could try to get people to recycle. We could plant trees." Mm. "We could try and promote solar energy.
We could try to promote fusion energy-" Mm... which barely exists now, you know? Mm, mm. But those things are super different. Mm-hmm. They can't all be equally effective. Mm-hmm. What should we do? And so I...
both as an individual and as a scientist, if you will, I found that entryway super, super perplexing, and found it really, really frustrating that I couldn't figure out the answer. Mm-hmm.
A lot of this stuff you could just kinda Google around and someone's done this work.
But I found I couldn't find the answer, and a lot of the people in the donor community, both individuals and institutions, were also struggling with this.
And so I said, "Well, you know, I have this background in essentially figuring out what works, and I've identified this issue that I personally have, which is I really wanna know what works to stop climate change.
And I think a lot of people have this issue, so why don't I apply these skills that maybe I've been using in slightly different ways with, like, farmers in India, or people buying solar panels in Uganda,
and just try to apply it to this larger question of where should people donate to stop climate change?" But you could do anything else. Oh, yeah. Okay, the second part of your question. Mm-hmm.
So I could do anything else. You know, with an economics degree you can do a lot. You can go work at Amazon and- Mm-hmm... you know, get people to buy more widgets. Mm-hmm.
You can go to Google and get people to click on more ads. You can go to finance and figure out the margins on every transaction and take a little piece for yourself. Mm-hmm. But that type of stuff never inspired me.
You know, I got into economics because I wanted to help the world, and I happen to be good at math, and that happened to be, like, maybe some sort of overlap where those two things can play. There we go.
But then the climate thing particularly, I mean, before we started recording, I was telling you that I have two young kids. Mm-hmm. And I'm nervous about the world changing due to the climate, and
I'm kind of obsessed with this idea that the world might be a little worse for our kids than it was for us. You know? Like, in general there's been this progress throughout human history where things have been...
Not always. There have been some ups and downs, but kinda things feel like they've been a little better for a generation than the previous generation. And I'm nervous that won't be true for my kids.
And, you know, that we as the adults in this situation, the parents, we have to take some responsibility for what's gonna happen next.
And so I think if I were to go and optimize clicks or something like that, that I would be abdicating my responsibility. [chuckles] Mm-hmm.
That I have a role to play in trying to solve this problem and make things better for my kids and everyone's kids. I love that. Seven different things. First, thank you for sharing all that.
Two, the kids thing really sticks with me as well, and not just my kids, but giving a shit about other people's kids, you know? Three, what is that great quote?
It's like the best minds of our generation are getting people to click on ads.
And the other piece that, [chuckles] you know, really sticks out to me is how you talked about starting in insurance, which again, is a wide net when you say insurance. It could mean anything, but I am
fairly consumed by thinking about how the insurance system is in a little bit of trouble- [chuckles]... and how we don't talk about it enough. And I think often, I was like, man, that's...
as, like, a literally any sort of first job in insurance would be really helpful for people to have in their toolkit right now.
I think k- sort of how I yelled at my children and told them they're all gonna be waiters someday because you have to work- [chuckles]...
in food service for one summer, 'cause that's how I judge people is, like, how do you treat waiters?
But also, you know, you have to work for your money, and you have to show up, and you have to put a good face on, and it's hard. I now think the same thing about insurance.
Like, it'd be really great if everyone had a little bit because they would look at everything a lot differently. Anyways, I'm completely insane. That's all... It's really helpful.
It really does check the box of I'm into this for a variety of reasons, and I've got this, what's the taken quote, unique set of skills.
I had on a couple years ago Matt Rogers, who developed the new company Mill Industries. They make the little... It's like a food composter, but it's not. As they call it, a food processor. It's a really sexy trash can.
It grinds up all your stuff every night. It's amazing, by the way. It's fantastic, especially with kids. You can put almost anything into it. It doesn't smell, it doesn't leak, anything like that.
But Matt designed the iPod and the Nest Thermostat, and I was like, "You could have done anything. You have all the money. You have all the acclaim, all this. Why did you make a sexy trash can?"
And he was like, "Honestly, who else should do it? Like, clearly this is my skill set. I give a shit about these things. I have kids. I think I have to do this."
And it sounds, like, a little bit about what you're saying, right? You could go... Amazon would pay you $1 billion to make widgets go faster. But I think it's... I think this is...
I mean, you probably get this from a lot of your guests. Anyone starting something new, like when we started Giving Green, part of the reason I started it is that there wasn't a thing like it. Mm-hmm.
And so you can get wrapped up in your head of, "Oh, there's not a thing like this because people don't want it." Sure. Or, "There's not a thing like this, but I'm not, like, the foremost climate expert in the world.
