{"id":347,"date":"2026-05-31T18:41:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T18:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=347"},"modified":"2026-05-31T18:41:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T18:41:20","slug":"i-asked-a-mining-billionaire-about-his-environmental-philanthropy-it-didnt-go-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=347","title":{"rendered":"I Asked a Mining Billionaire About His Environmental Philanthropy. It Didn\u2019t Go Well."},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story was originally published by\u00a0<\/em>Vox\u00a0and\u00a0is reproduced here as part of the\u00a0<\/em>Climate Desk\u00a0collaboration.<\/em><\/p>

Read more Fortress Europe: The Fight for Refugees in Greece<\/a><\/p>\n

Earlier this year,<\/span> a billionaire investor and philanthropist named Tom Kaplan\u00a0auctioned\u00a0off a small Rembrandt drawing of a lion at Sotheby\u2019s in New York City. It sold for nearly $18 million. A press release prior to the auction noted that Kaplan would donate the proceeds of the sale to an environmental organization that he co-founded,\u00a0called Panthera, which conserves wild cats like lions and jaguars.<\/p>\n

At face value, Kaplan\u2019s gift is extraordinarily generous. Kaplan, owner of the world\u2019s\u00a0largest private collection of Rembrandts, is redeploying wealth that could have stayed locked up in a private collection or bank account to support the conservation of threatened felines and their habitats across the globe\u2014all at a time when environmental causes are facing a\u00a0massive funding shortfall. This seemed like a feel-good story all around. And that\u2019s how it was pitched to me by a PR agency.<\/p>\n

My colleague Sara Herschander and I went to the auction in early February, and I spoke one-on-one with Kaplan the following week. I was expecting a fairly straightforward conversation about philanthropy and what he sees as the responsibility of billionaires, told through the lens of his recent gift. But instead, our chat exposed a more complicated and sometimes troubling side of big-money environmental giving.<\/p>\n

Kaplan\u00a0became a billionaire\u00a0through exploring for, mining, and investing in natural resources, including silver, gold, and natural gas. He remains active in metals mining to this day. Kaplan is the founder and chair of The Electrum Group, an investment firm focused on mining precious metals, and the chair of the gold mining company NovaGold Resources, which is developing a mine in Alaska that it expects to\u00a0be the largest single gold mine\u00a0in the US.<\/p>\n

That work sits awkwardly next to what Kaplan told me is his primary passion: wildlife conservation, and in particular, the big cats that Panthera works to protect. Mining is, by any measure, an unusually destructive industry\u00a0for the environment and for wildlife. So I asked Kaplan: Does he see, in any way, his environmental philanthropy as a counterweight to the impact of his industry?<\/p>\n

It seemed an obvious question to me, but not to Kaplan. \u201cYou know, people don\u2019t ask me these questions,\u201d he told me over Zoom from a car. \u201cFirst of all, I\u2019m not going to spend time on educating you about why mining has a very, very tiny footprint when you compare it to agriculture and climate change. Everyone knows that if it\u2019s a choice between my business and Panthera, I\u2019m always choosing Panthera. With all due respect, I\u2019m busy, so do you have anything [else] that you\u2019d like to discuss?\u201dI pressed further, explaining that\u00a0the public often sees\u00a0a tension between mining and conserving wildlife. \u201cYou\u2019re wrong,\u201d Kaplan told Vox. \u201cPlease don\u2019t make things up. When you say this is the public tension, with all due respect, it doesn\u2019t exist. You\u2019re making it up. It\u2019s a very hack journalist thing to say, \u2018How do you answer, you know, the criticism of X, Y, and Z.\u2019 I\u2019ve never faced it, ever, nor should I have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaplan went on to say that mining has no detrimental impact on wild cats\u2014a claim disputed by four mining experts we later interviewed. Mining metals\u00a0can destroy habitat,\u00a0leach chemicals into the environment, and\u00a0accelerate other threats, such as deforestation, that in turn impact wild animals, including big cats. Panthera itself, the group Kaplan cofounded, lists mining as a threat to at least two wild feline species: the\u00a0flat-headed cat\u00a0and the\u00a0Andean cat. Meanwhile, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the global authority on endangered species, lists \u201cmining and quarrying\u201d as a threat to 19 cat species including jaguars, Andean cats, and tigers.<\/p>\n

