How to Truly Make a Difference With Your Money This Holiday Season

“Giving Tuesday”—the nonprofit answer to Black Friday and Cyber Monday—is supposed to be a reprieve from the crass commercialization of this holiday period, or at least a way to make yourself feel better after spending hundreds or more on Wirecutter-approved deals. But I find it exhausting. Thanksgiving now heralds a multiweek stretch of increasingly frenetic marketing emails from people trying to destroy your budget, and “Giving Tuesday” just means that nonprofits join the fray, each competing against the next to offer the greatest sense of urgency and bang for buck in a world where there are too many crises and needs to count.

Climate and environment groups participate perforce. (How can they not?) “YOUR GIVING TUESDAY GIFT CAN SAVE OUR PLANET,” Al Gore–founded advocacy group Climate Reality Project told its supporters, adding that “ALL GIFTS WILL BE MATCHED.” The Sierra Club replaced its home page with a dedicated Giving Tuesday landing page, announcing: “If we reach our 1,000 donor goal by midnight, we’ll unlock a special $25,000 match for the environment.” The pressure, the pressure!

How do you choose where to give money and in what amounts without going broke? Wearyingly, there are now guides for that, not unlike Wirecutter’s annual “Best Black Friday Deals” tracker. Many of them rely on data and recommendations from nonprofits that now exist to help people navigate nonprofits. Various organizations operating more or less explicitly according to the principles of so-called “effective altruism” (championed by such techbro luminaries as the now-incarcerated Sam Bankman-Fried) promise a “systematic approach to try and determine where the high leverage points are in climate philanthropy—and by high-leverage, I’m thinking most greenhouse gas reductions per dollar,” in the words of Giving Green director Daniel Stein, speaking with Heatmap last week.

Experts could probably haggle over the methodology of such enterprises for years. Rather than get into the finer details of this philosophical debate or a practical one about the rankings that result, I want to point out another option for optimizing your “bang for buck” for the many people of limited means but concerned hearts. It lies in what you don’t give your money to: If you are the sort of person inclined to donate online on Giving Tuesday, you are probably somebody with a bank. And by switching away from a bank that finances fossil fuels, or by simply switching from one of the bigger offenders to a local credit union, you have the ability to extend your “impact” even if you don’t have the means to send large sums to exhaustively researched “evidence-backed” charities.

The Banking On Climate Chaos Report has found that JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup are among the top financers of fossil fuels worldwide. Bank of America recently even walked back its pledge to stop financing new coal projects. Despite the right-wing fantasy that the finance industry is engaged in a discriminatory “conspiracy” against fossil fuels, most financial firms continue to direct a lot of money toward environmentally catastrophic enterprises.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to begin the process of switching banks; like most people with organizational difficulties, I have developed a well-founded fear of fouling up the fine print or forgetting to change an autopay setting and somehow destroying my life through sheer logistical mismanagement. Pearl Marvell’s piece for Yale Climate Connections last February about how she herself made the switch—along with useful information from experts, tools for determining your bank’s climate-friendliness, and databases of banks to choose from according to your criteria—is what pushed me from dithering into actually doing it.

In case it needs emphasizing, this newsletter does not constitute any kind of financial or investment advice, nor is it intended to singlehandedly address the entanglement of capital with the climate crisis by convincing a few TNR readers to exercise their consumer choice. Switching out all your finances at once can be tricky; people have limited control over employer-sponsored retirement accounts, for example. (And certainly there are banks out there charging exorbitant fees for minor infractions that you’d be wise to avoid—although luckily many databases now allow you to select for banks that don’t do that.)

But this option may be more practical for some people than trying to stretch an already stretched budget and agonizing about where to donate. If we’re really going to go about beating our chests about “optimizing” our do-gooder impulses and extracting maximum “leverage,” then removing a bank’s ability to use the money you have in your accounts year-round to help fund fossil fuel projects is probably going to outweigh donating $25 or even $100 once a year to a carefully selected green effective altruism fund.

Psychologically, switching banks wasn’t as chaotic and disruptive as I’d feared. After keeping the old one open for several extra months to ensure there weren’t any automatic bills I’d forgotten about, I’m closing it later this month. It’s nice to know that money I receive from a day job dealing with the climate crisis isn’t being used to fuel that crisis while I sleep. It doesn’t hurt that the two smaller banks my family has switched to offer better interest rates and are way easier to deal with than the endless bureaucracy of my old bank. So far it’s a lot like switching away from a gas stove—after the initial logistical inconvenience has passed, it’s just a much nicer way of living.

Good News/Bad News

Electrifying and decarbonizing require copper—but high-quality reserves are limited and the extraction process is extremely toxic and emissions-intensive. Grist has an intriguing report on new technologies being developed to make the process less environmentally destructive.

Even if you were already aware of the dangers of formaldehyde pollution—an alarming amount of it coming from basic home furnishings—this ProPublica piece on the extent of the problem, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to tackle it, is going to hit very hard.

Stat of the Week
$334 million

That’s how much money from the EPA’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program has yet to be awarded, leaving it “vulnerable to reversal efforts from Trump officials or Republican lawmakers,” Inside Climate News reports.

What I’m Reading

No, the Fight for the Climate Isn’t “Over”

Historian Kevin Young’s new piece over at Jacobin is an intriguing entry in the emerging genre offering reasons for climate followers to have a degree of hope heading into the second Trump era. Despondent leftists have a distorted view of how the first Trump presidency actually played out, Young suggests. Environmentalists secured a number of crucial victories—and understanding precisely how that happened can help activists identify the most promising paths going forward:

Despite Trump’s best efforts, some of the US climate movement’s most notable recent victories happened on his watch. More coal-fired power plant capacity was retired in the United States from 2017 to 2020 than from 2013 to 2016. That’s right: the coal industry took a bigger hit under a president who campaigned on reviving it than under a president who was supposedly waging war on it. Notice how Trump rarely mentions coal anymore?

The reason is that coal’s fate depends only marginally on national politicians. Since the early 2000s, hundreds of local environmental groups, acting largely independently of the big national organizations, have made it much harder for coal plants to be built or remain in operation. The natural gas boom has also undermined coal, but the market shift has been amplified by the movement.…

Trump suffered many quieter defeats too. His efforts to enact extra subsidies for coal and nuclear energy, to expand offshore oil drilling, to end tax credits for the wind industry, and to force banks to fund drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all were blocked.…

It’s important to understand how we played that role. It wasn’t through the unfocused outrage of occasional mass marches nor through lobbying or electing Democrats. We were most powerful when we put sustained, disruptive pressure on capitalists and state elites whose interests diverged from Trump’s.

Read Kevin Young’s full essay at Jacobin.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.