Mining billionaire praises giving—then rejects the link

mining billionaire – A conversation with Tom Kaplan, a mining investor who co-founded Panthera and auctioned off a Rembrandt drawing of a lion for nearly $18 million, exposes a sharp contradiction at the center of big-money environmental philanthropy: he denies mining’s harms to w

When Tom Kaplan auctioned off a Rembrandt drawing of a lion at Sotheby’s in New York City earlier this year. the sale was supposed to read like a victory for nature. The press release before the auction said Kaplan would donate the nearly $18 million proceeds to Panthera. the environmental organization he co-founded. which conserves wild cats such as lions and jaguars.

But when a reporter sat down with Kaplan after that moment of generosity, the conversation quickly tightened around something less comfortable than check-writing: whether the wealth behind his giving can coexist with the industry that helped produce it.

Kaplan told the reporter he wasn’t going to be pulled into the question most people immediately reach for—whether his mining experience and his wildlife conservation work are in tension. “You know, people don’t ask me these questions,” he said 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?”.

He followed that by pushing back on the premise that the public even sees a conflict. After the reporter pressed on what people often view as a tension between mining and conserving wildlife. Kaplan snapped back: “You’re wrong. ” he told the outlet. “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.”.

The friction didn’t come from a misunderstanding about the basics. 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. He is the founder and chair of The Electrum Group. an investment firm focused on mining precious metals. and he is 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.

Kaplan said mining has no detrimental impact on wild cats—a claim disputed by four mining experts interviewed later. Those experts pointed to the ways mining can destroy habitat. leach chemicals into the environment. and accelerate other threats such as deforestation. which can then impact wild animals. including big cats.

Panthera itself lists mining as a threat to at least two wild feline species: the flat-headed cat and the Andean cat. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources—listed as the IUCN—also includes “mining and quarrying” as a threat. listing it for 19 cat species. including jaguars. Andean cats. and tigers.

After the first exchange, the reporter tried to follow up a week later to talk more about mining’s impact. Kaplan declined to comment further, after the outlet shared a detailed list of reporting questions with him before publishing.

Kaplan’s refusal to connect his philanthropy to his industry isn’t a claim that the mines he runs are uniquely harmful within extractive capitalism. The reporter notes that Kaplan appears to operate primarily in North America. where his mines are under a comparatively strict environmental regulatory regime. Still, the basic fact remains: mining at scale has documented environmental impacts.

The larger problem that emerges from the conversation is not simply whether one billionaire’s mines are worse than others. It’s whether the people funding environmental work through the profits of industries that experts say harm wildlife are willing to confront the relationship at all.

That pattern shows up beyond Kaplan. Jeff Bezos. for example. is committed to $10 billion to fight climate change and protect nature through the Bezos Earth Fund; his net worth was about $280 billion as of Thursday. according to the reporting. Yet Amazon produces carbon and plastic pollution that fuels some of the same problems those environmental goals aim to address.

The billionaire owners of MSC, the world’s largest shipping company, use philanthropy to help restore coral reefs. At the same time, MSC produces more carbon emissions each year than a small European country, and carbon emissions are described in the reporting as a leading threat to reefs globally.

Kjell Inge Røkke, the billionaire chair behind Aker ASA—which focuses in part on oil and gas exploration—has donated some of his wealth to clean the ocean of plastic. The reporting adds that plastic is made from oil.

In interviews for the piece. Stephen Prince—a multimillionaire who made his fortune from a gift-card printing company—described how wealth can insulate people from the discomfort of their own contradictions. “The superwealthy are increasingly enshrouded in a bubble of protection that allows them to ignore reality. ” he said. adding that the “folks who are super interested in destroying everything aren’t philanthropists.” Prince told the reporter he ditched his private jet in 2023 because of its environmental footprint.

Philanthropy experts in the reporting echoed that avoidance is common. Glen Galaich. author of the book Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short and CEO of the Stupski Foundation—rooted in the wealth of Larry Stupski. the former president and chief operating officer of Charles Schwab Corp—said the behavior described is “very. very common.” He argued that the giving often sidesteps the tensions tied to the source of that wealth.

Jessie Bluedorn, a young philanthropist and environmental organizer, made the same critique with a sharper edge. Bluedorn—whose family fortune came largely from the HVAC industry—funds climate justice organizations through her foundation, the Carmack Collective. She said her philanthropy is a form of wealth redistribution and told the reporter: “People need to be a bit more honest about the balance sheet of their contribution to our society.”.