After I pressed Kaplan about the impact of his mining work, he said we could talk more about it another time. But when I reached out a week later to set something up, he declined. Vox shared a detailed list of our reporting with Kaplan before publishing this, and he declined to comment further.<\/p>\n

The point is not that Kaplan\u2019s particular mines are uniquely harmful within the broader extractive industry. They\u2019re not\u2014Kaplan appears to now operate primarily in North America, which means his mines are under a comparatively strict environmental regulatory regime. But there is no denying the fact that mining of any kind at scale has real, documented environmental impacts. (And for metals that are key to renewable energy technologies, those costs may be well worth paying.)<\/p>\n

The point is that a man who has spent decades profiting from an industry that experts say harms wild animals\u2014and who has also spent decades now giving tens of millions of dollars to protect them\u2014doesn\u2019t see any connection between the two.<\/p>\n

And he is not alone.<\/p>\n

What our conversation highlighted is a bigger problem with environmental philanthropy. For every dollar spent to protect nature, the UN\u00a0recently reported, more than $30 goes toward destroying it, largely from private industries like energy, agriculture, and mining. The giving, as generous as it sometimes seems, isn\u2019t close to enough on its own. And the people writing the checks are often the same people making business decisions across industries that cause environmental harm in the first place\u2014whether they acknowledge that fact or not.Kaplan, of course,<\/span> is not the only billionaire in this category.<\/p>\n

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is perhaps the most well-known example. He\u2019s committed $10 billion to fighting climate change and protecting nature through his Bezos Earth Fund, a foundation. (His net worth, as of Thursday, was about $280 billion.) At the same time, his company produces an extraordinary amount of\u00a0carbon\u00a0and\u00a0plastic\u00a0pollution\u2014which is fueling some of the same problems Earth Fund seeks to fix.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the billionaire owners of MSC, the world\u2019s largest shipping company,\u00a0use philanthropy to help restore coral reefs. And yet MSC\u00a0produces\u00a0more carbon emissions each year than a small European country, and carbon emissions are a leading threat to reefs globally.<\/p>\n

Kjell Inge R\u00f8kke, the billionaire chair behind Aker ASA, an investment firm focused in part on oil and gas exploration,\u00a0has donated some of his wealth\u00a0to\u00a0clean the ocean of plastic. Plastic is, of course, made from oil.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not exactly surprising that these sorts of big-money philanthropists might insulate themselves from uncomfortable contradictions, whether they do so purposefully or not, said Stephen Prince, a multimillionaire who made his fortune from a gift-card printing company. As the wealthy get wealthier, he told Vox<\/em>, they become \u201cincreasingly enshrouded in a bubble of protection that allows them to ignore reality.\u201d Prince, who\u2019s vice-chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy people calling for higher taxes on themselves,\u00a0ditched his private\u00a0jet in 2023 because of its enormous environmental footprint.<\/p>\n

A number of philanthropy experts we spoke to echoed this view\u2014that philanthropists tend to avoid addressing the tensions between their source of wealth and their charitable giving. \u201cWhat you\u2019re describing is very, very common,\u201d said Glen Galaich, author of the recent book\u00a0Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short,<\/em>\u00a0and CEO of the Stupski Foundation. (The foundation is rooted in the wealth of Larry Stupski, the former president and chief operating officer of Charles Schwab Corp.)<\/p>\n

But among the financial elite, ignoring reality has far-reaching consequences. When billionaires fail to reckon with this contradiction\u2014between their source of wealth and the target of their donations\u2014they can indulge in a kind of feel-good eco-savior complex while attention is diverted from the much bigger environmental problems that they perpetuate.<\/p>\n

Truly fixing those problems, such as rising temperatures and rates of extinction, requires enormous reforms in industries like agriculture, energy, and mining. It\u2019s hard to see that happening if industry leaders who care about nature don\u2019t acknowledge their own culpability, no matter how much money they donate to charity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe philanthropy world is quite keen to put so much weight on what they\u2019re giving, but they minimize what they\u2019re taking,\u201d said Jessie Bluedorn, a young philanthropist and environmental organizer, referring to the environmental exploits of philanthropists.<\/p>\n

