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Industrious Labs: Deep Dive

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This report was updated in November 2024. The original version of this report was published in November 2022. Unless otherwise cited, information in this deep dive comes from direct correspondence with Industrious Labs.


This is a non-partisan analysis (study or research) provided for educational purposes. Support for Industrious Labs’ charitable climate advocacy runs through a Single Entity Fund of Tides Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.


Summary

  • What is Industrious Labs? Industrious Labs is an environmental organization launched in 2022 that aims to build advocacy networks to decarbonize heavy and light industry.

  • What does Industrious Labs do? Industrious Labs is the only US-based organization singularly focused on industrial decarbonization advocacy. It works with partners from across the field (community, advocacy, politics, industry, etc.) to identify the unique narratives and levers that will move individual industrial sectors towards full decarbonization. Industrious Labs’ strategy has four pillars: (1) campaigns, (2) data and analytics, (3) field building, and (4) strategic communications, all of which work in collaboration to build evidence-based, sustainable advocacy efforts to decarbonize heavy and light industry.

  • How could Industrious Labs help address climate change? Industrious Labs expects its activities to cause more heavy industry producers to switch to low-carbon production more quickly than they otherwise would have, resulting in earlier reductions in industrial emissions. It also focuses on activating the field of individuals and communities living on the frontlines of heavy industry to participate in creating a greener, sustainable future.

  • What’s new at Industrious Labs in 2024? Industrious Labs has continued to grow its North-America-focused campaigns targeting landfill emissions, steel, and aluminum. It has also recently launched a global cement campaign and a state-based industrial heat campaign.

  • What is Industrious Labs’ cost-effectiveness? In 2022, we developed a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to estimate the costs and impacts of Industrious Labs’ aluminum campaign to secure corporate commitments to switch to low-carbon procurement and production. This CEA included highly subjective guess parameters and was intended as a rough plausibility check. Overall, we estimate that Industrious Labs is highly cost-effective. We have low confidence in this CEA but generally view it as a positive input to our overall assessment of Industrious Labs. We did not update this CEA in 2024.

  • Is there room for more funding? We think Industrious Labs can productively absorb additional funding, which could increase its growth trajectory over the next few years. In the longer term, we think Industrious Labs is likely to have strong fundraising success, which may limit its future room for more funding.

  • Are there major co-benefits or potential risks? We think the co-benefits and potential risks of Industrious Labs’ efforts are similar to those for the broader effort to decarbonize heavy industry: it may reduce local pollution and have unclear employment effects as global industries respond to decarbonization.

  • Key uncertainties and open questions: In addition to our broader uncertainties around decarbonizing heavy industry (e.g., geographic focus), we are uncertain about Industrious Labs’ industry-specific effectiveness, US focus, techno-feasibility assessments, and future room for more funding.

  • Bottom line / next steps: We classify Industrious Labs as one of our top recommendations to address climate change, and we believe donations to Industrious Labs could increase its organizational growth trajectory. We plan to continue to assess our key uncertainties and believe that we will be able to substantially improve our understanding of these uncertainties as Industrious Labs continues executing its strategies in 2025.

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