That's the person who should start it, so not me." But- Oh, yeah. All day... but then tho- those are excuses to sit on your ass and not do anything. Like, somebody has to start a thing. Nobody's perfect. Mm-hmm.
So just do it, and if you weren't the right person or it wasn't the right idea, it-It will work. Yeah. And most of it's gonna fail anyways. That's gotta be your expectation. Yeah. But also if you don't do it.
And that's how we came around to our- Yeah... new app, which is the pivot point for all of our work, and all the questions we can do is just people going, "What the fuck am I supposed to do about this?"
Whether it's public health or whatever it is. Mm-hmm. So ours is the much more broader, but similarly, the goal is like in a couple clicks we tell you what to do.
We've gone through all these rigorous things to make you feel like you're not- Yeah... throwing money and time away. So all right. That's all super helpful. Was there a specific...
Again, because so many people listen to this either 'cause they're already in the fight, whatever that is, like working on the front lines of public health, or global health, or food, or insurance. Right?
But a lot of folks are trying to find their... and either they're young or they're our age and they wanna make a lateral move 'cause they hate moving people's money around, or
they're a boomer and they're like, "Well, we fucked this up. How can I try to [chuckles] make amends for it?"
Was there a moment for you that convinced you, you know, again, doing all the other earlier stuff, World Bank, et cetera, et cetera, where you said,
"Oh, I think the best use of my specific toolkit and passions was steering climate donations"? And again, you just talked about this a little bit, but was there a moment where you thought, "Okay, this is it"?
Like you said, you can sit on your ass and not do it, but when did you decide to go all in on it? You know, it's so weird because unlike some people who start stuff, they, like,
quit their job and say, "I'm doing it," I had a very slow ramp-up. Mm-hmm. So I was working at ID Insight, which is a larger nonprofit doing international development, monitoring and evaluation, really good stuff.
And I started Giving Green as a side-of-the-desk project. Mm-hmm. So first, like, uh, version 1.0 of the website just- Mm-hmm... by the seat of my pants, you know. Yeah. With a little bit of help.
And so it existed as a product, but didn't seem... It wasn't all in at that point. And then it just, it slowly built. It was like you build a version of the product, you get some press, you get a grant.
And then we got another version of the product, and then another grant, and some more press, and it slowly built. And so at then for a couple years I was at 50%. I was working 50% on Giving Green. I had a team of five.
But I also had my job as chief economist of ID Insight- Mm-hmm... running big research projects with the Gates Foundation. [upbeat music] Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here.
On this season of Revisionist History, we're going where no podcast has ever gone before. In combination with my three-year-old, we defend the show that everyone else hates. I'm talking, of course, about Paw Patrol.
There's some things that really piss me off when it comes to Paw Patrol. It's pretty simple. It sucks. My son watches Paw Patrol. I hate it. Everyone hates it except for me.
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And I think the time when I said, "Wow, this is really taking off. I need to go in," last year we got a $10 million anonymous donation for re-granting. So someone basically said, "We like what you're doing.
Let's put $10 million into your re-granting fund. You guys allocate it for us." Mm. And that was, "Whoa, this is..." The previous year we'd moved a few million dollars. Yeah.
And then it was suddenly, like boom, 10 million. And so that was kind of a vindication of, wow, there really is demand out there. Mm-hmm. There is, really is work out there. I think we need to do this full time.
So then started the transition. I actually only went to doing full time at Giving Green at the beginning of this year. Oh, okay. And now I know you've got- Mm... pretty low overhead.
Did that 10 million enable you to go, "I can leave ID and actually go do this"? Yeah, that was part of it. Although, you know, the 10 million was, it's all for re-granting. Right, right, right.
But I just mean as far as, like, really looking at it and going, "Okay, there's a structure here. Like, now we can build this- Yeah... in- including me in a real way." That's definitely part of it.
Like, there's enough work. This is something that I should really pour my time into, and, you know, our fundraising was going pretty well, so we were able to pay a full salary. Okay.
So again, insurance really matters 'cause it helps you really see if something is legit and what it's exposed to, which can be physical or political or all the above, but it's a great grounding to building this pretty great and very transparent evaluation process you guys have, which we've definitely been inspired by on this side.
So let's take an example. I think 23.3 or 2024, is it the Good Food Institute made your list? They're still on our list. Okay. Okay. They're a long-time favorite of ours. So I wanna use that as an example.
You talk about how- Mm-hmm... and I love this, systems change gifts- Yeah... can obviously be, you know, this order of magnitude more effective than something like carbon offsets.
Talk to me about how you use Good Food Institute. Take me through that evaluation process and how they fit in there- Yeah... into the systems change world. Definitely. Okay. So just to set it up a little bit. Yeah.
