Fearless
Philanthropy
Clean break from
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Fearless
Philanthropy
Clean break from
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Purpose
After decades of hard-fought progress, it’s time for fresh tools. Let’s hold onto what’s working, and make a clean break from what isn’t.
We’ve already exceeded climate-safe limits. Impacts are here, arriving earlier and hitting harder than models predicted. Tactics that defined climate work 20, 10, even 5 years ago are no longer enough.
The Clean Break Fund backs the kind of ideas this moment demands: bold strategies that break through inertia, disrupt entrenched systems, and create real shifts in possibility. And get results.
BREAK THROUGH, DISRUPT, SHIFT.
How we break through
How we break through
Our approach is built on three commitments: speed, impact, accountability. If we believe a new idea can move the needle, shift power, and open real paths forward, we’re in.
Philanthropy
Climate change isn’t a charitable cause; it’s a systems-level emergency fueled by decades of delay, denial, and dysfunction. Our funding doesn’t just try to soften the edges of an unjust world; we’re here to shift the ground beneath it.
STRATEGIC,
NOT SCATTERED.
We’re not here to tear systems down but to help people and institutions rise to the challenge. That means backing climate leaders — from any party — who are willing to shift incentives and update rules so that responsible action becomes the default rather than the exception.
Leadership
Investment
The future won’t wait for the perfect solution — it’s being shaped by the bets we make now. We are ready to take risks for ideas with momentum, integrity, and the potential to tilt markets toward survival instead of collapse.
American Dream
Turned Nightmare
Problem: The home insurance crisis is one of the most visible affordability challenges facing Americans today, and it’s almost entirely driven by climate change. In 2024 alone, weather disasters caused an estimated $320 billion in global losses, according to the world’s largest reinsurer, with only roughly $140 billion insured. To absorb these costs, insurers have raised rates, slashed coverage, stopped writing new policies, or exited entire regions.
Our Approach: Even as the oil and gas industry continues to extract trillions in annual profits, it is working aggressively to avoid accountability for the damage climate change is causing. Nowhere are the financial harms more immediate — or more visible — than in the insurance crisis. Homeowners and communities shouldn’t be left holding the bill for disasters they didn’t cause.
FEATURED GRANTEE WORK:
They Broke It. They Pay for It.
Problem: As climate disasters escalate, the bill keeps landing on families, communities, and taxpayers — while the polluters who created the problem walk away unscathed. To make it worse, many fossil fuel companies knowingly concealed the dangers while promoting their products. The industry also faces increasing pressure to address the physical legacy of extraction: more than two million abandoned oil and gas wells across the United States.
Our Approach: We take a multifaceted approach to oil industry accountability. This includes the creation of “Climate Superfunds” that target historic emissions, ensuring the oil industry cleans up its abandoned and exhausted oil and gas wells, climate-proofing oil and gas facilities, and a growing wave of consumer and municipal lawsuits that seek to recover the immense costs of climate adaptation. Assigning liability isn’t punishment; it’s honest accounting and smart policy.
FEATURED GRANTEE WORK:
Pollution Removal
Problem: Even in the best emissions-reduction scenario, we are locked into decades of disruption. To avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, the world must not only reduce emissions but also actively remove vast quantities of “legacy” carbon dioxide already saturating the atmosphere. Ignoring sensible, effective strategies to reverse the damage and mitigate future impacts will only magnify the consequences.
Our Approach: Invest in early-stage technologies like carbon dioxide removal (CDR) that reduce legacy pollution while complementing rapid emissions cuts. CDR is no longer an optional “insurance policy”; it is a foundational pillar of climate stability that must scale rapidly to rebalance our atmosphere. We focus on solutions that are safe, responsible, and scalable.
Build Policy Bridges
Problem: Across rural communities, coastal regions, and farm states, conservative Americans are raising alarms about rising insurance costs, failing infrastructure, wildfire threats, and the economic risks of delay. But their leadership and ideas rarely make it into the national policy conversation.
