Note: This article was originally published on May 6, 2022.
The venture capitalist John Doerr, who has amassed billions betting on tech startups, and his wife, Ann, made one of the biggest single climate or university gifts in history on Wednesday. The Silicon Valley couple will give $1.1 billion to Stanford University to fund a new school focused on climate change and sustainability.
Massive even by the standards of university donations, the Doerrs’ gift ranks second only to Michael Bloomberg’s donation of $1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, according to the New York Times. In terms of climate philanthropy, it’s on a level with the entire field. In 2020, foundations gave an estimated total of $1.9 billion for climate mitigation, based on ClimateWorks Foundation data.
The gift is the latest in a cascade of pledges from tech billionaires to address the climate emergency. Laurene Powell Jobs pledged $3.5 billion late last year. Jeff Bezos set up a $10 billion fund and has begun making grants and commitments. Bill Gates has poured untold resources into Breakthrough Energy, his climate-focused investment and philanthropic vehicle, and the Gates Foundation is also a top climate funder. Other tech leaders like Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have made smaller commitments.
With less than eight years left to halve emissions under the pathway laid out by the Paris Agreement, and under 30 to reach net zero, the Doerrs’ contribution is another sign that some of the world’s wealthiest are beginning to give at levels closer to the scale of need. The new Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability could help power the unprecedented transformations the world must achieve over the coming decades to preserve a liveable planet.
The couple deserve strong praise for committing such a substantial share of their known wealth, which Forbes estimates at $11 billion. As a proportion of their fortune, the Doerrs’ single gift surpasses the climate giving of several of their even wealthier tech peers (Bezos or Zuckerberg, for instance), not to mention the large collection of billionaires who have chosen to stay on the sidelines in the climate fight.
Yet the problem with this gift — big as it is — is that it’s deeply traditional, taking a narrow path on a crisis that demands a bolder approach. And that may limit its effectiveness.
The 70-year-old Doerr made his fortune through early bets on companies like Amazon, Google and Slack, and he and his wife are said to take a “venture philanthropy” approach to grantmaking. But not in this case. Rather than backing promising startups or scrappy outsiders, the couple chose to further enrich one of the wealthiest and most renowned universities in the world, which boasts a $38 billion endowment.
That choice reflects a long-running reality: The biggest checks for environmental change go to the richest institutions, whether that’s the largest green nonprofit groups or elite universities. They tend not to go to the grassroots movements and frontline organizations that have won important progress in the past several years. There are glimmers of diversification from some newcomers, yet not enough to shift the balance.
Folks from across the sector regularly tell us that an all-of-the-above approach is essential to making progress on climate change. But the rivers of tech money flowing into climate philanthropy are mostly moving in one direction. As in the first wave of major climate philanthropy in 2008, deep-pocketed newcomers have largely backed science and technology, with little left over for movements and activism. Don’t get us wrong: Billion-dollar climate gifts are needed. What would be even better is more mega-donors willing also to look beyond largely nonconfrontational funding and back the movement.
Longtime funders of education and climate
Of course, that’s not to say the Doerrs are lacking in philanthropic drive, and this mega-gift takes them to a new level. The donation brings together two of John and Ann Doerr’s biggest philanthropic interests: education and environment.
Over the past decade, the couple have given more to education causes than any other area, including major gifts to their alma mater, Rice University. (Neither, incidentally, attended Stanford.) Ann, an engineer, chairs the board of Khan Academy, the online education portal, and John is a lifetime director on the board of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which he co-founded in 1998 to bring a venture capital approach to K-12 education funding. Both organizations have received seven-figure donations from the Doerrs.
The couple’s rapidly growing environmental giving is nearly as large, according to IP’s research. Benificus Foundation, the couple’s philanthropy, has been among the top 40 climate funders in the United States. (It is a low-profile operation, without a public website, and little beyond tax filings to shed light on its grantmaking.) Ann is also a former board member of the Environmental Defense Fund, which received $1 million from the Doerrs in 2016.
While their Stanford gift is by far their largest climate commitment, the Doerrs’ prior climate grantmaking overwhelmingly went to one of the most well-funded mainstream climate groups in the United States. The foundation sent $10 million between 2017 and 2018 to the Climate Reality Project, a leadership development and advocacy group started by Al Gore. The former vice president became a partner in Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm Doerr chairs, after the latter watched Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in 2006.
A family viewing led Doerr’s daughter to tell him, “Your generation created this problem. You better fix it.” Doerr laid out that exchange in his 2021 book, “Speed and Scale,” which distills the climate challenge into a series of bullets, focused on the innovations he believes are necessary to reach net zero. The bestselling book also reviewed the many — and often unsuccessful — climate-related investments Doerr has made in the years since his then-15-year-old’s call to arms.
