Environmental groups are cutting programs as funding shifts to climate change

A significant shift in donor contributions to nonprofits fighting climate change in recent years has left some of the nation’s largest environmental organizations facing critical shortcomings in programs addressing toxic chemicals, radioactive contamination and wildlife protection. animals.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is shuttering its nuclear mission and has fired its top attorney, Geoffrey Fettus. Mountain in Nevada.

The NRDC is not alone. The Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and the Environmental Working Group, which have spearheaded efforts to clean up wastewater, regulate pesticides and adopt stricter standards for nuclear power plants, are facing similar financial challenges.

“Most environmental programs no longer have significant toxics programs,” said Ken Cook, founder and chairman of the Environmental Working Group, which still spends nearly half its budget fighting toxins in food, personal care items, cleaning products and water.

Meanwhile, global spending to combat climate change by environmental groups and other nonprofits reached $8 billion in 2021, most of it in the United States and Canada, according to a study published in September by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy of Indiana University.

Money has flowed to groups like the ClimateWorks Foundation, which had 2021 revenues of $366 million. In its own report, ClimateWorks said last week that international foundation funding for climate work had more than tripled since 2015, although it plateaued last year. year.

“Funders who had a nuclear program or a poison program have completely abandoned those fields and gone to climate change,” said Marylia Kelley, a senior adviser and former executive director of a citizen oversight group that has long challenged Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. on radioactivity emissions and national security issues.

Leaders of a number of existing environmental groups largely agree that climate change is a top priority given the wide range of increasing global impacts. But they warn that toxins in communities across the country remain an imminent threat to human health and animal habitats. There are also concerns about the growing acceptance of nuclear energy as a ‘clean’ source of electricity.

Mr. Fettus, who declined to discuss his recent resignation, was considered a unique force in the fight to clean up nuclear waste sites in Washington, New Mexico and South Carolina, among others.

“If there is no replacement, it will be a big day for the Department of Energy,” said Tom Carpenter, former executive director of Hanford Challenge, which oversees the highly contaminated Hanford weapons site in Washington state.

The NRDC has filed lawsuits against the department for decades to force it to conduct more extensive cleanups at Hanford and other nuclear sites, and to force it to do the work faster. The federal government is attempting to renegotiate and possibly roll back some of the previously reached legal agreements just as the NRDC is leaving the field.

The environmental group, which has also filed lawsuits against other government agencies over the years over issues such as water quality, wildlife protection and climate change, has cut nearly 40 positions from its 740 employees.

It has also halted work on California’s water resources and agricultural antibiotics, a spokesman said.

Similar financial problems this year affected Defenders of Wildlife, one of the nation’s largest organizations dedicated to the protection and recovery of endangered species in North America.

That organization, founded in 1947, eliminated 22 staff positions, according to Defenders United, a union that represents employees. A spokeswoman for the organization declined to comment, but union officials said on their website that managers cited an unsustainable budget deficit when they announced 14 layoffs in a “brief, last-minute meeting with staff.”

The shift in funding to climate has been exacerbated by several other forces, including a $9 million drop in contributions from small donors, part of a decline in overall donations following the “Trump bubble” when President Donald J. Trump was in power, said Phil Radford. , strategic head of the Sierra Club and former head of Greenpeace.

Government stimulus payments during the coronavirus pandemic had also prompted some people to increase their charitable contributions, an effect that has faded in the past two years, several environmental groups said.

And there is a growing tendency among younger donors, especially those rising to control large family foundations, to view climate change as more urgent than other environmental threats, the groups said.

The Sierra Club warned last spring of a $40 million shortfall if costs were not cut. The club declined to reveal how many layoffs took place this year.

The “budget crisis” forced the club to consolidate programs and eliminate duplication, but it did not eliminate any mission, Mr. Radford said.

Meanwhile, since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Sierra Club has expanded its work on climate change, surpassing some of the club’s other work. On climate, “More and more money is becoming available,” Mr Radford said.

Within the larger community that oversees public policy, there is growing concern that priorities have become skewed.

“It’s good that we have all consolidated around the climate change crisis – but at what cost?” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, which long monitored the country’s secretive nuclear weapons complex and the toxic pollution it created.

“Toxins are a foundation of the open government movement. It all started with communities wanting to know more about toxins in their environment,” she said.

The shift in priorities is also reflected in government policy, with climate change accounting for the lion’s share of some agencies’ budget increases. The EPA’s list of seven priorities in its five-year strategic plan starts with ‘addressing the climate crisis’.

The issue of climate change has drawn support from a number of billionaires with deep pockets, including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos. There is also a growing clean energy industry, including solar, wind, battery and manufacturing companies, all advocating for climate progress, said Kathryn Phillips, former director of the Sierra Club of California.

In contrast, she said, many environmental groups have been left to their own devices against powerful chemical companies and government agencies to enforce stricter regulations on toxic exposures and better cleanups.

NRDC President Manish Bapna said the organization was not retreating from its work on toxins but was “sharpening its portfolio,” with an eye toward investing in issues where it could demonstrate significant impact, including climate change .

These problems include lead in local drinking water, tailpipe emissions in trucks and pollution from trichlorethylene and polyfluorinated compounds that are now ubiquitous in humans and animals, Mr Bapna said.

Erik Olson, an attorney for the water and toxics group, said fundraising for toxic pollution issues was difficult even before growing alarm about climate change. “It has always been a challenge to use water and toxins. It has never been a well-funded area,” he says.

In its nuclear work, the NRDC helped fund and litigate many lawsuits brought by local groups, such as Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Tri Valley CAREs in California, which oversee the Energy Department’s two nuclear weapons design laboratories.

“It is clearly a tremendous loss to have NRDC leave the field,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “It was myopic. But young people are more interested in climate change. If you really want to see climate change, just wait and see what happens after a nuclear war.”

Ed Chen, the former federal communications director for the NRDC, said the passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which provided large subsidies for electric vehicles and green energy, signaled that the federal government is dramatically stepping up its commitment to fighting climate change. was increasing. He sees the NRDC’s move as a “strategic pivot” to keep the organization in line with changing priorities.

The Biden administration has also proposed tough new regulations on vehicle and power plant emissions. But some see the big boost in federal funding as a retreat from more direct greenhouse gas regulatory systems.

“The Inflation Reduction Act is not the kind of environmental law we had in the past,” said Mr. Cook of the Environmental Working Group. “It’s just a big spending bill.”

Growing concern about climate change has sparked a slightly different debate in the environmental community: how to address the issue of nuclear power.

There is growing support among some environmental groups for commercial nuclear power plants as an alternative to fossil fuels – often accompanied by hefty donations from those concerned about climate change.

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear energy safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has warned about the safety of nuclear power and the dangers of nuclear power, said environmental groups were “under tremendous pressure to adopt nuclear power without reservation.”

Mr. Gates, the founder of Microsoft, is now chairman and largest investor in the nuclear energy company TerraPower, which was founded to create what the company calls “safe, affordable and abundant carbon-free energy.”

TerraPower’s first 345-megawatt reactor — which uses uranium fuel enriched to levels about four times that of traditional commercial reactors — is under construction in Wyoming at a cost of about $4 billion, said Jeff Navin, director of external company affairs and a former chief of staff at the Department of Energy.

In the environmental community, Mr. Lyman said, Mr. Gates’ participation in the debate was “a game changer.”

And while Mr. Lyman’s organization does not explicitly oppose nuclear energy, he says it is not essential in the fight against climate change. “It’s more complicated,” he said.