Five Things John Doerr’s Book Tells Us About His Climate Philanthropy and Politics
/
Following a recent $1.1 billion mega-gift, Stanford tops the list of Doerr’s climate beneficiaries. Photo: turtix/shutterstock
Last November, billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr published a book on the climate crisis titled “Speed & Scale.”
Released six months before he and his wife, Ann, grabbed headlines with a $1.1 billion donation to Stanford University for a new climate center named in their honor, the book offers a revealing window into the mega-donor’s approach to the accelerating emergency and philanthropy’s role in addressing it.
As one might expect from an engineer and venture capitalist, science, technology and private investing take center stage. The core of the book is a series of bullets — following an “objectives and key results” format (known as OKRs) that Doerr laid out in a prior bestseller — on how to get the world to net zero.
Doerr has had legendary success in Silicon Valley, backing a series of world-changing companies on his way to accumulating a fortune Forbes puts at $10 billion. He clearly has a talent for anticipating what the tech future holds, though he’s admirably candid in the book about his climate investing missteps, including backing the electric car manufacturer Fisker over Tesla.
His book applies those experiences to the climate challenge, though, as he notes, it is far from the first such step-by-step framework, and not even the first one from a billionaire (see Bill Gates). While other reviews have weighed in on Doerr’s science-related conclusions, in this review, I’d like to zero in on what the book reveals about his views on climate philanthropy and political change.
Admittedly, philanthropic giving plays only a bit part in the book, with the first (passing) mention nearly 100 pages in. But philanthropy does get several mentions as a key supporting character. There is also a 12-page section at the end of the book dedicated to the sector. And Doerr does call for a dramatic rise in philanthropy’s climate commitment: “Increase philanthropic dollars from $10 billion” — i.e., the upper limit estimate of current annual individual and foundation giving on climate — “to $30 billion a year.”
Doerr’s book offers an extended look at the influences and outlook that may guide the 70-year-old’s future grantmaking. As an early signatory of the Giving Pledge and someone who has made a billion-dollar donation, there could be a lot of that to come. At the same time, Doerr’s book largely puts him on a path that many early climate grantmakers took but later judged to be ineffective. Doerr shows little to no inclination to support grassroots action, and seems to maintain a confounding faith in bypassing the powerful political and economic interests that have blocked climate action to date without actually confronting them.
His philanthropic circle is nearly all white, male billionaires
Doerr lists 16 contacts from the philanthropic world in his acknowledgements section, and a few more in the book’s section on charitable giving. The names suggest what types of personalities shape his view of philanthropy.
There are several climate funder heavyweights on the list, many with finance backgrounds. They include Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, hedge fund manager Christopher Hohn (of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation) and former hedge fund manager and climate donor Tom Steyer. The Simons family (drawing on Jim Simons’ hedge fund wealth) also gets multiple mentions, including Mark Heising and Liz Simons (of the Heising-Simons Foundation) as well as Nat Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons (of the Sea Change Foundation).
There are also a few folks on Doerr’s list who are not particularly known for their climate giving, including philanthropist and former hedge fund manager John Arnold (whose Arnold Ventures gives for climate, but not as a major priority), Google co-founder Sergey Brin (who gave $40 million to the new operation Climate Innovation last year, but has few other public climate gifts) and Walmart heir Sam Walton (presumably the third-generation heir, whose relatively small foundation does count climate as a priority).
Besides the ultra-wealthy, just two other names make the list: Larry Kramer, president and CEO of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, perhaps the largest U.S. institutional funder on climate, and Jennifer Kitt, head of the Climate Leadership Initiative, which provides free advice to mega-donors considering backing climate causes.
So what stands out about Doerr’s philanthropic influences? First, nearly all are billionaires or multimillionaires. It’s also hard not to notice that almost every one is either a man or part of a couple. Kitt is one exception, and the book’s philanthropy section also features billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and a female employee of hers. It’s also virtually an all-white list. If Doerr does have a more diverse set of folks advising him on his giving, the book does not reveal them.
His chosen grantmaking models are billionaires and corporate outfits
As he does throughout the book, Doerr mostly turns over the mic to others in the 12-page philanthropy section. Most of the section is composed of long interviews, mostly with representatives from the three grantmaking organizations he mentions by name: Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, the Bezos Earth Fund and the IKEA Foundation.
