I asked a billionaire about his environmental philanthropy. It didn’t go well.

Earlier this year, a billionaire investor and philanthropist named Tom Kaplan auctioned off a small Rembrandt drawing of a lion at Sotheby’s 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, called Panthera, which conserves wild cats like lions and jaguars.

At face value, Kaplan’s gift is extraordinarily generous. Kaplan, owner of the world’s largest 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 — all at a time when environmental causes are facing a massive funding shortfall. This seemed like a feel-good story all around. And that’s how it was pitched to me by a PR agency.

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.

Kaplan became a billionaire through 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 be the largest single gold mine in the US.

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 for 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?

It seemed an obvious question to me, but not to Kaplan. “You know, people don’t ask me these questions,” he told me over Zoom from a car. “First of all, I’m 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’s a choice between my business and Panthera, I’m always choosing Panthera. With all due respect, I’m busy, so do you have anything [else] that you’d like to discuss?”

I pressed further, explaining that the public often sees a tension between mining and conserving wildlife. “You’re wrong,” Kaplan told Vox. “Please don’t make things up. When you say this is the public tension, with all due respect, it doesn’t exist. You’re making it up. It’s a very hack journalist thing to say, ‘How do you answer, you know, the criticism of X, Y, and Z.’ I’ve never faced it, ever, nor should I have.”

Kaplan went on to say that mining has no detrimental impact on wild cats — a claim disputed by four mining experts we later interviewed. Mining metals can destroy habitat, leach chemicals into the environment, and accelerate 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 flat-headed cat and the Andean cat. Meanwhile, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the global authority on endangered species, lists “mining and quarrying” as a threat to 19 cat species including jaguars, Andean cats, and tigers.

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.

The point is not that Kaplan’s particular mines are uniquely harmful within the broader extractive industry. They’re not — Kaplan 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.)

The point is that a man who has spent decades profiting from an industry that experts say harms wild animals — and who has also spent decades now giving tens of millions of dollars to protect them — doesn’t see any connection between the two.

And he is not alone.

What our conversation highlighted is a bigger problem with environmental philanthropy. For every dollar spent to protect nature, the UN recently 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’t 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 — whether they acknowledge that fact or not.

Kaplan, of course, is not the only billionaire in this category.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is, perhaps, the most well-known example. He’s committed $10 billion to fighting climate change and protecting nature through his Bezos Earth Fund, a foundation. (His net worth, as of this writing, is about $275 billion.) At the same time, his company produces an extraordinary amount of carbon and plastic pollution — which is fueling some of the same problems Earth Fund seeks to fix.

Meanwhile, the billionaire owners of MSC, the world’s largest shipping company, use philanthropy to help restore coral reefs. And yet MSC produces more carbon emissions each year than a small European country, and carbon emissions are a leading threat to reefs globally.

It’s 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, they become “increasingly enshrouded in a bubble of protection that allows them to ignore reality.” Prince, who’s vice-chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy people calling for higher taxes on themselves, ditched his private jet in 2023 because of its enormous environmental footprint.

A number of philanthropy experts we spoke to echoed this view — that philanthropists tend to avoid addressing the tensions between their source of wealth and their charitable giving. “What you’re describing is very, very common,” said Glen Galaich, author of the recent book Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short, and executive director 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.)

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

Truly fixing those problems, such as rising temperatures and rates of extinction, requires enormous reforms in industries like agriculture, energy, and mining. It’s hard to see that happening if industry leaders who care about nature don’t acknowledge their own culpability, no matter how much money they donate to charity.

“The philanthropy world is quite keen to put so much weight on what they’re giving, but they minimize what they’re taking,” said Jessie Bluedorn, a young philanthropist and environmental organizer, referring to the environmental exploits of philanthropists.

Rich by inheritance from a family fortune made largely in the HVAC industry, Bluedorn funds climate justice organizations through her foundation, the Carmack Collective. She sees her philanthropy as a form of wealth redistribution. “People need to be a bit more honest about the balance sheet of their contribution to our society,” she said.