So, you know, we at Giving Green are trying to figure out how to help individuals or institutions contribute to the climate solutions that are super high leverage- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm...
that we think have biggest bang for your buck, which can mean different things, but normally we express it as the most greenhouse gas emissions reductions per dollar. Mm-hmm.
And, you know, like I said, in this journey that we've gone on trying to find the biggest bang for your buck, we've found almost all the time that it's these systems change interventions that matter. Mm-hmm.
And by system change, that's a buzzword, and so I like to be very specific what I mean by it. Mm-hmm. It means-We are changing policy, we're changing technology, we're changing markets Mm-hmm.
Essentially, these things together change the rules of the game such that everyone is incentivized to use lower carbon energy, right? Like, we don't want to protect this one hectare of forest, we want to
change all of the incentives in society such that no one wants to cut down any of these hectares, right? Mm-hmm. 'Cause if you conserve this one hectare of forest and all the demand
for whatever that was cutting down the forest, and I'm gonna talk about that in a second, [chuckles] is still there- Mm-hmm... then people just go cut down another forest. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm.
So you have to think about what are the deep drivers of the bad activities, and try to change them. So you asked about the Good Food Institute. Mm-hmm. And I was talking about deforestation.
So as listeners of this show probably know, we're losing massive amounts of forests every year. Mm-hmm.
You know, the s- it depends on the year, but sometimes you hear, you know, a s- a area of the Amazon the size of Kentucky was lost last year. And so what are you gonna do to stop that type of problem?
And we're skeptical of these solutions that are like, "Let's conserve this bit of the Amazon", because you have massive economic pressures that are forcing the Amazon to get cut down. And what are those pressures?
Well, it's agriculture. Mm-hmm. It is farmers growing food and ranchers ranching cattle. Mm-hmm. And most of the food that the farmers are growing is going to feed animals as well. To feed the cattle. Yep.
Feed cattle, feed pigs, feed chickens.
So you have this issue-- We wrote this whole report on forestry, looking at how you save trees, and just kept coming back to this idea that it was demand for agricultural projects was causing the trees to get cut down, and you just couldn't, you couldn't solve the deforestation problem without addressing agriculture.
Mm-hmm. So you asked about our system, and I've kind of circumvented it a little. No, this is all great. But basically, we, we use a framework that we call the scale, feasibility, and funding need framework.
And so scale basically means if you were able to solve this problem, how big would it be? Mm-hmm. Usually expressed in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
The second thing is feasibility, and specifically feasibility with the tools that we have in our disposal, which for us are philanthropic donations.
So how much do we think that we could actually make progress on this problem using philanthropic donations? And then third is room for more funding,
as in when you take problems that not that many people are working on, there's not much money going to them, you'd think that our money can probably make a bigger difference than ones where, you know, Bezos Earth Foundation has just committed 100 million or something like that.
So we're looking for these potential big solutions that philanthropy can make progress on, that there aren't tons and tons of money already in. So we take that lens, and then let's think about our food and land systems.
When you start looking at agriculture and food conservation, you immediately hone in on cows- Mm-hmm... as being this major problem. The scale of emissions from cows is just astronomical. Mm-hmm.
I was just working with some donors from Brazil and analyzing some of the Brazil greenhouse gas statistics, and in Brazil, roughly 50% of emissions can be tracked back to cows, and it's through two mechanisms.
One is land change, as in- Mm-hmm... demand for grazing causing forest to get cut down, and the second thing is direct methane emissions of cows. Sure. The famous cow burps. Right.
So the scale of this cow problem is huge. And then this question of are other people working on the problem?
Well, you would be surprised how little money goes to dealing with a agriculture problem, especially government money, because governments do not wanna piss off farmers.
So if you look at Europe, that, for instance, has this sophisticated emissions trading system, agriculture is completely out. In the US, there's essentially no-- I mean, there's not a lot of emissions policy in the US.
[chuckles] But even in, for instance, the Inflation Reduction Act that had decarbonization policy for all different kinds of sectors, almost nothing for agriculture.
Also, in philanthropy, I'll tell you, I can't tell you how many philanthropists I talk to that just can't really wrap their head around that, like, cows are causing warming.
So it's this major neglected issue that has big upside. And then the question is feasibility. Well, what can you do about it? Well, a lot of people would like to just convince the world to stop eating meat.
I'm of the belief that massive cultural and behavioral change is too much of a long shot, that meat is just, like, deeply imbued in people's culture, in people's satisfaction, and that if environmentalists go after meat,
that's a war they're gonna lose. So we've got this big problem. The normal solutions don't seem to be working. So what is a solution that seems exciting? Well, if you could create meat without the emissions,
well, then you would solve the problem. Mm-hmm. And so that's where the Good Food Institute comes in. They're trying to figure out how we can create meat, the perfect, juicy, delicious hamburger or steak- Mm-hmm...
that has no trade-off for the consumers, but has not been bred using deforestation and cow farts.