Our Approach: Support real solutions wherever they come from. We want to back efforts that expand the coalition for action and ensure that communities across the political spectrum have a seat at the table. Because solving the climate crisis requires all of us, durable progress will come from finding common ground.
FEATURED GRANTEE WORK:
About us
Chris Larsen, Principal
Chris Larsen is Executive Chairman, co-founder and former CEO of Ripple, an enterprise blockchain company that is building next-generation cross-border payment technology using blockchain and digital assets. Prior to Ripple, Chris co-founded and served as CEO of Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending marketplace, and E-LOAN, a publicly traded online lender.
Since transitioning from the CEO position at Ripple, Chris has made climate change his top priority. He founded the Larsen Lam Climate Change Foundation (since renamed as the Clean Break Fund) in 2021 to guide his climate philanthropy, and is an active early investor in numerous climate tech companies, as well as several prominent climate funds. His philanthropic priorities include the climate-driven home insurance crisis, making climate change a bipartisan issue once again, and carbon dioxide removal, among many other projects. Separate from his philanthropy, Chris also supports climate champions running for political office — in either party — at the local, state, and federal level, as well as other efforts to raise public awareness.
Chris is also involved in the SafeCity program to support Community Benefit Districts in San Francisco among a wide variety of other philanthropic efforts. Chris is an alum of Stanford Business School (’91) and San Francisco State University, where he was named alum of the year in 2003.
Michael Brune, CEO
Michael Brune led the Rainforest Action Network before steering the Sierra Club into one of its most effective chapters with its groundbreaking Beyond Coal campaign. With a focus on accountability — from fossil-fuel giants to financial gatekeepers — he helped reframe climate change not as a backdrop but as the main battlefield in the fight for justice and stability. Michael also is a Lecturer in Management at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and teaches a master’s class on climate policy and strategy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School for Public Policy.
Jodie Van Horn, Managing Director
Jodie Van Horn previously led strategic communications grantmaking at the European Climate Foundation and directed global teams at Purpose and Amazon Frontlines. Before that, she spent nearly a decade at the Sierra Club, where she led a nationwide campaign that inspired hundreds of U.S. cities and counties and several states to transition to 100% clean energy.
Chris Larsen, Principal
Chris Larsen is Executive Chairman, co-founder and former CEO of Ripple, an enterprise blockchain company that is building next-generation cross-border payment technology using blockchain and digital assets. Prior to Ripple, Chris co-founded and served as CEO of Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending marketplace, and E-LOAN, a publicly traded online lender.
Since transitioning from the CEO position at Ripple, Chris has made climate change his top priority. He founded the Larsen Lam Climate Change Foundation (since renamed as the Clean Break Fund) in 2021 to guide his climate philanthropy, and is an active early investor in numerous climate tech companies, as well as several prominent climate funds. His philanthropic priorities include the climate-driven home insurance crisis, making climate change a bipartisan issue once again, and carbon dioxide removal, among many other projects. Separate from his philanthropy, Chris also supports climate champions running for political office — in either party — at the local, state, and federal level, as well as other efforts to raise public awareness.
Chris is also involved in the SafeCity program to support Community Benefit Districts in San Francisco among a wide variety of other philanthropic efforts. Chris is an alum of Stanford Business School (’91) and San Francisco State University, where he was named alum of the year in 2003.
Michael Brune, CEO
Michael Brune led the Rainforest Action Network before steering the Sierra Club into one of its most effective chapters with its groundbreaking Beyond Coal campaign. With a focus on accountability — from fossil-fuel giants to financial gatekeepers — he helped reframe climate change not as a backdrop but as the main battlefield in the fight for justice and stability. Michael also is a Lecturer in Management at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and teaches a master’s class on climate policy and strategy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School for Public Policy.
Jodie Van Horn,
Managing Director
Jodie Van Horn previously led strategic communications grantmaking at the European Climate Foundation and directed global teams at Purpose and Amazon Frontlines. Before that, she spent nearly a decade at the Sierra Club, where she led a nationwide campaign that inspired hundreds of U.S. cities and counties and several states to transition to 100% clean energy.
© 2026 Clean Break Fund. All rights reserved.
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