A New Estimate of the ‘Most Effective’ Way to Fight Climate Change

On a dollar-for-dollar basis, where will your money do the most to fight climate change?

The economist Daniel Stein has a clear answer: You should give to groups that lobby for aggressive climate policies. And if you’re an American, he has three such groups in mind: the Evergreen Collaborative, Carbon180, and the Clean Air Task Force.

“If you’re like Joe Schmo, and you’re looking to do something for climate, I think you should give to policy,” Stein told me. “We think it’s something like 10 times more effective to give to policy than to give to one of these projects that are directly doing emissions reductions.”

A year ago, I profiled Giving Green, a new organization that applies the principles of effective altruism to fighting climate change. It tries to answer one of the most common questions I get as a reporter—“Where should I give my money to fight climate change?”—but with some degree of quantitative rigor.

Its list of recommendations has changed slightly since last year. Gone from the list is the Sunrise Movement, which Stein lauded—“I really do believe that the existence of Sunrise has led, at least to a certain extent, to major climate bills being passed in the Biden administration,”—but which is going through an internal restructuring and has yet to publish a strategy for the next few years. (It also needs individual donations less than it did, Stein said, because it has secured more institutional support.)

In its place are Carbon180, which advocates for policy to accelerate direct carbon removal, and the Evergreen Collaborative, a policy shop composed of veterans of Jay Inslee’s climate-focused presidential campaign. Evergreen “has very quickly become very influential, in terms of figuring out how to take the broader ideas of the progressive climate movement and turn [them] into actual laws that can be passed,” Stein said.

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