So this is a type of problem, it's such a big, difficult problem that is being ignored, and the way forward is very difficult. I don't wanna gloss over the issue.
I'm a huge connoisseur of alternative proteins and, you know, fake meat products.And a lot of them are terrible. Yeah. Like, really bad. And I do the dog test.
You know, my dog is voracious and will eat everything, and occasionally I'll find one of these fake meats that even she won't eat. Like, she eats feces, and she won't eat some of this stuff. Right.
But that's not the point. The point is that this is a long battle, and it is a probably solvable problem.
There's no reason why we in humanity, with our brilliant minds of chemistry and fermentation, should not be able to figure out how to rearrange atoms of soy protein just a little bit so that it tastes like steak.
You know? Yeah. We can get there as humanity and solve this problem, and that's what the folks at the Good Food Institute are trying to do.
They're working with scientists, they're working with governments, they're working with civil society, trying to chart the way forward for these next generation of alternative protein products that are hopefully so much better and can actually make a dent into our emissions.
And what I love about your process, but also your explanation, is one thing you'll get to with your kids as they start really dealing with emotions, and they're able to think about them i- in a
semi-rational way, is explaining that you can't do away with emotions, right? They're always gonna be there. Growing up is figuring out how to handling them.
But it's also understanding that multiple things can be true at one time. Multiple feelings can be true at one time. Things... You might wanna do three things at once, and you can't do them all. We've got an hour.
And what I like about your transparency and the way you just explained that is, and, and what we try to do as well when we recommend candidates or things like that, is going, "Yeah, of course, I
would love to see someone beat Mitch McConnell." Right? Of course. Totally get it. [upbeat music] Hey, I have three kids. They eat so much. We try to eat real food.
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there are 50 state races that are winnable and could flip state houses, and where your money will go farther than someone who is almost inevitably going to lose to Mitch McConnell, like every time, right?
Is this Climate Cabinet, our friends that you- Right, right. No, but, no, they're part of it too. Yeah. But it's, it, you know, it's Run For Something. It's Climate Cabinet. It's looking at all these- Yeah. Yeah, yeah...
and going, "Yes, of course." Also- Yeah... or races that we're definitely gonna win, right? That's really great. That's also- Mm-hmm... not a good use of your money, you know? Mm-hmm.
And so I appreciate you being like, "Yes, of course it'd be great if people just stop eating meat." It's pretty complicated, and we're not gonna win that at least anytime soon.
Also, there's other people working on that in a variety of ways, and it's so cultural and so niche in so many ways. Yeah.
But if we can work on this one thing, which is, sure, keep eating meat, but let's make it the safer meat, right?
Arguably healthier for your body, which affects both your personal and public health, but also for the planet as a whole. We can focus on that, and we can measure where the money goes and how that goes. Yeah.
So I mean, you asked about Good Food Institute, but you didn't quite ask, like, how we kind of even decided to hone in on agricultural emissions. I mean, I think you kinda got there, but take me there.
Basically, the thing that was missing was that we start with this really long list of 50 to 100 potential solutions- Sure... which might be let's address livestock emissions. It might be- Right...
should we look at airplanes, or should it be, should we be supporting orgs that are, like, throwing soup at paintings, you know?
We have this long list, this prioritization matrix, that we run through the wringer of this framework, the scale, feasibility, funding need framework.
And to try and show which of, you know, even of these high-level problems, which are the ones that bubble to the surface as ones that we should really be working on and therefore recommending to our users.
And what's interesting is that this whole framework and all of the analysis is all available online transparently. Right.
So someone can go in and say, "Well, why are they recommending the Good Food Institute, and they don't even have anything on, you know, convincing people to be more energy efficient or something?"
Well, you can probably find that in our... Actually, I don't even know if there's a line on that. But, like, you can go through and look at all the things that we haveAnalyze and say- Yeah...
like, oh, well, the reason they're not doing forest conservation is Bezos Earth Foundation just put $100 million into them, and so maybe that's not the best place for me to put my thousand dollars right now. Totally.
And again, like, no one is saying don't use LEDs. No one's saying don't- Right... investigate solar, I mean, before the credits go away and whatever. You know, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. That's all great.
If that's the choice you can make now and your priority now, then that's one thing. But if you're like, "I really care about deforestation," and you guys have said, "Here's all the things affecting it.
Here's the long list of places that we think could be useful, and now we've shortlisted it to this is probably the most effective short and long-term version. This is where you should send your money."