A new research and innovation hub — and a mixed climate record
The Doerrs aren’t the only wealthy couple backing the new school. Stanford has received a total of nearly $1.7 billion in pledges to launch the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which will be the university’s first new school in 70 years. Other backers include Yahoo!’s two co-founders — Jerry Yang and David Filo — and their wives — Akiko Yamazaki and Angela Filo, respectively. All four are Stanford alumni.
The school will bring together 90 current Stanford faculty and add another 60 over the coming decade, across disciplines like planetary sciences, energy technology and health. Existing bodies like the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment will be folded into the school, which will feature interdisciplinary institutes and an accelerator to develop technology and policy to address the climate crisis.
Stanford University is a good illustration of academia’s complex ties to both the past and future of energy — and the role of fossil fuel money in academic inquiry.
As laid out in the New Republic by a then-graduate student at Stanford, the university’s now-defunct Global Climate & Energy Project, which at one time was the largest energy and climate research center on campus, was co-founded by ExxonMobil and relied on fossil fuel funding, while the university’s Energy Modeling Forum counts the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP among its backers.
Nor is the new school wholly free of such ties, if only in a symbolic sense. Its inaugural head, Arun Majumdar, currently holds a chair at Stanford named for a man, Jay Precourt, who made his fortune in the oil and gas industry.
At the same time, Stanford has served as the birthplace for many of the companies (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook) and ideas that have generated the incredible tech wealth that is now flowing back into climate philanthropy. It is also generating a stream of startups working on creating a cleaner, greener future.
The university has also committed to transitioning the university’s operations and endowment to “at least net-zero” emissions by 2050, though it is also facing a legal challenge to its refusal to divest from fossil fuels.
Everyone needs money, not just elite institutions
Inside Philanthropy has long decried the tendency of the richest universities to receive the richest gifts. That holds true here, and should be considered within the context of the climate emergency.
Climate change demands a global transformation on a scale never before seen. There are serious technical problems — such as making emissions-free steel and concrete, or simply tracking current emissions — that demand creative minds and cutting-edge science. Universities like Stanford will need resources to work on this challenge.
On that basis, this gift should be celebrated. What’s troubling, though, is that the new dollars gushing into climate philanthropy from Doerr and others are overwhelmingly rewarding the Stanfords of the world. Elite universities and major green groups have key roles to play in this unprecedented transition. But they are not sufficient.
Such places are not the only homes of innovation. Solutions can also emerge from front-line and Indigenous communities. Research has finally caught up with the reality that Indigenous people are integral to effective conservation. The Green New Deal exploded into public consciousness, thanks to a small group of outsider youth activists. As study after study has found, a broad, powerful, intersectional and multiracial climate movement is imperative to galvanizing support for broad-based change.
We’ve been down this road before. The first wave of climate philanthropy in 2008 predominantly backed technical solutions and top-down policy approaches. It didn’t end well. International and domestic efforts fell short. And today, the U.S. still cannot get a climate package through Congress, thanks to unified opposition from Republicans.
A few new billionaire climate philanthropists seem to have taken note of that history. Jeff Bezos has sent sizable portions of his domestic grants to climate justice groups. MacKenzie Scott recently made a groundbreaking round of awards to international regrantors supporting front-line groups around the globe. The Sobrato family and Lukas Walton both dedicated some portion of their new climate portfolios to such efforts.
And the veterans of that first push have overhauled their strategy. The nation’s largest institutional climate funders are sending more of their dollars to groups led by people of color focused on community-centered climate justice. They are backing participatory environmental grantmaking projects like Mosaic and pledging to give 30% or more of their climate grants to such groups, or at least to be transparent about such funding. In some cases, such support is only a sliver of their grantmaking, but the mix has shifted.
What will the Doerrs do next?
In November 2020, the first leaked details emerged about where the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund would send its checks. That initial list showed the biggest gifts going to the usual suspects: a handful of massive green nonprofits, mostly white-led, that have long received the lion’s share of environmental funding.
But when the full details emerged, the awards included some historic sums for U.S.-based climate justice intermediaries. The bulk still went to typical destinations, but the additional grants were a transformational moment for their recipients and a first step toward balancing the movement.
Perhaps the Doerrs could surprise us in a similar way?
More commitments of some kind do seem likely. The couple signed the Giving Pledge back in 2010, though they have no public letter spelling out their intentions. With humanity’s future on the line, could we see another billion — or maybe more — materialize to fill in the gaps this gargantuan Stanford gift left open?