The trio seems chosen to represent three pathways: Bezos Earth Fund is purely philanthropic, Emerson Collective’s LLC structure is a hybrid investment-and-philanthropy model, and IKEA, which gets just a paragraph, shows how business can pursue philanthropic goals in parallel to operational emissions reductions. For a book not focused on philanthropy, perhaps it’s unfair to ask for more, but it’s too bad Doerr did not find room to include more of the many philanthropic structures, from regrantors to participatory funds, that support the climate movement.
His climate villains are ExxonMobil, the Kochs and “incumbents”
In trying to explain over three decades of American inaction on climate change, Doerr all but avoids mentioning political parties. Instead, in his section on the United States, he talks only about presidents. Elsewhere, he blames well-deserving if common targets — ExxonMobil and the Koch family — and one totally faceless culprit: “the gallery of ‘incumbents’ whose future is tied to greenhouse gasses.”
Yes, both political parties have members who are financially beholden to fossil fuel interests. Yes, that has led to some terrible decisions. Right now, one place we can point is to West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s refusal to support President Joe Biden’s climate-rich infrastructure bill.
But Manchin’s refusal is only an issue because not a single Republican will vote for the bill. Uniform Republican opposition also helped doom another key piece of climate legislation, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. The same goes for virtually every attempt at serious climate lawmaking over the years. For all the blame Democrats deserve, Republicans have offered neither a plan, nor practically a single vote, for climate action. In his book, Doerr seems unable to speak on this plain partisan reality — and is thus unable to fully diagnose the problem.
For years, though they nominally support the climate fight, a certain contingent of powerful people, like Doerr, have assumed there was no need to confront the political and economic interests that oppose climate action head on. Their theory was (and apparently still is) that reality would eventually set in and lead to a sea change.
Yet with lakes drying up and wildfires raging, Republicans are still lining up behind Trump, who demolished environmental protections and has called climate change a “hoax.” And the GOP is still blocking what may be the nation’s best chance to put the federal government to work on the problem.
He’s “impatient” on everything but politics
After choosing not to name the elephant in the room (i.e., the GOP), Doerr displays a frankly inconceivable degree of patience for their eventual conversion.
In the book’s opening pages, he asks, rhetorically, “Do we have enough time?” His answer: “We hope so, but we’re fast running out of it. On the next page, he then describes himself, in bolded highlights, as “hopeful — and impatient.” His final line of the prologue: “But the time is now.” The book’s title literally puts “speed” first.
Yet none of that urgency is on display in Doerr’s hopes for Republicans’ political conversion. After noting a “wide partisan divide” on climate change, he turns to the potential that future members of the GOP will both believe in science and in the need for government action on climate. He writes: “Our hope is that the tide will change with the next generations.” The question is, do we have generations?
To learn about movements, he spoke with big greens, Bezos, Walmart and BlackRock
To the extent that he does hope for swift political change, Doerr appears to lean heavily on the inspiring stories of young people.
He opens his nearly 40-page section on movements with a familiar retelling of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s first school strike. He also cites at length Varshini Prakash, the Sunrise Movement leader who helped launch the Green New Deal, as well as Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.
Yet none of them are featured in the extended interviews that are otherwise common in the book. In fact, Doerr appears to quote only from what they’ve told other sources. Instead, the nonprofit voices Doerr features are from the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund and a Mumbai-based nonprofit called Educate Girls. Elsewhere, he cites conversations with several other major environmental groups, including the World Resources Institute, RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Corporate actors appear to make up the other half of Doerr’s conception of the climate movement. He shares long excerpts of interviews from Bezos, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
To be charitable, you could say this reflects Doerr’s expertise as a venture capitalist. Three of his eight movement goals are for Fortune 500 companies. But the overriding message is that a movement clearly means something different to Doerr than, say, to me.
It’s telling that Doerr borrows so heavily from the stories of young activists like Thunberg, Prakash and Yousafzai without letting them speak directly to his audience. Instead, he gives that opportunity to three of the most powerful men in the world. Seems like he — and his readers — would benefit from hearing more from the figures he thinks are so inspiring.
That gets at what most concerns me about the book. Doerr could have written a plan solely about the scientific and technological steps needed to get to net zero. There isn’t perfect agreement on what those are, but doing so would have been well within his wheelhouse. Instead, Doerr, who is an influential voice in Silicon Valley and beyond, is presenting himself as a comprehensive expert.
To this reader, what he leaves out — like movement voices and a strong political critique — consistently speaks louder than what he includes. And those omissions suggest that if the Doerrs cut any more big climate checks, we can all but bet that the recipients will continue to be the Stanfords of the world.