I think that's very clarifying 'cause it's a struggle. It's obviously easy. And I really like-- And tell me if I get this quote wrong. And again, I just looked it up again.
You position yourselves as effective altruism inspired, climate focused, and pragmatically broad. Is that right? Something like that? Yeah. That sounds great.
I mean, the inspiration of effective altruism is there's all kinds of ups and downs and warps with that movement. Totally. But ultimately- Totally...
you know, the core philosophy of that movement that I still find inspiring is that, you know, is that people should be spending their time and money doing things that matter to make the world a better place. Yeah.
And that they should be strategic and focused and reasoned in terms- Totally... of how they spend that time and money, and try to apply it to things that really matter.
And that deeply inspires, inspires me, and that kind of pushes what we're doing, is like, we think people should be contributing to the climate problem, and we think if you do it, you should be putting your money towards the things that really matter, and you get the most bang for your buck.
Yeah. And I love that. And, and again, w- I think we're pretty similar in that respect, and we try to take that
mission, that philosophy, that methodology, and apply it to people who go, "No, I know, but I really care about kids' cancer." And I'm like, "Great.
That's a pretty small problem that doesn't get a lot of funding because it's a small problem compared to, you know, cardiovascular disease or lung cancer or whatever- Mm-hmm... it might be."
And we'll say, "If you really care about that, we're gonna point you toward an organization like one of my favorites, Alex's Lemonade Stand, and they specifically pay for both research, but also travel funds for families to go to trials or treatment- Mm.
... because it's fucking expensive, and that is- Mm-hmm... a very direct use of your money for a problem you really give a shit about. Is it climate? Is it gonna make the jet stream not slow down?
No, but we also acknowledge there are other things that people really care about that really matter, that are life and death. So
yeah, I think you can totally be inspired by that and still use it without getting into all the warts that everyone loves to pick into about. So- Exactly. Okay. That's all great.
Everything kinda changed last week in a super fun way. How do...
And I'm sure you anticipated a lot of this after November, and I know you wrote a post about it, and now it's July, and this enormous thing is been signed into law.
We've got a little time, not much, for some of these things. How do these big swings feed into your going-forward research priorities? So I guess- Yeah.
Of your current recommendations, of which there used-- I think there used to be a little more policy, that you guys recommended evergreen action for a little while. Like, we loved them.
How do you weight what's urgent now versus what's inevitably gonna lose some traction? How do you weight policy advocacy versus, again, like, some of this more emerging market stuff? Yeah. It's hard.
A lot of the organizations that we work with closely and support were working hard on the IRA to get it to pass, and some of the staff on our team was doing it, and it feels like a huge deflation to all of us working in climate to see so much of it get rolled back this week.
It was heartbreaking, to be totally honest.
That being said, the goals, the way we see the climate problem, in our work, we try to really take the long-term view, and we always know that there is going to be ups and downs and setbacks. So there's a couple things.
The first is that, you know, as we've known that there was great uncertainty with the election coming up and our research last year, we tried to make both our grant making and our recommendations
be wide enough that the portfolio was going to do well in different types of swings, and that meant supporting some orgs on the left and some orgs more on the right, and some orgs working in different parts of the world.
So we supported European orgs, some orgs- Mm... in India and Asia, and even the orgs in the US, some working on state level policy, some working on national level policy, different sides of the spectrum.
So we feel like our whole portfolio is still quite strong, though with massive winds of change, we as researchers and philanthropists obviously have to change with the times. Yeah. And so there's two things we're doing.
We living in the US can have a very US-centric view and say, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling," but the world is not the US.
In fact, most of the, you know, vast majority of the emissions, and especially the emissions growth, is going to happen outside the US.
We've always been super excited about how the US can help the rest of the world- Sure... and maybe now is not exactly the time for it.
But as donors and philanthropists, we can see that there's a lot of progress to be made now in Europe, in Southeast Asia, in Australia, and so we are working in some of those areas, as we always have been, and see a lot of those opportunities.
On the other hand, I don't think it's time to give up on the US. I think that the US is a huge player, a huge innovator in the world, and a huge trendsetter, and there are very important fronts.
Like, we can see in these arguments over the one beautiful bill, a huge front of negotiations was these tax credits. Mm. How long do they last? Especially should nuclear and geothermal be treated differently than solar?
And there's a huge part for even if there's going to be a rollback, there's a huge place for civil society to be involved inThese heated debates and trying to make sure that wherever we land on is not as bad as it could be.
And so you saw that in these debates, that there were some Republican congresspeople in both houses that were sticking their neck out for clean energy tax credits and- Yeah...
saving the nuclear and geothermal credits and you know, making sure the solar credits didn't expire right away and some of the orgs that we work with are playing a part in those discussions.