Senowa Mize-Fox. a climate justice organizer at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. also said these donors often believe writing checks can solve what their business decisions helped create. “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.”.

Even Mize-Fox, however, described accepting imperfect donor money when it comes with a realistic chance to fund frontline solutions. In a previous job, her organizations got a big grant opportunity from Bezos Earth Fund. “It is all blood money,” she said. “And the faster that we can divest from the billionaires and reinvest that money into frontline solutions is what matters to me. ” adding that most wealth is tied to some kind of exploitation.

So then: does it matter where the money came from if it’s used for environmental work?. Some advocates and donors have started to answer yes—not as an abstract moral argument. but as a matter of practical leverage. The reporting points to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. which pledged in 2014 to divest its endowment from fossil fuels such as coal and tar sands. aiming to align its investment practices with climate justice efforts it has supported since the 1990s. In 2020, the Rockefeller Foundation decided to untangle its endowment from fossil fuels.

Chan Lai, the Rockefeller Foundation’s chief investment officer, said in a statement that the divestment was “in part a form of accountability” for the source of the Rockefellers’ fortune.

Other major foundations, the reporting says, divested partly in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Protests pushed grantmakers to acknowledge damaging roots of their riches more publicly. fund more climate justice work led by people of color. and align endowments with charitable missions.

Some living billionaires have made similar moves. California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer has publicly talked about pivoting from investing in fossil fuels to funding climate solutions. In a recent interview on the podcast Heated. he said. “I went from being somebody who was blithely investing in everything in the economy to. ‘No. no. no. no. that’s not okay. ’” and that he needs to leave billions of dollars on the table to make sure he is “actually doing the right thing.”.

Nicky Oppenheimer, described in the reporting as Africa’s fourth-richest person and heir to the massive De Beers diamond fortune, sold his family’s $5.1 billion stake more than a decade ago. Since then, the reporting says, he has invested heavily in wildlife conservation.

Still, the scale of need dwarfs the donations on display. The reporting cites a UN finding that for every dollar spent to protect nature. more than $30 goes toward destroying it. largely from private industries like energy. agriculture. and mining. It also points to a UN estimate that in 2023. for roughly $220 billion spent to save nature. more than $7 trillion went to activities that destroy it. such as subsidies for fossil fuels.

Those numbers help explain why the reporter says the central question doesn’t disappear just because a particular gift is huge. Environmental philanthropy, in this framing, cannot balance the equation if it does not shrink the larger flow of harm.

As the piece notes, environmental groups could use more resources too. In 2023. less than 2 percent of global philanthropy—estimated at $15.8 billion high-end—went toward mitigating climate change. according to the ClimateWorks Foundation. The reporting contrasts that with $78 billion that US higher education reeled in last year. and it notes that while government grants typically make up a smaller share of an environmental nonprofit’s budget relative to philanthropy. the Trump administration has yanked loads of federal funds for conservation and climate groups.

The report ultimately returns to Kaplan because his story is built for the kind of narrative that makes people feel reassured: a mining billionaire. a treasured artwork. and a donation meant to protect threatened animals. The unresolved part is the refusal—or inability—to see his own wealth pipeline and the threats experts identify as connected to mining.

Kaplan’s Rembrandt auction may have been a dramatic public act. But in the reporting that followed, the contradiction wasn’t resolved by the gift itself. It lingered in the way he dismissed the question. challenged the framing of a “public tension. ” and insisted mining has no detrimental impact on wild cats—even as Panthera lists mining among threats to the flat-headed cat and Andean cat. and the IUCN lists mining and quarrying as a threat to 19 cat species.

Even the outlets’ own position in the reporting is acknowledged: the publication relies on grant funding for some of its environmental coverage, including the story itself.

The result is a kind of uneasy truth that philanthropy alone may not be able to soften. If the industry causing harm does not change. and if its leaders do not acknowledge the connection between their business and the wildlife they say they want to protect. the checks—however generous—cannot do the heavy lifting. The faucet stays on.

Tom Kaplan Panthera Rembrandt auction Sotheby's wildlife conservation mining environmental impact IUCN wild cats Jeff Bezos Bezos Earth Fund MSC shipping coral reefs climate philanthropy environmental funding shortfall UN report