Last week in Deep Dive, we looked at research on the role foundations do (or, perhaps more accurately, do not) play in democratization around the world. This week, we’ll look at an issue area where the philanthropic arms of the worlds’ super rich claim to have a greater impact: climate change.

In some ways, climate is a natural area for foundations to work in. For one thing, the uber rich are outrageously more responsible for climate change than the average human. Even aside from the carbon footprint of private jets, vanity space programs, and other trappings of supervillainy, the fact remains that even the most low key billionaire burned a lot of carbon to get where they are. Capitalism has not yet produced its first green billionaire, and maybe it never will. If foundations are meant to turn the assets of the super rich into good for the world, climate work offers an opportunity to mitigate some of the harms that generated those assets.

For another, it is largely the interests of the super rich that will be affected by climate mitigation efforts. With their funders’ skin in the game, foundations have an extra incentive to insert themselves into international climate action. It’s that impulse that political scientist Edouard Morena wrote about in a recent article in the journal International Politics. Morena dug into the archives to track how foundations involved themselves in international climate policy and what kinds of reforms they favored.

He found that foundations in the US (where they play an outsized role in policymaking compared to the role of foundations in other democracies) played two key roles in bringing international climate action to the point it is at today. The first, arguably positive, is that foundations worked diligently to bring the US into dialogue with the rest of the world about climate and to keep it at the table. The US — the largest historical carbon emitter in the world and still a massive contributor to fossil fuel output — has long been reluctant to consider the kinds of reforms that are necessary to avert ecological catastrophe. Dating back to the 1980s, longstanding US foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation funded efforts that created key climate organizations like the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat (UNFCCC). The Rockefeller Brothers Fund acted as behind-the-scenes dealmakers to protect the IPCC and UNFCCC from fatal interference from US government figures that had an interest in climate denial.

In the late 1990s, however, the structure of US philanthropy in the climate space began to change. The rise of Silicon Valley and the gobs of cash that came with it brought new players to the table. The Gates’ and Moores were no more eager to pay taxes than the Rockefellers or Fords had been, so a new generation of foundations was born. These new foundations, however, had a different political bent than their predecessors. Still interested in climate issues, they wanted to pursue action on climate through programming that emphasized, rather than limited, capitalist approaches. The “greed is good” method of climate mitigation sought to find technological and market solutions to emissions issues, hoping that the prospect of getting rich on green energy would drive transformational innovation. These approaches were hugely influential — by 2012, the five foundations that most backed these approaches accounted for $350 million of the $450 million being spent annually on climate mitigation philanthropy.

The advocates of this new approach worked diligently to freeze out activists who argued for more drastic, government imposed curbs on carbon emissions. A 2015 publication by a coalition of “greed is good” advocates lumped together climate deniers and “climate idealists… frustrated with the progress made to date… in light of the necessary emissions reductions required” as equally dangerous to the movement to limit climate change. Their spending power and their targeting of more progressive voices has, Moreno found, served to keep the interest of the US (and, by extension, its billionaires) front and center in the climate debate. Market-based approaches to climate mitigation demand much less change to the US economic structure than the top-down approaches advocated by progressives, and there is little to suggest that they will yield the same emissions reductions that more drastic reforms could produce. As people in the US and around the world become more concerned about climate change, and appetite for drastic change increases among the average person, the role of foundations involved in climate advocacy in protecting the interests of billionaire funders should not be overlooked.

Jordan Cohen, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Valeriano analyzed the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which was signed into law in late December. The act highlights the disconnect between US security commitments and its defense budget. After pulling out of Afghanistan, the US has no major ground war commitments for the first time in decades and the Overseas Contingency Operations account that paid for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is no more. Yet, overall defense spending is still increasing in 2022, with no end in sight. With COVID-19 and climate change as much clearer threats to US security than any conventional military challenge, Cohen, Gomez, and Valeriano bemoaned US policymakers’ continued preference for military spending as a substitute for a reasonable security policy.

Shirin Jaafari chronicled efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 in Syria. The World Health Organization says that 3,000 people in Syria have died from the virus, but that number likely significantly underestimates the true toll. Idlib province, in the northwest of the country, is still suffering from a third wave of the virus that has stretched already meager medical facilities to the limit. The medical system in Idlib has been severely disrupted by the civil war, and many people in the province live in closely packed refugee camps where they have little opportunity to isolate. Poverty brought on by the war has also left people without the funds to purchase masks and other protective equipment in necessary quantities. Most challenging of all, less than 5% of Syrians are vaccinated, due to both a lack of resources and a well-earned distrust of the public health system.

Mason Richey looked back on 2021, a year that included both the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. The former anniversary marks the beginning of a two-decade disaster of military interventions abroad that caused massive death and destruction but did little to protect people in the US. The latter marks the culmination of a superpower decline that featured similar failures of military adventurism. To avoid the Soviet Union’s fate, Richey recommended that the US focus its resources on domestic renewal rather than prioritizing more international competition with China or any other rival

One German senior citizen lives out the fantasy of anyone who has ever interacted with Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Twitter.

Presumably, Disney will jealously guard the beshirted Pooh copyright as long as Xi Jingping remains in power.

This really gets at the essence of “tacticool” — dressing like you’re down to one life left when you’ve still got all nine.

The “Arf” of Not Being Governed.

In a burger democracy, military recruitment to defend the fryers would be much simpler.

On the day of his sentencing, he stood in the courtroom and sang “if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done! Ugh!”