Another thing is trying to look at places in the medium term where we think there really could be bipartisan support, even with this current administration.
And s- so there's a couple places where we're excited about going forward. One is general innovation funds.
So the Republican Party has, for a long time, been a supporter of clean energy innovation and domestic energy production. That's something that both parties have always agreed on
and the US does a lot of energy innovation through the Department of Energy, through its various demonstration projects, and the loans programs office.
[chuckles] And you know, we think that type of stuff is defensible under this administration, and so we are supporting organizations that are working on this problem of keeping the innovation engine of the US going forward.
Another thing that we are exploring doing later in the year is thinking about permitting and increasing energy supply.
That's something that both sides of the aisle really wanna do, that the Republican administration has talked about. You know, let's decrease the barriers to building things- Mm...
and getting all forms of energy on the grid. If you're gonna get all forms of energy on the grid, well, lo and behold, solar energy is probably the cheapest and is going to- Yeah... really win out.
So you know, I wouldn't say I'm optimistic about progress under the current administration, but I would say that there's always some positive side to the coin, and there are places where we, a- as people who are working to prevent climate change, can make a difference even under this administration, both in playing defense and even offense.
Yeah. I think that's great.
I mean, you can acknowledge the harm that will be caused by this in a thousand different ways, and also that we have to look at it as this nuanced set of opportunities, whether it's political things to run against, like a loss of these
growing clean energy jobs and clean energy subsidies that were going mostly to red states, or again, some more of these long-term efforts that are gonna be a little less affected because they weren't top of mind when all this was going.
You know, we have to figure out how to decarbonize cement, right? It is a complicated one, but it is... What is cement? It's crazy. It's some large single digits number percentage of emissions, right? It's everywhere.
It's in everything. And figuring that out and contributing to that in some way through you all or whoever it might be, is almost like for an investor, like you talked about with your general innovation funds.
You know, it's long term, short term. It's like time and market, right? This is going to happen because it needs to happen, and in the short term, you know, there's so much energy to bring online.
Transmission and permitting are a nightmare. We're gonna take some hits along the way 'cause they're gonna bring some bullshit back online. But at the same time, solar's the cheapest energy of all time already. Yes.
And that's, you know, at this point, not gonna change.
So the more we can advance and almost do an end around on some of these things, right, knowing that we have to control what we can control, feels like a very pragmatic way forward considering, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
And I think, you know, I think it's important to not bury your head in the sand and say- Yeah... "The world is falling. You know, there's nothing we can do under this administration.
I'm just gonna sit at home and drive my Prius and eat my Boca burger." I don't think that's the right response. It's like there's still a fight out there.
Let's talk about short term versus long term, though, as we kinda get into- Mm... what people can do. And again, this could be $1 or millions. We have people running college endowments that listen to this.
We have, you know, policy aides, whatever, and we've got bartenders. Everybody loves a bartender. Let's talk short term first, knowing what we know now.
As an individual or maybe a small family office, what is the simplest path you think to maximize impact today still? What do you recommend, again, donations-wise, knowing what we know?
By short term, you mean what can this individual do in their short term? Yeah. I think on a more... So we often tell people to start locally because- Yeah...
you wanna get the hooks in them, and you're often gonna see- Mm-hmm... the most bang for your buck, like things you can touch and feel locally. Bike lanes, electric school buses, right?
Better HVAC systems in schools- Yeah... so the air is cleaner. And then you'll go, "Oh, look what I can do. Look what I have done. Look what I've accomplished."
So when I say short term, I mean somewhere where someone might see the result of their efforts in the next five to 10 years, again, knowing what we know now after last week. Doesn't matter the scale. Y- yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I think I would push back against that a little bit. Please. I think that climate is this big, long arc global problem. Totally.
And I almost think that when people get too focused on what they can see and feel in local initiatives, that you lose sight of forest for the trees. Totally. So I wouldn't recommend that people work on bike lanes.
Like, I just... I don't think it's that big of a deal.
I think we're gonna have electric cars, and the electric cars are gonna get powered by renewable electricity, and that's gonna solve the problem, and bike lanes aren't really gonna matter. Sorry. Unpopular opinion.
No, it's not, it's not that it's unpopular. It's just that we are n- no matter what you or I say about it, is this- Yeah... bigger, more complex systemic problem. Yeah.
There are gonna be people who come back and go,Great, but I wanna see the impact of this happening. Great. Yeah. I'm happy for those people to do it, but the advice on that is not gonna come from me. Okay.
So the advice from me is going to be let's look to the future. The future is we need to massively electrify. We need our electricity to be produced by clean energy.
We need to figure out how to make steel with clean energy. Mm-hmm. We don't really know how to do that now. Concrete. Mm-hmm. Hamburgers. Mm-hmm.