Rich by inheritance from a family fortune made largely in the HVAC industry, Bluedorn funds climate justice organizations through her foundation, the\u00a0Carmack Collective. She sees her philanthropy as a form of wealth redistribution. \u201cPeople need to be a bit more honest about the balance sheet of their contribution to our society,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

It should be said that billionaires don\u2019t\u00a0have to\u00a0<\/em>donate anything. A mining mogul could just mine and mine and not support philanthropic causes, whether environmental or not. Many of them do. From one perspective\u2014long the dominant one in philanthropy\u2014choosing to support a cause like wildlife conservation instead of making oneself that much richer is generous. Donating the proceeds from a beloved $18 million drawing is generous.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also true that choosing to be a philanthropist can open up a billionaire to criticism that their less generous peers don\u2019t face. There are dozens of billionaires on the Forbes<\/em> Billionaires List whom you\u2019ve probably never heard of, perhaps because they\u2019re not giving money away publicly. And sure, billionaires may donate, in part, because they\u2019re chasing positive attention. But those who privately hoard wealth do less good in the world while more easily avoiding accusations of hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

Put another way, \u201cthe folks who are super interested in destroying everything aren\u2019t philanthropists,\u201d said Tamara Toles O\u2019Laughlin, CEO of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. EGA is a network of over 200 private foundations, most of which are funded by wealthy families, that support environmental causes.<\/p>

Read more Greg Bovino Keeps Posting to Get His Job Back. No One Is Listening.<\/a><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, many philanthropists are \u201cbreaking their backs to figure out how they can change their relationship to the money they got and what that money is going to do,\u201d O\u2019Laughlin said.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s another important point: Environmental groups could really use the cash. In 2023,\u00a0less than 2 percent\u00a0of global philanthropy\u2014a high-end estimate of $15.8 billion\u2014went toward mitigating climate change, according to the ClimateWorks Foundation. That\u2019s compared to the\u00a0$78 billion\u00a0that US higher education reeled in last year. At the same time, the Trump administration has\u00a0yanked\u00a0loads of federal\u00a0funds\u00a0for conservation and climate groups. (Government grants, however, typically make up a smaller share of an environmental nonprofit\u2019s budget, relative to philanthropy.)<\/p>\n

Senowa Mize-Fox, a climate justice organizer at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, is a sharp critic of the kind of donors who give to climate-related causes without addressing their own, sometimes troubling environmental records. \u201cThese billionaires are so self-absorbed, and so far removed from the reality of the majority of people on this planet, that they think that\u2026giving that money away is going to solve everything,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not. It will not. It never will.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even Mize-Fox has at times opted to accept money from imperfect donors. In a previous job, the organizations she worked with got a big grant opportunity from Bezos Earth Fund.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is all blood money, and the faster that we can divest from the billionaires and reinvest that money into frontline solutions is what matters to me,\u201d Mize-Fox said, noting that most wealth is tied to some kind of exploitation, whether it was last year or 100 years ago.<\/p>\n

So then, does it really matter where the money came from if it\u2019s put to good use?<\/p>\n

A new generation of climate advocates\u2014and some philanthropists themselves\u2014are starting to think so.<\/p>\n

In the last decade<\/span> or so, some billionaire donors and their foundations have finally begun to grapple more explicitly with the source of their wealth and the harm it\u2019s caused, often with the help of donor advocacy groups like Patriotic Millionaires and\u00a0Resource Generation.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the clearest example is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It\u2019s one of several foundations started by heirs to John D. Rockefeller\u2019s gigantic Standard Oil fortune. In 2014, the fund\u00a0pledged to divest\u00a0its endowment from fossil fuels like coal and tar sands. Its aim was to align its investment practices with the climate justice efforts it has supported since the 1990s.<\/p>\n

In 2020, the much larger Rockefeller Foundation\u00a0similarly decided\u00a0to untangle its endowment from fossil fuels. It was a remarkable statement from an organization founded from a $100 million cut\u2014worth about $3.3 billion in today\u2019s dollars\u2014of one of history\u2019s largest oil fortunes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe weight of this legacy is not lost on us,\u201d Chan Lai, the Rockefeller Foundation\u2019s chief investment officer, told Vox<\/em> in a statement. The divestment was \u201cin part a form of accountability,\u201d he said, for the source of the Rockefellers\u2019 fortune.<\/p>\n

