Our preparations for & responses to the 2024 US Elections

When a major political shift occurs, philanthropists need to consider two key questions:

1. How does this alter the landscape of opportunities and risks?
2. How are other funders reacting to these changes?

It's at the intersection of these questions – identifying what needs to be done that isn’t already being done (sufficiently) by others – where we can find the greatest opportunities for impact.

Our team has conducted extensive research into the climate philanthropy landscape since 2017, which has led to multiple publications, including, most relevantly:

• A Volts podcast about why the most fashionable climate interventions aren’t necessarily the most effective ones.
• A report before the election about the considerations we took into account to prepare for possible election outcomes and where we analyzed how climate philanthropists reacted to the 2016 elections.
• A 2020 report previewing the Biden Presidency’s climate opportunities for philanthropists and a 2022 follow-up contextualizing major policies passed in 2021 and 2022 in light of climate philanthropy priorities.
• Grant-making by the Founders Pledge Climate Fund action in anticipation of changes in the opportunity and philanthropy environment.

The Post-Election Landscape

The recent US election is a major political shift for climate action, reshaping the political environment in which climate philanthropy operates. This will be the most Republican-dominated political moment in a generation, with the Republicans holding a trifecta: control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives.

Our view on likely election outcomes and priorities for action under different scenarios; with probabilities from July/August 2024.

We’ll be publishing a more comprehensive analysis of what this means for climate philanthropists early next year, but at a high level, we see several ways the landscape provides challenges as well as new opportunities for impact.

Much of Biden’s climate agenda will likely be under attack, with the upcoming political fight around the renewal of the “Trump Tax Cuts” (TCJA) providing the window in which the tax credits at the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s major climate law, will be under scrutiny. Many Republican lawmakers face mixed incentives. Consider the fact that about 80% of the Inflation Reduction Act's benefits accrue to red districts; several House Republicans have already signed a letter in support of parts of the IRA.

Bloomberg's analysis of the economic benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act by district partisanship.

At the same time, an interest in energy dominance will shape Trump’s agenda, with no priority given to climate change and a likely increase in fossil fuel production and exports and domestic emissions.

Yet, there are forms of climate and energy policy, such as permitting reform, that could continue to accelerate clean energy while also likely aligning with Republican interests. Indeed, climate conservatives see large potential for upside by making it easier to build all forms of energy and the likely dominance of clean forms of energy in new energy build-out. A “Build Baby Build” energy agenda – focused on more quickly building out all forms of energy – would have much different climate impacts than a “Drill Baby Drill” agenda focused solely on fossil fuels.

Because of these mixed incentives and different pulls, everyone who is confident about what precisely the climate outcomes will be is over-confident. While certainly challenging, this is not an "everything is lost" situation, but rather one that requires careful analysis of where and how progress remains possible.

What Climate Philanthropists Can Do

Climate philanthropists have several potential responses to this new landscape. And, as discussed, it is from the interaction between how climate philanthropists react and how the opportunity landscape is changing that opportunities for outsized impact arise.

While it is early days in climate philanthropists reacting to the 2024 elections – none of the ten largest climate foundations have made public statements of how they will react – analyzing past reactions gives some indications of what we will likely see.

Two philanthropic strategies are very common in light of an election outcome seen as unfavorable – “lawyering up” and “going to the states”.

The first describes funding legal work to defend climate policies in court; the second describes a move to sub-national work in more favorable circumstances. While one cannot precisely identify these shifts, estimates suggest strong reactive changes in strategy in response to the 2016 elections:

Modeled estimates of philanthropic responses to the 2016 elections, based on ClimateWorks raw data.

We can see that the move to cities was the major response to the 2016 election of Trump, with the “We Are Still In” campaign being a dominant response. Other responses, such as a move to state-level work, are not estimable from the raw data, but are also likely to have occurred.

To be clear, both of these strategies – strengthening legal work and moving to sub-national levels with more favorable conditions – are important parts of the solution. Yet, they are also part of climate philanthropy’s “muscle memory”: responses that are unlikely to be underfunded and unlikely to be the most promising opportunities given they are very prominent and recurring.

A third strategy that we believe is likely to be impactful is to increase support for right-of-center climate and clean energy groups, collectively known as the “Ecoright” field. We've observed relatively little funding flowing in this direction, even leading up to the election widely understood as a coin-toss. Almost all of US climate philanthropy focuses on environmental organizations that are aligned with the left to varying degrees, with only ~$30M going to the Ecoright.

Over the past 18 months, we've made this a major focus of our work, deploying about $9 million to support over 20 organizations that work on climate and clean energy right-of-center—engaging key constituencies, informing policy makers, and building a civil society ecosystem supporting Republican lawmakers to act on climate (through our partner DEPLOY/US). We expect to continue this emphasis, as long as these groups remain significantly underfunded relative to their potential impact in the current political environment.

A fourth strategy, focused on seizing the federal bipartisan opportunities in any environment and providing advice and support to policy makers seeking to take action, is one that our longest-standing grantee, the Clean Air Task Force, is focused on. We believe that such federal work remains crucial and that it would be a mistake to perceive the upcoming political environment as one where federal progress is impossible and, thus, not worth investing in.

Fifth and finally, geographic diversification to other regions – for example investing more in Europe when perceiving less opportunity in the US – is more complex than it might appear. Since a Trump presidency affects global climate politics in various ways (e.g., reduced cleantech innovation, weakened international cooperation, and trade policies), the negative effects tend to be correlated across regions. This doesn't mean geographic diversification is wrong, but rather that the perceived higher attractiveness of other regions is easily overstated. Yet, there is clearly some argument for investing more in other regions and we believe that grantees such as Future Cleantech Architects and Carbon-Free Europe are doing essential work in helping Europe’s climate response be more focused on enabling global decarbonization.

Looking ahead, we believe the key to maximizing impact is focusing on opportunities that are neglected relative to their importance. This requires constant analysis of how the political and wider environment in which climate philanthropy operates changes as well as analyzing how climate philanthropists respond.

This is the work we are doing day to day at Founders Pledge, both to guide our own grant-making but also to provide public analysis for other climate philanthropists.