And you gotta be working towards those big problems or else you're playing in the sandbox. Totally.
And so I'm sorry if you can't see it in the next few years, but my recommendation to you is gonna be to shoot for the moon. Let's do it or we're all gonna fry. So what can people be doing?
Well, you know, one thing, and, you know, not to get up on my own high horse, is one thing that is- That's why you're here... a lot of people are in a position to do is to donate. Yeah.
And that's what Giving Green's guide is for. It's a guide to help people figure out what are these high leverage opportunities, and people can go to our site, they can see the recommendations that we give.
They can give through us, through our Giving Green Fund, where- Mm-hmm... you can give to us.
We take nothing off the top, and then we reallocate to either our top organizations or other organizations in timely matters that we think are doing incredible work.
So that's the service we provide, and it's all free and accessible.
But to give other options, I also think that people should think about how other ways-- other things they can do that will contribute towards changing the systems, changing the laws. Mm-hmm.
And, you know, the big things that people can do is get involved with politics, get involved with candidates running, you know, get involved in various pressure groups that are convincing candidates to do things.
Some of these are the same groups that we fund- Mm-hmm... but they also need people power and- Yeah... people writing congressmen and changing hearts and minds of people around them.
But I really would push to-- for people to think about, you know, like, what does the world look like when things are fixed? You know? It, it probably doesn't involve everyone being vegan.
It probably doesn't involve everyone biking. It involves people having juicy red steaks that somehow didn't emit carbon and driving gigantic Hummers that also don't emit carbon. Mm-hmm.
So, like, work towards those solutions rather than maybe feel-good second-best solutions. Totally.
I just try to push people in a, like, a yes and way, which is-- and that's one of the things we try to do is it's actually built into the app, is if you go and you're like, "Look, I just want a fucking induction stove, man."
You know? Let's call it what it is. I'm in Denver, I wanted the-- want one of these e-bike rebates that sells out every minute. Mm-hmm.
We will literally pop up and go, "That's great, but here's what else you can do about that particular thing that's much bigger and on a bigger scale and a long-term."
Again, like, coming at-- you wanna talk about bike lanes? Let's talk about cement, right? Like all these different things. Yeah. You wanna talk about housing? Let's talk about green steel.
That stuff really matters, and I do think it helps to, again- Yeah... get people in the fight.
And also, some of these things, you know, I've poo-pooed individual actions a little bit, but some of the ones that you recommended I like.
I mean, I do think one of the things that people can do is be early purchasers of new tech that's just getting its footing. Yeah.
I think the induction stove is a good example because these companies might go out of business, these induction stove companies. That's it.
And every few people that buy these new fancy induction stoves that are, quite frankly, too expensive for mass adoption. Oh.
But if you're in a position to be an early adopter, get the companies on their feet, help get that next factory built. Mm-hmm.
You know, okay, sure, you're only one customer, but if you and a few buddies buy an induction stove, it's building demand and hopefully getting the price down in the future for mass adoption.
And that's literally the way it works, right? Solar's cheap- Yeah... because we've been scaling it since two thousand and nine. Yeah.
Like, again, literally get an induction stove and have house parties and then just yell at people about it. And- Yeah... a small percentage of those will go and buy them.
[chuckles] Like you said, maybe the next factory gets built. It's like that's what gets you over the hub. Hardware is so hard. And what I like to tell people is I don't think anyone cares if you skip your hamburger.
No one will notice. I don't care. But if you go out and you buy, you know, a big pack of Impossible Burgers and serve them to all your friends, well, that's something.
Like, that's moving towards this direction that we care about. How does a-- This is a bit of a pivot though, slider scale up. If you are running a small foundation or you are running a family office,
you don't wanna lose agency, but you still wanna transparently and proactively use the best tools. How do they leverage your work without feeling like, you know, they're just handing it over per se? Yeah. Yeah.
So our work is basically a completely transparent research stack going from, you know, like I said, this big spreadsheet of all climate solutions all the way down to recommendations. Mm-hmm.
So people don't have to give to our fund. That's just an option if it's easy for people.
Other times people just read our work, read the research and read the recommendations, and then make their own choices and give directly. Yeah.
A lot of times people can just get on the phone with us, so we take calls with donors large and small who say, "Look, I read this research, but I've got some questions," or, "We're really into food systems.
You guys only have a couple recommendations. Are there-- There are some others?" Mm-hmm.
And we can help people come up with a portfolio based on that so they can still feel like they have a- uh, well, they still do have agency.
They can still be giving based on their values, but also just leverage our research and c- basically combine our research with their values to come up with something customized. Sure.
