A New Billionaire Climate Funder: Where Chan Zuckerberg’s First Green Grants Are Headed and Why

New Africa/shutterstock

It wasn’t the largest climate funding announcement from the last few weeks, not by a long shot. 

But the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s $33 million in awards for carbon dioxide removal and decarbonization in mid-October was still a milestone: the first-ever climate grants (that we know of) from CZI, the philanthropy of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and former pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

It’s always notable when one of the world’s 10 or so centibillionaires enters a new area of funding. And it’s particularly so given that the couple has pledged to give 99% of their shares in the social network—the major source of their wealth—to charity during their lifetimes. 

The grants also come as philanthropic support is slowly building for carbon dioxide removal. Foundation funding is believed to have reached $85 million in 2020, up from estimated levels of just $25 million annually a few years ago, according to ClimateWorks Foundation. This award and other new support should boost that total still further, and the U.S. Energy Department is also planning major funding with the aim of lowering technology costs. 

Zuckerberg, who has bounced between whistleblower-sparked scrutiny to company-rebranding ridicule this fall, has waded into a somewhat controversial field of grantmaking. Carbon dioxide removal—a blanket term that covers activities ranging from planting trees to machines sucking carbon dioxide out of the air—sits at the center of the debate over the extent to which humanity should rely on still-nascent technology and major interference in ecosystems versus dramatic societal and behavioral shifts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Both, at some level, are necessary. Serious emissions reductions are the most important action to staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, beyond which climate catastrophes multiply. But most scientific projections say some degree of carbon removal will also be necessary. At the same time, critics are concerned that unproven carbon removal technology is being used to justify continued polluting, and represents the kind of hubris that brought humanity to this point in the first place. For all of these reasons, carbon removal has become both a growing cause among wealthy donors and something of a battleground.

Before diving into this new round of grants, it’s always important to point out that Zuckerberg’s day job at Facebook—now Meta—has incalculably more impact on climate than his giving. And in that regard, his record is poor. The Guardian recently named the 37-year-old one of “America’s top climate villains” due to a “consistent willingness to profit off the spread of climate denial.” As their analysis covered, over the first two months of 2021, disinformation about climate and clean energy was seen around 25 million times on the social network, according to a report by Avaaz. Another study found millions of views of such material in the first half of 2020.

In that sense, climate change appears to be another area of Zuckerberg and Chan’s philanthropy that stands in stark contrast to the damage being wrought by the source of their wealth.

What the funding will support

Over the past year-plus, CZI staff have been talking to experts in the climate space to understand the landscape, according to a spokesperson. The team wanted to support an area where they believed CZI funding could make a difference. They saw carbon dioxide removal as both aligned with its strengths—particularly its technological focus and ability to take high-risk bets—and underfunded. 

The funding falls into three main buckets. One portion aims to build a pipeline for new technology. Three similarly named grantees—Activate, Actuate and Prime Coalition’s Azolla program—pursue this goal through a mix of two-year fellowships, DARPA-inspired research and venture-style investments. (CZI did not disclose grant amounts for any recipients.) There’s also an investment in CarbonBuilt, a company working to reduce emissions from concrete, which recently raised $10 million. 

Another focus is on two elements of the field’s infrastructure. One piece of that is evaluation. Funding will go to the nonprofit Carbon Plan to measure the effectiveness of methods for long-term carbon dioxide removal (CDR). 

The other piece is environmental justice. Carbon180, one of the most prominent carbon removal nonprofits, which recently published a report on equity and justice in the space, will regrant $1 million from CZI to environmental justice organizations. ClimateWorks Foundation, one of the major intermediary funds in climate philanthropy, will use funding from CZI to support its ongoing work to develop responsible CDR, such as giving grants of up to $150,000 to groups working on CDR with an environmental and climate justice lens. 

As newcomers to the field, CZI opted to back experienced intermediaries in this round, but is considering giving directly to environmental justice organizations in the future, according to a spokesperson. 

The third bucket is policy. Two policy shops, the Bipartisan Policy Institute and Great Plains Institute, will get support to bring together companies, labor unions, environmental groups and other organizations to work on governance issues for these technologies. 

Not all of the funding is going strictly to carbon dioxide removal. Of the $33 million, $10 million will go to the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program, a project of Microsoft co-founder and mega-donor Bill Gates to support entrepreneurs and researchers working on high-potential decarbonization technologies. Drawn from research institutions in America, Europe and New Zealand, the first cohort of fellows will be focused on hard-to-abate sectors like cement, steel and fertilizer, as well as hydrogen and electrofuels. 