It should be said that billionaires don’t have to 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 — long the dominant one in philanthropy — choosing 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.

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

Put another way, “the folks who are super interested in destroying everything aren’t philanthropists,” said Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, 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.

Meanwhile, many philanthropists are “breaking their backs to figure out how they can change their relationship to the money they got and what that money is going to do,” O’Laughlin said.

And there’s another important point: Environmental groups could really use the cash. In 2023, less than 2 percent of global philanthropy — a high-end estimate of $15.8 billion — went toward mitigating climate change, according to the ClimateWorks Foundation. That’s compared to the $78 billion that US higher education reeled in last year. At the same time, the Trump administration has yanked loads of federal funds for conservation and climate groups. (Government grants, however, typically make up a smaller share of an environmental nonprofit’s budget, relative to philanthropy.)

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. “These billionaires are so self-absorbed, and so far removed from the reality of the majority of people on this planet, that they think that…giving that money away is going to solve everything,” she said. “It’s not. It will not. It never will.”

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.

“It 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,” Mize-Fox said, noting that most wealth is tied to some kind of exploitation, whether it was last year or 100 years ago.

So then, does it really matter where the money came from if it’s put to good use?

A new generation of climate advocates — and some philanthropists themselves — are starting to think so.

In the last decade 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’s caused, often with the help of donor advocacy groups like Patriotic Millionaires and Resource Generation.

Perhaps the clearest example is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It’s one of several foundations started by heirs to John D. Rockefeller’s gigantic Standard Oil fortune. In 2014, the fund pledged to divest its 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.

In 2020, the much larger Rockefeller Foundation similarly decided to untangle its endowment from fossil fuels. It was a remarkable statement from an organization founded from a $100 million cut — worth about $3.3 billion in today’s dollars — of one of history’s largest oil fortunes.

“The weight of this legacy is not lost on us,” Chan Lai, the Rockefeller Foundation’s chief investment officer, told Vox in a statement. The divestment was “in part a form of accountability,” he said, for the source of the Rockefellers’ fortune.

A number of other major foundations have similarly decided to divest from fossil fuels, spurred in part by the murder of George Floyd. Protests in 2020 pushed grantmakers to more publicly acknowledge the damaging roots of their riches, fund more climate justice work led by people of color, and align their endowments — the investment funds they use to grow their wealth — with their charitable missions.

Some living billionaires have made similar moves. California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer has spoken publicly about his pivot from investing in fossil fuels to funding climate solutions.

“I went from being somebody who was blithely investing in everything in the economy to, ‘No, no, no, no, that’s not okay,’” he said in a recent interview on the podcast Heated. “And I need to leave billions of dollars on the table to make sure that I’m actually doing the right thing.”

Given the sheer scale of environmental problems — and the gaping hole in funding to fix them — it is, perhaps, a terrible idea to criticize any environmental philanthropist. Vox, 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’re already donating a lot is, as Kaplan put it in our call, “an unusual take on things.”

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, more than $7 trillion went to activities that destroy it, such as subsidies for fossil fuels, according to a recent UN report.

Environmental philanthropy comes nowhere close to balancing the scales — especially if it does nothing to shrink the larger half of that equation. To borrow an analogy from groups fighting plastic waste, it’s like trying to mop up from an overflowing bathtub without turning off the faucet.

To truly solve the world’s 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 — from mining coal to building solar panels, from cutting trees for cattle to investing in plant-based protein.

“Foundations in the US give away a grand total of $100 billion a year,” Galaich, the Stupski Foundation executive director, told Vox. “[But we] are talking about multitrillion-dollar problems.”

Just ask Bezos, who told CNBC in an interview this month: “If 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.” 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.

Maybe the companies that Kaplan has invested in are leading the way in sustainability — in making the metal mining industry less harmful to ecosystems and the cats that he adores. The gold company he chairs has a whole page dedicated to its environmental efforts. That’s 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.

Ultimately, it’s hard to understand how an industry will stop creating environmental problems if even its leaders who are most passionate about the environment — so much so that they are giving away their prized possessions for it — don’t first acknowledge that they exist.