Alliance for Climate Education

ACE has a politically oriented sister-group, Climate Emergency Advocates. ³

Education and Outreach

Our Climate Our Future

The Alliance for Climate Education runs Our Climate Our Future, an online environmental activism education website that includes dozens of videos and in-classroom teaching tools. In 2022, Our Climate Our Future claimed 4.5 million views at a cost of $0.03 per view. ^{4 2}

ACE Assembly

ACE provides education assemblies to schools on climate change and environmentalist activism. ⁵

Creator Collective

Creator Collective is a program for countering supposed “climate disinformation” by paying social-media content creators to make environmental activist content. ⁶

Youth Action Network

ACE’s Youth Action Network consists of young people who receive news and alerts from ACE. The Youth Action Network has as many as 1.1 million members. ^{5 7}

Action Team Network

The Action Team Network is ACE’s youth climate activism network, consisting of dozens of Action Teams across the United States. ⁸

Voter Registration

During the 2022 election cycle, the Alliance for Climate Education launched a youth voter outreach and registration campaign that reached 36 million individuals and registered 100,000. ²

Early in its operations, ACE received $250,000 from Pepsi for a partnered get-out-the-vote campaign. ⁹

Campaigns

Letter-Writing and Petition Campaigns

The Alliance for Climate Education claims to have interacted with over 100 million individuals through its campaigns. ¹⁰ As of 2023, ACE was running a letter-writing campaign to ask President Joe Biden (D) to block the reopening of Freeport LNG, a major natural gas refinery in Texas, which shut down after an explosion in June 2022. ¹¹

At that time, ACE was also running an email campaign demanding that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) respond to the February 2023 Norfolk chemical train derailment with “unbiased medical testing” and better medical monitoring. ¹²

ACE hosted a petition demanding that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, stop hosting advertisements for “climate deniers,” including right-of-center educational-video outlet PragerU. ¹³

Advocacy Positions

ACE supports the establishment of an excise tax on plastic made from non-recycled material. ¹⁴

ACE supports state-level mandates to aim for the use of 100 percent weather-dependent energy. ¹⁵

ACE supports an end to all subsidies to fossil fuel companies. ¹⁶

Rigged

Rigged is ACE’s campaign to combat alleged disinformation produced by fossil fuel companies that are supposedly misleading the public about their intentions to embrace weather-dependent energy. According to ACE, fossil fuel companies “spend an estimated $900 million annually to sow disinformation, slow the energy transition, and perpetuate the fossil fuel status quo to protect their revenues.” ⁵

Legislative Advocacy

ACE student members have advocated before policymakers for environmentalist causes. For instance, in 2015, eight students on an ACE fellowship met with a group of Nevada Senators to discuss energy policy during an event organized by the Sierra Club. ¹⁷

Opposition to Nuclear Energy

In May of 2021, Alliance for Climate Education was one of 715 groups and businesses listed as a co-signer on a letter to the leadership of the U.S. House and Senate that referred to nuclear energy as a “dirty” form of energy production and a “significant” source of pollution. The letter asked federal lawmakers to reduce carbon emissions by creating a “renewable electricity standard” that promoted production of weather dependent power sources such as wind turbines and solar panels, but did not promote low carbon natural gas and zero carbon nuclear energy. ¹⁸

Nuclear power plants produce no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, and as of 2021 accounted for 19 percent of American electricity production—the largest source of zero carbon electricity in the United States. ¹⁹ An October 2018 proposal from The Nature Conservancy noted that zero-carbon nuclear plants produced 7.8 percent of total world energy output and recommended reducing carbon emissions by increasing nuclear capacity to 33 percent of total world energy output. ²⁰

Leadership

The Alliance for Climate Education was founded by Mike Haas, the founder and chief executive officer of Orion Energy Group, a large-scale wind-energy developer. Haas launched ACE with a $2.7 million donation and initially operated ACE in the same office building as Orion. In 2006, Haas sold Orion Energy, an entity distinct from Orion Energy Group, to BP Alternative Energy, which also shared the same office building with ACE and Orion. ^{9 21} As of August 2023, Haas remains the president and board chair of ACE. ^{22 23}

Earlier, Haas’s father, Jim Haas, served as an ACE board member. ⁹

Jim Eisen, the former vice president of policy and regulatory affairs for BP Alternative Energy, is an ACE board member. ^{9 22}

Criticism

In 2010, the left-wing Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) wrote an article criticizing the Alliance for Climate Education for being too moderate in its environmentalism. Though CMD noted that ACE “zoomed onto the scene and suddenly became a huge player in the much-overlooked field of climate education,” ACE’s response to the 2010 BP oil spill was only to “[suggest] a list of lukewarm activities young people can engage in to address their feelings of helplessness about the spill.” ⁹

CMD also criticized ACE for engaging in corporate sponsorship, even with companies that have conventional-energy assets. ⁹

CMD criticized ACE for the connections between its founder, Mike Haas, and oil giant BP, and speculated that ACE might even be funded by BP. On its website, ACE denied that it has any significant ties to BP. Former ACE executive director Pic Walker has stated that ACE has “no connections financially or otherwise with BP.” Haas has denied ever working for BP for pay. ⁹

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

The Alliance for Climate Education “views the climate crisis as a social justice crisis.” ²⁴ The organization holds “annual racial justice training for its staff and board members, as well as frequent opportunities to explore how we dismantle traits of white dominant culture.” ACE’s 2021-2024 Strategic Plan includes a commitment to “justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.” ³

The Strategic Plan also asserts, “We believe that communities most impacted by racial injustice and social inequity are also those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. We place particular focus on supporting their voices and power within the global climate movement.” ³

Partners

Alliance for Climate Education’s partner organizations include 350.org, Climate Generation, the Climate Justice Alliance, Earth Guardians, Friends of the Earth, the People’s Climate Movement, the U.S. Climate Action Network, the Youth Organizing Institute, and Wisconsin Voices. ²⁵

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lists ACE as a “Climate Change and Water Partner Organization.” ²⁶

Funding

In 2021, the Alliance for Climate Education earned $6,974,503 in revenue, ²³ up from just over $4 million in 2019 and $2.3 million in 2018. ²⁷ In ACE’s 2021-2024 Strategic Plan, the organization aimed to have a $30 million budget by 2024. ³

In 2020, ACE received a three-year grant of $1 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. ²⁸

In 2017, ACE received two grants totaling $57,500 from the Ray C. Anderson Foundation. ²⁹

In 2016, ACE received a $60,000 grant from the Sills Family Foundation. ³⁰

Also in 2016, ACE received a grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. ³¹

Since 2018, ACE has received annual grants from Del Mar Global Trust. ³²

Since 2014, ACE has received five grants totaling $70,000 from the Heising-Simons Foundation. ³³