A number of other major foundations have similarly decided to divest from fossil fuels,\u00a0spurred\u00a0in part by the murder of George Floyd. Protests in 2020 pushed grantmakers to more\u00a0publicly acknowledge the damaging roots\u00a0of their riches, fund more\u00a0climate justice\u00a0work led by people of color, and align their endowments\u2014the investment funds they use to grow their wealth\u2014with their charitable missions.<\/p>\n

Some living billionaires have made similar moves. California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer has\u00a0spoken publicly\u00a0about his pivot from investing in fossil fuels to funding climate solutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went from being somebody who was blithely investing in everything in the economy to, \u2018No, no, no, no, that\u2019s not okay,\u2019\u201d he\u00a0said\u00a0in a recent interview on the podcast\u00a0Heated<\/em>. \u201cAnd I need to leave billions of dollars on the table to make sure that I\u2019m actually doing the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than a decade ago, Nicky Oppenheimer, Africa\u2019s\u00a0fourth-richest person\u00a0and heir to the massive De Beers diamond fortune, sold his family\u2019s\u00a0$5.1 billion stake. Since then, he\u2019s invested heavily in\u00a0wildlife conservation.<\/p>\n

Given the sheer scale<\/span> of environmental problems\u2014and the\u00a0gaping hole in funding\u00a0to fix them\u2014it is, perhaps, a terrible idea to criticize any environmental philanthropist. Vox<\/em>, itself, relies on grant funding for some of our environmental coverage, including this very piece. Implying that a philanthropist could do more for the planet when they\u2019re already donating a lot is, as Kaplan put it in our call, \u201can unusual take on things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet that response, again, belies a more fundamental issue. The economic system we live in today, which billionaires help perpetuate, is not working. For the roughly $220 billion spent to save nature in 2023,\u00a0more than $7\u00a0trillion<\/em>\u00a0went to activities that destroy it, such as subsidies for fossil fuels, according to a recent UN report.<\/p>\n

Environmental philanthropy comes nowhere close to balancing the scales\u2014especially if it does nothing to shrink the larger half of that equation. To borrow an analogy from groups fighting plastic waste, it\u2019s like trying to mop up from an overflowing bathtub without turning off the faucet.<\/p>\n

To truly solve the world\u2019s big environmental problems, harmful industries need to change the way they do business. They need to redirect financial flows that dwarf philanthropy toward less harmful activities\u2014from mining coal to building solar panels, from cutting trees for cattle to investing in plant-based protein.<\/p>\n

\u201cFoundations in the US give away a grand total of\u00a0$100 billion\u00a0a year,\u201d Galaich, the Stupski Foundation executive director, told Vox<\/em>. \u201c[But we] are talking about multitrillion-dollar problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just ask Bezos, who told CNBC\u00a0in an interview this month: \u201cIf I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving.\u201d Bezos was referring to the value he sees generated by companies like Amazon and his space tech company Blue Origin, which may be debatable, but the point is that the scale of for-profit industry is so great that what is done there matters more than what can be done in philanthropy.<\/p>\n

Maybe the companies that Kaplan has invested in are leading the way in sustainability\u2014in making the metal mining industry less harmful to ecosystems and the cats that he adores. The gold company he chairs has a\u00a0whole page\u00a0dedicated to its environmental efforts. That\u2019s a question we planned to ask him in a follow-up conversation, though answering it would have required being open to the contradictions at the heart of so much environmental philanthropy.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, it\u2019s hard to understand how an industry will stop creating environmental problems if even its leaders who are most passionate about the environment\u2014so much so that they are giving away their prized possessions for it\u2014don\u2019t first acknowledge that they exist.<\/p>

Read more Troops Must Be Fit and Tall to Attend Trump\u2019s UFC Fight<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Kaplan\u2019s attitude illustrates a common paradox in green giving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":345,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nI Asked a Mining Billionaire About His Environmental Philanthropy. It Didn\u2019t Go Well. - Moving and Mortgage Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=347\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Asked a Mining Billionaire About His Environmental Philanthropy. 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