Fundraising Policy

We are grateful to Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program for its thoughtful Fundraising Policy, which we have modified and adopted below.

1. We do not accept anonymous donations.
2. We do not accept donations from corporations, foundations, or individuals if the majority of their current profits or wealth come from the fossil fuel industry unless they can clearly demonstrate that they do not have a conflict of interest and present a strong track record of supporting efforts to address climate change.

Rationale: We are concerned that fossil fuel companies or other interests will seek to exploit solar geoengineering as a pretext for delaying reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. We do not want donors who are (or could reasonably be construed as being) motivated to support solar geoengineering research to protect fossil fuel industries.

Process: For purposes of excluding such donors, we consider a rough weighting system as a guide. We rate the donor’s ties to fossil fuels on a 1 to 5 scale, where 1 has no connection with fossil fuels and 5 has nearly all of their current wealth and social connections tied to coal. Then, we rate the donor’s commitment to climate from 1 for a donor who has long devoted a majority of their time and resources to climate action to 5 for a donor who has no visible interest in climate. We then take the product of the two ratings, rejecting donors with a multiplicative combined rating that is larger than 10.

Examples: We offer a few examples of our funding decisions:

• We would not accept funding from Exxon both because the company would benefit from prolonging the use of fossil fuels and because it has clearly undermined efforts to meaningfully address climate change. In other words, we would rate Exxon with a 5 x 5 = 25.
• We would accept funding from an individual or philanthropy who had made their initial wealth from investments in the fossil fuel industry, but who has since sold off their fossil fuel holdings and would no longer benefit from the continued use of fossil fuels. In this example, the donor might rate 3 (some connection with fossil fuels) x 2 (strong commitment to climate) = 6.