Funding rising for carbon removal, but below proponents’ hopes

Funding for carbon dioxide removal is slowly climbing. Between 2015 and 2020, philanthropic support for CDR averaged $50 million annually, and saw an increase over the last three years, reaching an estimated $85 million last year. But even with the new CZI funding, advocates see a long way to go, noting that foundation funding for climate change mitigation totaled $1.9 billion in 2020.

“It’s still a tiny drop in the bucket, but every little bit helps,” said Jan Mazurek, senior director of ClimateWorks Carbon Dioxide Removal program, one of the grantees.

In an Inside Philanthropy op-ed this year, Mazurek and co-author Noah Deich, president of Carbon180, wrote that carbon removal needs philanthropic funding similar to the support for halting coal use and speeding adoption of wind and solar energy, arguing those fields had received more than $200 million annually for decades. 

Some of the field’s major backers have plenty more to give. Elon Musk recently funded a $100 million carbon removal prize as his first act of mega-philanthropy (though as a prize, it’s not included in funding totals), while Bill Gates has invested in Climeworks, among other efforts. Foundations of tech billionaires like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and cryptocurrency platform co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried have also backed some of CZI’s new grantees.

The federal government has also joined the push. Congress set aside $60 million for carbon removal technology development in 2019, and Jennifer Granholm, secretary of energy, said at the U.N. climate summit last week that the administration wants to invest to bring the cost of carbon removal under $100 per ton by 2030. That is well below the cost of many current methods.

Corporations, too, are putting millions toward carbon removal. Much of that comes in the form of investments, but there are also sizable grants. This popularity in the private sector has prompted concerns that companies will prioritize carbon removal over efforts to reduce fossil fuel use, particularly given many companies with hard-to-abate emissions lean heavily on these methods in their plans to reach net zero. 

While new tech often gets the most attention, approaches described as “natural” actually received most of the carbon dioxide removal funding from philanthropy in 2020. More than 70% of such support has gone to natural methods, such as planting trees or changing farming practices, according to ClimateWorks’ database. About 9% goes to ocean processes, which include growing seaweed and dissolving minerals to impact alkalinity. Less than 15% has gone to technological approaches, a field best known for machines that suck up carbon dioxide. The remainder (6%) goes to a variety of other strategies and innovations, such as glued or laminated wood used in construction in place of more carbon-intensive options.

Differing concerns about carbon removal

To keep the climate livable, the IPCC’s landmark report suggests humanity ultimately needs to remove between 100 billion to a trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the end of the century. That means we need to scale up rapidly to removal on a gigaton scale, i.e., a billion tons of CO2. Yet tech-based approaches, if they are to be used, have a long way to go: The largest plant in the world today can only remove 4,000 tons annually. 

Mazurek is concerned the level of foundation funding does not meet the challenge. “We know that the philanthropic ambition around removal is very small,” she said. So far, funding is “inadequate to removing 10 gigatons and then 20 gigatons” and continuing to scale, she told me.

She is also dismayed by the perception that there is competition for a limited funding pie. “We see a concern that somehow, removal is going to compete for resources with renewables,” she said. “That is a false narrative. This is not a zero-sum game.”

Meanwhile, CDR continues to face pushback. Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the German Green Party that does not make grants, has been a vocal critic of what a recent blog post called “speculative techno-fixes” to address the climate crisis, including CDR. Linda Schneider, senior program officer for international climate policy, told me heavy reliance on CDR technology threatens to allow continued pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and people of color. In addition, she’s concerned that governance and regulation are lacking on carbon removal, particularly as industry pins its plans on these technologies.

“These types of philanthropic investments… are really just bypassing this discussion,” she said. Schneider would like to see society consider whether to use any such technology before money floods in or it gets to the operational stage. “We should be debating the if, not just the how,” she said.

Schneider and Mazurek find agreement on an interesting area: The field’s terminology can be misleading. Both say that most any approach—whether it’s referred to as “natural” or “technological”—involves extensive human manipulation of the environment. 

Tree planting can displace people in the Global South, occupy precious farmland or even cause more deforestation. Growing seaweed on an industrial scale and sinking it to the ocean floor remains a path filled with unknowns. Direct air capture at needed levels could require massive amounts of energy—up to “a quarter of global energy” by 2100, according to research published in Nature Communications.

“All of the carbon dioxide removal technologies, if they’re rolled out at a really large scale, come with environmental risks and side effects,” Schneider said. “It’s deeply problematic from a climate justice perspective.”