No, I think that's great because there is this huge wealth transfer happening, and you get a lot of younger, relatively younger folks who are involved or running these family offices, but there may be a lot of entanglements from the prior generations that can make it complicated.
So as much as they might want to come to you and be like, "Yes, great. I'll just give everything to the fund," often politically, internally, that's not quite as easy as it can seem. So any flexibility- Yeah...
is I think helpful there.And that's not a problem for us. I mean, like I said, we don't make any money off the fund. Yeah. The fund is just a product to make it easier for people who wanna set it and forget it. Yeah.
A lot of donors that we work with just give directly and use pieces of our advice, and that's great. Yeah. Yeah.
Was there demand for something like the fund, or did you feel like maybe this was the easiest way, again, to enable a segment of people to set it and forget it? Yeah, there was definitely demand for a fund.
We kept having people ask us about it. Mm-hmm. And as soon as we set up the fund, it did attract a lot of donations. I think you have different types of people out there.
Some people wanna spend a lot of time and think about the things they care about and what they get passionate about and, you know, be really hands-on, and some people wanna say, "I don't have time for this, man.
I got a full-time job-" Yeah. "... and a family and whatever." They wanna spend maybe an hour, like, doing some Googling, saying, "Okay, a few people really trust these guys. I've read through their process.
It seems to make sense to me. Set it and forget it." Sure. "Let's give to the fund." Sure. "Let's have these guys manage the money." Yeah, and you can sleep a little better at night.
Again, you're not as hands-on, but you trust that, like, you're putting it in better hands, frankly, like, for people who are directly working on the thing you want to accomplish. Yeah. Right? And it's all we do.
We sit around and think about how to allocate the next marginal dollar to fund climate change. We eat, sleep, and breathe that stuff. So, so happy to help people out. That's super great. I really appreciate this, man.
This is all super helpful. What have I not asked, or what have I missed? Again, no one can't cover it all, and it's this enormous hyperobject. Yeah. I think I would say that we, you know...
The main thing we work on is really focused on climate change mitigation and just, you know, stopping climate change. But we also do other types of research.
We have a guide on what we think businesses should be doing to stop climate, which is, I think, very different than most businesses are doing with either doing nothing or buying carbon offsets, so- Mm...
any, you know, business sustainability people out there l- listening, I think you should take a listen. We're also-- we're working on a new guide on biodiversity. Mm.
So, you know, right now we have this super strong focus on stopping climate change, but a lot of people are really passionate about natural systems and saving biodiversity, and we think there's some overlap with climate work, but there's also some other things you can do if you apply the same scale, feasibility, funding need framework.
So that's gonna come out at the beginning of next year. So yeah, encourage your listeners to check out the various parts of research on our site. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, those might be good fodder for, you know, shorter, more concise, now that we've laid the ground, conversations. Like, I'm really into the business one because, again, the fucking offsets thing, man.
It's gonna break me. Yeah. And I'm really interested in the biodiversity one 'cause, again, like you said, again, like the short term and local thing.
There's a lot of people who are like, "No, I really care about the rape of these ecosystems." You're like, "Yes." Mm-hmm. "And we might as well-" Yeah. "... do the work 'cause we're best positioned to do it," so- Yeah.
You know. Yeah. But it's gonna take work. It's not as simple as you might think. Yeah, exactly. Kind of like carbon offsets. Awesome. All right. Last question I'll ask anybody.
Any books you're reading these days you recommend? Could be relative to the work. It could be kids books for two-year-olds and six-month-olds about fucking dragons. It could be anything.
Well, you know, I'm just finishing up-- We were talking a lot about food systems and forestry and how food systems affect land.
I'm reading a book that just came out by Mike Grunwald called "We Are Eating The Earth"- Hmm... that I think is a really nice primer. If people wanna understand how
what you eat and what fuel you put on your car affects natural systems through, you know, really nerdy economic stuff that this book is not about. This book is about taking it and making it very practical for- Yeah...
people to understand, and it's a bit of a page-turner. I, I think it's great, and I think it goes into some of these issues that, that we do, which is,
you know, why meat and cows are such an issue and why things people think really matter, like regenerative agriculture, organic farming, is not quite what you think it is. So I highly recommend it. I think it's great.
Okay. Awesome. Yeah, we'll check that out. Again, the base level understanding of these systems-oriented- Mm-hmm... approaches and how we attack them from all sides.
The example I always use is smoking and lung cancer, right? It was the kitchen sink. It was marketing. It was capitalism. It was legal. It was all of it, and we made a lot of progress, but it wasn't inevitable. Yeah.
Awesome. That's it, man. Thank you so much for taking the time today, Dan. I really appreciate it, man. Thanks so much, Quinn. Thanks for having me on. [upbeat music] That's it for this week's conversation.
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