How to create climate progress without political support

Our first newsletter of 2025 discussed how we can keep moving the needle on climate progress if politicians don’t want to be ambitious on climate, or—in the case of the US—outright deny that the climate problem exists.

Some EA-aligned research organisations and grantmakers have now released some great reports to deal with this question, which we’ll highlight in today’s newsletter.

In this this newsletter:

• Making progress on climate change without political support for climate action

• Updated charity recommendations

• A big list of relevant ideas and writing

• Updates to the EffectiveEnvironmentalism.org website

• We’re hiring a social media volunteer

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In the early 2020s, the momentum for climate action had never been stronger. Greta Thunberg and the youth climate movement sparked a wave of climate action. The European Parliament just adopted the Green Deal. In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act promised massive spending on climate change. But in 2025, little of that initial momentum still remains. How can we make progress that don’t depend on politicians’ support for climate action?

Founders Pledge, an EA-aligned grantmaker and research organisation, just published its report Robust to Risk: Building a Climate Giving Portfolio for a Turbulent 2026 and Beyond. Founders Pledge argues that the climate community was not prepared to fund right-leaning climate organisations, mistakenly opposed permitting reform, and overestimated support for climate policy. According to Founders Pledge, the effectiveness-oriented climate movement must now focus on:

• In the US: Permitting reform to accelerate the rollout of renewables, supporting clean firm power like geothermal and nuclear, and supporting energy innovation.

• In Europe: Supporting existing legislation on energy and climate, and influencing the world’s largest climate budget.

• Expanding action elsewhere, such as China, the rest of Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Read 'Robust to Risk'

Giving Green,1 a climate charity evaluator and grantmaker, released its report Unleashing Clean Energy in the U.S. where it highlights the opportunity for bipartisan support for decarbonization by not framing legislation as “pro-Climate” but as removing barriers to construction, low-domestic energy, and reviving US industry. Giving Green recommends donors to focus on commercializing and deploying clean firm power and addressing clean energy deployment barriers.

Read 'Unleashing Clean Energy'

• 2 December 2025: Giving Green webinar: Unleashing Clean Energy in the U.S. with High-Impact Donations

• 5-7 December 2025: Effective Altruism Connect

• 12-14 December 2025: EAGx Amsterdam, including a presentation about effective environmentalism. (Applications close 23 November.)

• Other effective altruism conferences

• The effective environmentalism Slack community now has 100+ members. Come join the Slack community and exchange ideas about effective climate progress.

• New website articles: We’ve given our website a fresh make-over and have published articles about the most impactful lifestyle changes, the protein transition, carbon lock-in, and clean firm power. Including practical advice about how to get involved in climate action.

• Updated climate charity recommendations: Giving Green has updated its list of Top Climate Nonprofits. Its five recommend nonprofits are: Clean Air Task Force, Future Cleantech Architects, the Good Food Institute, Opportunity Green, and Project Innerspace.

• First biodiversity charity recommendation: the EcoResilience Initiative—a research group focused on long-termist biodiversity solutions—recommends advancing precision fermentation as the highest-impact biodiversity intervention, and recommends donating to the Good Food Institute.

• Project Drawdown now includes climate solutions that have potential, but aren’t yet available for implementation.

• Action guide for mountain leaders: Mieux Donner has released an EA-inspired Climate Action Map for mountains guides to show groups what they can do to tackle climate change.

• The Global Energy Innovation Index, released this month, measures the contributions of thirty-nine nations to the global process of improving energy technologies.

• Grant transparency: Meta Charity Funders highlighted the Effective Environmentalism Initiative’s spring grant on the EA forum.

• Narrative Framing Analysis: Exploring tools for Effective Advocacy. A method to identify and track narrative framings across media and government to support advocacy organizations with impact monitoring. (Hubert Thieriot)

• The overall cost-effectiveness of an intervention often matters less than the counterfactual use of its funding. When evaluating the impact of charity, how the charity’s donors would have otherwise spent their money might often be more important than the impact of the intervention itself. (Abraham Rowe)

• Eliminating contrails from flying could be incredibly cheap. Could we halve aviation’s climate impact at a fraction of the cost of sustainable aviation fuels? (Hannah Ritchie)

• What My Students Taught Me About Climate Action. Improving offsetting by paying for good things to happen to the planet and animals.

• Can advance market commitments jumpstart climate’s hardest sectors? Episode on the Volts podcast about how advance market commitments can commercialize new climate tech. (David Roberts, Clay Dumas)

• Building an Impact-focused Community. How to create and maintain a community focused on change.

• Supermarkets Are the Next Big Challenge for Meat Reduction. We buy so much meat at grocery stores, so it’s crucial to figure out how to lower animal product consumption in retail. (Björn Jóhann Ólafsson)

• Global renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time. (The Guardian)

Several articles about making progress on biodiversity:

• Biodiversity Philanthropy Must Look Far From Home. To maximize impact during the sixth mass extinction, giving must focus on “where”. (Ben Valentine)

• Two-thirds of agricultural carbon and biodiversity loss occurs on one-third of the agricultural area. (Liu et al., preprint)

• Food impacts on species extinction risks can vary by three orders of magnitude. Animal products and commodities grown in the tropics generally have much negative impacts than staple crops and vegetables. (Ball et al., Nature Food)

We’re looking for a Social Media Volunteer to help grow the effective environmentalism movement and increase the visibility of the Effective Environmentalism Initiative. Read more here.

Apply

You can find more high-impact climate job opportunities on Probably Good.

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