By usual standards, a billionaire heir giving out five million pound sterling does not qualify as notable philanthropic news, particularly when private foundations are apparently footing much of the bill.
But when the founder’s family once subjugated a quarter of the earth, the rules are different. Thus Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, which he founded in 2020 and claims to seek “game-changing innovations that will help us repair our planet,” tends to get a ton of press coverage.
It helps that the prize tends to toot its horn during COP and Climate Week, like this year’s finalists’ announcement, which noted the group received 2,500 nominations this cycle for its one-million-pound prizes. There will still be only five winners. There’s not much room at the top, it seems.
Yet there are a lot of big-league philanthropies on board. Bezos Earth Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Foundation and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation are just a handful of the prize’s 19 (!) “strategic funding partners.” How many ways do they split those five checks? There’s even some incredible activists and climate icons involved, including Dame Christiana Figueres, architect of the Paris Agreement, who chairs the prize committee.
I am mystified as to everyone’s motivations. Is it for the ample publicity for the awardees? Do they think the mentorship and other help winners receive is, uh, priceless? Did the prince pigeonhole them with a pitch over canapés at Davos?
But really, are these billionaires hoping the heir to the British throne, the Princess of Wales and the kids will come to their holiday parties? Do they want to do tea at Buckingham? A knighthood? Maybe their bucket list includes dragon boating with a prince?
As a reporter, I’d normally call a few backers and ask, but there’s just too little money involved to make it worthwhile. Besides, the basic facts of this competition speak more clearly than anything anyone could say.
The prize claims that finalists “reduced, avoided or captured” 420,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions between 2020 and 2023. Big number, but that’s the equivalent of about 16 private jet flights from London to New York. Hopefully everyone flew coach to those star-studded summits!
Beyond the philanthropies, there are companies and brands that support the prize, and a few celebrities who help judge the award, but instead of boring you with a list, I’ll just say the Earthshot Prize has more named sponsors per dollar given than any other I have ever seen.
Is it just me, or is there something profoundly wrong with a prize with more billionaire backers than millions in awards? Let’s count: Aga Khan IV, Mike Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Holch Povlsen, Jack Ma, the Law Family, Marc Benioff, Rob Walton… In fact, there’s almost more centibillionaires than millions involved. Did they fund this with the spare change found between the cushions of their Learjets?
At least the group is self-aware: “Change is not yet happening fast enough or at the scale we need,” reads the Earthshot Prize website. Tell me about it.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of Earthshot is that some of its backers are among the most serious and high-spending climate donors of their class. Gates and Bloomberg, for instance, have put more money into climate over the years than just about any other living billionaires — and both say they plan to give away the rest of their fortunes. They — or at least their people — have seen this operation from the inside and came to a conclusion: It has all the funding it deserves.
This is not remotely a mark, to be clear, against the many inspiring winners and finalists, who I would name, but I wouldn’t want to tar them with guilt by association.
The whole thing feels like some kind of twisted lemonade stand. You can imagine these billionaires thinking: “Hey, it costs only a quarter and it’ll make this plucky kid feel good about themselves.”
There is some good that could come from this: As prize philanthropy’s defenders are often quick to point out, the thousands of nominees who do not win might get grants from someone else. But wait: Such ancillary funding has totalled just 75 million pounds over four years — and that’s according to Earthshot’s own press release. Again, that might sound like a lot. But MacKenzie Scott’s first open call yielded $640 million to 361 recipients. The Audacious Project gives out $1 billion a year. Heck, Rihanna gave nearly three times more to climate groups in 2022 than Earthshot’s total annual prize pool. And she did it on her own.
The Earthshot Prize’s Forbes list lineup of backers should do the decent thing and make the prize pool match the attention it gets — not to mention its own lofty rhetoric. “This is the decade we make a difference.” Nope, not at this rate. Adding a couple zeroes to the total would be a start.
The competition claims to be “inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’ challenge in 1962 to land a man on the moon within a decade.” If that’s true, these men are definitely not funding it like they mean it. The moonshot program cost $260 billion over 12 years in today’s dollars. That would be $22 billion a year — and they could easily afford that.
Then again, maybe they are on it? “We are optimists,” the website reads. “We see genuine pathways to an era of regeneration and abundance.” Yes, there is a way. The first step is opening those fat wallets, boys.
Until they get serious, everyone should call this prize what it really is: a publicity campaign. In short: greenwashing.
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